The walk to the dogs (Kästner)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The walk to the dogs is the title of a reconstruction of the original version of the novel Fabian by Erich Kästner . The book was edited by Sven Hanuschek . It was published in 2013 by Atrium Verlag ( Zurich ). The paperback edition followed in 2017 . Going to the dogs quickly became a bestseller .

Before the novel was published for the first time, Erich Kästner had been asked by his publisher to make a few cuts and changes in sensitive areas. He did this before it was first published in 1931. Later editions of Fabian always show revisions by Kästner, which never went as far as Hanuschek's "fictional original version". It is not known why Kästner himself did not restore such a version.

content

In addition to the text of the novel, Hanuschek's edition also contains in an appendix the various forewords and afterwords that Kästner wrote for his Fabian : the afterword for the moral judges , published outside the novel in 1931, the afterword for the art judges , the foreword to the new edition of 1946 and the author's foreword to the new edition of this book from 1950. There is also an editorial note in which the differences between The Walk to the Dogs and the first edition of Fabian from 1931 are listed, as well as an extensive afterword by the editor.

Fabian

The story of the fate of Jakob Fabian, who holds a doctorate in philology and who works as an advertising specialist in Berlin at the beginning of the novel , is well-known: Fabian appears to be habitual in Berlin pubs in the inter-war period and moves with the same sovereignty in artistic circles and among cheating housewives as under the dictates of despotic landlords, between left and right petty bourgeoisie and proletarians, who beat each other up or even with firearms, although they actually suffer from the same fate, he provides help to run-down figures who have already been expelled from society without a moment's hesitation and he and his friend Labude amused themselves by the philistinism of Berliners. From his perception of the critical situation in which society or the whole globe is, he draws the consequence for himself not to strive for any civil honors and no respectable position. Despite all his sympathy, he regards his friend Labude, who is not only working on his habilitation thesis, but is also politically active, with a certain distance; it does not occur to him to act in a similar way himself.

His seemingly carefree demeanor leads him into a crisis when he becomes unemployed at the very moment he has found a girlfriend with whom a more solid future seems possible to him, and when Labude commits suicide because of a failed joke. He returns from Berlin to Dresden , where his parents run a soap shop, and soon dies there a senseless death like Labude. While he fell for the assertion of a university employee that his habilitation thesis on Lessing had been rejected as miserable (in reality it will soon be published as a special print because of its excellent quality) and shot himself, Fabian jumps into the Elbe to have one child to save from drowning, which, unlike Fabian himself, can swim.

Reactions of the publisher to the original version

Kästner wrote the novel from around the end of September 1930 to the end of June 1931, at last haunted by the idea that Hermann Kesten and Ernst Glaeser could anticipate it. Because he had heard that these authors were busy with books on the same subject as himself. In addition, his publisher Gustav Kilpper pushed for the manuscript to be completed. On July 10, 1931, the editor in charge, Curt Weller , wrote his feedback to Kästner. He congratulated the author and assured the audience would be shocked, but already predicted that the work could be severely attacked. He found the first nine chapters "cold", only from the tenth onwards something like humanity set in. In the publisher's report, which he wrote on the same day, Weller wrote that it was not Kästner's fault that something repulsive and terrifying was expected of the reader, because Kästner wanted to improve by uncovering the truth. Weller described the novel as a warning sign . In contrast to Weller, Martin Mörike , who headed the DVA stage sales company Chronos , was not at all impressed and made devastating comments about the novel. But Weller also demanded cuts and defuses, which Kästner implemented.

However, Erich Kästner tried to keep some of the deleted passages and make them accessible to the readership in other ways. So he had The Lord without Appendices and Fabian and the Art Judges and Fabian and the Morals Judges printed in magazines in the 1930s. He made the changes requested by the publisher within approximately two weeks; Kilpper received the amended manuscript at the end of July 1931 and expressed his approval a few days later, on August 5th. The first printed copies of Fabian were delivered on October 15, 1931 .

