The Judgment Day Master

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The Master of Judgment Day is a novel by Leo Perutz from 1923.

General

For Perutz, the work was one of the greatest successes with audiences and critics. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin , for example, made positive comments . Jorge Luis Borges included the novel in his series of great crime novels of the 20th century. Perutz himself didn't think much of the work, even calling it “bullshit”. Originally the work was intended as a film expose, but after the plans for a film by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau came to nothing, Perutz reworked the text into a novel.

content

At the beginning there is a “foreword instead of an afterword”, the author of which is Gottfried Adalbert Freiherr von Yosch and Klettenfeld, Rittmeister of the Austro-Hungarian Army . In this foreword, Yosch assures the truth of the events he describes and emphasizes his good memory with the help of seemingly insignificant details that were imprinted on his mind on September 26, 1909: “I wrote the full truth. Nothing ignored, nothing suppressed - what for? I have no reason to hide anything. "

Yosch now describes a company with the court actor Eugen Bischoff, in which he takes part as a musician - the piano trio op. 8 in B major by Johannes Brahms is given. In addition to Bischoff and Yosch, people present at this society are: Bischoff's wife Dina, with whom Yosch was previously in a relationship; the chemistry student Felix, Dina's brother; Waldemar Solgrub, engineer and friend of the Bischoffs; as well as Dr. Gorski, doctor.

Lately Eugen Bischoff has been very unstable mentally; he has problems with creativity, can no longer vividly imagine the stage characters he plays. In addition, he has difficulties with his directorship. Those present therefore try to keep the collapse of the bank, where he has deposited all his assets, from him. After being told by the guests about his new role, Richard III. , has been questioned, Bischoff withdraws to the garden pavilion to offer the guests a taste of his role afterwards. Meanwhile, Yosch is walking in the garden and thinks about the past time with Dina when two shots are fired in the pavilion - Eugen Bischoff has committed his own life.

Felix accuses Yosch of secretly following Bischoff and telling him about the collapse of the Bergstein bank. His motive: He could never get over the fact that Dina married someone else. Yosch gives Felix his word of honor that he has never entered the pavilion, when Felix presents him with Yosch's pipe, which was on the table in the pavilion. Felix demands that Yosch commit suicide, otherwise he will appeal to the military court of honor and request Yosch's dishonorable discharge. Yosch seems apathetic to surrender to this demand.

Engineer Solgrub, however, does not believe that Yosch was the perpetrator, and suspects connections with other puzzling suicides in Viennese society, which Bischoff also mentioned in the conversation. Solgrub starts an investigation and persuades Yosch not to kill himself. In the course of Solgrub's investigation, other people were killed, including Solgrub himself. However, his death was not in vain: In a self-experiment, shortly before he died of a heart attack, he found out who was responsible for the suicides.

In a 16th century tome, a Florentine painter reports that his master, Giovansimone Chigi, consumed an incense that was given to him by an alchemist, who still had an open account with him, on the premise that it would be his Revive creativity. When he smoked, however, a celestial fire appeared to him in an eerie color: that is the color of drumstick red, in which the sun shines on the day of judgment. From then on, Chigi is said to have gone mad and only painted pictures of the Last Judgment.

Before Solgrub died, he had destroyed the recipe for the incense. Yosch smokes the remnants of the recipe that have been preserved in the pipe in the pavilion and is haunted by the thought that he is going insane. Shortly before he kills himself with a revolver, Felix saves him with a punch in the forehead - this is how the alchemist ripped Chigi out of his drug intoxication. Doctor Gorski analyzes the effect of the drug as that of a creative stimulant, which at the same time evokes visions of horror and states of madness. The seat of the imagination in the human brain is also the center of fear. Yosch closes his report with the painful farewell to Dina.

Immediately after Yosch's report there are “final remarks by the editor.” It is said that von Yosch “went to the front at the beginning of the World War and fell a few months later (...) during a reconnaissance ride (...)”. The affair about the suicide of Eugen Bischoff had ended with an honorary conviction of the baron; his officer rank had been stripped from him. The first part of his report still corresponds to the facts, but at one point in the report turns "the representation with a sudden turn into the fantastic." Solgrub's hunt for the "murderer", the tome with the mysterious drug formulation are merely products of Yosch's imagination .

