The bed
Das Bett is the title of a novel by the German writer Martin Mosebach, first published in 1983 and published in a revised edition in 2002 .
Action overview
The novel describes the visit of Stephan Korn and his mother Florence to Frankfurt in the post-war period as well as his unhappy love for the narrator's aunt. The family stories and the fates of the protagonists, predominantly during the Second World War , are unfolded in flashbacks .
The main topic is the relationship problems of the protagonist with his nanny Agnes and his mother, as expressed in the sub-headings. This constellation symbolizes the uprooting or the search for identity and reorientation of the son of a Jewish family who emigrated to New York with his parents .
The story of Stephan Korn
Stephen's father Willy, son of a Frankfurt entrepreneurial family, met Florence Gutmann, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish upper-class family, during a stay in New York. She accepts his marriage proposal despite her feeling that the down-to-earth Hessian husband does not correspond to her social position. After the marriage, she lives with him, who is proud to have brought such a representative woman back to his homeland, and the two sons, Willy jun. and Stephan, as neighbors of the narrator's family in a villa in Frankfurt's Westend . Florence feels like a stranger here in the provinces. She leaves Stephen's upbringing to Agnes, who previously worked as a housekeeper for Monsignore Eichhorn, the confessor of the narrator's mother. The child develops a close emotional bond with her, which is also expressed in the fact that Stephan later keeps her sweaters knitted for him as fetishes.
The story of the emigration of numerous German Jews is reflected in the biography of the protagonist : Just in time for the start of the Second World War and the deportation of Jews to Germany, the Korns sell their factory and villa and escape to the United States . Stephan, who is the same age as the narrator's father, was the courier of the US embassy in Paris and of the Pétain regime in Vichy during the war .
During one of his stays in Paris, in the apartment of the blind painter Bonetti, he met the Balt woman Aimée von Leven (third part, I), the daughter of former large landowners who fled to Western Europe with the help of a socialist youth organization after the occupation of Estonia by Stalin (second part, II). She maintains her inherited disciplined attitude of the aristocratic survivor and uses ("she never wanted to feel pain at all"), since she is without money or passport at this point and her landlady has terminated her, through a cleverly staged game the opportunity to join Stephan in the Provence to flee, and there is his mistress (part II). “The warm paradise of vegetative happiness” in Narbonne , where they stay at the Hotel Midi, ends for both of them when the occupation of southern France by German troops is imminent and Aimée hopes to get a passport through marriage. Stephan suspects that she only entered into a love affair with him for this tactical reason. He also does not want a permanent bond and leaves for Vichy without her. But soon afterwards he returns to the holiday destination, ashamed, and learns that his girlfriend and other refugees have already left the city to get across the border with the help of a gang of smugglers. He later hears that this group was betrayed and killed.
After the war, Stephan lives with his parents in New York. Florence worries about his phlegm , his general disinterest and discusses the symptoms with the psychoanalyst Dr. Tyrolean, who actually only treats healthy people because of the healing success rate, but makes an exception for the son of his neighbor, whom he admires. During his conversations, he falls in love with Ms. Korn, albeit with no hope of realization, and suggests that she travel with him to a CG Jung conference in Switzerland. According to his theory of the dream, he diagnoses a son-mother bond as a substitute satisfaction , which he would like to break. However, his attempts meet with the rejection of the patient, to whom the psychiatrist's interest in his inner life appears as an invasion of his private life, as well as the incomprehension of his insensitive father, who is skeptical of psychoanalysis, which threatens to affect his wife too. expresses through rude remarks with a South Hessian accent : "[E] in [crazy] patient per family is enough."
Tiroler recommends shock therapy : Stephan is sent to Frankfurt to develop his personality in order to control the reconstruction of his father's car tire factory near Hanau (first part, II). Instead of taking care of the business, however, he immediately drives to Agnes' housing estate in a suburban area and sleeps there during the day in a kind of regression period in his nanny's bed.
To further refresh his memories, he visits the narrator's father. His sister-in-law, a French teacher at the Catholic St. Ursula Grammar School, who was spending her holidays with her older sister's family at the time, fell in love with the guest on a trip to Würzburg to the burned-out residence of the Prince-Bishops.
