The swan house
The Schwanenhaus is a novel by Martin Walser . The book was first published in 1980.
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Dr. Gottlieb Zürn, real estate agent and family man, has not signed a contract for a long time. To blame is not only the economic downturn, but above all his inner resistance to seeing his colleagues as competitors, to assert himself and to fight outside in hostile life. His ideal is his father, who died early and was unsuccessful in business, who is said to have always had something soft and fragrant about him. He also has the desire to see himself as a poet - but not as a poet "also for others" and certainly not with the intention of making money from his works. He is also not interested in expressing things through his poems, but on the contrary to conceal them - or to indicate through concealment that he has something to express but does not do so. Too sensitive and at the same time too childish - he sees himself in his subjective age classification, according to which he judges all people, as around twelve-year-olds - to act as a tough businessman, he loses the fight for the Schwanenhaus, an Art Nouveau gem , like his clairvoyant Well-known Helmut Maier, commonly known as Schaden-Maier, predicts:
- I'll tell you in advance, Mr. Kaltammer will snatch the Schwanenhaus under the nail. […] Jarl Graf Kaltammer- Aspergillus niger from the changing silk, he'll get the swan house. You can do what you want there, Gottlieb. That’s the law. System. Objects of this size are simply shunted on the Kaltammer floor. This is a cold hammer society. This company produces Kaltammers just as Kaltammers' buildings produce Aspergillus niger. And just as Kaltammers 'buildings perish on Kaltammers' Aspergillus niger, so this society perishes on Kaltammers.
The Schwanenhaus, symbolically adorned with images of love and longing, falls victim to Kaltammer's profit-making mindset and thus the wrecking ball.
Zürn, who has so far always kept his wife Anna secret from defeats, cannot hide this failure. But Anna, who courageously tackles other adversities in life such as the pubescent antics of her four daughters, also masters this situation. She succeeds in letting her unhappy husband, who fantasizes sometimes long to go back to the pram and the mother's breast, calmly fall asleep in her arms.
Motifs
The Schwanenhaus is program: motifs of longing and love adorn its rooms and facades. A portrayal of Leda with the swan and her four children is explicitly mentioned , in front of which the different perspectives of the Zürn couple become only too clear: Gottlieb feels stimulated by the portrayal of the naked Leda and would like best in what is conceivably unsuitable because it is already furnitureless and Swan House, swarmed by interested parties, slip into the role of the swan, but Anna directs all her attention to the four children tumbling out of the eggshells, who remind her of their own family. Almost regularly, or so it happens to Gottlieb, she destroys his advances with such obstructive remarks. But when Anna approaches Gottlieb once, he for his part does not feel in a position to respond to her wishes. Only in the end they finally show themselves peacefully, if not erotically united.
Another picture shows a disunited but yearning couple on either side of a body of water full of swans. An inscription makes it clear what the viewer has to think about: Lohengrin's story.
The naked woman racing up on a swan, who can be seen in the stairwell, remains uncommented.
At an auction of the inventory, Gottlieb is bidding for an Art Nouveau lamp that shows a similarly ecstatic female figure. But here, too, he is the loser: Paul Schatz, next to Jarl F. Kaltammer his biggest competitor, acquires the beauty for himself. When Gottlieb caused a rear-end collision on Schatz's car a little later, Schatz generously gave him the shattered torso of his ideal. Here, too, he cannot get what he actually wants.
Combined with the motif of infantility , the swan motif appears in the form of a full-grown, but still like a young animal, brown-spotted swan, which the animal shelter has housed in the swan house due to lack of space. This mistake of nature reacts so aggressively to his surroundings that he has to be shot in the end.
Armin, the dog of the Zürn family, is explicitly described as infantile by its owners. However, through his beauty, his submissive behavior and his flattery, he succeeds in reconciling his surroundings with his shortcomings.
Paul Schatz, the almost always successful colleague, who is extremely committed to social and environmental issues and is considered an exemplary role model everywhere, even though he collects his commissions as ice cold, appears once in a suit that is based on the sailor suits of childhood. He manages to be almost everyone's favorite. At a party, HIM is only spoken of in the form of this pronoun, as if it were a deity. He seems to come pretty close to a secret ideal of Zürn:
- Everyone should want to be his parents.
To make matters worse, Schatz tends to talk about his parents, both of whom are still alive, at every opportunity, and thus stirs up anger's envy.
In addition to the swan and childlike motifs , similar to the novella A Fleeing Horse, the wanderer's fantasy , here too, a piece of music becomes the leitmotif. This time it is Beethoven's Eroica that accompanies Gottlieb Zürn in all his struggles and defeats.
References to other books by Walser
Dr. Gottlieb Zürn is also the protagonist of the novels Hunt and The Moment of Love by Martin Walser. He is also the landlord of the holiday home that the Halm couple, known from A Fleeing Horse and Surf , have lived in for years. The plot of Das Schwanenhaus apparently takes place some time after that of Ein flehendes Pferd and at the same time as that of the novel Soul Work . Xaver Zürn, the hero of this novel, is a cousin of Gottlieb. He is not mentioned in Das Schwanenhaus , but his wife, who is looking for her runaway daughter Julia, is. Another cousin, Franz Horn, appears in Das Schwanenhaus am Rande. For his part, he is the protagonist in the novels Letter to Lord Liszt and Beyond Love .
Locations
Zürn's house, this is evident from the novella A Fleeing Horse , one has to imagine in Nussdorf , where the author lives. The city in which many scenes take place, especially between the broker colleagues and competitors, is Überlingen and the contested Schwanenhaus stands in the middle of the city on Lake Constance.
References to the author's biography
Walser always processed the experiences and injuries that life had in store for him in his works. Gottlieb's difficulties with society, with his age, with his relationship with his wife and children are certainly topics that preoccupied the author personally at the time the book was written. A clear parallel between the fictional character and the author can also be seen in the family constellation - Martin Walser also has four daughters.