The moon and the girl
The moon and the girl is the title of a novel published in 2007 by the German writer Martin Mosebach .
Course of action
The novel tells against the background of change of the city and its ethnic communities, a tragicomic story of Hans' and Inas's failed marriage start in a loft on busy Frankfurt Baseler Platz before as a family residence, a house in the Taunus purchase.
Prehistory (Chapter I)
After completing their university education, Hans and Ina legalize their five-year student relationship with a wedding celebration appropriate for the bride and move from northern Germany to Frankfurt. Here the young man found his first job as an assistant executive in a chilled glass tower at an American bank. Irma von Klein would have actually wished her daughter a more distinguished husband and a nicer city as a place of residence. Since her mother is widowed, Ina feels obliged to accompany her on her holiday to Ischia , as before, immediately after her marriage .
The apartment search (Chapters I-IV)
Hans is therefore given the task of looking for their first apartment together, and his wife repeatedly assures him on the phone that she has complete confidence in his decision, which he cannot justify. The real estate market is proving to be very difficult: First, Hans is interested in an expensive property in a beautiful old, chestnut-lined district near a small park. After seventeen more unsuccessful visits, he tires more and more and is finally satisfied with a partially furnished attic apartment in a pie-like corner house next to a four-lane route that cuts through Baseler Platz. Although he senses that this area near the high-rise banks and the red-light district lacks the atmosphere to feel at home in a city and raise children, but in his pragmatic way he also thinks he can discover advantages: the evening view from the window at the red taillights of the cars, the 10-minute walk to the office, the proximity to the promenades on the Mainkai . After all, he says to himself, it is only a temporary measure, since he will probably soon change jobs on the career ladder, and a love affair actually only needs improvisations between bed and bathroom. There is no time for a loving renovation with individual coloring. The Moroccan property manager Abdallah Souad and a Ukrainian auxiliary team organized a quick white painting of the wall and the cleaning of the dingy kitchen and had a used mattress transported from the cellar to the bedroom.
Grotesque Entanglements (Chapters V-XV)
With Ina's return, the one-month grotesque chain of chance or fate that ends in the chaos of marriage begins. Hans has prepared a picnic with champagne and roast duck by candlelight for the first evening, but when both enter the bedroom, the bed is littered with bird droppings and a dead pigeon lies on the floor. She apparently flew in through the window, which was open to let out the smell of paint, and after Souad closed it because of a thunderstorm, the animal fluttered itself to death. Ina reacts disturbed and confesses to her husband that she is afraid of pigeons (Chapter IV). The divergent courses of action of the two protagonists begin here:
- Over the next few days, Ina tries on the one hand to make the rooms habitable for herself with curtains and some missing pieces of furniture (Chapter V), on the other hand she avoids contact with the flatmates and hardly leaves the house, especially since she has no job with her master's degree in art history to explore the city. She becomes more and more unhappy, suffers crying fits and complains of hallucinations (Chapter XI).
- Hans avoids such tense situations and, after work, sits down in a backyard bar run from the fast food restaurant »Lalibella« on the ground floor (Chapters III, IV, VI. VII, X). Here the Ethiopian Tesfagiorgis serves an international audience in the evening, including a Despina Mahmouni , from Syria , who is married to the homeowner Sieger but is currently at odds with him . The guests, mostly emigrants , talk about their business projects, their experiences and failed marriages and exchange their sober wisdom.
- Since Ina only made one welcome visit to the actress Britta Lilien, who lives one floor below, and her husband Dr. Elmar Wittekind lets them push (Chapter VIII), Hans appears alone at the other invitations and over wine and gin listens to the lectures of the art historian and new duo friend who works in the museum about immigrants and the limits of assimilation, the change in European culture a Phoenician merchant spirit or his philosophy of adventure as a “poetic gift []” of life (chap. V, VI).
- The annoyance about Ina's detachment from her hoped-for marital love life and Britta's encouraging looks lead to a short affair as a link in the random chain (Chapter XI): Hans mixed up the date for an evening party with a colleague and so he has to be annoyed with his on Sunday Woman who can only control her inner anger with difficulty, go home again (Chapter X). The Wittekinds they meet in the stairwell offer a substitute drink, which only Hans accepts (Chapter XI). When he returns to the apartment, he finds out that he has no key. Since his wife plugged her ears with pink drops of wax, "a wedding present from her mother" to stand next to a husband, in order to fall asleep, she does not hear his ringing. Britta notices that he is locked out, offers him a place to sleep in her bed and assures him that the museum man, who tolerates her need for personal space, has nothing against a little sexual affair. However, she makes sure that his sleep is not disturbed.
