Chez Krull

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Chez Krull is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was completed on July 27, 1938 in La Rochelle and published by Editions Gallimard in February of the following year . The first German translation by Stefanie Weiss was published by Diogenes Verlag in 1989 under the title The Foreign Vetter . A new translation by Thomas Bodmer under the original title was published by Kampa Verlag in 2018 .

The Krulls are a German-born family who settled in northern France many years ago, but were never really accepted into the community there. Cousin Hans, who is visiting from Germany, not only confuses the family with his carelessness and his antics, his inappropriate demeanor also triggers the secretly smoldering xenophobia of the locals. When a dead young woman is fished out of the canal, suspicion immediately falls on the Krulls, and a threatening crowd begins to gather in front of their house.

content

“Chez Krull” is the name of the shop with a bar that the Krull family of German descent has been running for decades in a small village in northern France. But their customers mainly consist of inland barges passing through the nearby canal, because the locals still cut the "strangers". The father Cornelius speaks a barely understandable gibberish from German and French, but mostly he speaks nothing at all, retires with his old journeyman into the workshop and weaves baskets all day. The shop is run by his energetic wife Maria, who keeps clashing with Pipi, a drinker from the village with whom she has a kind of love-hate relationship. Her support is the unmarried daughter Anna, who dutifully helps with household chores and the shop until she gives up on herself. The son's back is kept free, because he is studying medicine and is currently sitting over his dissertation. His future path in life has long been planned in advance: from his marriage to his fiancée Marguerite from the Schoof family, who are also of German descent, to the nearby house in which they will settle. The baby is seventeen-year-old Lisbeth, who is relieved of all duties and practices piano all day.

One day, cousin Hans from Germany breaks into the regular and uniform daily routine of the Krulls. Allegedly fled across the border for political reasons and fear of the concentration camps , but in truth the main thing for him is to get through cheaply, and so he is not afraid to write a letter of announcement in the name of his long deceased father. Where in the Krulls' house there is usually devoted fulfillment of duty and sadness, Hans is light-hearted and high-spirited; where the Krulls have learned over the years to subordinate and adapt as foreigners, Hans enjoys showing off his otherness and provoking the locals. When Hans needs money, he tricked himself into it. And it doesn't take long before he seduces his cousin Lisbeth without her dreams of a future together worrying him particularly.

When the raped and murdered Sidonie, Pipi's daughter, is fished out of the canal the day after the fair, Hans sees only a great adventure in that too. Out of curiosity, he approaches her friend Germaine, but in doing so he sets events in motion that can no longer be stopped. Only after his insistent questions does the girl remember that it was Joseph who stalked Sidonie at the fair. The inhibited Joseph, whose shy attempts to get close to women mostly failed miserably, had long led a double life as a voyeur , huddled around dark alleys at night to watch couples. Joseph admits that he actually persecuted Sidonie that day and even observed her being raped by an unknown person, but did not recognize her as such. When he later realized that he had witnessed a murder, he dared not go to the police.

The fact that it is Joseph, of all people, the “German” who is suspected of the murder of a local girl, lets the already subliminal xenophobia break out in the locals. At first it's only Germaine and Pipi who make a scene in front of the Krulls shop. But soon others join them, the first cobblestone flies through a window, and the words “Murderer” and “Krepiert!” Are emblazoned in large letters on the shop. Maria asks Hans to leave, hoping that his escape would divert suspicion from her son. But Hans is curious about the progress of events and stays. Only when the otherwise silent Cornelius reveals that he saw through Hans and his forged letter from day one and calmly demands that Hans must go, does he understand that he has overstepped the curve. The same evening, before he can draw the conclusions, events come to a head.

More and more people are gathering in front of the Krulls shop, driven by a mixture of xenophobia, general anger and lust for the spectacle. The lonely police station cannot master them and has to call for reinforcements. Soon it is no longer just individual stones, but an entire bombardment that falls on the Krulls' house, in which the family barricades themselves in silent fear. Chants demand the extradition of the murderer. After all, the summoned police superintendent sees himself in a position to calm the crowd down no other than actually arresting Joseph, even if only in appearance, as he assures the Krulls. Secretly, however, he is also firmly convinced that the strangers are to blame for the escalation. After the news of Joseph's arrest has made the rounds, the people in front of the Krulls are slowly leaving. But when it became quiet outside, the silent Cornelius disappeared inside the house. Hans finds him in his workshop where he hanged himself. The German cousin leaves the house that night.

Years later, Hans meets Joseph again as a family man in Stresa, Italy on Lake Maggiore . The encounter is visibly uncomfortable for him and he tries to evade his cousin's affable curiosity. So Hans only learns that everything has stayed the same with the Krulls. They still live in the same city. Anna is still helping Aunt Maria in the shop, Lisbeth is married. Joseph became a doctor and he married his fiancée as predicted. While Joseph and Marguerite try to forget the visit from the past, the extraordinary stranger has left a lasting impression on their son.

interpretation

Gavin Lambert called Chez Krull one of Simenon's bitterest and most disturbing novels from the 1930s. He illustrates the thesis that as an individual you have two options for your life plan: to integrate yourself completely into the community until you get lost in the crowd or to stand by your individuality and stay to yourself. The half-heartedness of the Krulls, on the other hand, with which they copy their surroundings, but lack inner conviction, only earns them contempt and takes revenge in the end. Hans, who stands by his role as an outsider, watched his relatives through the novel with only amusement. He plays with his cousin's feelings as with those of his cousin, enjoys the fact that the latter watches their caresses and later nourishes suspicions against him. For Hans, the events that threaten the existence of the Krulls are just an absurd spectacle that brings their fears and weaknesses to light. He invades the Krulls' lives, commits some kind of psychological murder, and disappears again. In the end, he asks himself whether it is his fate to play the stranger who is the cause of all evil in the world.

