The Third Reich (novel)
The Third Reich ( Spanish El Tercer Reich ) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño . The work - a fictional diary from the perspective of the protagonist Udo - was written in 1989, but was only published posthumously in 2010 from the Bolaños estate. In Germany, the novel was published in 2011 by Hanser in a translation by Christian Hansen . It's about a German strategy game champion who, while on vacation in Spain, deals intensively with the board game "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".
content
Udo Berger from Stuttgart is spending his summer vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg on the Costa Brava in Spain . He is working on a strategy to spectacularly win the war game "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" at the next championships by leading the Axis powers to victory in World War II . Then - according to his dream - he could quit and only live from writing articles in special magazines and appearing at game fairs.
As a sparring partner, he finds the pedal boat rental company El Quemado (the burned ), a Latin American in exile with disfiguring burn scars. While Udo and Ingeborg initially roam the clubs with their holiday acquaintances Hanna and Charly and get to know several opaque locals, for Udo everything soon revolves around the game: In a gloomy, day-long duel against the burned man, he works manically - forgotten about history and without reflection - on a victory of the German Wehrmacht and enthusiastically moves the German troops on the board game's map of Europe.
Ingeborg has long since left, Charly has disappeared while surfing, Ms. Else, the hotel manager remains as a communication partner. This rapprochement also fails because Udo can no longer contact anything. He's addicted to the game; to the bitter end.
reception
The novel The Third Reich was widely reviewed in the German feature pages. Time put the suppression and the reappearance of the horror of World War II in consumer culture at the center of its consideration. The reviewer also recognizes, "We understand here how great Bolaño's own passion for gambling must have been, how important his enormous knowledge of Germany's military history, which also found its way into 2666, must have been to him ."
The NZZ is considering whether the champion of the strategy games might be the master from Germany from Paul Celan's death fugue .
Trivia
The literary place Blanes on the Costa Brava is in the book the vacation spot of Udo's family, where he spent the summers of his childhood. In reality, Roberto Bolaño had lived there himself since 1977 and initially kept himself and his family afloat by doing odd jobs.
The Florian-Linden-Krimis are a fictional crime series that Bolaño invented in order to sketch Ingeborg's interests from Udo's perspective. However, Florian Linden soon haunts him in his nightmares. Game designers and Bolaño fans occasionally take up the figure of Florian Linden to pay tribute to the author.
German editions
- Roberto Bolaño: The Third Reich. Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3446236103 .
- Roberto Bolaño: The Third Reich. Fischer Taschenbuch , Frankfurt / Main 2013. ISBN 978-3596187867 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Leonie Meyer-Krentler: Roberto Bolaño: A novel as a war game . In: The time . September 27, 2011, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed on August 28, 2017]).
- ^ "The Third Reich" - Roberto Bolaños posthumously published first work from 1989: The hour of early birth . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . August 29, 2011, ISSN 0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed on August 28, 2017]).
- ↑ Alex Acht: SpielRaum . 1st edition. BoD, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7431-5643-2 , pp. 67 .