The thirtieth year

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The thirtieth year is a cycle of seven stories , first published by Ingeborg Bachmann in 1961, dealing with topics from the post-war period in Germany and Austria . Although the public reacted cautiously to this first prose text by the author, it is considered one of the most important texts in the German language after 1945.

Overview

“ 'After the war' - this is the calculation of time, ” writes Bachmann in the story contained here, Unter Murderer und Irren . According to a remark by W. G. Sebald , the majority of representative German authors occupied themselves in this post-war period with propagating the myth of the “ good German ”. “ The core of the apologetics that came into circulation was the fiction of a somewhat significant difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration. “(Cf. references ) In contrast to this literature of a good conscience, Ingeborg Bachmann describes various forms of subsequent passive collaboration , which the author tells from the perspective of ongoing individual responsibility.

The story “ The Thirtieth Year ” gives the basic tone of the following stories in terms of title and content, which examine the characters' responsibility for their actions in various decision-making situations. The actions of the characters are influenced by the structures of the rooms, facilities and language, which, as sign systems, shape character actions. However, this determination is never hermetic, but leaves a leeway in which the characters can choose between conformity and step sizes of border crossing and thus remain responsible for the result. The contingency of situations in this year of decision accentuates the irrevocable responsibility of individuals for the relationships in which they live.

The seven stories follow a dramaturgical structure from the problem definition through a four-fold investigation of the adaptation to a double conclusion. In addition to the topics of violence, destruction and adaptation to social expectations, which men usually agree on among themselves, almost all of the stories also deal with the love between man and woman, in which the sexes take their positions far apart and a new departure is about to begin miss out on new forms of relationship.

In these brief notes, references in the text to the author's biography or to other of her works, to social developments or to political disputes in the 1950s cannot be traced. For this, reference is made to the extensive secondary literature.

Youth in an Austrian city

content

A first-person narrator visits the city (s) of a childhood while passing through and walks through the streets of Klagenfurt , where his family lived a long time ago. He remembers many facets of a joyless childhood in which the " Anschluss of Austria " to Nazi Germany falls, which changes everything for the children: a childhood only with reservations, which ends with the bombs and funerals of the war at the latest. Sometimes they just crouch there, “stare in front of themselves and no longer listen when you call them 'children'.” The machinations of adults cost the children their childhood and sometimes their lives. The traveler leaves the city without answers to his questions.

interpretation

Ingeborg Bachmann also grew up in Klagenfurt / Austria , but she wrote this text not as an autobiographical attempt , but as a report on a general biographical mutilation . The story bears “ youth ” in the title, but not in the text, which only speaks of “children” in the plural. Apparently it is not about a whole youth and not a specific childhood. It's about the time machine of war that catapults children past their youth into adult life. After the war, the children are “ asked to come into life ”, robbed of their youth, suspicious, with a talent for sadness: “ They go away, their hands in frayed pockets and with a whistle to warn them themselves. "

Visiting the past cannot answer the questions of the reporting self: “ In motionless remembrance, before departure, before all departures, what should we open up? There is very little to enlighten us, and youth is not one of them. “The imploring invocations also turn out to be helpless in the search for explanations.

The causes of the destruction no longer seem accessible, the traveler leaves the place of a childhood unsolvable and unsaved, but the reader now steps with him into the decision-making situations determined by post-fascism .

The thirtieth year

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The story tells of events and reflections from the year before the thirtieth birthday of a nameless he-figure who one day wakes up with the " wonderful new ability to remember " and draws a painful balance sheet of her life, her hopes and her possibilities. This “he” of “ good origins ” discovers in his thirtieth year that he has to say goodbye to his vision of a future that is open to him in all directions. Instead, he sees himself in a “ prison ”, in a “ network ”, in which he believes himself to be trapped early on. But he decides to accept the offer of permanent employment “ out of indifference, exhaustion and because he doesn't know anything better ” and to establish himself in the social “ trap ”.

As with the author (Ingeborg Bachmann's birthday was on June 25th), this 30th year begins in June after her 29th birthday. In July, "he" undertakes a second trip to Rome , which is actually another attempt to escape. In Rome he meets his former lover Elena and his friend-enemy Moll. In September – October he still finds the strength to call for the overthrow of society, in November – December an “ unbearable ” love develops , which leads him to another flight to southern Italy , where he collapses. Finally he makes his way to Vienna , his hometown, and here meets Moll again, who as an intellectual can make a living from the adaptability of his opinions. In the last of the five escapes mentioned in the story, he travels to Italy again shortly before taking on the permanent position and barely survives a car accident as a passenger.

