The book Blam
The book Blam ( Knjiga o blamu ) is a novel by the Serbian writer Aleksandar Tišma . The first edition was published by Nolit (Belgrade) in 1972. The book opens Tišma's main work, a 5-volume cycle of novels, which is set in the war past and the post-war present of his hometown Novi Sad .
content
On an everyday stroll through Novi Sad in 1956, the reader accompanies the protagonist Miroslav Blam - in his mid-30s, husband, family man, small employee of a travel agency and Jewish Holocaust survivor - through his world of experience, his reflections, fantasies and memories, which are kept at a distance . Two buildings play a central role in his symbolically circular walk: the one he grew up in and the one he has lived in since his marriage - the house on Vojvoda-Šupljikac Square and the Merkur Palace .
Blam's father had sold the former, a small single-family house which, according to the eventful genealogy of both parental lines, showed modest prosperity, shortly before he and his wife fell victim to a raid ordered by the Hungarian occupiers . Blam, about the whereabouts of the proceeds in the unclear, has reason to assume that a Hungarian who had previously resided in Novi Sad, an idler who had taken up residence with a widow who lived in the secret annexe, contributed to the death of his parents through denunciation and maybe even benefited from the home sale. As little as the prospect is of shedding light on the exact circumstances more than 10 years later, Blam feels that it would be his duty to at least make an attempt to direct his steps in this direction. What he lacks is the determination and drive that he once admired in his classmate Čutura. This is why his imagination is occasionally kindled by the idea of how Čutura would act in his place - knowing, of course, that he is long dead; he died in the resistance , as did Blam's sister Esther.
The apartment in the Merkur Palace makes it even clearer how inevitable for Blam the past affects the present. On the one hand, his life in it is a privilege, a multiple even. His house is considered to be “the most important building”, indeed the “undisputed center of the city”, and his apartment in the attic seems to have been made for him, as it is a place of retreat that is just as difficult to find as the access to the one around it Mansard-leading promenade, which he perceives as a place of freedom, because from there he can participate in life in the way that best suits him: see without being seen. On the other hand, it is there that his primal fear always overtakes him. It seems impossible to him that his life will “go by without a chase, without another war” - and then the refuge would become a trap. In addition, he knows that it is “not thanks to him” that he has enjoyed this privilege. It needed a patron for that. He found himself in the smart, bustling Popadić, an opportunistic charmer whom the occupying power tolerated as a compliant vicarious agent, while the liberating power brutally shot as a collaborator. At the beginning of the occupation he got both Blam and his wife Janja permanent employment, then both that attic apartment, and during the raid he made a benevolent testimony to protect himself from Blam, for the fact that he had recently married a Christian and having been baptized did not automatically mean salvation. At that moment, Blam already knows that Popadić's help is by no means selfless. He has a relationship with Janja. From a moving tram Blam had observed how they both hugged each other in the open street. More than the fact itself, it is the manner in which they embrace that makes this moment the key scene of his being. From then on, he comes to terms with being excluded from life. A brief moment from the time when he was wooing Janja promised him the opposite: “Janja at the fountain” (very different from the cool, attractive girl he had met while dancing) - “barefoot, disheveled, red-cheeked and breathless ". But she closes this part of her self, the most desirable for him, from him. Therefore, Blam is convinced that she has other lovers. He also believes that one of them fathered his daughter and not himself - an idea that rather calms and relieves him. He wants “the little one to be healthy and lively”, and it would be a burden to him if he discovered traces of his broken self in her, if not his own, whom he believes to have survived by chance and undeservedly and for her “lost world “He no longer wants to be“ your last witness, connoisseur and explainer, but only for yourself ”.
“He got away with it, but it's no honor. He was spared, but that's out of luck. He survived, but that's a shame. He was not tested by God like the Old Testament Job , and perhaps this failure to test is the worst test of all. Blam suspects: whoever has not been haunted does not exist; he who has not suffered has not lived either, he is dead. He is unknown on earth. Only good that letters [from his cousin Lili, who lived with the Blams on her way into exile and was expecting a child from him, whom the family council decided to have an abortion taking advantage of Popadic's relationships, and who is now trying to get her former lover reach], addressed to Blam, return with the label "Unknown". [...] Blam, this anti-Job, can neither quarrel nor argue with God because he does not believe in him. And yet Blam sits at the end of the novel in the synagogue of Novi Sad , which is now a concert hall, and feels with unease the eye of God resting on him. He feels that he is looking for nothing more than his own death. He has to "close the circle that he broke off on his own initiative," he has to share the downfall to which his people were condemned with them - as 'an act of deepest truth'. "
layout
The book Blam has 15 unnamed chapters. Each of them usually consists of three parts. About half of the chapters begin with a brief excursion into the topographical and historical reality of Novi Sad, followed by a piece of contemporary plot and a flashback. Sometimes the individual parts are narrated together, sometimes Tišma places them next to each other without being connected, so that a coherent picture only emerges when viewed as a whole.
