The death ship
The Death Ship , The Story of an American Sailor , is a 1926 novel by B. Traven in the Gutenberg Book Guild .
action
The first-person narrator Gales - he already appears in the story The Cotton Pickers (1925), then in The Bridge in the Jungle (1929), each time without a first name - is an American sailor from New Orleans in this novel . After a shore leave in Antwerp, he missed his ship, the S. S. Tuscaloosa . Since his only identity document, namely his seaman's card, remained on board, he had a new experience, namely falling through all the meshes of recognized social affiliation without papers . Claims as a stateless person , he is deported across national borders and goes on an odyssey through Western Europe from Belgium via the Netherlands to France, Spain and finally Portugal. The American consul in Paris tells him most clearly what situation he has got into without documented confirmation of his existence, so that even the consul can no longer help him:
“I wasn't born, I didn't have a seaman's card, I could never get a passport in my life, and anyone could do whatever they wanted with me, because I wasn't anyone, wasn't officially even born, and consequently couldn't be missed. "
In Barcelona, his situation forces him to hire the completely derelict steamer Yorikke . The ship is supposed to leave for Liverpool . Apart from the skipper, only seafarers work on the ship who no longer have papers, i.e. are living dead, for whom no one feels responsible, except that they can still work for the owner of a “death ship” like the Yorikke . They are no longer allowed to go ashore through the controls in any port, so that they have little chance of ever being able to leave the "death ship" properly again after being handed over to the skipper for their low wages. So the trip does not go to Liverpool, but the ship, which is officially on the way with worthless cargo, is smuggling weapons on Mediterranean and coastal Atlantic routes. In a country program in Dakar Gales is with that of Poznan -born Stanislav Kozlovsky, his only friend, who after the First World War , neither the German nor the Polish citizenship could obtain, shanghait and gets to the Empress of Madagascar .
The Empress is only three years old and in good condition. However, it does not bring the specified machine performance, so that the profits to be generated by freight are not achieved. That is why the ship owners have already made two attempts to sink the ship for the purpose of insurance fraud . In a new attempt from Dakar, in which Gales and Stanislaw are forced to participate, the ship finally sinks with man and mouse, and Gales finds himself completely exhausted and haunted by hallucinations on a piece of cabin wall in the sea with no prospect of rescue.
“However, Gale survived - how is not described, and Traven refused to provide information with a wink in [an] essay on The Dead Ship , only admitting that whoever was telling the story was 'probably also' alive. [...] Gale can continue to tell. "
style
The seafaring first-person narrator speaks sarcastically, ironically and uses many phrases from the seaman's language :
“I didn't want to have worked in vain and just give the money to the skipper. And so he had me all the more firmly. But where, when and how do you take samples? It didn't exist. The sampling was not confirmed in any port. No papers, no homeland. Never get rid of the man. Can't sign off. - There was only one sampling. The removal of gladiators . Marking on the reef . Sign by the fish. "
The position of the exploited seaman appears to be absurd when it comes to signing on:
“When I arrived, I asked in memory of normal boats:
'Where is the mattress for my bunk?'
'Not delivered here.'
,Pillow?'
'Not delivered here.'
,Ceiling?'
'Not delivered here.'
I was just surprised that the company even delivered the ship we had to drive; and I would not have been surprised if I had been told that everyone has to bring the ship with them. "
Biblical figures are often alluded to in order to show the alleged age and poor quality of the objects marked in this way:
“The lamp itself was one of the lamps those seven virgins had worn when they were on guard. Under such circumstances one could hardly expect that it would even be able to lightly illuminate a seaman's quarters. The wick was still the same one that one of the seven virgins had cut from her woolen petticoat. The oil we used for the lamps, which for fraudulent reasons was called petroleum, sometimes even diamond oil, was already rancid when the seven virgins poured oil on their lamps. It hadn't gotten any better in the meantime. "
The seaman also derives conclusive judgments from his experience:
“There are many death ships on the seven seas because there are many dead. Never have there been so many deaths than has been won for true freedom and true democracy since the great war. Tyrants and despots were defeated, and the victor became the age of greater tyranny, the age of the national flag, the age of the state and its lackeys. "
A new "human comedy"
B. Traven's allusions to Dante's Divine Comedy are unmistakable . Above the “Second Book” of the novel is the motto: “Whoever enters here / Des Nam 'and Being is extinguished. / He is blown away…” These verses, an allusion to the heading at the entrance to Dantes' Inferno , the “inscription above the crew quarters of the death ship ”, will be repeated later in a leitmotif. When Stanislaw dies at the end, the narrator lets the “great captain” appear and inspect the drowning man “faithfully and honestly for the long journey”. Above his last quarters it says, as if it were going to Dante's paradise: “Whoever enters here / is free from all torments” (end of chapter 48).