A few days later, Stephan also takes a walk through the Bockenheim district adjoining the Westend (second part, III and IV). Together with his aunt, he feels the atmosphere in an old, closed suburban cinema, the Titania Palace, experiences the “friable charms of the color world” of the streets and, in a pastry shop, tells the mesmerized listening companion, whose gentle beauty he has now discovered, lively about Paris theater visits on Rue Chaptal Montmartre . The beginning love relationship is broken off by the arrival of Florence.
After receiving no news from her son for some time, the mother, worried, searches his room and finds Agnes knitted woolen things in a drawer (Part One, III). She talks to Tiroler, who is lying in the hospital after a collapse as a result of the argument with Willy about his rich patients. The next actions arise from a mutual misunderstanding: the psychoanalyst advises Florence, contrary to his theory, to get Stephan back, but he wants her lover to reject this proposal and stay with him in New York. She, on the other hand, thinks that her secret lover reads her soul's wishes and sends her to her sick son.
When she arrives in Frankfurt, she finds the unopened love letter from her aunt in Stephan's hotel room and interprets it as another alarm signal that her son is slipping away from her (Part One, IV). Florences immediately visits the narrator's family and after dinner drives with her aunt to a restaurant in Kronberg, where she explains to her that Stephan is a sick man and that a love affair should not endanger him. This promises to make the sacrifice and prays for the redemption of the beloved from his emotional suffering.
Florence then sets the joint departure date. Her son does not contradict her, but is undecided whether he will obey her orders. During a farewell visit to Ines, he meets Aimée, who was believed to be dead, who married Eddi Oppermann in the south of France and was thus saved. He escapes the house numb and flies back to New York with his mother without any news to the family of the narrator. So he does not see the state of his aunt (third part, III), who, outwardly childlike cheerful, mentally confused, has woven herself into her inner world. He keeps her in dreamlike memories as the lover who freed him from the magic of Agnes.
The family of the narrator
The events before and during the Second World War contrast with the apparent post-war normality of the narrator in the largely destroyed city: he occasionally sees Aimée Oppermann when she is picking up her son from school by car or with Madame Ines Wafelaert, Florence's friend from Belgium, who lives in an emergency shelter after the bombing of her villa, at poetry readings by Monsignor Erich Eichhorn, to which he accompanies his mother (second part, I).
In his parents' house in Westend, which survived the war unscathed, he experiences the tension between his classically educated father, whose lectures lead his mother to an “aversion to the world of books” in her husband. She is characterized as a Catholic “devout rationalist who [shows] great reverence for the principle of causality”. But she usually goes to confession with the monsignor, although she actually has nothing to report but snacking on the Rhenish apple cabbage in the pantry, the "place of one of the most devastating defeats of her morale."
Literary classification
The bed is the writer's first novel in the Frankfurt pentalogy . It follows in the historical sequence: Westend , A Long Night , The Blood Beech Festival and The Moon and the Girl .
structure
The actions are essentially focused on two levels: the protagonist's visit to Frankfurt and the story of the Korn family.
- First part: Agnes
- Chapter I: Review: Family History of the First-Person Narrator
- Chapter II: Stephan Korn's visit to Frankfurt, his regression sleep with the former nanny Agnes. The trip with the narrator's family to Würzburg, the acquaintance with the aunt who falls in love with him
- Chapter III: Review: Situation Florence, Willy and Stephan Korns in New York
- Chapter IV: Florence travels to Frankfurt and works on the aunt to end the relationship with her son. This brings the recommended sacrifice in order to save the beloved.
- Second part: Stephan
- Chapter I: The narrator's memory of the time of his communion with the poet-priest Monsignore Eichhorn
- Chapter II: Review: Emigrations before the Second World War: Aimée von Leven, the daughter of large Baltic landowners, flees from Estonia to Paris, where she meets Ines Wafelaert, an old friend of her parents. The Jewish Korn family, who lived in Frankfurt after their marriage, sold their house and moved to New York.
- Chapters III and IV: Stephan and the aunt bring their typewriter to be repaired and fall in love in a café in Bockenheim, where Korn tells theatrical stories from Paris.