Differences between the original version and Fabian

Linguistic

The walk to the dogs shows numerous blurrings that were at least eliminated in the first print version of the novel. The mother's letter in particular, in which the punctuation also differs significantly from the version in the first edition, bears testimony to Hanuschek's statement: “Kästner [...] was more important than using the same correct high-level language; his figures are characterized more vividly in this way ”.

Cut sex scenes

In addition to a few minor changes, parts of the sex scenes that the publishers once seemed too daring were deleted from Fabian . In the 16th chapter, the passage in which Fabian goes to bed with a cheating housewife, who takes a flashlight before having sexual intercourse and examines her guest carefully because one cannot be careful enough at the moment, was basically retained, but the term "sexual apparatus" was deleted from this description.

The brothel scene that takes place in Dresden was also preserved. B. the mention of a rubber link that a prostitute handles, deleted. Fabian enters this brothel together with his former school friend Wenzkat, who now belongs to the paramilitary Stahlhelm-Bund and lives out his sadistic tendencies in the establishment . This amalgamation of political attitudes and sexual inclinations of Wenzkat seemed to the publishing editor possibly too pointedly presented.

The indignant bus

In Hanuschek's reconstruction, the passage The indignant bus from chapter four was restored : Labude and Fabian drive through Berlin in a bus. One of the two friends plays the hard of hearing tourist, the other “explains” to him the buildings and monuments that the bus passes by. It is z. For example, from the Brandenburg Gate the “traffic tower”, the “little horses on top” are a memorial for the last cabs and that the coachman has so little on is symbolic: “Because of the taxes.” Such statements or even the provocative saying “Yes, the bullshit is very common here ”cause general indignation among the passengers and it almost leads to a fight.

Such provocations by passengers in public transport are also known from Thomas Mann's story Disorder and Early Suffering . But while there the professor's children Ingrid and Bert only cause offense through a gruesome conversation about the nature of the morbid cruelty in a Munich tram, Fabian and Labude attack "national sanctuaries" in the Berlin omnibus. Hanuschek suspects "that Curt Weller [in addition to parts of the brothel scene] also canceled the bus trip [...] due to political concerns, not only in order not to offend the local patriots in Berlin."

Breitkopf's appendix

In the previous third chapter is the episode with Director Breitkopf and Fabian's punctual but untalented colleague Fischer. He shows up at the office in good time every morning, while the late riser Fabian regularly annoys Mr. Breitkopf by arriving late, but then does significantly more than Fischer at work. In fact, this morning Breitkopf is conciliatory towards Fabian after there had been an argument about being late, but claims that he couldn't laugh at his question about a raise because otherwise his appendix scar would burst. Fischer promptly inquires about this scar, whereupon Breitkopf locks himself in with his two employees in the office and undresses in order to demonstrate the inflamed and not yet healed scar. Fischer shows the director all sympathy, but Fabian brings the conversation back to the desired increase in salary, since he cannot live on 270 marks a month. Breitkopf suspects him of having a sideline because he is late every morning, whereupon Fabian angrily replies that he does indeed have a sideline, namely to live. Breitkopf is extremely irritated: “You call that life? [...] You hang around in bars and dance halls! Do you call that life? You have no respect for life! ”Now Fabian gets angry too:“ Only not for my life, sir! [...] But you do not understand that and that is none of your business! Not everyone has the bad taste to put the typists over the desk. Do you understand that? ”After this scene, when Fischer describes his fear that he might now be released, Fabian still reacts very brashly. It is more or less important to him if he is fired because he is looking for something new. During the inflation he had managed stock exchange papers, then had a greengrocer's shop , he had already worked as an address writer and on the side he also had a dissertation on the subject of Did Heinrich von Kleist stutter? written. Fischer responds respectfully, but when Fabian actually becomes unemployed shortly afterwards and cannot find a new job, this also affects his relationship with Cornelia Battenberg, who, originally with a doctorate in law, now wants to embark on a film career and considers it necessary in view of the financial uncertainty to sleep with the filmmaker.

Kästner “saved” this memorable passage by printing it elsewhere. It appeared for the first time in 1932 in Wieland Herzfeld's compilation 30 Narrators of the New Germany , which was published by Malik .

