Letter to Lord Liszt
Letter to Lord Liszt is a novel by Martin Walser . The first edition was published by Suhrkamp in 1982 ( ISBN 3-518-04632-2 ).
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On the Friday before Pentecost 1979, the owner of the Chemnitzer teeth company , Arthur Thiele, a native of Saxony , called his department heads together and announced that the night before his competitor, Benedikt Stierle, had spectacularly killed himself and had his company go up in flames .
While several colleagues, especially Horst Liszt, are still looking for a conversation with Thiele after this message, Franz Horn leaves the room immediately. This suicide - the greatest possible "failure" Thiele can imagine - reminds him of his own suicide attempt that was thwarted four years ago by this same Thiele, and he is sure that Thiele must also think of what happened at that moment. He is also affected by the news of his death because he had applied to Benedikt Stierle shortly before and now sees the chance lost to leave the Chemnitzer Zahn company and its subsidiary Fin Star before it is absorbed by the Bayer Group and restructured by management consultants . Thirdly, he does not want to give the impression that it is important to him to talk to his boss about what has happened. Horn it is clear that he has run down in this company and in Thiele's eyes and that Thiele's appreciation has sunk deeply.
He was once considered Thiele's right-hand man, procured the company's properties with a minimum investment of capital and bullied the cumbersome Mr. Ochs, whose cooperation Thiele no longer cared about at the time, out of the company. Then the North German Horst Liszt undermined his position. But Liszt is now in the same situation, too, as Thiele, who has long since ceased to be interested in the production of dental technology supplies, but driven by the desire to build surfboards and yachts, hired the young "Austro-Finn" Rudolf Ryynänen.
But although Horn and Liszt, at least in Horn's understanding, have to consider themselves "removed", Thiele invited them to a sailing excursion a week before Stierle's suicide.
This venture, however, went completely wrong. It was agreed that Horn and Liszt should hike from Hagnau to Haltnau , have lunch there and wait for Thiele to pick them up with his yacht . But the afternoon passed without Thiele landing at the landing stage. Hours after the agreed appointment, he calls the inn, where Horn and Liszt are still sitting and waiting, and explains that he has turned off because of the total slack and is already on his way home.
At this point the two employees have already emptied a number of bottles of Weißherbst and, although they were both trying to achieve harmony at the beginning of the afternoon, they are embroiled in a senseless argument. Liszt, rumored to have long since become an alcoholic , provokes Horn to contradict it with nonsensical assertions and, when Horn responds to the provocations, is playfully superior. Horn, on the other hand, defends himself against Liszt's attempts to present his position differently from how he sees it. At a time when his position was still not threatened by any Ryynänen, Liszt blasphemed Thiele and his family - which horrified Horn at the time - he now presents himself as a follower and admirer, but above all as a close confidante of the Thiele family. Horn, on the other hand, sees Thiele's descent as a basis for finally getting on friendly terms with his colleague, to form an alliance, so to speak: “[...] you would have said: Franz Horn, I'm ready now! we belong Together! then I would have sunk towards you. But just pretend that you are coming towards me as undamaged, that you want to finally raise me up or allow me to be at your level ... no, no! not with me."
The situation has escalated, they broke up in an argument, and now, a week later - a letter that Horn wrote to Liszt the very next day went unanswered - Horn feels compelled to reopen the whole thing To clarify the relationship between Liszt, Thiele and himself in every detail. It becomes a letter that he writes for a whole night while drinking Weißherbst. In the end, after the nineteenth postscript , he finally gave language to his feelings, he put into words all the everyday injuries and insults that existence has inflicted on him in recent years. He confesses: “Let's say there is a person who has an opinion of himself that no one else shares. For years he has blindly hoped that one day the world will think of him exactly as he thinks of himself. [...] The person disappoints himself from time to time. But he does not allow the world to be disappointed in him. The world should react as he dreamed it would. So now it looks like the world has failed, not him. [...] I wanted to make Thiele first, then you, an accomplice in a sneaking into reality. I wanted to bribe Thiele first and then you. I wanted to get both of you to the point where my picture of myself was the real thing. It failed. ”But after he had known this, after he had regained his independence and freed himself from the idea that Thiele and Liszt should be able to understand him, he suddenly felt free and unencumbered. He can stuff the bundle of sheets of paper into the overflowing desk drawer, in which he refers everything that once emotionally burdened him, and set off to his family in Tettnang , with whom he intends to celebrate his mother Klothilde's name day : “In the future he would write such a night letter to anyone he mistakenly believed needed, such a letter that could not be sent. There is nothing better! [...] Poppy seed , poppy seed, poppy seed, thought Franz Horn, you remind me that I'm alive. Maybe it's an advantage after all [...] "
Connections to other works by Walser