- Third part: Florence
- Chapter I: Review: The story of the marriage of Willy Korn from Frankfurt to Florence Gutmann from the New York upper class. Your platonic love affair with Dr. Tyrolean in connection with his attempts at therapy with Stephan
- Chapter II: Review: Stephen's acquaintance with Aimée von Leven in Paris and their affair in Narbonne during the Second World War
- Chapter III: Stephen's indecision to return to New York, his hasty departure after meeting Aimée Oppermann without saying goodbye to the mentally confused aunt
Reality and fantasy
In the afterword of the revised edition, the author explains his first work as a work of remembering autobiographical condensed and thus metaphorically changed experiences. Corresponding to this tension between poetry and truth, the first-person narrator confesses: "I was a daydreamer , and once I had an indefinite sensation [...] I supplemented myself in fleeting images that I lacked to explain my sensation." When, however, in later years I began to look at people around me with different eyes, I was amazed to find that the fantasies and desires that I began to develop in relation to others had roots that I had long known. " For example, he invents the story of the seven squirrels of Ephesus, inspired by the legend of the dormouse , or he dreams of nighttime adventures with his bear for stuffed squirrels that he saw on Sunday excursions with his parents in an inn .
Little Stephan Korn also experiences such overlays: The archaic story of the vigilante justice of Agnes' aunt, who gives the unfaithful Konrad a poisoned plum cake to eat, leaves a lasting, vivid impression in his soul as of the "sorceress, [...] the violence over." Holds life and death in her hands ”, also“ [z] u a time in which the forgetful Stephan has not remembered the story of Agnes for a long time []. ”In the same way, Korn in Frankfurt is aware in his attempts to remember that the "events in France" "can no longer be reconstructed []" anyway.
Elsewhere it is explained: “In order for a narrative not only to entertain, but also to affect and shake our security, it must contain elements that connect it directly to our everyday thought life, as far as it otherwise takes the listener to the most remote regions of the world Fictitious. "
Narrative form
The framework for this narrative principle of memory is formed by the chapters of the first-person narrator , the son of a Frankfurt family friend of Stephan Korn (first part, I, II and partly IV. Second part, I, partly II), who describes the time of his childhood, tried to understand when the American was visiting and fell in love with his aunt.
From this perspective , new windows open again and again for the protagonists' actions and reminiscences: retrospectives interrupt the narrative flow. In a mixture of personal narrative form with alternating looks from Stephen, Florences (first part, III and IV), but also Willys, Tirolers, the museum director, the aunt, Aimées (second part, II), Ines (second part, II) etc. The actions are presented , oscillating with authorial classifications and additions. I.e. the general plot and the historical processes are expanded to include a view of the inner world, for example Florences, Willys, Tirolers, Stephans or Ines'.
When looking back or changing location, the reader is often guided through the plot: "Later, Florence told her friend [...]", "[no] a bridge led [...]" back to Agnes: the roots are "in the vegetative". Information about landscapes is obtained, e.g. B. about the Westerwald , and the history: "In the meantime the big cities had emerged." An authorial narrator also helps with reflections on the actions of the characters: "How would the story have affected Florence", "how much we perceive it Victims of our moods are ”,“ [e] Another reason for the memorability of the […] village must have been its ugliness ”,“ [d] it was quite fitting that Agnes […] ”.
According to the polyphonic method described above, the views of the mother or the aunt are also shown here. This does not happen in strict separation: formulations of the first-person narrator also infiltrate into other chapters, so the aunt is always spoken of as "my aunt", regardless of the respective narrative perspective. Likewise, in these contexts one can find inserted passages about “our [] Westend []”, where “our apartment” is also located.
The personal constellations as well as the various narrative threads in a mixture of reality and fantasy converge again and again in the framework plot in the reconstructions: “The struggle that the various realities that I perceived through my reason fought for approval was undecided for a long time back and forth. The spheres still mingled without disturbing each other, so that the world of traffic lights and dentists [...] effortlessly merged with the demons lurking everywhere and the magical powers of my bear. It was a new aspect that my bear and Stephan should have so many similarities. "
Historical background
The bed addresses the time of the Nazi dictatorship and the persecution of the Jews . The focus of the novel is the fate of the Korn family as an emigrant , supplemented by that of Aimée von Levens from the Baltics during the Second World War in France at the time of the Vichy regime .
The life paths of the protagonists are brought together in the post-war period and interwoven with the memories of the son of a Frankfurt family. From the child's perspective, a bizarre, fairytale image of his environment emerges compared to the events of the past. Political-historical discussions or processing that should actually result from Stephan Korn's visit are kept secret or are at least imperceptible to the narrator: His mother only goes to confession regularly out of habit, but has no sins to confess in private.