Narrative

The personal narrator takes a narrative perspective close to and in the he-figure and alternates between a "he" and an ambiguous "me". The narrator plunges into the stream of thoughts of the he-figure and changes into the role of a dialogue partner in the last sentence: “ I tell you: get up and go! “The perspective of time, in which the sequence of events and stations is not easy to reconstruct by the reader, is similarly fluctuating. The intertwined thread of memory, the wavering narrative perspective, the mosaic of places and times - the vagueness of the narrative thread reflects the unfinished identity of the seeker.

The narrative is largely written in the present tense, which reinforces the impression of the not-yet-decided and being driven. The language is rich in metaphors, experiments with a transition to a lyrical typeface and supports the topic of fluctuating identity and crossing borders when entering society:

“When finally comes
Then
Then jump up again and tear
the old shameful order. "

interpretation

The two opposing life concepts are that of the he-figure and that of his friend-enemy Moll, who with his opportunism reveals everything that “he” thinks is right. Moll is not an individual, but like the other musical gender, a different type of person whom “he” encounters in the past and present, in Rome and Vienna: “ How do you avoid Moll? What is the point of cutting off a head from this Hydra Moll ... "

Within this minor society, which, morally rejected and successful, uses “ crooks' language ”, there are two life plans, both of which are just variants of the lie: Either be a minor yourself or be your “ henchman ”. But in a surprising turn the approach to this Hydra der Molls loses its horror for the Er figure: "He" enters her service and with this decision, which overturns the pattern of action of foreign expectations and the subsequent flight, he renounces his previous moral claims .

The more or less straightforward liberation described by the travel metaphor is bent back into the society of crooks and there into a “ circling ” in an “ orderly life ”. The er -figure experiences the scandal of moral surrender and self-integration in the same way as the accident that damages her physical integrity, just as her employment with the Molls damages her soul. In this “ moral exhaustion ” of the hero, the virulence of the adaptation echoes, to which the three following stories also refer as vanishing point.

Everything

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From the perspective of a nameless father, the changes in the relationship between the two thirty-year-old parents and their son Fipps are told at the end of the story. The man married his wife because of pregnancy and is increasingly distancing himself from both Hanna and his son, who dies after an accident during a school trip.

The reason for the father's growing disappointment and his alienation from his wife and child is his immeasurable hope that the son will succeed in becoming a new person who cannot " hurt, insult, take advantage of, kill ". But Fipps is a “ very ordinary ” child, sometimes tender, sometimes wild, sometimes aggressive, whom the father observes with increasing distance. The child disappoints its expectations because it gradually steers the child's openness to everything into the path of the familiar, into the “ trap ”, in the “ footsteps ” of the generations of people before him and “ would soon howl with the wolves. "

The father's disappointment becomes most tangible when he observes Fipps 'development from childish aggression to hatred: while he sees the courage to rebel in the infantile anger, Fipps threatens to set fire to his parents' house a little later, and a neighbor girl pushes down the stairs, injured a classmate with a penknife and, being forced to apologize by his educators, is capable of a “ fine, very adult hatred ” - “ he was as if beaten to a man ”.

As Fipp grew up, the initial misunderstandings between the parents turned into a growing alienation. Only after Fipp's death can the father break away from his role of the hoping but remaining passive observer, admit to his “ guilt ” and to having loved his son but not having given him much support.

interpretation

The narrative, which is designed as a retrospective, usually lines up the phases of this childhood and the accompanying disappointment of the father, which also causes the estrangement from his wife, in chronological order. As a reflected experience, it is told in the past tense, which in the end gives way to the present tense because of the father's ongoing responsibility.

The father explains that Fipps grows into the " wolfish practice ", first of all with the power of language, in whose sounds and meanings the continuity of evil is inscribed: " If a child is of course called Fipps ... ", Fipps, a " lap dog " , but also one in which the evil is " like a source of pus ". But since the father does not know a non-damaging, non-injurious " shadow language ", the adaptation of the child to the " vicious circle " apparently gains something inevitable: it was " Hanna's blood, in which the child was nourished and which accompanied the birth (...) And it had ended in blood, with his resounding, glowing child's blood that flowed from the head wound. "

But the father does not stop here, digs deeper and gradually the thought breaks through that the failure of education to be human is based on the father's passive over-expectation. Because he not only does not prevent the “ dressage act ” on his son, but also renounces all possible resistance: “ To the extent that it enlarged his circle, I put mine back. "And:" It was me, I was the first person and I gambled everything away, did nothing! “Finally the father recognizes a personal“ guilt ”because he did not use his language of love (“ My wildling. My heart. ”).

