The man who watched the trains

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The man who watched the trains (French: L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . According to various sources, the novel was written in Igls in 1936 or in the spring of 1937. It was published in 1938, and its first German translation was published in 1970 under the title The man who saw the trains go by .

content

One evening just before Christmas, Kees Popinga, authorized signatory in Groningen , learns from the company owner that fraudulent bankruptcy is inevitable. His boss staged his disappearance that night. Popinga returns home, but refuses to go to the office the next day, knowing for certain that he has not only lost his job, but also his fortune, since he was involved in the company, as well as his house that he had borrowed and secured the mortgage through company shares.

In the afternoon of that day he breaks out of his bourgeois existence, changes from a man who previously only watched the trains to one who now wants to enjoy life. He goes to Amsterdam to see his boss's mistress, whom he tries to win over, accidentally kills her, as he says, because she laughed at him, and then immediately goes on to Paris . There he meets a prostitute, who on Christmas Eve passed him on to her pimp, the head of a gang of car smugglers , from whom he finds out in time that this is not about help, but about taking away his last belongings.

He escapes, returns to the prostitute, injured and leaves her, is now on the streets of Paris - but at the same time, with a letter, brings the police not only on the trail of his second crime, but also on that of the car smugglers. He spends his time with constantly changing activities and in always different places, since he does not want to bring the police on his track through repetitions, and thereby narrows his room for maneuver from day to day.

Since he does not like the reports about him in the press, Popinga writes to the newspapers, which also publish his letters, albeit with psychiatric statements that ascribe paranoia to him and his urge for validity . On New Year's Eve, the only way he escapes discovery is that he sees a jealous drama coming among the guests of the restaurant in which he is also and flees in time. At the same time, the police had blown the car door open, and shortly thereafter agreed with them, since they were the only ones to see him, that they and with it the whole Parisian underworld are also looking for him.

A few days after the New Year, Popinga finally loses the last of his money to a pickpocket, whereupon he decides to give up. He lies down on railroad tracks, but is "rescued" and handed over to the Paris police, who deport him home and thus to the psychiatric ward.

interpretation

At the end of the novel, the protagonist writes "The Truth About the Kees Popinga Case". But he just gives the doctor a pile of blank pages. According to Lucille F. Becker, the truth that Popinga cannot write down is that life cannot be changed, it remains impossible to live after dreams. This message, which, according to Becker, runs through Simenon's entire work, makes him a novelist of “futile battles”. The final escape into madness is Popinga's reaction to the realization that his life was useless and that nothing justified his existence. In the end, Becker saw a typical solution for Simenon's novels, which had often earned him criticism: a well-constructed novel ended in the end by accident, hastily or violently.

For Lutz Gräfe, the novel about the “inexorable decline of a gray mouse” was part of Simenon's “dark psychological studies in which the Belgian explores the abysses of the petty bourgeoisie and which almost always come to a bad end.” According to Alex Rühle, Popinga, who has to come out of his fixed reality wanted to break out, to experience how he is caught again by the media in an image, the image of a monster, which he is desperately trying to correct. In the end, he literally loses everything until he is arrested in full nakedness. But Simenon leaves in the balance, “to what extent Popinga only fails or in this failure also gains a kind of freedom; and the extent to which he actually goes mad in an effort to shift the fixed conditions in his life. "

reception

The man who watched the trains was so successful, especially in the USA, that, according to Jean Améry, he “made serious competition for the best American crime novels”. Harold French filmed the novel under the title The Man Who Watched Trains Go By with Claude Rains in the leading role. The film was released in German as The Man Who Didn't Know Himself , the later TV title was Paris-Express . The film premiered on February 26, 1954. The film-dienst assessed: "A poignant character study based on a novel by Georges Simenon, which, despite some unbelievability, captivates with its calm plot and intense representation."

A German translation of Simenon's novel did not appear until 1970, at that time under the title The man who saw the trains go by at Heyne Verlag . The first edition of Diogenes Verlag followed in 1981 as The Man Who Was Watching the Trains . In 2000, Horst-Jürgen Gerigk classified the novel among those books that were more present through their title than through their content. Nevertheless, both Diogenes selected the novel in 2002 for the 50th birthday of the publisher for the anniversary edition of twelve Diogenes classics and the Süddeutsche Zeitung 2004 for their SZ library , which brought it back into the public eye. André Hille read a “grandiose story”, for Alex Rühle the floating state of the novel was “uncanny”, the website maigret.de rated: “Exciting to the last page”.

In 1998 the SWR produced a radio play adaptation. Directed by Walter Adler , Christian Berkel spoke the Kees Poppinga, according to Lutz Gräfe, “with oppressive intensity” in a “dialogue piece with few, but all the more accentuated effects”. The result is an "exciting psychogram [...] whose coldness sometimes freezes your heart." In 2002 the audio play was published on CD by Audio Verlag .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: L'Homme qui regardait passer les trains . Gallimard, Paris 1938. (first edition)
  • Georges Simenon: The man who saw the trains go by . Translated by Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1970. (German first edition)
  • Georges Simenon: The man who watched the trains . Translated by Walter Schürenberg. Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-20815-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: The man who watched the trains . Translated by Linde Birk. Diogenes, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-257-05609-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: The man who watched the trains . Translated by Ulrike Ostermeyer. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13332-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bibliography on the Georges Simenon Society website.
  2. ↑ Alain Bertrand: Georges Simenon. De Maigret aux romans de la destinée . CÉFAL, Lüttich 1994, ISBN 2-87130-038-0 , p. 222.
  3. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 69.
  4. ↑ a b The man who looked up the trains in the HörDat radio play database .
  5. ↑ a b Alex Rühle: The naked monster . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 28, 2004.
  6. ↑ Jean Améry : The hardworking life of Georges Simenon. This side and the other side of Commissioner Maigret . In: Claudia Schmölders, Christian Strich (Ed.): About Simenon . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-20499-X , p. 106.
  7. ↑ The Man Who Did n't Know Himself in the Internet Movie Database .
  8. ↑ The man who didn't know himself on the Kabel Eins film lexicon .
  9. ^ Horst-Jürgen Gerigk: Title dreams. A meditation on the literary title following Werner Bergengruen, Leo H. Hoek and Arnold Rothe . In: Jochen Mecke, Susanne Heiler (ed.): Title, text, context. Outskirts of the text. Festschrift for Arnold Rothe . Galda & Wilch, Glienicke 2000, ISBN 3-931397-30-0 , p. 25.
  10. ^ André Hille: Grüezi anniversaire . On literaturkritik.de.
  11. ↑ The man who watched the trains on maigret.de.