The kingfisher

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Eisvogel is a novel by Uwe Tellkamp that was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 2005 and as a paperback by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2010 .

Emergence

The manuscript of the novel was finished in 2003; Tellkamp offered it to various publishers in vain between 2003 and 2005. Only when Jaroslaw Piwowarski, the then editor of the literary magazine Edit in Leipzig, became aware of it and recommended it to Rowohlt Verlag, Tellkamp found a publisher. Most of the action takes place between 1998 and 2000 in the Berlin republic .

action

The starting point of the plot is the act of Wiggo Ritter, who shot his best friend Mauritz Kaltmeister at the beginning of the novel and is now in a clinic with severe burns. In the novel, non-chronologically arranged scraps of memory of the first-person narrator are assembled with statements from people close to him and official documents . These materials are intended to help Wiggo Ritter's defender, who is addressed several times by dictation machine, understand the background to the cold master's killing.

Wiggo Ritter grew up as the son of a banker in Nice and London. Instead of the career desired by his father, he strives for a career as a philosopher. He gets to know the siblings Mauritz and Manuela, who belong to an elitist "organization rebirth" and talk about wanting to overcome democracy. He starts a relationship with Manuela; at the same time his academic ambitions fail, for which he blames his professor, a shabby “old 68er”. Wiggo later finds out that the professor secretly supported him and previously also the "Organization Wiedergeburt", while at the same time he acted as an opponent of all German romanticism in the academic world.

Mauritz and his sister founded the secret society "Cassiopeia" within the organization, Mauritz repeatedly talks about the necessity of a war and a radical upheaval. His fantasies of violence grow into concrete plans for an attack on KaDeWe . On the other hand, he beats up skinheads in the subway who threaten foreigners. When Mauritz detonates an explosive device in a disused egg pasta factory and threatens Manuela with a weapon, he is finally shot by Wiggo.

Relationship of the author to the protagonists of the novel

After the publication of the novel Der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp in 2008, Katrin Hillgruber from the Tagesspiegel claimed : “With his second novel 'Der Eisvogel' (2005) Tellkamp […] caused some irritation. Because as a narrator he slipped one to one into the character of Wiggo Ritter ”.

The novel is actually written predominantly from the perspective of Wiggo Ritter, in a haunting, largely unironic way in first-person form. Therefore, from the perspective of 2018 , Gregor Dotzauer considers it appropriate to put the warning before the reprint of his review of the novel from 2005 in an introduction: “The anti-democratic and anti-liberal hate speech that buzzes through the book must not be considered authentic Look at the author's utterances - they are broken by the figures. But Tellkamp was no stranger to you either. "

In 2005, Uwe Tellkamp was confronted with the assumption in an interview: "And this terrorist organization, but it was invented?" Tellkamp replied: "I wish it were so."

In August 2017, Oliver Reinhard judged after reading Uwe Tellkamp's prose text Die Carus-Dinge : “Like his debut 'Der Eisvogel' in 2005, 'Carus-Dinge' is pervaded by the never directly expressed wish to stop dull compromise democracy, dull mediocrity and a fall in values, ideally under the aegis of a romantic-pragmatic intellectual aristocracy. "

reception

After the book was published in 2005, it initially received mostly positive reviews.

In the Spiegel magazine , Claus Christian Maltzahn praised the structure and language of the book, while at the same time he found the philosophical superstructure "banal":

“An artistic creation of voices, time levels, images and fragments of memories from a childhood in the south of France. Not easy fare, but Tellkamp succeeds in creating passages of poetic beauty and, above all, impressively depicts the father-son conflict. [...] The political storyline of the novel, on the other hand, was badly unsuccessful: this Mauritz is a joke, a would-be charismatic with his organization "Rebirth", which does not shrink from terror in order to heal society and create a caste state with order and new - to create old values. And everything that Wiggo, this supposedly talented academic philosopher, expresses about philosophical thoughts is implausible and banal. "

On Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Helmut Böttiger praised the "visionary nature of sentences" ("Tellkamp smells something that is in the air."), Which contrasts with "the trivial of the plot in a strange way":

“Tellkamp can write suggestively. There is no irony with him either, but above all pathos, and something flares up that one would not have expected after postmodernism. "

In 2005, Gregor Dotzauer described the novel Der Eisvogel as “the first serious right-wing book in recent German literature that is rooted in an original disgust for 'Morbus 68'”, but criticized the portrayal of the movement led by Mauritz Kaltmeister as “static- Weltanschauung ":

“At the same time, he muddles through many milieus that Tellkamp cannot even know. As a doctor by training, he is familiar with hospital operations, but he is much less familiar with the universe of a TV comedy show. The really annoying thing is that he seems to be inadequately familiar with the subject of his protagonist, philosophy: he doesn't manage much more than name dropping. "

Gunther Nickel , on the other hand, stated that in this novel “[t] the young, conservative milieu [...] is portrayed with all the necessary differentiation”. What the “young conservatives” of the time around 2000 had in common was the pairing of an “intellectual aristocratic elitism with a sharp criticism of capitalism”. Nickel accused critics of the book with the “concern that this book might invite too much identification because it makes motives for political radicalization plausible”.