The title of the story is used more than a dozen times in the text as an indefinite pronoun describing the importance of this child to his parents, who expect “everything” from him: “ I couldn't be kind to him because I went too far with him him. “The unconditional, undemanding motherly love is opposed to an immoderate messianic expectation from the father and between these two distant shores the nutshell of a more humane future sinks, which the father sees as a gift from a child and not as a result of his commitment. The failure of this kind of salvation is inscribed in their approach and is not a result of fate but of behavior.

Among murderers and madmen

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A little more than ten years after the war, a young man around thirty visits his usual regulars' table on a Friday evening in Vienna. The spokesmen at the regular table of the seven men are editors for radio and newspapers, a doctor, a professor and a patron of the business man. They immerse themselves in their memories, talk about the war as a source of culture and the experiences that they cannot miss. The younger ones, who are surprised that well-known Nazis, fellow travelers and a Jew belong to the regulars' table whose relatives were murdered, despair of the apparent consent of perpetrators and victims. A man in his early thirties sits down next to them, who has had an urge to kill since his youth, but has not killed anyone: This ideology , this “ naming of others - Polack, American, black (...) Russians ” would have been during him of war made simple killing impossible. The man who failed in the murder tells the story of his psychiatric treatment and steps into an adjoining room to a gathering of successful murderers who sing their songs “ as if not a day had passed. “These Nazis feel provoked by the seemingly insane through an action not reported in the text and murder him as if in an ironic reversal of insanity and normality.

interpretation

The poetic access to war and post-war is made by constructing the text from living spaces that stand against each other. The text begins with a juxtaposition of women who “ murder ” their husbands out of “ desperation and malice ” in their dreams , but do not actually reach them: the men “ were far away. (...) We were far away. “The spatial separation puts an end to the conflict of worlds, which can only be frozen in another way in the following section on the men's group.

It is here that the critical members who describe themselves as “ Jews ” by their attitude or origin encounter those who were diligent then and now - and would have to take a stand. But they feel they are “ forced to listen and stare in front of us ” and this self- incapacitation leaves the field to the cultivated post-fascism of the dignitaries. Outside the group of gentlemen, in the washroom, the telling self instructs his - a little - rebellious friend even urgently: “ You will not say anything! “And closes her lips forever even after the murder in the pub. But he blames one of the members of their round table for the “ miserable harmony ”, whose wife and mother the Nazis murdered, “ because he helps prevent us from sitting at another table with him and a few others. “In addition to this flight of responsibility, the quietly indignant have strong reasons for their withdrawnness: Friedl, the young friend of the first-person narrator, insists above all that concern for wife and children is a legitimate argument for adjustment. In doing so, he justifies his silence, as does the Nazi soldiers who also “ think of their families ” who murdered them - whether “perpetrators” or “opponents” who agree, time rolls the dice.

But then the worlds meet: the notorious murderer joins the assembly of innocent murderers and is himself murdered. The offensive penetration into the other world has terrible consequences and proves: The violence is still powerful and avenges transgressions on the foot. Just as in the individual biographies the people behave very differently during the war and afterwards, so the world difference of women and men, of victims without accusation and perpetrators without remorse, becomes the prerequisite for an unstable equilibrium and for that the split off part of the personalities, the “ blue game ” leads a separate life: “ So they all operated in two worlds and were different in both worlds, separate and never united I who were not allowed to meet. "

In this analysis of post-fascism in Austria, social conditions are portrayed as continuity, continuity as a precarious balance and balance as inwardness shaped by violence. This self-education of the moralists in conformity and conditional submission is the core of the moral post-war catastrophe and the theme of the narrative.

One step to Gomorrah

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After a party by the younger, married and still childless musician Charlotte, all the guests except for the student Mara left. Mara gets Charlotte to go to a bar with her, where Mara dances for Charlotte to advertise her and she starts to say goodbye. They touch arms and hands, go back into the apartment, and Charlotte realizes that she is about to end her marriage to Franz, who is approaching Vienna on the train. In a storm of demarcation and rapprochement, Charlotte recognizes the possibility of liberation for a lesbian love and her own thoughts. She examines the implications of this other life and goes to sleep with her new friend.

interpretation

Behind this texture of departure and the crossing of boundaries reproduce more and more the structures against which Charlotte has started to rebel: Mara becomes her “ creature ” and her “ prey ”, which submits to Charlotte's claims to property, although she does not initially “ into them” Trap "wanted to go.