According to Lucille Frackman Becker takes the xenophobia, which is a common motif in Simenon's novels, Chez Krull forms a veritable xenophobia on. The strange cousin Hans becomes a catalyst in his aunt's house, bringing out the suppressed tendencies of every family member and ultimately causing his uncle to commit suicide. Just as the cousin threatens the family from within, they threaten the citizens of the city from the outside. Their anger, incited by Hans, grows into such hysteria that the mob finally storms the Krulls' house. Pierre Assouline refers to other novels by Simenon that deal with the subject of lynching by an angry mob, such as The Engagement of Monsieur Hire and Black Rain . They went back to an experience by Simenon in Liège in 1919, when the young reporter was an eyewitness to a confrontation in a hotel that led to the escape of a man over the rooftops, observed by a growing number of good citizens on the street who, after rumors, it was a German spy who fanatically asked for his head.

Another central theme in Simenon's work, according to Becker, is the identity of opposites, which is repeatedly addressed in the novel. So Hans discovered early on the special relationship between his righteous aunt and the drunkard Pee, who seem to need each other, whereby Maria sees the drinker as a caricature of herself if she did not behave morally at all times. Elsewhere, Hans draws a comparison with his cousin Joseph, who he could have been as well as Maria Pipi. Simenon's theory is that fates are interchangeable and that it only takes one major event in life to turn an existence into its opposite. The way in which the strange cousin Hans succeeds in feeling the complex connections in the Krull family and in empathizing with the individual family members in such a way that he reports at one point that he is Hans and Joseph at the same time is a typical example of Thomas Narcejac the empathy, understanding and compassion that characterize Simenon's novels and also many of her heroes such as Maigret .

background

Simenon's biographer Patrick Marnham believes he clearly recognizes Liège in the nameless town of Chez Krull , and the Krulls' family have features of the Belgian-German Brüll family, from which Simenon's mother came. The Krulls arouse the suspicion of their neighbors, as did many Flemish families in Belgium during the First World War , who were divided in their loyalty between the warring factions. Like Joseph Krull, two of Simenon's cousins ​​from the Brülls branch of the family studied medicine, and one of Simenon's uncle lived as a lock keeper in the Coronmeuse district, where the lock in the novel is also located. Peter Foord also refers to Simenon's own family, in which an aunt named Marie Croissant (nee Brüll) ran a shop for river boatmen on the Maas . Like Maria Krull, she had three children named Joséphine, Maria and Joseph.

As early as 1932, a very similar shop with a bar and a similar family constellation was the focus of a novel by Simenon in the novel Maigret bei den Flemings . There the siblings are Anna, Maria and Joseph Peeters, who is already looking forward to an inescapable future with his fiancée Marguerite. And like Maigret in this novel, an outsider intrudes into the family with its secrets in The Foreign Vetter . Peter Kaiser, however, points to another literary relationship: In 1922, Thomas Mann published the first version of the confessions of the impostor Felix Krull , which he completed 32 years later. His hero shares with Simenons Hans Krull not only the surname, but also the character of an "Luftikus and slacker".

reception

For the Berliner Morgenpost, Der Fremd Vetter proves “once again the diversity of Simenon's work, which by no means consists only of Maigret crime novels.” Her conclusion is: “It is remarkable how the mechanisms of exclusion are shown here.” Stanley G. Eskin finds in the novel a "downright dramatic expressiveness", and the long final scene is "a brilliant depiction of mass injustice." John Raymond calls Chez Krull "one of the strangest and most ambivalent of Simenon's dramas". Oliver Hahn judges on maigret.de: "Well written and with a societal explosiveness that you don't often find at Simenon".

In 1988 Jacques Fansten filmed the novel under the title Le Mouchoir de Joseph as a French TV production. It played Piotr Shivak , Isabelle Sadoyan , Catherine Frot , Coraly Zahonero , Laurent Arnal and Benjamin Lemaire .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Chez Krull . Gallimard, Paris 1939 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The Strange Cousin . Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-21798-6 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Strange Cousin . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 15. Translation: Stefanie Weiss. Diogenes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-257-24115-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Chez Krull . Translation: Thomas Bodmer . Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-13335-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Chez Krull . Translation: Thomas Bodmer. Reading by Felix von Manteuffel . The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-7424-0748-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ^ Chez Krull in the bibliography of Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 97.
  4. ^ Gavin Lambert: The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , pp. 175, 186, 188. (also online )
  5. ↑ Lucille Frackman Becker: Georges Simenon . Twayne, Boston 1977, ISBN 0-8057-6293-0 , p. 65.
  6. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Knopf, New York 1997, ISBN 0-679-40285-3 , p. 20.
  7. ↑ Lucille Frackman Becker: Georges Simenon , pp. 65-66.
  8. ^ Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, p. 21.
  9. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 192-193.
  10. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Chez les Flamands (The Flemish Shop) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  11. ↑ Peter Kaiser: Les Boches ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.litges.at archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on litges.at.
  12. ↑ It's good that Simenon wrote so many books . In: Berliner Morgenpost from January 19, 2007.
  13. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 231.
  14. ^ "Chez Krull (1939), one of the strangest and most ambiguous of Simenon's dramas." In: John Raymond: Simenon in Court . Hamilton, London 1968, ISBN 0-241-01505-7 , p. 87.
  15. ↑ Chez Krull on maigret.de.
  16. ↑ Le Mouchoir de Joseph in the Internet Movie Database (English)