The Ship of Fools (Porter)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

The Ship of Fools (Original title: Ship of Fools ) is a novel by Katherine Anne Porter , which was published in 1962. The author was inspired by a boat trip to Europe, which she undertook in 1931, and by reading Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494). From Brant she took over both the title and the archetypal image of the voyage as a journey through life. In an interview with The Paris Review , she stated: "Human life itself is a mess. Everyone asserts their place, insists on their rights and feelings, misunderstands the motives of others and their own. Nobody knows beforehand how life, that he leads, ends, neither do I. Do not forget that I am a passenger on this ship too. It is by no means just the others who make the fools! Lack of understanding and isolation are the natural conditions of human life. We are all Passengers on this ship, but when it arrives everyone is alone. "

Katherine Anne Porter, already a renowned and popular author after the publication of her short stories, began writing her first and only novel in 1941 and worked on it for twenty years. The eagerly awaited book was announced by the publisher again and again, but the date of publication was repeatedly postponed. When the Ship of Fools came out in 1962, the New York Times called it "the novel that a whole generation has been waiting for thirty years". The book immediately became a huge success in the US: three days after it was published, it was number 1 on the bestseller list and became the best-selling book in the US in the 1960s. Stanley Kramer's film adaptation from 1965 also contributed to this, in which an international cast around Vivien Leigh , Lee Marvin , Heinz Rühmann , Simone Signoret , José Ferrer and Oskar Werner acted.

content

The novel tells of the crossing of the steamship "Vera" from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, from August 22nd to September 17th, 1931. A central theme of the novel is the emergence of National Socialism. During the journey, the fates of numerous passengers of different nationalities cross. In addition to the employees on the ship, especially the captain and the ship's doctor Dr. Schumann, many of the travelers are also Germans: for example Siegfried Rieber, editor of a specialist magazine for women's clothing, who openly advocates National Socialist ideas, and Wilhelm Freytag, who "has to do" with an oil company in Mexico and travels to Germany to meet his wife and his Catch up with mother-in-law. Mr. Freytag's wife is Jewish, which is why he is not allowed to eat at the captain's table; he is forced to sit at a separate table with the Jewish factory owner Julius Löwenthal. Professor Hutten, the former head of a German school in Mexico, is traveling with his wife and the white bulldog Bébé, who is pushed overboard by children and rescued from the intermediate deck by a Basque who drowns in the process. The ship's doctor Dr. During the crossing, Schumann falls in love with a drug-addicted Spanish aristocrat, called La Condesa, who has lived in Cuba for many years and is deported to Tenerife as a political exile.

Other passengers are u. a. the American Mary Treadwell, a forty-five-year-old divorced lady who is returning to Paris and has nothing but contempt for her male fellow travelers and their advances; two young American painters, David Scott and Jenny Brown, who by the end of the 27-day trip are no longer a couple; as well as a Spanish zarzuela troupe, a group of singers and dancers who return to Spain after failing in Mexico. Over eight hundred Spanish workers from the sugar plantations in Cuba, which were expelled from the sugar market as a result of the crisis, are crammed onto the tween deck. You will be treated with condescension and arrogance by the other passengers.

Reception in Germany

In Germany, the book was received critically, especially because of the depiction of the German passengers. Herbert von Borch described it as "a document of hatred" in 1962 in the world .

Der Spiegel wrote in 1962: "In fact, the novel, whose staff is largely made up of Germans, shows quite drastically the author's antipathy for the Teutonic mentality, in which she believes she recognizes fanaticism and cruelty as weighty traits ... and in the spirit Such a blanket judgment is also laid out in her book of success: The "Ship of Fools" parable portrays the Germans as a bogeyman, as the black man of world history ... The extraordinary success that Porter and Ship of Fools have with American audiences is likely due to their reputation alone Author not be declared. Rather, he confirms once again the current good business success with anti-German resentment. "

Even two years later, Ulrich Sonnenmann expressed himself rather negatively in another criticism in Der Spiegel: "The German-Jewish relationship in 1931 is completely wrong. On the one hand it is distorted, on the other hand it is played down: she acts as a retrospective prophet, knows nothing of the extent of the biological and She still understands where, in the German consciousness at that time, in contrast to the impulsive negro hatred of her southern compatriots, the anti-Semitism actually sat, purely theoretically, in a theoretician people that is why it was practically much more dangerous ... "

expenditure

  • The Ship of Fools . Translated by Susanna Rademacher. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1963.
  • The Ship of Fools . Translated by Susanna Rademacher. Revised and annotated edition. With an afterword by Elke Schmitter . Manesse Verlag, Zurich 2010. ISBN 978-3-7175-2220-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Thompson Davis: Interviews - Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction No. 29 . the Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1963
  2. ↑ Darlene Harbor Unrue: Katherine Anne Porter: The Life Of An Artist . University of Mississippi Press 2005, ISBN 978-1-60473-634-2 , p. 254 ( excerpt (Google) )
  3. ↑ The Ship of Fools . Der Spiegel, 37/1962
  4. ↑ Ulrich Sonnemann, Der Spiegel , 7/1964 ( online copy )