From today's perspective, the flashbacks are the parts that are most likely to be conventionally designed. The plot is more action-packed and more stringent, there are opportunities for identification despite the clear tendency towards de-heroization, and the predominant perspective is that of the omniscient narrator .
However, if one takes into account the time and conditions of its creation, this judgment is put into perspective, and it hardly applies to the flashbacks, which focus more on the historical than the novel. The short scene, for example, which describes the preparations for the deportation of the Jews in the spring of 1944, is alienated by a "disruptive factor from the animal world": a handful of dogs left behind, seeking to be close to their Jewish owners, ensure "in their ignorance of conception and animal trust" u. a. for the fact that "the Judengasse is filled with happy barking" when it is removed and that there are "good moments" when saying goodbye at the train station. The unusual view and skill of this scene - it was also explicitly mentioned in the Literary Quartet on April 20, 1995 - helps ensure that an event like this, which quickly runs the risk of narrative wear, is given the desired weight again.
The description of the raid is also extraordinary, just in the approach. First, the narrator lets the reader, apparently very pragmatically, take a look at the map of Novi Sad; then he has the desk criminals do the same on the eve of the raid with their strategic intent, in order to clarify afterwards what should be shown when he follows the executors through the streets and houses in the third, more detailed part: that for the victims “death or life, execution or pardon ”depends above all on how the perpetrators are determined“ by their birth, their appearance, their language, their feelings and thoughts ”.
In some of the contemporary scenes and “excursions” it becomes even clearer how Tišma tries to sound out design possibilities. Blam's fantasies of revenge against that Hungarian informer, for example, stand out from the outside because they are pure dialogues, formally drama within an epic work. The conclusion about the content is obvious: In Blam's existence, the dramatic only takes place in his imagination.
His married life, which outwardly looks completely normal, shows the same thing, makes him even clearer. Because the possibility of an alternative is always in mind here. Blam, however, prefers to suspect rather than ask when dealing with Janja, to avoid instead of acting. The oppressive effect that comes from it results to a large extent from the fact that the narrator restricts himself here entirely to the perspective of the protagonist. “However, he omits the wife's inner view, by which the reality of Blam's bitterness can be assessed. Whatever Janja's 'quick, sure smile' means when she confronts her husband - it brings his world-negation close to madness. "
One of the most unconventional parts of the novel is the introduction to the penultimate chapter - a miniature of almost two pages. It begins with the description of the weather on an unspecified day, which is linked to the expectation that an action will follow in the second paragraph. Instead it says: "Or ..." and describes a completely different weather situation. After this pattern is repeated in the third and fourth paragraphs, however, the expectation that these are études on a fairly everyday literary subject is also undermined. The following sentence leads to a formulation - a metaphor , the understatement of which can hardly be overcooled - in which Tišma's program seems to be canceled not only for this first novel, but also for his entire work over the next 20 years: “All this happens in of the city, and it seems as if the city is there so that the seasons alternate in it, as if it were a retort for testing the stability and variability of material and people under different pressure and temperature conditions ”.
literature
- Aleksandar Tišma: The book Blam. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-446-17822-8 .
Web links
- Editions of Knjiga o blamu in WorldCat
- Annette Meyhöfer : The bitter truth of the Miroslav Blam review in Focus
- Hellmuth Karasek : Truth Without Consolation Review in Der Spiegel
Individual evidence
- ↑ Aleksandar Tišma: Nenapisana prica . In it: Ankica Vasic: Bibliografija Akademika Aleksandra Tišme . Vojvodjanska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Novi Sad, 1989.
- ↑ Sigrid Löffler: Laudation for Aleksandar Tišma . Laudation on the occasion of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 1996; accessed on August 17, 2012 (pdf; 32 kB)
- ^ Dieter Wunderlich: ZDF: The literary quartet . 2002.
- ^ Andreas Breitenstein : Man, the animal . Review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; Retrieved August 17, 2012.