Ambiguity through frame technology: Art as a displacement product?

In many of his novels Perutz works with framing techniques that make the main event appear ambivalent; this also applies to the “Master of Judgment Day”. At the beginning there is a foreword by the first-person narrator, in which the narrator emphasizes the authenticity of his descriptions. After the main text, the actual story, however, an anonymous editor speaks up, stating that Yosch is responsible for the death of actor Eugen Bischoff. Yosch could not bear the truth, however, and fantasized about the circumstances that were responsible for the deaths in the main text in an act of repression. However, the editor does not provide any evidence; after all, Yosch's text is also a novel, thus attributable to art, and could have been created through the effects of the creativity drug. The radio play based on the novel also points to a possible creative aspect of repression.

The unreliable first-person narrator

However, the many mistakes that Yosch makes in his report speak against Yosch's version. For example, he bumps his head at one point in a dark room and a few pages later doesn't know where he got the wound from. This would in itself be a fact that would raise doubts, but it is in even sharper contrast to the emphasis on good memory at the beginning of the novel. At another point, while listening to a play by Johannes Brahms , Yosch hears the “Last Judgment” beginning long before the tome with the story of the master appears in the plot. In addition, his interpretation of the piece is much more cryptic than the music would actually suggest. On the other hand, Yosch also (pretend?) Reproaches himself for being careless towards Eugen Bischoff, from whom the collapse of the bank should be kept secret.

Adaptations

The novel was used as a template for a radio play in 1988 (script: Marina Dietz, director: Götz Fritsch ). In the radio play, the subjectivity of the novel was radicalized again by conveying almost the entire plot from Yosch's subjective listening perspective. As a consequence, many passages are difficult to understand and require the listener to concentrate. There are also many indications of Yosch's possible guilt or the aspect of repression. Depending on how focused the listener is recording the radio play, Yosch will appear once more, once less than the culprit. There is also a reference in the radio play to Sigmund Freud's interpretation of dreams , in which the question is discussed whether culture should be seen as a product of displacement.

Shortly afterwards, in 1989, the novel by Michael Kehlmann was made into a film for television. The film focuses heavily on the drug aspect and almost completely ignores the issue of repression; the end of the film is very different from the novel. In addition, the events in the film do not appear as ambiguous as in the novel and radio play.

Web links

literature

  • Fotis Jannidis: Leo Perutz: The Master of Judgment Day. In: Tom Kindt / Jan-Christoph Meister (ed.): Leo Perutz 'novels. From structure to meaning. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag 2007, ISBN 978-3484321328 , pp. 49-67.
  • Henry Keazor : "(...) as if someone had hit him in the forehead": "Meaningful portraits" by Leo Perutz. In: Matthias Bauer , Fabienne Liptay , Susanne Marschall (eds.): Art and cognition. Interdisciplinary studies on the creation of image sense. Wilhelm Fink, Munich et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7705-4451-6 , pp. 87–113 (analyzes in particular “Der Judas des Leonardo” as well as “Die Sarabande”, “Der Maler Brabanzio” (both from Nachts unter der Steinernen Bridge ) and "The Master of Judgment Day").
  • Beate Pinkerneil: The terrible enemy in us; Beate Pinkerneil on Leo Perutz: "The master of the last day (1923)." In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Novels from yesterday - read today. Volume 2: 1918-1933. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-10-062911-6 , pp. 23-30.
  • Oliver Stangl: The Master of Judgment Day. Investigations into the radio play adaptation of a novel by Leo Perutz. Vienna 2005 (Vienna, University, Diploma thesis, 2005), The work in the online catalog of the University of Vienna .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.kunstblogbuch.de/2010/06/14/leo-perutz-der-meister-des-jungsten-tages/
  2. ↑ Andreas Mertin: Drommetenrot - A small story from the evidence of the sensual , 2003, in: Magazin für Theologie und Ästhetik , 21/2002, accessed on July 9, 2018