“Fake News” in the print edition

Honoré Daumier: Progrès. Les Escargots non sympathiques

The appendix episode removed from the novel was, as mentioned, initially published elsewhere by Kästner, slightly modified. In the novel Fabian , he replaced it with the episode with the political editor Münzer, who had to edit a speech by the Chancellor and, since the break on the front page of his newspaper was no longer correct, invented a short message: In Calcutta , street fights between Hindus and Muslims were fourteen Dead and twenty-two injured claimed. When his colleague reacts in horror, he explains: "Make a note of the following: reports that are untruthful or can only be determined after weeks are true." The chapter ends with a conversation in the pub about the political situation. Sentences like “We perish from the inertia of our hearts. [...] Solving the present crisis economically without a previous renewal of the spirit is quackery! "

When Fabian goes home drunk, he is heartbroken and remembers a drawing by Honoré Daumier on which progress is shown in the form of snails. The worst part is that, according to Fabian's memory, the snails crawl in circles.

Hanuschek's afterword

Hanuschek emphasizes that he does not want to replace an annotated edition of Fabian with The Walk to the Dogs , which is already available, but also provides a lot of background information on the novel beyond the editorial note.

Among other things, he deals with the archetypes of literary figures. Jakob Fabian shares, as is easy to see, a number of fates and characteristics with the author. Kästner came from a rather small family in Dresden and was closely connected to his mother, so Kästner returned from the First World War with a heart condition , Kästner lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and Kästner also has a dissertation on one Philological topic written: In 1925 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the responses to the writing De la littérature allemande Frederick the Great . Kästner's preoccupation with Lessing, however, was transferred to the figure of Labude. But in addition to the similarities between Kästner and his character Fabian, which also include anti-militarism , Hanuschek also sees differences. Fabian is a history pessimist, which is particularly evident in the chapter written later in which he worked on Daumier's paper Progrès. Les Escargots non sympathiques from 1869 thinks it can be recognized. Kästner, on the other hand, just like his fictional character Zacharias, shared Herbert George Wells ' view that propaganda could educate mankind for the better. In keeping with this and the name of the character in the novel, Wells or his protagonist Clissold was influenced by the Fabian Society , which in turn was named after Quintus Fabius Cunctator , the procrastinator who, as a Roman consul, was reluctant to deploy troops. Finally, the name of the doctor Warner Fabian could also have played a role in the novel. Kästner was familiar with his book on premarital sexuality.

Stefan Labude possibly had several archetypes in real life. Ralph Zucker, Kästner's school friend and student of medicine, apparently acted as a model for the ambitious young man who took his own life because of a joke that was not understood, but Hanuschek also gives the theory that Labude is a portrait of Walter Benjamin , which was set up by Werner Fuld and has meanwhile found widespread use, as well as Fabian Beer's considerations as to whether two academic teachers Kästner played into this figure: Albert Köster and Georg Witkowski . He points out that the scholarly satire is an important topos in the novel and that z. B. Fabian's dissertation topic was actually worked on scientifically: In 1913 Richard Finger dealt in Heinrich von Kleist's Secret with the question of whether he stuttered.

According to Hanuschek, the archetype of Irene Moll, who consumes men and whom Fabian encounters again and again, could have been Rosa Valetti , with whom Kästner was apparently acquainted, but he does not give any detailed reasons for this. The sexual exploits in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s have been addressed in numerous literary and other works (Kastner himself refers in the preface to the edition of 1946 on the piece disease of youth of Ferdinand Bruckner , which was often played around 1930) References to individual known people seem rather far-fetched here. Hanuschek explains that Kästner's image of women in the novel is by no means as woodcut-like as he was accused of, but it is striking that he hardly mentions a hypothesis about the archetypes of the female characters in The Walk to the Dogs , whereas he does so for the main male characters found a wealth of material.

