The giraffe's neck (novel)

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The neck of the giraffe is the second, in 2011 published novel by Judith Schalansky . It tells less of a story than describes a condition - using the example and from the perspective of an aging biology teacher.

Main character and plot

Inge Lohmark, 55, is a high school teacher for biology and sports in a small town in the hinterland of Western Pomerania . The 9th grade assigned to her is the only one of the year, has 12 students and will have the last high school graduates when the high school closes in four years. She does not have a “plan B” for the remaining years of work afterwards; She categorically refuses to even think about elementary school, secondary school or adult education center. “The natural sciences are not suitable for a hobby”, so one of their reasons. Accordingly, she confronts her students. The classroom is their territory. She insists on her claims, norms and principles. The achievements of the students prove their right. So she doesn't have to question her expertise. Not even her methodology - at least not within the limits that she herself draws: “Nothing beats frontal teaching. Your lessons were good. Your students were good. [...] And their results were good. The censorship level was above the national average. Always. "

What Inge Lohmark would have reason to question is her teacher-student relationship. She clearly distinguishes herself from colleagues who strive for closeness and understanding; however, her intimate enemy ( Schwanneke , as she is used to contemptuously calling her) does indeed act inappropriately when dealing with students. Lohmark's cool detachment seems more honest, even more personable. Smarter anyway, she has a keenly analyzing eye for the “nature” of her students. Especially for their weaknesses. With this knowledge she is sometimes skilful, sometimes hurtful, and in one case negligently: She immediately recognized the class's potential victim of bullying; involuntarily (her car does not start, and for the first time in years she has to take the bus again) she is even present when the expected happens, but does not intervene. So the problem is dragged on until it escalates. The headmaster - like the other male colleagues, more differentiated than the female ones - threatens her with consequences; which and whether he will implement them remains open.

The image of a woman who looks confident on the outside but is hollowed out on the inside is complemented by snapshots from her private life that go back to her childhood. Her status: married, modest cottage in the country and grown daughter who has lived in the USA for 12 years. With her husband - the former insemination technician is completely absorbed in his ostrich breeding - she is nothing more than a community of habit and purpose; She did not tell him about an affair with consequences (abortion). What really worries her is the estrangement from her daughter. The only visit to her has deepened the trench; the exchange of messages is becoming increasingly rare and formal. When, surprisingly, good news arrives (she got married), it is no wonder that the mother also feels excluded from it and feels no joy at all. As she retraced the process of alienation, she finally became aware of a scene that corresponds to her current greatest omission: Her daughter had also been bullied as a schoolgirl, and when she desperately appealed to her as a mom one day in class , she rejected her, caught her in her role scheme: “Of course she was her mother. But first of all her teacher. [...] You were in school. It was class. She was Mrs. Lohmark. "

There are signs that the protagonist's body and soul are defending themselves against the progressive hardening and impoverishment. Dreams and wishes are perceived, attacks of tiredness registered and the need to give in to them. “How good it had to be to follow an urge. Without meaning or understanding. ”- Her subliminal need for change manifests itself most clearly, but also most disturbingly, in the fact that she feels drawn to a student: Erika ( the heather ), who makes a rather boyish impression on her (as it does once means that she would rather have had a boy than a girl). Unlike usual, when she deals with students and is dominated by negative affects, she is soft-tempered towards Erika, attentive, affectionate, even loving - as she sometimes does when observing nature. Of course, that scares her too. Especially the sexual connotation; so she asks herself while watching Erika next to her in the car: "Was there actually female pedophilia?" She is weaned from human closeness, fears uncontrolled actions and worries about her image (contrary to her code, she speaks to Erika outside of school, even takes them in the car). Therefore, she also reacts in panic when the headmaster takes her out of class, suspects a connection with her "forbidden" inclination and objectively fears inappropriately: "That was the end."

Individual aspects

Each of the three parts of the novel describes a day in the protagonist's school year (September, November, March). The headings ( ecosystems, inheritance processes, developmental theory ) refer directly to topics that she deals with in the biology class of her 9th grade and appear in the left header - on the right supplemented by chapter-like terms that change with each page, all of which are also at home in the world of biology .

The design is completed - as previously done by the author herself in her books - with illustrations (mainly of animals) and the cover in gray, somewhat coarse linen with a headless giraffe skeleton.

All of this allows associations with a conventional biology book and thus a reading that can also take the subtitle Bildungsroman unironically. Measured against classic models, beginning with Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship years , it is designed as a satirical reversal, because what is shown is not a development, but precisely the refusal of a development - a refusal in a double sense: the teacher refuses a possible development, and she she also denies her students.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the passage that gives the novel its title. As part of evolutionary theory, she comes up with the giraffe's neck and is interrupted by the headmaster just at the point ("... but how the giraffe got this long neck was very different ..."), which would be ideal to stimulate thinking and discussion in students. Instead of embarking on such uncharted territory, she leaves the class with the usual authoritarian phrase quiet work . Back from the "pronunciation", which is a monologue because it blocks itself, it in turn lets a monologue follow, whereby the different hypotheses are no longer mentioned and the only one that seems to be valid ( Lamarckism , as the reader takes from the header) of it is neither designated as such nor indicated that it is considered obsolete. Even more: Her apodictic Suada now sounds like the speeches that the headmaster had made until recently and which she rightly despised because they resembled those she was used to from GDR times - all of them hollow appeals that never reach anyone from her mouth, however, seem even more cynical, because she herself does not believe in what she preaches to the students (“Only if we try, we achieve something”) and they feel it, especially non-verbally, otherwise often enough leaves.

reception

The novel was included in the longlist for the German Book Prize 2011 . The literary criticism has so far been largely positive.

“The intended linguistic inconspicuousness and sobriety, in which Inge Lohmark's character is reflected, is blown up by the richness of nature, which for Schalansky is not only material and visual, but also conceptual. A better biology lesson cannot be imagined. [...] It is an inverted Bildungsroman that Judith Schalansky presents here, a small anti-Darwinist manifesto. "

“It is enjoyable to read in it, but, like every textbook, it has one problem: it soon gets a little boring. Because even when it comes to 'development theory' - nothing develops any more. Once you have understood how Inge Lohmark thinks and perceives, the rest is just implementation and variation. Instead of development, there is stagnation. But maybe that corresponds to the situation described, in which change only occurs as disappearance and settlement. "

In May 2015, the novel was the focus of the two-week Stuttgart literature festival reads a book .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Felicitas von Lovenberg: In the animal kingdom one does not meet to drink coffee. faz.net , September 9, 2011, accessed January 2, 2012.
  2. ↑ Jörg Magenau: You have to be a bacterium. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 28, 2011, accessed on January 2, 2012.
  3. ↑ Stuttgart is reading a book. Stuttgarter Schriftstellerhaus, accessed June 4, 2015 .