A magic circle that deals with methods of conjuring up spirits and necromancers could allude to the passive resistance in Frankfurt, the inner emigration , during the Hitler era . In her mysterious Privatissima at the Monsignor's, Ines asks "less [...] out of a hatred of Hitler, but mainly because she [wants] to put the spiritual forms of influence to the test" about whether the political conditions are influenced by invocations can be changed and an "assassination of the will" can kill a dictator. Eichhorn takes the view “that the willpower, if it is sufficiently developed, can appear almost physically condensed.” The seriousness of such considerations is relativized by the clergyman's declarations that they are “purely theoretical problems” “that arise for him the literature in its dazzling pros and cons are too well known to gain through practical testing, since the extraordinary dangers of such exercises basically already forbid their use on a regular basis. ”Another limitation of the implementation in the political struggle is that Eichhorn's wisdom "Only became visible and tangible in the presence of the great master, but in the triviality of the material world faded into invisibility."
This affinity to the irrational, combined with a loss of reality, can be found in the family of the narrator's mother in the repeated motif of madness : in the grandfather tearing up his copper engraving collection, in the aunt's retreat into her dream world, her form of inner emigration, but also in the fantasies of the mentally ill Genofefa Hauff, who temporarily lived in the house.
Analysis of personal relationships
Agnes - Stephan - Florence
Dr. Tiroler diagnosed Stephan Korn's developmental problems as the vampiric mother fixation of the son, from which he wanted to free Florence, and his stay in France as a personal confrontation with Hitler , as his existential struggle against the dictator and the persecution of the Jews.
Stephan himself sees this much more modestly in his reflection: “What was he after all? [...] a person with no real preferences, no zeal, no pain, no passions. […] It was astonishing that in a century of catastrophes and apocalyptic horrors, the earth tolerated such a human being still on the crust […] a person who did not care about injustice everywhere, even if he was touched by it himself and who, above all, did not even notice that he was solely the chain of undeserved fortunate coincidences that protected him from falling victim to the great persecution. "
In an ironic reversal of Tiroler's theories, his inability to bond and his lethargy seem to be more the result of an uprooting, mixed with personal traits passed on by his understanding father. His escape into the nanny’s bed is preceded by the following typical symbiotic Frankfurt dialogue: “Eh, Mr. Stephan [...] Are you back? [...] And? ”-“ Net so well ”- Would you like to lie down a bit? - "I think it would be better". Stephan now sleeps warmly wrapped up with Agnes, who once assumed the role of mother in the daily elementary tasks for the toddler and, in contrast to Florence, does not pursue any claims of ownership.
Ms. Korn, on the other hand, is obsessed with the elitist idea that there is no equal wife for her son, as a scion like herself, of an elite family. So it would theoretically be his only possible adequate option , comparable to a pharaoh marriage . Therefore, she only reaches Tiroler's mother-son separation proposal intellectually, emotionally she feels identical to Stephan and is actually not interested in changing the situation. The latter, on the other hand, not only keeps his freedom from birds in France and his sleep adventures a secret: Florence actually doesn't know much about her son, she is only informed about his affairs with married women, which she does not worry about. In contrast to the psychoanalyst, Agnes, too, does not take it seriously as an opposite pole. But the aunt's love letter, as she instinctively senses, requires her to intervene, because she fears that her son will lose her alleged bond with her through her “recovery” in the form of a young woman.
Stephan and the narrator's aunt
The relationship with the teacher could mean a turning point in his private life for Stephan. The love adventure with Aimée was quickly resolved for him when he recognized the egocentricity of his beloved, which was related to him. The narrator's aunt, on the other hand, with her childlike inexperience, is the embodiment of selflessness and self-sacrificing devotion. The touching helplessness of this relationship is symbolized by the hat catch in the wind in front of the fountain with the seated statue of Walther von der Vogelweide on the empty square in front of the Würzburg residence, which was destroyed by bombs. The aunt lives "behind such a high wall of naivety" that her fascination with the guest from America is recognizable to everyone before she is aware of it: "The only person she ever hid was herself."