- In the morning, Hans, who had been unfaithful for the first time, returned to his apartment wrinkled and with a guilty conscience to his wife, who was guilty about spending the night on the stairs. He replaces his missing wedding ring, which Britta pulled from the sleeping man's finger on a whim while showering, with another one: the one previously discovered in a coin plate on the windowsill (Chapter IX), which belongs to the winner's wife . He presented the newly ringed hand to the actress the next evening, when she provocatively alludes to his loss through a song sung mockingly in the backyard, while Wittekind, apparently without feeling embarrassed towards him, returns to her-form. Britta realizes that her game with the neighbor is over and angrily throws the ring into Hans and Ina's mailbox as a source of desirable disputes (Chapter XIV). However, it does not come to that.
- The ring swap connects with the story of Sieger and his wife Despina Mahmouni, which the corpulent house owner Ina told when he visited his old apartment, in which some of his furniture is still standing (Chapter VI. XII). In this way she learns of the love of a “willingly slack” woman for a strong-willed woman with great hatefulness. When they parted, she threw the wedding ring at his feet. Now he's looking for it to give it back to her, but he can no longer find it in the coin plate. Ina can empathize with his unhappy situation because of her own situation. She also feels “endlessly abandoned and neglected” and thinks: “Here lives 'complete hopelessness'”. When she, who doubts her perception anyway, finds a ring in the mailbox, she thinks it is unchecked to be the one Sieger was looking for. Without telling Hans anything, she calls the homeowner, who happily picks up the lost item from her (Chapter XIV) to present it to his wife as a token of his loyalty. They are reconciled again and Despina Mahmouni regulates the situation in the backyard according to her principle: “There are a thousand reasons for every action; hopeless to explore it. Plus, a lot more people are crazy than you think. [...] So no why. ”After clarifying the relationship with her husband, she takes over the management of the house again and gives Souad a new job in her hotel.
- Ina's disorientation intensifies after Sieger's visit (Chapter XIV). She escapes from the apartment, wanders through different parts of the city and returns in despair at the new moon (Chapter XV). At home she tries to pack her things for the trip to Hamburg, but everything slips out of her hands. In her misfortune she does not think of Hans and does not blame him: “He was safe from the sight of the senselessness of Medusa under the protection of his bad conscience .” When she saw her husband at the court society and Wittekind's remark, “But it doesn't even matter to be happy. «, she snaps trance-like towards Hans, smashes a beer bottle on his head and waits“ in the enchanted silence ”for something that would happen (Chapter XV).
Epilogue (Chapter XVI)
In the last chapter the reader learns that Ina lives with Hans and two children in a house in the Taunus northwest of the city.
Literary classification
After Das Bett , Westend , A Long Night and The Blood Beech Festival, the moon and the girl is the fifth novel in the Frankfurt pentalogy of the writer. Unlike the first three predecessors with its local, mostly in civil Westend or Holzhausenviertel resident families are the protagonists of new citizens who wander with foreign glance, the anonymous big city scene, without knowing the history of the way stations, and happened on a busy square in the station district with international influences are stranded: An ethnically mixed population animates the adjacent streets with Ethiopian fast food, Pakistani vegetable shop, Filipino laundry, Bengali newspaper kiosk, tattoo studio, Islamic travel agency and Lebanese restaurant. This work, like the first part of Die Türkin , reflects the change in the cityscape and the residents. The final chapter, on the other hand, establishes a thematic-geographical connection to the Taunusvilla social novels Ruppershain and What happened before .
Narrative form
An authorial narrator presents in sixteen chapters essentially chronological with faded-in retrospectives from changing perspectives mainly Hans and Inas, but z. B. also Brittas, the protagonists' crisis situation condensed to approx. One month between full and new moon. I.e. the reader follows the actions and the conversations, reproduced in direct or indirect speech, of the participants essentially from the point of view of the two main characters.
