The friend and the stranger

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The friend and the stranger is a short story by Uwe Timm , which was published in 2005 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . After the book about his brother ( On the example of my brother , 2003) it is his second memory book, this time about his friend and classmate Benno Ohnesorg .

content

In this story, Uwe Timm processes memories of his time at the Braunschweig Kolleg in the early 1960s, when he and his classmate Benno Ohnesorg made up for the Abitur on the second educational path . He describes Ohnesorg as an idiosyncratic, reserved, quietly determined person who painted and wrote poetry, read the works of French modernism and became one of the first readers of Uwe Timm's works. They soon formed a friendship in which they shared Apollinaire and Beckett , Camus and Ionesco - and discover the fact that “writing is not just a lonely act, that you can talk about texts, change them, improve them, that closeness and radical obstinacy are possible at the same time. "

During his subsequent studies in Munich and Paris, the friends lost sight of each other, and Timm learned of his death in Paris, where he was doing his doctorate on Camus. Even then he wanted to write about his school friend, whose scandalous death became a beacon of the student movement. But it did not succeed, and a second attempt years later also failed. But the resolution remained, which he felt almost an obligation to write about him. "A story that could only succeed - and this insight first had to grow - when I also told about myself."

As in Using the example of my brother , Timm takes this detour via his own self and, after more than forty years, feels the short and strangely cool, but intense and intellectually close relationship with his childhood friend and classmate, which has since gone down in the history books. More than about Benno Ohnesorg and the friendship between the two, we learn about the young Uwe Timm, who, after the early death of his father at the age of 18, has to take over his furrier business, but really wants to become a writer. As part of his work on this story, Timm researched like a journalist, but remained entirely a poet in his work. He spoke personally to Benno Ohnesorg's brother Willibald and son Lukas, who never met his father. Also Friederike Hausmann's memories of the day of the shooting Ohnesorg were incorporated into the work.

The result is not a chronological narrative, but a cleverly composed memory mosaic of fragments and anecdotes that paint a lively picture of the youth in the 1960s, which addresses the thirst for education, the youthful idealistic striving for their own texts, poems and works and the interest in Art, literature, philosophy that you read to each other:

Once, in the summer of the second year, when we were sitting at the Oker, in the silence of a slowly piling up thunderstorm that was not announced by any gust of wind, we talked about feeling and language, about us in the blue sky, gray-black that low-hanging clouds, he read me an unfinished poem, which he never did before. The last stanza was still missing. […] When he had finished, neither of us said a word, and we saw the rain approaching, a tightly falling, streaked gray-blue front in which the lightning struck down, and the thunder rolled across the meadows and fields with a force , who lay down on her chest, paralyzed for a moment, not with fright, but deeply delighted, we stood and were immersed in this flood.

expenditure

  • Uwe Timm: The friend and the stranger. A story . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-462-03609-1
  • Uwe Timm: The friend and the stranger. A story . Dtv, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-13557-3 .
    • as audio book: Uwe Timm: The friend and the stranger . Random House Audio, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-86604-040-7 (4 CDs, read by the author)

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The friend and the stranger: blurb . perlentaucher.de. Retrieved June 4, 2013.
  2. ↑ The friend and the stranger . In: TAZ , August 20, 2005. Retrieved June 4, 2013.