While reading the letter, Florence immediately grasps the danger that her son could fall for a social romantic instead of occasionally associating with women from her society as before. Basically, Stephan is not really capable of relational because of his self-centeredness, as his mirror dialogue with himself about 35-45-year-old women demonstrates. At first his aunt is too uncoquettish for him, too little puzzling. During his walk through Bockenheim he saw in her the modesty of a nun, "her [] whole [] clumsy [] despair [...], her shy inclination, her gray life" and "[it] the thought suddenly occurs to him that he could be called to bring a little shine to this poor existence, to let the sun rise over this karst coast and to radiate it with an abundance of warmth. ”In the café he sees her in her hitherto hidden beauty, he discovers their "loss of center" and their willingness to "follow [him]."
For Stephan this means a new love experience: So far, he had both his affairs and his dreams under control: “[But now] [he] was shocked that suddenly another face came up in front of my aunt's. It had a horrified expression, fear was on its features, and a wonderfully colored streak of blood oozed from the right corner of its beautiful mouth. Stephan closed his eyes and wiped the picture away with determination. "
Although Stephan knows that Florence is preparing the joint departure, he does not believe in leaving Frankfurt, but neither contradicts and in his dreamlike passivity suppresses his mother's actions. So he leaves, shocked by Aimée's appearance, with the fantasy of the dreamed lover.
He learns nothing of the aunt's mental state. He would probably not have been able to assist her in her weakness either: “Anyone who viewed Stephen's character with skepticism had to fear for his steadfastness in the event of an encounter with my aunt who was so changed. It is not certain whether he would have stood by her [...]. He was looking for a unique adventure, a life that would have met his flight plans in the broadest sense, the life of the new and the real Stephan, but not a job as a nurse for a French teacher who had gone mad. That would not have changed the fact that it was the story of her love for him, the behavior of his mother, but also his own, which she had taken to heart until her heart saved itself and made itself insensitive to unhappiness. "
The Frankfurt trip into the past ends with the grotesque result that the love for aunt frees Stephan from his regression phase with Agnes, but the tragic end strengthens his bond with Florence and the Korns emigrate to New York.
reception
In a newspaper interview with Martin Mosebach from 2007, the early history of reception is presented. Like others before being awarded the Büchner Prize works published literary criticism took the bed , with few laudatory reviews, hardly true or criticized the language as a narrative style of the turn of the century and the author's attitude to tradition as the "backwardness". Similar evaluations can also be found in the later publications in the feature section that is split on this question.
Mosebach opposes this determination of the location, it is based on “misunderstandings”, he is not reactionary politically, but, in the sense of the Colombian philosopher and aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila , in a “belief in original sin, the imperfection of man, the impossibility To create paradise on earth ”, by the way,“ [re] actionary and revolutionary standpoints […] could touch ”, as with Büchner . He justifies his preoccupation with the post-war period and the 1950s with the fact that it was "artistically one of the most productive decades of all."
With increasing awareness, the out-of-print early works were republished. Reviews are now increasingly appreciating the Frankfurt novels as their main work, recognizing the linguistic virtuosity of the "poeta doctus, [...] writing thinkers, [...] high-ranking art critics" and praising Mosebach as the one Zeit perhaps the most important representative of the social novel , which takes up topics such as tradition and progress or people's search for cultural orientation in the context of our time and represents its position inappropriately in the spectrum of German literature.
literature
- Mosebach, Martin: No youth work , in: Renatus Deckert (Hrsg.): The first book. Writer on her literary debut. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-45864-8 , pp. 225-229.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mosebach, Martin: The bed . dtv, Munich 2002, p. 509. ISBN 978-3-423-13069-1 . This edition is quoted.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 182.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 435.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 354.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 256.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 360 ff.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 30.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 23.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 24.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 12.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 36.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 122.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 76.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 105.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 104.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 118.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 119.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 108.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 107.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 109.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 97.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 103.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 453 f.
- ↑ a b c Mosebach, p. 467.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 465.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 463.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 368.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 54.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 75.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 132.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 130.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 261.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 263.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 266 f.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 487.
- ^ A b Volker Hage, Philipp Oehmke: "Reading is a laborious business". Interview with Martin Mosebach . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 2007, p. 196-198 ( Online - Oct. 22, 2007 ).
- ^ Daniel Haas: Büchner Prize Winner Mosebach: Stilberater der Literatur. In: Spiegel Online. June 7, 2007, accessed May 11, 2019 .
- ↑ u. a. Ulrich Greiner and Ijoma Mangold in various Die Zeit articles