The big protocol against Zwetschkenbaum

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The big protocol against Zwetschkenbaum is a novel by the Austrian author Albert Drach, written in 1939 but not published until 1964 . It was published as Volume 1 of the eight-volume edition of the work by the until then completely unknown writer.

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The novel is set in a rural area in Austria at the end of the First World War and during the first post-war period. He tells the story of the 24-year-old Galician Talmud scholar Schmul Leib Zwetschkenbaum in the form of a court record. He is arrested sitting under a plum tree on the charge of stealing from this plum tree. He is sent to the insane asylum by the forensic doctor. There he is seriously injured by a fellow inmate. In the infirmary he witnesses a rape and escapes with the curse supposed to burn from the asylum, which catches fire at this moment. On the run, he comes back to the farm with the plum tree. The farmer, who burns down his empty stable with fraudulent insurance, delivers Zwetschkenbaum to the police as the alleged arsonist. When taken in court, Zwetschkenbaum collapses and is admitted to the hospital. Here he makes the acquaintance of the two petty criminals Stengel and Raspberry. The forensic doctor considers him incapable of having committed the two arson attacks, and the proceedings are discontinued. Zwetschkenbaum is sent back to the madhouse. Here he receives preferential treatment with a single room and good, even kosher meals. An alleged inheritance from his brother Solomon enables him to find shelter from Jewish small traders. While searching for the mysterious steward of the inheritance, he almost freezes to death in Vienna and is rescued by his acquaintances Stengel and Raspberry. They want to appropriate his inheritance and set up a clothes shop for him to sell their stolen property. When Zwetschkenbaum is arrested again for stolen goods, the secret of the alleged inheritance is revealed: the money comes from all the people who were guilty of Zwetschkenbaum and was given by Dr. Schimaschek, lawyer and with Zwetschkenbaum in the madhouse, collected. The judge entrusted with the investigation against Zwetschkenbaum, Baron Dr. Xaver Bampanello von Kladeritsch, orders the drafting of a comprehensive protocol, the large protocol against Zwetschkenbaum available to the reader .

Emergence

According to the author from the 1980s, he had planned the novel back in 1937, while still in Austria. He wrote it in 1939 while in exile in Nice. Here he had written already two plays, the Sade -Drama The Satan game of the divine Marquis and Hitler -Stück The puppet play by the master Siebentot . Between June and October, the novel was written from existing material. According to information in his autobiographical work Das Beileid he wanted to write the novel under the title Le procès verbal in French, but this failed due to his lack of knowledge of French. The original manuscript of the German version has not survived. There are two typescripts of the novel in the Drach estate, with only minor differences between them, and which are practically identical to the print version. The older typescript is incomplete and contains corrections that were incorporated in the second typescript. Thus the origin of the text is largely unknown.

Both typescripts are undated, but are likely to have been written between 1946 and 1948, when Drach offered the novel to various publishers along with other texts. Drach changed the title several times. While the title on the first typescript was initially Zwetschkenbaum as a tree and as a Jew is the subject of this document , Drach later deleted that as a tree and a Jew . The folder of the second typescript bears the crossed out handwritten title How to stone plum trees or The groaning in the plum tree recorded by Dr. Albert Drach . This title has been replaced by the definitive Das Große Protocol against Zwetschkenbaum .

The end of the novel with the court intern taking notes came later. It is possible that the passages with the political argumentation, which is rare for Drach, can be traced back to the influence of the Viennese city councilor Viktor Matejka , who - in vain - campaigned for the novel at Ullsteinverlag.

Three other handwritten volumes on Zwetschkenbaum, which Drach mentions in his autobiographical work Das Beileid , have largely been lost.

By 1964, the novel was rejected by 16 publishers. The Viennese publisher Ilse Luckmann justified her rejection in 1947 with the fact that the time was not yet ripe for a book in which a Jew would get along well. Despite all the euphemism of this anti-Semitic statement, André Fischer admits in 2008 that the novel would have indeed found few readers in 1947, since the view of the world presented by Drach represents the majority of the population.

In 1964 the novel was accepted by Langen Müller Verlag , who immediately published it as volume 1 of an eight-volume edition. This is probably a unique case in German-language literature, since the novel, with the exception of a volume of poetry and a play, was the first printed book by the completely unknown author Albert Drach.

reception

After its publication in 1964, extensive reviews and reports on the work and the author appeared in numerous newspapers and on the radio. Fischer attributes this primarily to a misinterpretation of Drach's style of language at the time. Most reviewers praised the protocol as an odyssey, written in an old Austrian chancellery style. The sharpness of Drach's humor, his irony taken to extremes, and the hopelessness of Zwetschkenbaum's disastrous life story remained largely ignored at the time. The reviewers pointed to Drach's unique writing style, but found it difficult to use the radical form of representation. Some compared him with Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando , whose works were then just in the versions edited by Friedrich Torberg for the first time accessible to the public.

One of the exceptions to this trivialization of the novel was Karl Heinz Kramberg in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , who wrote of the protocol style as "that monstrous product of grammatical schizophrenia".

The writing style only became the focus of considerations with the rediscovery of Drachs from 1988. The style was no longer seen as a parody of the Austrian chancellery style, but as “a unique form of aesthetic thinking and consistency building” In his laudation for Albert Drach on the occasion of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1988, Wolfgang Preisendanz summed it up as follows: “What This mode of presentation of the protocol, which provides a factual report that excludes everything symbolic, metaphorical, imaginative, is always an anesthetized optics, which even brings paroxysms of injustice, calamity and horror to speech with extreme objectivity, lack of emotion and aloofness. "

expenditure

  • Langen-Müller, Munich / Vienna 1964 (= Collected Works Volume 1)
  • Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1967 (dtv 412)
  • Claassen, Hamburg / Düsseldorf 1968
  • Modern book club, Darmstadt 1970 (licensed edition)
  • Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1989
  • Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2002 (dtv 13026)
  • Zsolnay, Vienna 2008 (= works in ten volumes, volume 5) ISBN 978-3-552-05226-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Fischer: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . In: Ernst Fischer (Ed.): Major works of Austrian literature . Kindler's New Literature Lexicon , Kindler, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-463-40304-8 , p. 512f.
  2. ↑ a b c d Textgenese . In: Albert Drach: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . Works in ten volumes, Volume 5, edited by Bernhard Fetz and Eva Schobel, Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 2008, pp. 317–323.
  3. ↑ a b c André Fischer: Afterword . In: Albert Drach: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . Works in ten volumes, Volume 5, edited by Bernhard Fetz and Eva Schobel, Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 2008, pp. 303–316.
  4. ^ Karl Heinz Kramberg: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 9th and 10th, 1965. Quoted from: André Fischer: Afterword . In: Albert Drach: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . Works in ten volumes, volume 5, edited by Bernhard Fetz and Eva Schobel, Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 2008, p. 310.
  5. ^ André Fischer: Afterword , 2008, p. 310.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Preisendanz: The cruel chance comedy of the world . In: Yearbook of the German Academy for Language and Poetry 1988 , pp. 114–119. Quoted from: André Fischer: Afterword . In: Albert Drach: The great protocol against Zwetschkenbaum . Works in ten volumes, volume 5, edited by Bernhard Fetz and Eva Schobel, Paul Zsolnay, Vienna 2008, p. 310f.