In addition to the living people, Hanuschek also names other sources that apparently inspired Kästner and entered the novel. For example, he mentions the operetta Im Weißen Rössl by Ralph Benatzky , which premiered in Berlin in 1930 , and whose librettist was Robert Gilbert , who was a friend of Kästner's . The motif of jumping into the water can be found here in the love song Spectators can i net . Hanuschek sees the “central topos of Kästner's protagonist” as a theme. Fabian's description of the hidden homes, in which horribly wounded war invalids vegetate, could be traced back to Ernst Friedrich's pamphlet-like work Krieg dem Krieg , which appeared in 1924.

In addition, numerous historical events are mentioned in the novel, of which Erich Kästner was a witness, such as the Rathenau murder or the confused situation after the 1930 Prime Minister election in Saxony .

The editor of The Walk to the Dogs also lists the various titles that have been discussed for the book. Kästner had suggested pigsty or pigsty without Hercules , as well as youth in vacuum . Curt Weller would actually have favored Confusion of Emotions , but Stefan Zweig had already chosen this title for one of his novels . The slaughterhouse of the heart, into which Europe has found its way , the waiting room and provisional facilities were also titles that Weller could imagine for the novel. A publisher named Lang was for Herz below zero . This Mr. Lang then also beat the title Fabian. The story of a moralist before. Kästner was not immediately satisfied with this idea, which was also communicated to him in the letter of July 10, 1931. He was still thinking about Matthew on the Last and Sodom & Gomorrah . It is possible, but not proven, that he suggested going to the dogs at this time .

Hanuschek's sources

Erich Kästner's Berlin apartment burned down after a bombing in World War II ; Numerous publishing documents have also been lost. But Ida Kästner's copy of a typescript with handwritten corrections and additions by Elfriede Mechnig and two original pages remained , which is now in the care of the German Literature Archives in Marbach am Neckar and is on display in the Modern Literature Museum. It served as the source for Hanuschek's reconstruction of the novel and the two afterwords, while the foreword from 1946 was available in Kästner's estate, both in a handwritten draft and as an extract from the first post-war edition of Fabian . Hanuschek had the preface from 1950 in typescript with Kästner's handwritten corrections; it was compared with the foreword in the last edition, and it turned out that, in contrast to the text of the novel, the foreword text had not been changed by Kästner since 1950.

The Marbach romantic script has no cover sheet and therefore no title. Although Kästner had it noted on the cover of the last edition of Fabian 1969 that The Walk to the Dog was his originally favorite title for the novel, there is no evidence of this from the time of the first edition.

reception

Hanuschek claims to have restored Fabian in his reconstruction "as it was planned and meant by the author". In his review in the FAZ, Hernán de Caro expressed doubts about this, as well as about Hanuschek's assumption that going to the dogs would change the image that the readership had so far made of Erich Kästner as an author. According to de Caro, "it is doubtful that the new edition could completely change our reading experience and our understanding of the meaning of the novel or really scandalize us." What he admits to the book, however, is the fact that it offers readers a happy opportunity to reread Fabian , which he describes as a brilliant work: “Kästner's melancholy fairy tale for adults is [...] one of the greatest city novels the city-loving Weimar Republic ; a philosophical parable and a “plea for reason in times of unreason” ( Marcel Reich-Ranicki ); the sober portrait of an uninhibited milieu on the eve of the catastrophe; literary fiction with autobiographical features; cheeky, free, self-deprecating satire . ”Above all, however, Kästner's book was a warning to his contemporaries, which admittedly remained ineffective.

For the reviewer David Denk, who spoke about the original version of Fabian in the taz , the hero appears touchingly naive and the novel, even in the reconstructed version, is obedient and old-fashioned: “Today's readers see the passage removed for reasons of disgust , in which a man drops his pants and shows an inflamed scar, just as harmless as the practical joke that Fabian and his best friend Labude use to attack an entire bus. ”Denk respects Hanuschek's reconstruction primarily as a successful hard work and gives, in contrast to other reviewers, reasons why Kästner never tried to reconstruct the novel in this way: firstly, he had more and more urgent things to do and, secondly, it was unclear whether Kästner even knew that the typescript was based on the Hanuschek's reconstruction rested, survived the Second World War.

