The secret agent (novel)
The Secret Agent: A Simple Story (OT: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale ) is a novel by Joseph Conrad from 1907. The novel belongs Nostromo and with the eyes of the West to the political novels of Conrad. Behind the level of the spy novel hides a complex and ironic examination of the petty-bourgeois life in the modern city. Conrad himself thought it was one of his best novels.
The first translation into German by Ernst W. Freißler and a foreword by Thomas Mann was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1926 .
action
1886: In the London borough of Soho , Adolf Verloc runs a small, not-too-prosperous shop selling pornographic products and knick- knacks. He lives with his wife Winnie and their mentally challenged brother Stevie in a small apartment behind the store. What his wife does not know: he delivers reports on the anarchist circles in which he operates to an embassy for good pay. One day he will be quoted on this message. The new secretary, Vladimir, asks Verloc to do more than just carry out a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory . The public outcry over this attack on science would change the British police's slack attitude towards the anarchists, who also threaten the security of his country.
The Verloc, torn from his contemplative life by this assignment, makes his preparations. He sends Stevie to one of his anarchist friends in the country on the grounds that the city is too exciting for his spirits and begins - much to the pleasure of his wife - to take him on his walks. He gets an explosive device from the professor , another anarchist. Stevie, who trusts him unconditionally and thinks he's a "good" person, is supposed to bring him to the observatory, but he trips, the bomb explodes and tears him apart.
The Chief Inspector Heat, in charge of the police investigation, quickly finds his track through a rag with Verloc's address. Verloc is no stranger to Scotland Yard . He had given the police one or two tips before. But Heat is whistled back by his superiors. They want to use the knowledge of the connection between Vladimir and Verloc to convince Vladimir to withdraw his agents from England. Verloc's friends from the anarchist group believe him to be the victim of the explosion.
Verloc, meanwhile, expects to have to flee abroad after the failed assassination attempt and withdraws all his money from the bank. Heat visits him unofficially. Winnie overhears the inspector's conversation with her husband, learns of her brother's death and Verloc's guilt. When he downplayed Stevie's death as an unfortunate accident and accuses her of having brought the police on his trail, she stabs him.
After the murder, she excitedly leaves the apartment, where she meets Ossipon, another comrade from Verloc's anarchist circle. She asks him for help, which Ossipon, who is in love with her, agrees with. They plan to flee to the continent, but when he finds out about Verloc's money, he takes it, jumps off the approaching train at the last moment and lets them down. He later learns from the newspaper that a woman threw herself off the ship into the English Channel after leaving her wedding ring on board .
Note: The plot summary follows the chronology, the novel is not structured chronologically and an omniscient narrator changes the narrative perspective several times.
To the novel
Vladimir's country of origin is not mentioned in the novel. His name, the problems with anarchism in this country, the mention of an emperor and Conrad's later and thematically more similar novel, set in Russia and among Russian exiles in Geneva, With the Eyes of the West (1911) point to tsarist Russia . The German name of its predecessor also allows Austria-Hungary or the German Empire .
Birgit Neumann ( Kindlers Literatur Lexikon ) sees anarchism in Conrad's novel as a symbol of social reality: It indicates the predominance of individual interests in modern society and honors it for the fact that it combines metaphysical uncertainty and individual ethos into a tense synthesis and thus the Modernity not only prepares the way, but warns of it.
Historical background
Joseph Conrad used an event on February 15, 1884 for the bombing of the Greenwich observatory. The Frenchman Martial Bourdin died of serious injuries after an explosive device exploded in his hands in front of the observatory. The police found out that he was a member of an anarchist club. Why he had chosen the observatory as the target for his bomb, which was too small, remained unclear.
aftermath
The figure of the professor in Conrad's novel has, in its bomb-end, misanthropic and reclusive parallels the behavior Unabomber become known Theodore Kaczynski on. Profiler the FBI had believed that Kaczynski of The Secret Agent was affected. It turned out that he was a great admirer of Conrad and had occasionally used his name as a pseudonym .
Because of the focus on terrorism, the novel was one of the most cited literary works in the American media in the period after the 9/11 attacks .
Editions of the book
The secret agent - novel. Introduction by Thomas Mann, translation from d. English by Ernst W. Freißler, S. Fischer, Berlin 1926.
Film adaptations
Conrad's novel was the template for Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 thriller Sabotage . The film was released under this title because Hitchcock had recently turned Secret Agent , a film adaptation of two Ashenden stories by William Somerset Maugham . Christopher Hampton filmed the novel in 1996 with Bob Hoskins , Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu .
It was filmed for television in 1981 and 1992 as a three-part mini-series.
Audio book
- The secret agent , reading with Jürgen Holtz , 7h, 11min., MDR Figaro 2004 / Der Audio Verlag 2015, ISBN 978-3-86231-629-8
proof
- ↑ a b c Birgit Neumann The secret agent In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Kindlers Literatur-Lexikon. Volume 3: Chu - Dud. 3rd completely revised edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , pp. 164f.
- ^ Dates of the first German translation
- ^ Joseph Conrad: The secret agent p. 33, Diogenes, Zurich, 1975, ISBN 3-257-20212-1
- ^ Propaganda by Deed: the Greenwich Observatory Bomb of 1894
- ↑ German Grad Student Plays Detective In Unabomber Case
- ^ Chasing After Conrad's Secret Agent
- ↑ Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The double life of Monsieur Verloc in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Secret Agent in the Internet Movie Database (English)