In a more recent study on the death ship it is stated that B. Traven did not write a simple adventure literature , in which he has been classified most commonly so far. In addition to the literary allusions to Dante and Honoré de Balzac's The Human Comedy , other literary heritage appears in the death ship . As in Georg Büchner's dramatic fragment Woyzeck , criticism is made of a concept of freedom “which favors the wealthy and encourages the enslavement of the wage earner. Traven's narrator polemics against the bourgeois concept of freedom with that sharpness that we only know from Georg Büchner and the young Marx ”.
Statelessness as an issue
In chapters 39 and 40 of the novel, in addition to Gales and Stanislaw, two other stateless persons who Stanislaw saw die on the Yorikke are explicitly mentioned : Paul, a German born in Mulhouse (Alsace), and Kurt from Memel . As a result of the nationality conflicts and the new demarcation of borders after the war, both did not acquire citizenship because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. For B. Traven an occasion to let his first-person narrator Gales think about the new reality, following the anarchism represented by Max Stirner :
“The mainland is surrounded by a wall that cannot be overlooked, a prison for those who are inside, a death ship or a foreign legion for those who are outside. It is the only freedom that a state that wants to and must develop to the extreme of its senses can offer the individual who cannot be numbered if he does not want to murder him with a cool gesture. The state will have to come to this cool gesture. "
B. Traven can claim as the first novelist to have made the absurdity of statelessness, which became obvious after the First World War, his subject.
The novel as a radio play, film and opera
In 1946 Ernst Schnabel edited the book as a radio play for the NWDR . The director had Ludwig Cremer ; the leading role was spoken by Peter Mosbacher . The first broadcast took place on December 2nd of the same year. Other productions:
- 1947: Director: Karl Peter Biltz ; Main role: Wolfgang Golisch
- 1948: Director: Carl Nagel ; Leading role: Maximilian Larsen
- 1956: Director: Gustav Burmester ; Leading role: Peter Mosbacher
In 1959 the novel was made into an adventure film under the direction of Georg Tressler and starring Horst Buchholz and Mario Adorf .
In the early 1990s, songwriters Gerulf Pannach and Christian Kunert wrote the musical Das Totenschiff based on the novel.
In 2018 Kristine Tornquist wrote an opera libretto based on the novel, which was set to music by Oskar Aichinger . The siren opera theater in Vienna premiered the opera in 2018.
literature
- Jan Berg, Hartmut Böhme a. a. (Ed.): Social history of German literature from 1918 to the present . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-596-26475-8 .
- Johannes Beck, Klaus Bergmann, Heiner Boehncke (eds.): The B. Traven book . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1976, ISBN 3-499-16986-X .
- Thorsten Czechanowsky: “I am a free American, I will complain”. On the destruction of the American Dream in B. Traven's novel "Das Totenschiff". In: Jochen Vogt, Alexander Stephan (ed.): The America of the authors. Fink, Munich 2006.
- Thorsten Czechanowsky: The odyssey as a borderline experience. Reflections on the metaphor of the border in B. Traven's novel "Das Totenschiff". In: mauerschau 1/2008, pp. 47–58 ( PDF ).
- Burkhardt Wolf: “There are no death ships.” B. Travens sea change. In: DVjs . 80/4 (2006), pp. 435-455.
Individual evidence
- ↑ In English contexts he is not called Gales, but usually "Gerald Gale". "Gerard Gale" is also a spelling because the life story of the mysterious B. Traven was told under this pseudonym in 1966 . (Cf. Max Schmid: B. Traven and his first-person narrator Gerard Gale . In: Johannes Beck, Klaus Bergmann, Heiner Boehncke (Eds.): The B. Traven book . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1976, ISBN 3-499-16986- X , pp. 119–145, here p. 120.)
- ↑ See Thorsten Czechanowsky: The random walk as a borderline experience. In: wall show . 1/2008 ( PDF ; 119 kB).
- ↑ Since there are editions of the novel in various publishers, a page number is omitted here and reference is only made to the relevant chapter of the comparatively short 48 chapters.
- ^ Karl S. Guthke: B. Traven. Biography of a riddle. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-7632-3268-0 .
- ↑ B. Traven : The Death Ship . Gutenberg Book Guild in Diogenes Verlag, 1982, ISBN 3-257-05000-3 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ Ernst-Ullrich Pinkert: Traven's fairy tale of 'simple storytelling'. On the intertextual references in the novel "Das Totenschiff" . In: Günter Dammann (Ed.): B. Traven's narrative in the constellation of languages and cultures . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3080-X , pp. 23–36, here pp. 24 and 33 f. ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ See Wolfgang Eßbach: An abandoned language. Max Stirner's influence on B. Traven . In: Mathias Brandtstätter, Matthias Schönberg (ed.): New "BT-Mitteilungen". Studies on B. Traven . Karin Kramer Verlag, Berlin 2009 ( PDF ).
- ↑ SirenOpera Theater