The Jewish car

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"How deep does memory reach?" With this leitmotif questioning, the GDR writer Franz Fühmann opens a literary visualization of his first decades in Das Judenauto . Fourteen auto-fictional reports tell how the first-person figure experienced important historical events between 1929 and 1949 (“14 days in two decades”): as a schoolboy, enthusiastic Wehrmacht soldier and Soviet prisoner of war who chose the GDR as his new home. With the confession of perpetrators published in 1962, in times of collective amnesia on the one hand (FRG) and the anti-fascism doctrine on the other (GDR) of the Iron Curtain , Fühmann presents a courageous text that struggles for truthfulness and which has long been denied due recognition. The fact that the narrative cycle is to be rated as an exemplary "case of censorship in the GDR literature business" is proven in a historical-critical research work on a work by Fühmann with a synoptic comparison between the published editions and the previously unknown original version of the text.

Table of contents of the first edition 1962 [deviations in the supposed original version 1979]

  • The Jewish car | 1929, Great Depression
  • Prayers to Saint Michael [prayers to Saint Michael] | February 12, 1934, revolt of the Viennese workers
  • The defense of the Reichenberger gymnasium | September 1938, before the Munich Conference
  • Down the mountains | October 1938, occupation of the Sudetenland
  • A world war breaks out | September 1, 1939, outbreak of the Second World War
  • I want to be a good lord [Catalaunian battle] | June 22, 1941, invasion of the Soviet Union
  • Discoveries on the map | December 1941, Battle of Moscow
  • Each his own Stalingrad | February 1943, Battle of Stalingrad
  • Völuspa [Muspili] | June 20 [July] 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler
  • Plans in the Blackberry Cave | May 8, 1945, surrender of the Hitler army
  • Rumors | July 1945, Potsdam Conference
  • Rainy day in the Caucasus | April 21, 1946, unification party conference of the KPD and SPD
  • A day like any other | October 10, 1946, verdict in the Nuremberg trial
  • For the first time [for the first time]: Germany | October 7, 1949, foundation of the German Democratic Republic

Publication history

At the beginning of 1962, Fühmann gave the Aufbau-Verlag the manuscript of his volume of short stories entitled “Days. A sonnet in reports ”. As early as mid-February, the editors Günter Caspar and Joachim Schreck informed him that the entire narrative cycle was to be given the title (of the first episode) Das Judenauto and that it would go to print with considerable text changes. The title and text of the volume lying on or under the counters in autumn 1962 are not intended by the author.

The Aufbau editors also reject Fühmann's request to use the original version of the text for the 2nd edition (1969) and the reprints in Reclam (1965, 1987). At the same time, the author is not allowed to publish Das Judenauto in NSW with a publisher of his choice ( Klaus Wagenbach ) because Wagenbach had published Biermann's Die Drahtharfe . After a grueling two-year hang-up, the volume of short stories was published by Diogenes in Zurich in 1968 with a 'follow-up' in which the author admits a “break in style” in the final report. This text version is translated into Czech (1964), Russian (1966, 1973), English (1968) and French (1975, 2 2016). The fact that Das Judenauto - in contrast to other texts by Fühmann - does not appear in Polish translation is probably due to the latent anti-Semitism in Poland. While a single story is reprinted from the volume of stories in the GDR, the title episode alone appears in 30 different collections abroad.

Fourteen years later, Siegfried Scheibe , textologist at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , wants to break new ground in editorial science based on the Jewish car and present a historical-critical study of the text of a living car. Since the manuscript handed over by Fühmann to the Aufbau-Verlag at the time has disappeared there, Scheibe prepared a reconstruction of the original version and submitted it to Hinstorff - Fühmann's new 'house publisher' - for a planned reprint. However, in 1979 Das Judenauto was published again in a new version with questionable text interventions by Hinstorff's editor Ingrid Prignitz , without the character of the text version now being edited being transparently explained to the reading public. Only after another 35 years is Scheibe's reconstructed original version discovered by chance and made available in a synopsis in 2017, in which the differences to all published text variants ( structure 1962 and Hinstorff 1979 as well as preprints of individual episodes) are clearly recognizable. The supposed original version ( Hinstorff 1979) is also available in English (2013) and Dutch (2014).

reception

The contemporary response in the GDR to the 14 stories about the former Nazi remains manageable: a protagonist who has not always heard the anti-fascist grass grow does not fit into the cultural-political concept of a state that has been transformed into an anti-fascist by proclamation. In the Bonn Republic, the Diogenes edition (1968) received quite a lot of attention, initially because of Fühmann's distancing remarks, with which the “perceived wishful thinking” in the text of the final narrative was cured. Only with the sociopolitical paradigm shift after 1968 towards an open civil society did the autofictive perpetrator reports of a GDR writer gain attention. a. in the field of education - often reprinted and elevated by many a literary pope to the rank of canonical literature of the short form. However, this is mostly limited to the title episode, which Mochem attests: "The process of indoctrination, the creeping possession of a harmless adolescent by pernicious ideology - and here, instead of anti-Semitism or xenophobia, one could certainly use other heresy - has been presented with similar credibility and poetic intensity. ”So far, however, it has also been overlooked that in other episodes of the Jewish car in the early 1960s, Fühmann exposed a cultural memory view of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, the extermination campaign against Bolshevism, forced labor and overexploitation, as well as everyday racism As it has only slowly begun to assert itself in the collective memory of the German majority society since the 1990s and against considerable opposition from politics and science.

censorship

Fühmann submits his manuscript to the Aufbau-Verlag with reports on the experience on certain historical days at a time when the censorship system in the GDR literature business has "stabilized" and with the "Department of Literature and Books" (from 1962 "Headquarters Publishing and book trade in the Ministry of Culture ') a "literary political control center" is installed, which delegates the main responsibility for censorship to the publishers. Against this background, on the basis of the synoptic comparison, more than 5,300 text interventions by the structural editors can be proven, which, in addition to stylistic changes, are clearly attributable to ideologically motivated censorship. For the first and last time you can benefit from the “compulsory participation” to which the author feels obliged; because Fühmann's consequence after this case of censorship is lasting: "I'll never let myself be censored again."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Franz Fühmann: The Jewish car. A fortnight out of two decades. Construction, Berlin 1962.
  2. ↑ Franz Fühmann: The Jewish car. A fortnight out of two decades . In: The Jewish car. Cable crane and Blue Peter. Twenty-two days or half of life . Hinstorff, Rostock 1979, p. 7-172 .
  3. ↑ a b Uwe Buckendahl: Franz Fühmann: Das Judenauto - a case of censorship in the GDR literature business. A historical-critical exploration with a synopsis of all published text variants . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2017.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Werth: The moment of faith. The past of the writer Franz Fühmann . In: The time . 23rd year, no. 44 , November 1, 1968, pp. 26 .
  5. ↑ Helmuth Mojem: The expulsion from paradise. Anti-Semitism and sexuality in Franz Fühmann's story Das Judenauto . In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society . 41, 1997, pp. 479 .
  6. ^ Siegfried Lokatis: Successes of central literature control in the early GDR . In: Monika Estermann u. Edgar Lersch (Ed.): Book, book trade and radio 1950–1960 . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999, p. 100 .
  7. ↑ Manfred Jäger: The interplay of self-censorship and literature control in the GDR . In: Ernest Wichner (Ed.): 'Literature Development Processes '. The censorship of literature in the GDR . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 37-41 .
  8. ^ Franz Fühmann to Dora Speer on September 23, 1974 . In: Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Ed.): Franz Fühmann. Letters 1950–1984. A selection . Hinstorff, Rostock 1994, p. 153 .