Franz Horn already appeared as the protagonist in the novel Beyond Love from 1976. This work heralds a whole series of stories in which Walser's heroes, mostly more or less closely related carriers of monosyllabic surnames, have to deal with injuries in a similar way as Franz Horn did in a letter to Lord Liszt . In the other cases, however, they do not react with such a night letter, but rather by - like Horn, too - on the one hand they submit to the external circumstances, but on the other hand they try to gain inner freedom. Most of these stories end with the hero beginning in the last sentence of the work to tell his wife the intricacies and problems that were the subject of the book. This is what the Stuttgart teacher Helmut Halm thinks in Ein Flehendes Pferd (1978) and Brandung (1985). Halm also has problems reconciling the image that his surroundings have of him and the idea that he himself has of himself - or rather, he takes the opposite path and enjoys it when everyone has the best possible " wrong “idea of him. So z. B. also the broker Dr. Zürn, main character in Das Schwanenhaus (1980), who rents out Halm the same holiday home near Überlingen year after year . This Dr. Zürn, a cousin of Franz Horn, has to experience how his colleagues or competitors overtake him in the fight for a wonderful Art Nouveau property on the lake that ultimately falls victim to the demolition company, how he no longer succeeds in a single degree and like his wife the business and takes more in hand, because she can adjust to the external circumstances. Another cousin, Xaver Zürn, who is also mentioned once in a letter to Lord Liszt , has similar problems with his boss, who is also from Saxony: he, the driver, waits for years in soul work (1979) to be perceived as a person. He never succeeds, instead one day he is demoted to a forklift driver. His stroke of relief does not lead him to a desk drawer, instead he sinks everything that can remind him of those years into a stream in the forest.
The very understandable sufferings of all these protagonists are on the one hand tragic because every reader can identify with them on the basis of related experiences, on the other hand there is also a lot of humor to discover in the books - especially when Martin Walser reads them out himself.
Internal narratives
Letter to Lord Liszt , located in locations accessible to everyone, precisely localizable, receives additional local color through the legend of the Wendelgard von Halt and the mention of the two saints Sigisbert and Placidus von Disentis, who fell into Lake Constance for inexplicable reasons . The characters in both internal narratives are also related by Franz Horn himself to the actual characters in the narrative. Wendelgard with her humpback and her pig's trunk was as little “loved” by those around them as the employees were by their boss and had to pay dearly for the benevolent behavior of those around them, while Sigisbert and Placidus, on the other hand, allow themselves to be stylized as martyrs .
References to real people
According to several scientists, Uwe Johnson is the archetype of both Dr. Liszt in a letter to Lord Liszt and to Rainer Mersjohann in surf . Ulrich Krellner wrote in a review of Jörg Magenau's Walser biography: “The failure of the relationship [between Walser and Johnson], which was only characterized by competition at the end of the 1970s, can be regarded as perhaps the most profound human chapter in Walser's life, the one in terms of tension just seems poor. But also in literary terms Johnson is [...] a central reference person. It took no fewer than three novels to deal with all the irritations that the relationship has given rise to over the years. Magenau indicates that the 'Letter to Lord Liszt' (1982), which was conceived as a 'accounting orgy' and is still breathtaking in its transgression of fiction, serves as a medium of distancing, which ultimately forms the prerequisite for Walser's changed awareness of Germany and history [.. .] "Magenau himself emphasized that the figure of Arthur Thiele shows features of the publisher Siegfried Unseld :" It is not possible to say with certainty at which position in Unseld's ranking of authors he [= Walser] stood. But there was a reliable measure of this among the Suhrkamp authors: the New Year's Eve calls from the publisher. On New Year's Eve he telephoned his authors in order of their importance, so that everyone could see his appreciation from the minutes that had passed since midnight. At least that's how Walser portrays it in the 'Letter to Lord Liszt', the novel that more exposes than hides the relationship triangle Unseld - Walser - Johnson. "And Magenau goes on to say:" The novel is an ironic answer to reality. It offers the irony that would have been necessary to playfully resolve the mutual lies. In the broken relationship between Johnson and Walser, nothing could be taken lightly. Every insult was completely serious, every action had to be interpreted as a targeted attack. Irony was Walser's great research topic in the 1970s [...] "
Literary references
Richard H. Lawson describes the letter to Lord Liszt as "descendant in tone and spirit" from Kafka's letter to the father .
Translations
Letter to Lord Liszt has been translated into several languages.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=11485&ausgabe=200801
- ↑ http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=8323
- ↑ Jörg Magenau: Martin Walser. A biography. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 378 f.
- ↑ Jörg Magenau: Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 380.
- ^ Richard H. Lawson, Letter to Lord Liszt as a Epistolary Novel , in: Frank Philip (ed.), New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser , Camden House Inc. 1994, ISBN 978-1879751675 , pp. 79-88, here p .80