Roman Halfmann struck in the same notch: under the heading of old wine , he explained that "it really doesn't matter whether the new edition contains an immoral sentence or a brothel scene is presented more explicitly," because that is actually scandalous, including the one version of the novel approved by the publisher, the fact that "the hero, Fabian, is not a hero, although he, as the only one in this dance, has what it takes - and that he does not want to be a hero, and possibly cannot be either" . In Halfmann's opinion, the novel is not well known and deserves a renaissance, but “in a direct comparison [of the reconstruction] to the earlier versions we are dealing with only marginal changes that do not result in any new reading experience, let alone take on the character of a new discovery. "

Oliver Pohlmann, on the other hand, described Fabian , as the public had known him so far, as almost censored and, in a review on Deutschlandfunk , said he was pleased that the work had now finally been "freed from its distortions and defusing", because the cuts once requested by the publisher and changes had rather obscured the satirical intentions of Kästner and tore apart some contexts of the plot, so that Fabian became more of an episode novel. As an example, Pohlmann cites the deletion of the appendix chapter, in which the motive for the termination is laid out, which Fabian's superior expresses shortly afterwards: Fabian accuses him in this chapter of offending his secretaries. However, Pohlmann also sees a loss in the Hanuschek version: the omission of the chapter in which a newspaper editor fills an empty space in his paper with a fabricated message is difficult to get over. However, this is "the only place where the reconstruction of the original version leads to an aesthetic loss".

Georg Diez wrote in the Spiegel that going to the dogs was "linguistically closer to the rawness" that Kästner wanted, tougher than Fabian and closer to "a political consciousness that is not so easily associated with Kästner today". He embedded his remarks about Kästner's novel in a reflection on the life of the writer who, because he had stayed in Nazi Germany, remained below his possibilities as a writer and after whom Fabian had written “nothing really good at all”. About the deletions and changes that Kästner made for the publisher's sake, he judges: “[G] erad the parts of the novel that were deleted out of fear show how wasteful the climate was in 1932: They weren't political allusions that might have been weakened . [...] Disgust and ridicule, that was something in those prehistoric times that the later book burners, fanatics of order and stupid thinkers couldn't stand - just as little as the ease with which Kästner staged this disgust and ridicule, which is so rare in the world German literature, a more journalistic and definitely point-safe approach to writing ”. It was only after the war that Kästner stylized himself into a moralist, which he actually never was.

output

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 279
  2. ^ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 283
  3. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 284
  4. ^ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 286
  5. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 279
  6. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 41 f.
  7. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 41
  8. ^ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 295
  9. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 29
  10. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 29 f.
  11. ^ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 286
  12. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 253
  13. ↑ Erich Kästner, The Walk to the Dogs , edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , p. 260
  14. ^ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 277
  15. ^ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 295
  16. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275–310, here pp. 295–300
  17. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 289
  18. ^ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here pp. 301 f.
  19. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 280
  20. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, editor's afterword , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here p. 293
  21. ↑ Die Schwarze Fahne 1, 1925 ( digitized version ) contains a picture and a caption which clearly show parallels to the corresponding passage in Kästner's novel.
  22. ↑ Sven Hanuschek, afterword by the editor , in: Erich Kästner, Der Gang vor diehund, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-03882-001-7 , pp. 275-310, here pp. 284 f.
  23. ↑ Hernán de Caro, Erich Kästner: The walk to the dogs. Fabian, before he came under the scissors, October 25, 2013 in the FAZ ( online )
  24. ↑ David Denk, Kästner's original version of “Fabian”: A roughened picture , October 21, 2013 on www.taz.de
  25. ^ Roman Halfmann, Old Wine. About Erich Kästner's “The Walk to the Dogs” , January 8, 2014 on literaturkritik.de
  26. ↑ Oliver Pohlmann, new edition. Kästner's "Fabian" uncensored , March 26, 2014 on www.deutschlandfunk.de
  27. ↑ Georg Diez, After the fire, stupidity , in: Der Spiegel 16, April 15, 2013, pp. 124–127 ( digitized version )