The hidden word

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The Hidden Word is the second novel by the German poet and writer Ulla Hahn . It was published in 2001, ten years after her debut novel Ein Mann im Haus , as the first part of her tetralogy , strongly autobiographical series of novels and by the end of 2010 had a circulation of over half a million copies. The hidden word was awarded the German Book Prize, which was awarded for the first time in 2002. The book was filmed as a two-part TV series under the title Teufelsbraten and was first broadcast on arte in 2008.
Aufbruch , the second part of the tetralogy, followed the Hidden Word in 2009, in 2014 the third part with the title Game of Time and in 2017 the fourth part We are expected .

The heroine of the tetralogy is Hildegard (Hilla) Palm, a simple working-class child who grows up in the anti-spiritual Rhenish Catholic province, laboriously learns High German, is punished for reading books, would have preferred to play the violin rather than "squeeze bar" and ultimately found the way out of the spiritual depths up to intellectual heights. While Das Verborgene Wort mainly describes Hilla's childhood and secondary school time, Aufbruch spanned her time at high school through to the beginning of her German studies . The third part begins with Hilla leaving her parents' house, moving to a student residence in Cologne and falling happily in love for the first time in her life.

Ulla Hahn, 2009

content

"Lommer jonn" - let's go. This is how the book begins and ends, and this is how the grandfather speaks in Kölsch , the language of the local residents of Dondorf - Dondorf, like Ulla Hahn's hometown Monheim, is between Cologne and Düsseldorf - when he moves to the Rhine every day with Hildegard and her younger brother Bertram to play with pebbles there and tell fantasy stories. Stories are also told in kindergarten and read later in school. Hilla remembers everything. "You go into a book and you are in another world," she will later realize. She was fascinated by that world at an early age and kept escaping into it. What is the relationship between words and things? How can literature and reality be combined? Hilla becomes an excellent student. It only weakens in mathematics. Her teacher recognizes her talent and ensures that she is allowed to attend secondary school after the four years of primary school - against the will of the parents, whose life consists only of work, earning money, praying and obeying. Hilla does not fit into this family - and should be made to fit, through beatings, threats, coercion. The father is primarily responsible for the blows, the stick is omnipresent behind the wall clock. He is an unskilled factory worker, his wages are insufficient so that he still has to take on part-time jobs, the always overworked and disgruntled mother is a home worker and cleaning lady, the bossy grandmother a devout Catholic.

When Hilla begins to speak High German and eat with a knife and fork, the parents feel offended and react indignantly: the father brutally pokes Hilla's head into the plate of hot soup and scalds her face: she shouldn't imagine something better to be. But Hilla is despised by the really better off because of her dialect and her origins. A humiliating and dogged battle begins on two fronts. But the girl won't let herself get down. It asserts itself by adapting itself externally, but delimiting itself internally. Her refuge is a small shed behind the house, where she retires to read Lessing and Schiller . She adores the latter so idolatry that she even erects a small altar for him. However, applying what you have read to reality is seldom successful. The heroes of the classical period are very different from the village boys in reality, and the ambitions and crises of a Don Carlos have little in common with the hated office apprenticeship in the local paper mill, the gray future of boring business letters and disapproving colleague gossip. Hilla succeeds less and less in finding consolation in the books. She discovered the relieving effect of alcohol. Your new friend's name is no longer Schiller, but Underberg . But before it threatens to break completely, they save pastors and teachers, their old advocates. They are also the ones who ensure that Hilla can finish her apprenticeship and go to the advanced high school .

Kölsch

The dialogues conducted in the novel are conducted in long sections in the local Kölsch , in total that is about a fifth of the text, with a total of 600 pages. In the book, selected expressions in footnotes are translated into high German written language, the book also has a “Dondorfer Platt dictionary” for one hundred expressions.

reception

It seems like the irony of the literary business that of all people, Marcel Reich-Ranicki , Ulla Hahn's former mentor, who once so benevolently reviewed her first poems and thus established the literary fame of the poet, later sliced ​​her novel Das Verborgene Wort in the “ Literary Quartet ”. Basically, according to Reich-Ranicki, his criticism was directed primarily against his uncritical colleagues, above all Ulrich Greiner , who with his early, almost hymn-like review ushered in a series of euphoric hymns of praise and thus documented the apparent disappearance of the standards in literary criticism have. And that despite the allegedly only traditionally linear narrative style of an epic debutante whose work, in the eyes of Reich-Ranicki, was merely conventional and not worthy of a review in the literary quartet , which was primarily committed to the innovative avant-garde. For him, Ulla Hahn remains a notable poet, but as a novelist she is a negligible figure.