In the form of the experienced speech ("Ina had to like that." "That had to be a failure", "The poor man slept on the stairs"), for example, Ina's view is combined with authorial remarks, which are often ironically refracted , several perspectives are incorporated: "A major argument - you don't want to call it a crash - but it was unusual for the two of them - there was when the people on the third floor," le ménage Wittekind ", as Frau von Klein would have said, asked for dinner. Hans was heartily delighted with this gesture. [...] But Ina wasn't happy. [...] She said nothing to Hans about that. "
Furthermore, the narrator reflects on behalf of his characters or the reader: “Would Hans have accepted the invitation to the Wittekinds for a last glass if it had been clear how this evening would develop? [...] Was it the agonizing day? Was it the burden Ina had piled on him during the last few hours ”. "Whether Hans would ever find out with which variant of his speculation he was right?" "In her wildest imagination, she could not have imagined what effect she had with this throwing the ring in the mailbox."
Analysis of personal relationships
Hans and Ina
On her wrong way through Frankfurt, Ina reconsiders her situation: “Hadn't she done with moderate discipline, simply out of her nature, what one might expect of her? It now seemed to her as if with her marriage and the conjugal life afterwards she had already strayed far too far from the circle of life that was appropriate for her, as if she were moving here in foreign zones for which she was not equipped, and as if she were becoming Hans herself a stranger here. "She longs, unconsciously in symbiotic agreement with Frau von Klein, for the orderly life" in an environment of casual luxury, with a daily routine that was of monastic precision. "A world" in which it is other than There were no unimportant important things at all, that now seemed to her to be the epitome of the feeling of home. ”“ Hans and Ina had left the familiar spheres and it was obviously not difficult for Hans to find his way elsewhere. ”This is a“ disturbing discovery, which asked for him, whom she thought she knew, to be completely reinterpreted. [...] and now she saw that the apartment began to fight back and it flaked off like a dead substance. "" '[W] ie in a dream sequence' [sees] [s] you sinking into a pitch-black moor, he [Hans] walking far from her towards the red sun, singing and whistling and deaf for her screams. "In her analyzes she relates her problematic to herself, does not blame her husband for it:" He had nothing to do with it [...] but he couldn't help either. "" She no longer mourned the loss of ideal states. As a whole person she had become an explosive feeling poured into all of her vessels. "
After the second conversation with Sieger, Ina increased her perplexity and disorientation in the rooms: “[N] un things began to lead their own lives and to be where they wanted to be in their blind mind, that of the uprising against the order was deeply ingrained. […] She suddenly felt the ugliness of this incipient neglect, like the utterance of a foreign, hostile power that only showed its strength after its own was used up. ”She leaves the house and wanders through the city (Chapter XIV), comes in old, halfway preserved residential areas with the chestnut avenues that wilt in midsummer. Here she thinks: "Would life be different if you had lived on this street?" As Hans did on his first visit (Chapter I), she goes through the iron gate to a backyard with a sandpit under a large tree. At the same place a few weeks earlier, at the time of the full moon, while Ina was returning from her unsuccessful hike at the new moon, “the young man” asked “How about living here?” And sketched a picture of a middle-class family idyll. An alternative start would have been possible here, but this chance was wasted: The moon symbolism signals a falling action .
Correlation of the inner and outer world
The sensitivities of the protagonists and their changes in this phase of life are reflected both in their reactions to the environment, etc. a. symbolized in Ina's walk through the strange city, as well as in her dreams and projections or other borderline experiences. For example, the protagonist takes the dead pigeon as a bad omen and, after the second conversation with Sieger, dreams of a voice that says: “This is the devil's house.” In her immaturity, she confidently left the joint task of looking for an apartment to her husband and this overwhelmed with it, but at the same time gained a better insight into his being.
Hans' lack of sensitivity can be seen in his decision for what is perhaps the worst possible location: “The city literally crumbled apart here. It was as if a geological fault had occurred in the middle of the free area that was taken up by the motorway, which caused the rows of houses to tip over to the left and right of the road. ”It is an example of the death of the old city by the Bombing: "Desolation of lifelines, a paper cardboard smell [...] the complete loss of reverb and timbre [...] The city was cleared, as it is called in the German of gynecologists during certain radical operations [...] On the Baseler Platz this occurred." Being cleared even to a particular extent to the light. "
This example shows how after the Second World War the "highly integrated old city [...] functionally separated" so that it can no longer be a "home" for people because "the constant object relationship, the permanent relationship to people and things ”, which supports the formation of an“ identity ”. "[T] he means my feeling of not being a stranger to myself, but of being someone who has become acquainted with me" is of great relevance when developing a personality and building a partnership. In the “inhospitableness” of Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel, Ina's attempt to transplant and reorient, and thus her relationship with Hans, must fail.
