The alphabet house

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Das Alphabethaus (in the Danish original: Alfabethuset ) is a thriller by the Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen from 1997. The German first edition in the translation by Hannes Thiess and Marieke Heimburger was published in 2012 by Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag . The work managed the leap to first place the mirror - bestseller list .

The novel is about two young British pilots who are shot down over Germany and a little later find themselves under a false identity in a psychiatric facility near Freiburg , the alphabet house. Your only chance of survival is to maintain the masquerade and undergo medical treatments. Decades later, the terrible events of the past catch up with them.

action

Part 1

British pilots Bryan and James were shot down during an air raid over northern Germany in January 1944 . On the run from their pursuers, the two of them save themselves on a slowly passing hospital train coming from the eastern front . In a recumbent compartment with seriously injured and sedated SS officers, they throw their clothes and two of the wounded out of the window and take their place and identity. With a cannula and dirt, both add the typical SS blood group tattoo under the armpits. After a three-day journey, the train arrives in Freiburg and the wounded are transported to a distant camp near the Kaiserstuhl .

SS officers receive shielded treatment in the psychiatric clinic known as the "Alphabet House". Patients are regularly treated with electric shocks and psychotropic drugs. The management of the facility distrusts the patient. In order to track down simulants , the patients are repeatedly interrogated, monitored and threatened by the guards. Convicted fraudsters are publicly executed . Although James, in contrast to Bryan, speaks a little German, both remain largely silent under the pretense of a war neurosis in order not to be betrayed by language or accent.

Despite all caution, the two British caught the attention of a small group of three SS officers who, pretending to be mentally impaired, evaded the front line. In order not to be exposed, the German simulants decide to render Bryan and James harmless.

James is beaten up by the simulators and given several blood transfusions . Since he tattooed the wrong blood type on the train , serious complications arise. James does not recover from this incident and becomes increasingly apathetic . At the same time, Bryan also suffers from nightly attacks by the group. When the threat to him grew, he decided to flee in November 1944 and leave his bedridden friend behind. He is rescued and eventually makes it back to England.

Part 2

28 years later. Bryan lives in England, studied medicine and later made a small fortune trading medical supplies. As a consultant for the Olympic Games in Munich , he decided to intensify his decades-long search for James on site. He has not set foot on German soil since his escape. Bryan hires a middleman and hires him to find the alphabet house.

In Freiburg, Bryan stumbles upon the footsteps of an acquaintance from the alphabet house and learns that her former adversaries, the simulators, brought prosperity and local prominence under false names in the post-war period. In order to prevent the disclosure of their past, the former SS officers try to get Bryan out of the way.

Bryan finds his friend James in a Freiburg sanatorium , where he was secretly housed by the simulators. For almost 30 years they had incapacitated and abused him with psychotropic drugs. All the while, James had hoped Bryan would return. Bryan travels back to England with James .

backgrounds

The following explanations can be found in the afterword and appendix:

The author about his novel

“This book is not a war novel. It tells a story of human error and how easy it can be for people to fail one another. It can happen to anyone. That goes for marriage, that goes for work - and of course it is especially true for extreme situations like war.
There were several reasons for moving the plot of the novel to World War II . As the son of a psychiatrist , I grew up in " mental hospitals, " as they were called in the 1950s and early 1960s. And although my father was one of the progressive doctors who advocated new, more humane approaches, I inevitably and directly experienced how the "mentally ill" were treated at the time.
[...] But is it possible, as a healthy person, to survive in such a milieu for years without losing your mind ? Hard to imagine if you consider the brutality of the treatment methods of the time. And didn't that taciturn patient actually get sick over the years - under the influence of the system?
[...] My desire to bring these two phenomena so fascinating to me together in one story - the perhaps mentally ill on the one hand, the Second World War on the other - was additionally fueled by conversations with a friend of my mother's. "

The term "alphabet house"

"With the usual German thoroughness, everyone who was obliged to do military service in the Third Reich was assigned a code made up of letters and numbers , both at the drafting stage and later in the event of a war injury , which precisely and completely inscrutable for outsiders the suitability for war Investigated fixed. The further the war progressed, the more it became clear that a whole series of these " labels " had fatal consequences for those who wore them and could even lead to their liquidation. This was especially true for diagnoses in the area of mental illness and nonsense . "

Remarks

Reviews

“Clumsy, sometimes outrageous and constructed - that's how you can judge the first part of the novel, which begins with the plane crashing and ends in the so-called alphabet house. The events during the train ride are quite unbelievable and an exposure of the two friends would have been inevitable. […] While the first part of the two-part story not only leaves a vague but also a sluggish impression, the second part surprises with an astonishing dynamic. [...] What remains is a currently known name, a title that arouses interest and a vague, shallow story. Despite the certainly great sales figures, not a novel that you should have read. "

- Jürgen Priester : Krimi-Couch.de

“The Alphabet House is an incredibly compelling novel - especially the second part. It really grabs you. On the other hand, the book is so oppressive and gloomy that you often want to put it away because you think to yourself: These atrocities are so incredible! And yet it is primarily not a book about World War II, but rather the question: what can a friendship endure? "

- Manuela Rid : swr3 .de

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Spiegel 06/2012, bestseller fiction.
  2. ↑ Jussi Adler-Olsen : The alphabet house . dtv, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-423-24894-5 , p. 592 .
  3. ↑ Review on Krimi-Couch.de , accessed on August 21, 2013.
  4. ↑ Review on swr3.de ( Memento of the original from December 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. , accessed on August 21, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.swr3.de