Consummatus

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Consummatus is a novel by Sibylle Lewitscharoff that was published in Munich in 2006.

The erratic monologue of the 55-year-old first-person narrator, the German teacher Ralph Zimmermann, called Ralphi, on Saturday, April 3, 2004 in the morning in the Stuttgart café house Rösler, revolves around tragic family events. In two accidents in Kenya and France , the parents Agnes and Erwin and the other time the lover Johanna Skrodzki - Joey for short - perished.

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One should perhaps not believe everything in the first-person narrator. In the first chapter, when he has not yet had all the vodkas , he wants the naive reader to believe his journey to the hereafter in 2000 with a successful return. The monologue on God and the world is actually not entirely confused. At least Ralphi relativized the educational title Consummatus - in German the perfected - towards the end of his lament for the dead , when it was not enough to stop at coffee : Jesus' last word on the cross: Consummatum est - It is done .

Ralphi appears as a lovable contemporary - if only because he fears the reader might mistake him for a babbler. In addition, the term monologue is incorrect for the talk. Ralphi talks to the dead incessantly and constantly receives answers from the realm of the dead. Mother Agnes smiles at the vodka drinker; is a little proud of her household miracle Ralphi. Unfortunately the inmates of the realm of the dead cannot be touched. In this cute dialogue, the utterances of the German teacher who consumes alcohol in the café appear in normal black; In other words, printer ink was wasted, but with the pale answers from the beyond, the printer saved ink. In the last chapter - Saturday afternoon has dawned, Ralphi has settled the café bill and acknowledged with the title "it is done". He steps out into the April snowstorm. When the flakes swirl of snow crystals in the middle of page layout and even within the text line shall abound, the narrator of vodka is so befuddled that the reader with the best will not know what is carved and pierced. The immediately following attempt at a brief discussion of the protagonist's excursion into the realm of shadows has to be limited to the little that is halfway understandable.

The pale Ralphi has been teaching German and history in a high school in Stuttgart for 26 years. He was born in Stuttgart in 1949 and Joey in Berlin in 1942. Even as a child in ruins, Joey had lost her parents. Ralphi's parents had fled to Degerloch from Stettin and Breslau .

Sibylle Lewitscharoff has a number of pleasant ideas. This does not mean the pretty gags of displaying the 16 chapters of the novel as a magic square à la Yang Hui or the loose integration of such icons of Pop Art as Andy Warhol , Jim Morrison and Edie Sedgwick . What is meant, for example, is the matter of the dead, whose number, as is well known, tends towards infinity over time. So, the inexperienced reader might guess, the distance between a dead man and his neighbors in the realm of the dead is getting closer and closer. Not even close. The expansion of the universe , which takes place day and night , always creates space. Or how Ralphis dealt with the more well-known dead - from Goethe to the Swabian local hero Hölderlin to Freud . There is no intelligent dialogue with these people. Freud doesn't want to be bothered. Lessing , Jean Paul , Rilke , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Benn , Stefan George and Peter Handke are named. Regarding the fauna : some birds in the realm of the dead are "larger than human size". Ralphi is a believer; it wasn't mama during her lifetime. Ralphi says: "It exists ... It becomes noticeable in the silence of a large library." Sibylle Lewitscharoff, basic knowledge in theoretical physics , i.e. in the field of interaction of waves on spatial obstacles , cannot be denied. Applied to the Dear God - He should be thought of as a “wave” in our world of the living and as a “wave back” in the realm of the dead. Of course, humans are too small to internalize the running times of these oscillation processes alone. God is switching at a speed that is guaranteed to be greater than the speed of light .

The history teacher Ralphi specializes in Emperor Frederick II , the Sicilian Frederick , the Thirty Years War and a number of “ Gauleiter rubbish ”. The latter topic primarily revolves around Gauleiter Murr , around December 4, 1944 in Heilbronn and the photo in which the father of a school friend can be seen "in front of a pile of corpses in Poland".

In the novel - apart from Ralphi's terrible memory work - nothing meaningful happens. At most, the circumstances of death of the relatives of the first-person narrator are worth noting. The Douglas DC-3 of the Serengeti-Airways started with the parents on board from Nairobi , crashed in 1979 over the Engaruka basin on the approach to Kilimanjaro and Ralphi accidentally injured his lover Joey, this "long bar", in November 1981 while doing it Fatal kickback by car on a French street.

Ralphi criticizes Joey for starting sentences and not finishing them while she was still alive. The first-person narrator applied this annoying principle to the vast majority of his thought fragments throughout the novel. From the resulting difficulty and in parts incomprehensibility of the text, however, meaning shines out touchingly in some places. On this occasion, the narrative potency of Sibylle Lewitscharoff comes to light. An example of this is given. Above, the hubbub between the snowflakes at the end of the novel was chalked. But the second time reading through it, the cause of Ralphi's flight into "falling drunkenness" becomes clear. This man cannot get over the accidental death of his beloved, which was partly to blame. Ralphi will always love Joey; love with all their big and small flaws.

Challenging prose

Ralphi is a teacher. So now two examples from the text, this rollercoaster of emotions, on the subject of education .

First, Joey had brought her eight-year-old son François with her. Thanks to his mother's travel across national borders, this little boy had successfully avoided going to school every time. The teacher Ralphi had given tutoring.

Second, not every fragment of thought is indisputable in the novel. Ralphi says about his students at the Stuttgart grammar school: "... with some it would have been better to have cushions pressed onto their unreasonable mouths in good time." Such provocative writing generates points of attack for interpretations after reading it. At least two claims could surge in the reader's brain. First, the teacher's point of view: Over the years, this high school teacher Ralphi has been ruined by children who have not been raised at all or - worse still - anti-authoritarian education and has to be filled with vodka every Saturday morning at Café Rösler for expensive money. Second, the parents' point of view: this Pauker Ralphi has no place in our beautiful Stuttgart, thoroughly humanistic high school. Such a subject must no longer be let loose on my child. It must be suspended from service in Schleune.

reception

literature

First edition

  • Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Consummatus. Novel . DVA, Stuttgart 2006, 236 pages. ISBN 3-421-05596-3 .

expenditure

  • Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Consummatus. Novel . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010 (Licensor: DVA Munich), 237 pages. ISBN 978-3-518-46230-0 (edition used)

Remarks

  1. ↑ If Ralphi resigned, "she ... could be run over" (used edition, p 208, 9. ZVO), then perhaps to the death wish kind in such scenes as the themed in Roman Pop played.
  2. ↑ Speaking of errors. Here is an example. Joey had spread the word in Holland, France and Spain that her father had died in a concentration camp. The soldier did not survive the fight on the Eastern Front (edition used, p. 202).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, pp. 95, 14. and 18. Zvo
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 173, 14. Zvo
  3. ↑ engl. Engaruka
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 116, 2nd Zvo
  5. ↑ DTA : Goethe: West-Eastern Divan. Stuttgart, 1819: "Blessed Longing"