The magic of the place
On the summer nights together with the international, exotic society in the backyard of the apartment building, Hans increasingly fell into a demonic magic that carried him away from Ina: “But the moonlit night spoke to him more clearly since he had some alcohol in his blood and from the light of the arc lamp It was in the moonlight, as if you were sitting by a candle that put a few lights on the objects and otherwise let them go into darkness. One only suspected the masses and bodies, which were retreating in stubborn black. That made the rooms smaller and larger at the same time. After all, he felt as if he had stepped into a space in his own body that was large, the limits of which could not be estimated, and which nevertheless looked like a cave. The conversations of the late evening had started in this dark cave. ”“ But now the cold moon and the even colder arc lamps had suddenly glowed the house and the courtyard. [...] The house opened its eyes, as it were, and that is a terrifying sight for someone believed to be dead. "
what is the human? Self-determination or determination
Just as the protagonist suffers from the lack of attention from her husband compared to the great loving winner, so in response to Ina's emotional withdrawal, Hans develops an increasing interest in Souad's allegedly numerous sexual activities and is receptive to an affair with Britta. His insecurity about the woman dominated by her mother is taken up dreamily in the philosophical question about the nature of the human being: for example, in his sleep in the backyard he hears Wittekind discussing whether "the human being [...] is nothing but himself", " Comparable to an airtight bottle, filled to the brim with its own substance, everything just developing from itself, every feeling, every emotion, love, hate and fear ”and Ms. Mahmouni replies: It is only“ a reservoir for everything that is in it flows in ", an" empty bottle. "
This topic reappears in a nocturnal experience of the protagonist: Souad, who suspects Hans's relationship crisis and boasts of being a woman expert, takes him to a nightly Derdeba ritual, an obsession cult of the Moroccan Gnawa . A healing ceremony is supposed to evoke and appease the spirits of the patients who dance ecstatically to the music until they collapse. After Souad's declaration, "You never get rid of the evil that is in you - you have to come to terms with it, get used to it, make a compromise with it." Hans asks himself whether such a dance also applies to Ina's situation ( Chapter XIII).
Irma - Ina - Ida
Hans feared and tried to limit the intellectual influence of his mother-in-law Irma, who, as his “simple-minded” first name indicates, feels too “plain” before the marriage: “He had indeed seen the sarcasms of his mother-in-law on Ina pearls off without being properly perceived [...] but the idea of constant instillation of malice in his wife's tiny auricles was a deep worry to him. As it is with hydrochloric acid: at some point the thickest protective layer is etched away. ”In his critical view, he suspects that the reason for naming his wife is the“ practical [] equality of the monogram of mother and daughter ”:“ The monogram of their silver things […] Should also fit for the daughter so that nothing later had to be engraved. ”The wife is slumbering next to him under a“ sheet […], a present from the mother's old trousseau holdings, and there was actually a capital I. embroidered under a small five-pointed aristocratic crown. ”In line with this symbolism, Ina reacts to the first violent marital argument with Hans, who has been so patient and diplomatic about the mother-in-law's question:“ She would never allow Hans to force a power struggle over Frau von Klein. In the mood she got into, nobody had the right to shake what gave her life security. "
After the main storyline, the change in the relationship obviously goes in a direction that is undesirable for Hans, as the last chapter, an excerpt from last year's circular from Frau von Klein, suggests. The narrator provides an aid to interpretation: “If you wanted to find out something tangible from your letters, you had to master the art of reading between the lines. […] So the few words […] at least give an idea of how Ina and Hans might have fared after the events described here. ”The maternal success report shows that the main characters, after they“ lived city life to the fullest Enjoyed ”, living with her two children in a house bought by Ina's father's fortune, everything on the ground floor and with a large slate roof, just as Ms. von Klein had imagined, in the Taunus Mountains. This suggests that Ina seized the reins, turned away from the "hideous city" in the sense of her mother, who she regularly visits in Hamburg ("[D] a we have found a rhythm."), And her life has set up according to their ideas. The fact that her daughter Ida is continuing the Irma line could be due to the neurosis of a “broken articulation of the self under the compulsion to repeat ” or to the “development of the“ as if personality ”or of what D. Winnicott calls“ wrong ” "Has described" himself, point out: "People develop an attitude in which they not only show what is desired of them, but merge with what is shown that one [...] would hardly suspect how much else there is behind the" masked self-image "(cf. Habermas, 1970) is still in him."