Limitation of development, departure and a new love of domination take place in spaces that shape figure action without determining it: the bathing cabins and gymnasiums of the schoolgirls are an early indication of the possibility of erotic alternatives, Mara is a young woman not only from a geographical " limit " , Charlotte and she are redefining the marital apartment together ... With this change in the apartment, Charlotte also wants to change the way of thinking, since neither the language of men nor that of women, which is mirror-inverted, is suitable for a new order. In an early addressing of the gender problem, she longs for a time “ when this no longer applies - man and woman. “In Mara's idea of ​​language education, the precarious attempt at liberation from everything resounds, albeit in the gesture of overpowering and not of withdrawal, and with it the subject of self-inflicted failure.

This relapse of the familiar behavior pattern of the two women is not forced by the physical space, language or expectations . Because both women have already experienced forms of liberation in nuce before: Even in the old order, with her “ inventive ” openness - and rejection - Mara can anticipate both men and women towards an order beyond “ man and woman ”; Charlotte already experienced moments of female eroticism as a student and as a woman even with a man “ for a moment ” the departure into a new time. The new finds its beginning already in the old - and yet Charlotte lets herself into a marriage which, as a form, “can not tolerate any innovation or change ”.

The decisive factor is that Charlotte goes back to this old structure for reasons that could not be more mundane: " Leaning, security, protection ". The power of this structure only exists if both protagonists decide to live in this form out of calculation. This structural assimilation is practiced by Charlotte when she aggressively urges Mara into submission, as well as Mara when she " blackmailed " Charlotte's tenderness through her behavior . Behind the renewed symbiosis of self-submission and the claim to domination are therefore joint individual decisions of the two women to let the project of freedom fail, the facets of which are already echoed in the previous stories.

The step after Gomorrah therefore means both the hell of a lesbian love that triggers fear from a bourgeois perspective and a concept of liberation that only reproduces the old boundaries by reversing the signs.

A wildermuth

content

The judge Anton Wildermuth is before a court that is investigating the murder of his father by Josef Wildermuth, who is not related to him. The judge hopes for an easy trial, but his search for the truth, which has dominated him since his youth, leads him to ask beyond the accused's confession. This interrogation of one Wildermuth by the other becomes a self-questioning and the matter is so complicated that even an expert on coat buttons gives a detailed opinion.

When the defense attorney, the accused and the public prosecutor demand further details, albeit for different reasons, the judge Wildermuth rises and shouts: “ Stop the truth, stop the truth ...! “He leaves the courtroom and stays in bed for a few weeks under the surveillance of a family doctor and a neurologist. In a long monologue, the judge turns from there to “ his loved ones ”, tells of the origin of his “ intoxication of truth ” and the special truths of his own life.

interpretation

As a youth, Wildermuth often used the decomposition of an act into its atomic action in order to evade responsibility. After the statements of the button expert in the courtroom, the judge suspects that the case of the defendant Wildermuth will again get stuck in the facts and only “ the truth will come to light that we can use. (..) That we use the most useful corner of the useful truth. “As a law student, he had come to know another, a deeper truth beyond the facts in the reasons for an act that say more about the act and the perpetrator than the reconstruction of all the details.

In researching his memory, he comes across this deeper but painful truth that in his marriage to Gerda instead of the waitress Wanda, his only real lover, he lived a life against the truth, following social expectations and his own weighing of interests like the protagonists of the previous stories. Even in the court proceedings he is leading, there are unexploited evidence of the truth about the brutalisation and exploitation of the father who was murdered by his son, which the defensive attorney, who has fallen out of time, addresses in vain. The truth about the life of the judge and the truth of many others about their life before this post-war period is “ a truth that nobody dreams of, that nobody wants. "Against this" lulling the truth "the judge puts his cry ineffectively, but with wild courage (h).

