The jungle

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The Jungle ( English The Jungle ) is a socially critical novel by the American writer Upton Sinclair , which was published in 1905, initially in sequentials, and then as a whole in 1906.

With the example of an immigrant family from Lithuania illustrated Sinclair the catastrophic effects of a profit mania and corruption dictated American capitalism in the late 19th century . Specifically, he described the exploitation of workers and the hygiene shortcomings in the slaughterhouses and canning factories in the Union Stockyards in Chicago . In doing so, he triggered a public scandal that ultimately resulted in changes in the law.

Creation and publication

Sinclair was commissioned in 1904 by Fred Warren , editor of the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason , for the socially critical work. For research purposes, he went to Chicago among the approximately 20,000 workers of the Union Stock Yards .

Sinclair later reported: “It seemed to me that I was standing in front of a true fortress of oppression. How do you break through or remove these walls? It was a military problem. In the evenings I sat in the workers' apartments, both foreign and local; they reported and I wrote everything down. During the day I scoured the slaughterhouses and my friends risked their jobs to show me what I wanted to see. "

The Jungle first appeared as a series in 1905 in the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason . At the same time, Sinclair tried to get a contract for publication as a book. Various publishers rejected the book or asked it to leave out “blood and guts”, that is to say, to cut the work around explosive passages, which the author refused. Finally, the first printing took place in 1906 at Doubleday . The publisher sensed a bestseller. In fact, the book made Sinclair known across the country in one fell swoop - the realistic details of the conditions in the slaughterhouses got through the press, translations of the book in 17 languages ​​appeared within a few months.

The first German translation by H. zur Mühlen was published as early as the year it was published under the title Der Sumpf ; further translations followed, for example by I. Gronke 1974 under the title The Dschungel .

Worker cleans a half of beef in a slaughterhouse, Chicago 1909

action

The protagonist , Jurgis Rudkus, who assumes the archetype of the good-natured, inexperienced little man , loses his job in a slaughterhouse after an industrial accident .

This sets off a chain reaction that leads to the death of his wife, the destruction of family ties, and his own unstoppable social and physical decline. After his prison way he becomes a tramp and falls temporarily to the lure of Mobster his city.

At the end, however, there is an unexpected turn: Purely by chance, Jurgis ends up in a socialist meeting and experiences his “enlightenment” there, so to speak. From this point on, the novel becomes a veritable pamphlet with socio-political demands and theses .

effect

In its style, the work proves to be a mixture of a drastic social report with a plot that some perceive to be one-dimensional. This novel can also be seen as an indirect source for the currents of the American social reformers at the beginning of the 20th century and as a prime example for the so-called muckraking novels , to which Michael Moore , for example, refers today.

Sinclair sent one of the first copies to US President Theodore Roosevelt , who then invited him to Washington; the result of the meeting: two speakers went to Chicago to do research on behalf of the White House . They came back with a report that confirmed Sinclair's account. Specifically, the novel brought about new federal legislation on hygienic meat processing.

The intention of the novel was also a criticism of slaughter in general: Sinclair was a vegetarian and in the novel it is said that it has been “proven that humans do not need meat. And meat is indisputably more difficult to produce than vegetable food, more unpleasant to process and also more perishable ”. But the effect was limited to hygienic improvements in the slaughterhouses. In addition, the writing was intended as a means of agitation for socialism , but was primarily received by the masses as an indictment of the catastrophic conditions in the meat industry. "I was after people's hearts, I hit their stomachs," said Sinclair, commenting on the effect of his book.

Graphic novel

In 2018 Carlsen Verlag published an adaptation of the novel as a graphic novel by Kristina Gehrmann , it is also entitled The Jungle .

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Dieter Herms: Upton Sinclair - American radical . Two thousand and one, Jossa 1978, p. 31 .
  2. ↑ Matthias Rude: The great slaughter: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Retrieved November 25, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Appeal to Reason on the Spartacus Educational website ( Appeal to Reason ( Memento from October 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ))
  4. ↑ Matthias Rude: The great slaughter: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Retrieved November 25, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Otto Wilck: The jungle. Novel . 44–46 Thousand circulation. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-499-15491-9 , p. 470 .
  6. ↑ Screams from the jungle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , September 25, 1978 ( spiegel.de [accessed November 25, 2017]).