Gudrun Norbisrath from the WAZ has a similar opinion: "Ulla Hahn is a lyric poet, many of her poems show great poetic power. Now she has written a novel: The Lost Word . She shouldn't have done it. It's about the language. A Material that is worth a great novel, but the poet fails because of the detailed story and, surprisingly enough, because of the language. [...] The time when such true stories represented new literary territory is over like already read twice, three times, often. " "The honest knitting pattern of storytelling seems touchingly old-fashioned in the digital age. Above all, however, it can do justice to the contradicting, highly complex problem areas that pervaded the second half of the 20th century, if at all on the surface."

Dieter Borchmeyer (Die Zeit), on the other hand, raves about Ulla Hahn's precision, “visionary power” and “overflowing linguistic fantasy”, with which the milieu of the Rhenish Catholic society of the fifties was described from the perspective of a child. The author, who, as a lyricist, did not trust such a litter, succeeds in telling an exciting story and in drawing vivid characters with just a few lines and details.

The reviewer of the SZ, on the other hand, is bothered by the large autobiographical part of the novel. She thinks the novel is a poignant read. The wealth of details, however, is occasionally too luxurious for her, the description too drastic or pretentious.

The FAZ complains that one sees a “hidden curriculum” shimmering through behind “useful ideas”. She considers this didactic index finger to be problematic, and the fact that almost a fifth of the book is written in the Cologne dialect is a handicap that unfortunately all too often local poetry is afflicted with.

Martin Ebel (NZZ) particularly likes this generous use of the regional original sound. Although some parts of the novel seemed a bit constructed, the representation of Rhenish Catholicism was very successful. With Ulla Hahn he no longer has any of the loose generosity that is often so glorifyingly ascribed to him, but instead contributes in an oppressive way to the deformation of people with his vicious mixture of petty bourgeois envy and narrow-minded orthodoxy.

expenditure

Movie

The book was turned into a two-part television film under the title Teufelsbraten in 2007, in language and events close to the novel, by Hermine Huntgeburth . The film had to be dubbed into a toned down version of the dialect before it was broadcast.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulla Hahn's search for one's own voice , ndr.de, August 29, 2017
  2. ↑ The well-known poet Hilde Domin was also called (after her marriage) with her real name Hilde Palm. Since her biography shows some parallels to Ulla Hahn's (born in Cologne, feminist, SPD member) and since Ulla Hahn gave the eulogy for her colleague in 1992, when Hilde Domin was awarded the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize , it can be assumed that that Ulla Hahn wanted to honor her namesake by choosing the name of her protagonist or even to suggest that she regards her as her role model. There is also another allusion within the novel to the fact that there is a connection between Hildegard Palm and Hilde Palm, alias Hilde Domin: In Latin classes, Hilla Petra calls herself Leonis (stone of the lion) and uses this pseudonym to write her later diary Beati Dies (Happy Days). This in turn is reminiscent of the family name Hilde Domins: Her Jewish father was the Cologne judicial officer Eugen Siegfried Löwenstein (1871–1942).
  3. ↑ Lt. Statement of the author during a discussion following a reading of her novel Aufbruch on November 11, 2010 in Bielefeld.
  4. ^ Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, September 5, 2001
  5. ↑ Jens Dirksen, Neue Rhein Zeitung (NRZ), October 29, 2001
  6. ^ Die Zeit, August 23, 2001
  7. ^ Kristina Maidt-Zinke, Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 24, 2001
  8. ^ Gerhard Schulz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 9, 2001
  9. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 20, 2001