Several motifs from the previous stories can be found in the text: The classification in society despite differing principles as in The Thirtieth Year , the question of furnishings “ in this language as in the furniture ” and the never-impossible change as in everything , the contrast between simple murders and mass murders as in Among Murderers and Madmen , Beginning and Continuation of a Marriage for the Wrong Reasons as in One Step to Gomorrah . These motifs are less expansive than in the other stories and ornament the central theme of truth here, which sums up what the protagonists have hardly admitted to: their lack of interest in a life in accordance with their own truth. On their behalf, Judge Wildermuth, resigned, but now before everyone's eyes, ends his search for truth in a time that “has no time to search for truth ”. This summation with an exaggeration or the figure of a recapitulation leads on to the big farewell in the last of the seven stories.

Undine goes

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The nymph Undine is called up by the people in the country and falls in love with a man named Hans. This betrays her love and, following her own law, she crosses “ the wet line between me and me ”, never to return to human society. The text is her accusing monologue, which addresses both this Hans and all men.

According to the myth , Undine is a nymph who alternates between a life on land and in the water, but can only live permanently out of the water through the loyalty of her human husband. She was used as a literary figure by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué (1811) and Jean Giraudoux (1938), among others .

interpretation

As in the other cases before in the cellar of the gentlemen's group, in Charlotte's apartment or in the courtroom, the event here develops at a place of transition, on a “ clearing ”, on the border of land and water, of “ fixed ” and “ what cannot be determined ”.

This double determination is also a characteristic of those “ monsters with the name Hans ” who build houses and furnish themselves there with their wives, but “ never agree ” with themselves. The men of men feel a deep longing for change in everything that exists, hear throughout their lives “ that Muschelton, the wind fanfare ”and call the nymph as the master of all transgressions to help.

Although “ monsters ” and “ monsters ”, the men are an ambivalent sex of perpetrators: “ You buy and let yourself be bought. (...) You deceivers and you deceived. “They even have their good points and are capable of more than“ shoddy acts ”. But the new fails because of the weakness of the men, who are aware of the danger of “ shame ” and “ expulsion ” and who sacrifice love, the “ glorious and great while ” in “the same spirit ”, through betrayal on the altars of society. Just as Hans and the other men will not be able to live part of themselves in the future, Undine's future under water is also only a second choice, determined by loneliness. In spite of the betrayal, she will not be able to stop calling Hans and as she goes down she renews the call of the beginning in a weakened form: “ Come on. Just once. Come on. "

The Hans concept evidently transcends a purely negatively understood masculinity, just as a purely positively understood femininity is not found either in this story or in the previous ones, since the stuntedness of both sexes are mirror images of one another. Undine is also not a mortal woman or a figure who possibly personifies today's femininity, but a being who criticizes the gender relationship from a point of view outside of time and place and, as it were, the distant awakening of Charlotte " when this no longer applies - man and woman " One step after Gomorrah brought forward to today.

The prominent position of this narrative in the present cycle is clearly instrumented in terms of content and form. The texture of the already known motifs can also be found in this story and connects it with the others: For example, the question of truth, the speechlessness of the characters and the uselessness of their thoughts as favoring love, the moments of togetherness destroyed by the individual calculation, the power of language etc. etc. As the conclusion of this inner-worldly problematic, the transition of the undine figure into a sphere outside the human world concludes the cycle in terms of content.

Formally, the last of the stories accentuates the structure of the entire work in a special way. Wildermuth and Undine distinguish themselves from the other narratives such as recapitulation and coda from previous parts by invoking the reader and a first-person narrator who has almost never appeared . But while Judge Wildermuth apostrophizes the readers as “ my dear ones ”, Undine begins her offensive complaint with the famous words: “ You people! You monsters! “And your all-judging first-person narrator expands the personal self of the judge into the cosmic. The narrative ends with the last exclamation of Undine in a lyrical phrase that underscores the transgression of boundaries through the form and at the same time lets the eponymous narrative echo again (“ When finally comes Then ... ”, see above The Thirtieth Year ). These content-related and formal aspects underline the special function of the narrative in the compositional unity of the work.

literature

  • Ingeborg Bachmann: The thirtieth year . Piper, Munich 1961
  • Ingeborg Bachmann: All the stories . Piper, Munich 1978

Secondary literature

proof

  1. ↑ WG Sebald: Campo Santo . Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2006, p. 105.
  2. ↑ a b Peter Beicken : Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 165f.
  3. ↑ Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 170f.
  4. ↑ Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 172.
  5. ↑ Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 175.
  6. ↑ Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 178.
  7. ↑ Peter Beicken, Ingeborg Bachmann , Munich: Beck 1988, p. 183. Bachmann could have been inspired in the use of a musical composition form by HW Henze's “Ondine” ballet (1958).