Götz Kubitschek analyzed the message of the novel from his point of view in 2006: “The fascist does not want clumsy Nazis when it comes to rebirth. Even in the confrontation between donors and perpetrators, the sympathies are clearly distributed: the industrial tycoon, the state secretary, the bishop, the countess - all old conservative groups are represented and at most have the task of carting the young soldiers to the front. That the stage itself does not succeed is one of the profound insights that Tellkamp gained in a milieu with which he must at least have had contact: his descriptions are too authentic. "

A far-reaching reassessment of the book began in 2018 after Tellkamp's statements in the run-up to the Leipzig Book Fair about a "corridor of attitudes between desired and tolerated opinion". For Thomas Assheuer ( ZEIT Online ) the novel The Kingfisher is the counterpart to his 2008 novel The Tower . In both novels the "usefulness modernity" rejected by Tellkamp is analyzed.

“Tellkamp's insistently described modernity of utility is a crusher, and he delivers it in duplicate: once as the GDR, as plastics and elastics from the communist east. And as a liberal premium product from the capitalist West, known as the FRG. But strange: While the east modern simply rustled, the west modern survived its downfall. "

The Assheuer, according to Tellkamp himself (and not only by his fictional characters) in the context of the Schröder era, rejected liberal democracy based on an “alliance of Wall Street bankers and the left establishment”. Assheuer continued:

“The majority of the reviewers praised the kingfisher at the time, and indeed: the character speech is arranged as a feverish dream with powerful words, as the anger of a soul that has become mad at the times. Not a feverish dream, however, is a central passage in which Tellkamp takes up a figure of argument taken from the ultra-right disgust arsenal. Because where does Wiggo's world hatred come from? It comes from his Jewish professor, a left-handed creep who sent his highly gifted assistant Wiggo into the desert because of thoughts deviating from the right (“You are a romantic!”). Tellkamp's Jewish professor does not tolerate any other gods beside him, he does not let the German student think and feel German in German. “He didn't let me live. He. He. ”But then the shock. When Wiggo seeks revenge, he realizes that the hated professor is an Auschwitz survivor who secretly reads Heidegger and even joined the resistance group for a while. What an assimilation fantasy: the Jew with the “bird's head hairstyle” as an unredeemed left-wing kingfisher, as an enchanted German thinker who voluntarily or involuntarily betrayed German romanticism. How did Tellkamp come up with this? Who did he read to write something like that? "

Emanuel Richter analyzes the novel from a social science perspective. The messages reported in the novel should be seen in the context of an increasing disenchantment with democracy and the advocacy of post-democracy . In fact, the views and demands of the protagonists in the novel are before democratic. Richter believes that the pre-democratic ideals, "put into the mouth of Western citizens, of course represent the greatest possible cynicism towards those people who, as losers in modernization, are actually exposed to such pre-modern, confrontational and violent living conditions in other parts of the world."

Artistic arrangements

The opera Der Eisvogel , staged by Stefan Otteni , had its world premiere in September 2012 in the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp receives the 2009 Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize , Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2009 online
  2. ↑ Zeit der Bürger , Der Tagesspiegel, September 17, 2008 online
  3. ↑ Review of Uwe Tellkamp's "The Kingfisher" - Dream of the Conservative Revolution , Der Tagesspiegel, March 14, 2018 online (original version of the text: March 16, 2005)
  4. ↑ New Germany . FAZ.net, April 11, 2005, online
  5. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp's novel The Pike, the Dreams and the Portuguese Café was published in 2000. His first text is said to have been published as early as 1987.
  6. ↑ On the way to Lava , Sächsische Zeitung (SZ), August 11, 2017 online
  7. ↑ The novelists flee the republic , SPIEGEL 14/2005, online
  8. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp. Der Eisvogel , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, March 18, 2005, online
  9. ↑ A novel after the age of irony , Tagesspiegel, March 16, 2005
  10. ↑ The return of the "Conservative Revolution" , Swiss monthly issue: Journal for Economy, Politics, Culture 85 (2005), online
  11. ^ Aseptic revolts - About the new novels by Matthias Politycki and Uwe Tellkamp . sezession.de , January 1, 2006 online
  12. ↑ The Great Depression , ZEIT Online, March 14, 2018, online
  13. ↑ Emanuel Richter : The Analysis Pattern of 'Post-Democracy' - Conceptual Problems and Strategic Functions . In: Post-Democracy - A New Discourse? Research journal social movements. Analysis of Democracy and Civil Society . Issue 4/2006, p. 32f. (33f.) Online
  14. ↑ Tellkamp's "Eisvogel" as an opera: The great patriotic knight opera , FAZ.net, October 1, 2012 online