Hans has now also been integrated into this system and has taken on an adapted position: he has restricted his socializing and has become more at home: "Hans [reads] a lot" and thus has, whatever is important, a job. Presumably this is his little revenge on his mother-in-law, who avoids talking to well-read, intellectual men.
reception
While literary criticism initially hardly noticed the extensive novels published before the award of the Büchner Prize , Der Mond und das Mädchen benefited from the public interest generated by the award and was immediately discussed in the renowned media. As in reviews of the author's earlier works, the assessment of the style fluctuates between "antiquated [] and chiseled []" and deliberately used in its "organizational [n] function" as a "contrasting film to the disorder of the circumstances". The critics also disagree on the author's position in relation to his characters: “upper-class comfort” and “intellectual comfort” of the narrator on the one hand and “homage to the ungodly” or “[und] nter the facade of the bourgeois” on the other. Similar differing assessments can also be found in the later publications in the feature section, which is divided into these aspects.
In a newspaper interview from 2007, in which the early history of reception is also presented, Mosebach opposes the determination of the location of a backwardness. It is based on "misunderstandings", he is not reactionary politically but, in the sense of the Colombian philosopher and aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila , in a "belief in original sin, the imperfectibility of man, the impossibility of creating paradise on earth", Otherwise, "[r] eactional and revolutionary standpoints [...] such as with Büchner could touch".
With increasing awareness, the out-of-print early novels were reissued and the reviews increasingly pay tribute to the "Frankfurt Epos", and The Moon and the Girl as the last part of it, as the main work, recognize the linguistic virtuosity of the author and praise Mosebach as the Currently perhaps the most important representative of the social novel , which takes up topics such as tradition and progress or people's search for cultural orientation in the context of our time and represents its position inappropriately in the spectrum of German literature.
expenditure
- Mosebach, Martin: The moon and the girl . Hanser, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20916-9 .
- Martin Mosebach: The moon and the girl . Audio book. Audiobook Hamburg , Hamburg 2007, 5 CDs, 359 min. (unabridged reading), read by Frank Arnold , ISBN 978-3-89903-476-9 .
literature
- Miller, Alice : The Drama of the Gifted Child . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. 1979.
- Mitscherlich, Alexander : The inhospitableness of our cities . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. 1965.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mosebach, Martin: The moon and the girl . Hanser, Munich 2007, p. 129. ISBN 978-3-446-20916-9 . This edition is quoted.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 131.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 146.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 150.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 151.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 186 f.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 184.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 188.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 189.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 95.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 93.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 134.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 92.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 127 f.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 168.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 169.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 178.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 179.
- ↑ a b c Mosebach, p. 180.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 183.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 181 f.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 173.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 174.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 10.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 23.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 46 f.
- ↑ Mitscherlich, Alexander: The inhospitableness of our cities . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 9.
- ↑ a b Mitscherlich, p. 128.
- ↑ a b Mitscherlich, p. 129.
- ↑ Mitscherlich, p. 9.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 45.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 46.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 47.
- ↑ a b c Mosebach, p. 118.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 117 f.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 163.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 34.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 17.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 94
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 94.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 101.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 94 f.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 190.
- ↑ a b Mosebach, p. 191.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 8.
- ↑ Miller, Alice: The Drama of the Gifted Child . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1979, p. 126.
- ↑ a b Miller, p. 29.
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of August 20, 2007.
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 11, 2007.
- ^ The time of October 4, 2007.
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 11, 2007.
- ↑ Volker Hage, Philipp Oehmke: "Reading is a laborious business". Interview with Martin Mosebach . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 2007, p. 196-198 ( Online - Oct. 22, 2007 ).
- ↑ u. a. Ulrich Greiner and Ijoma Mangold in various Die Zeit articles