The tunnel (Dürrenmatt)

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The tunnel is a short story by Friedrich Dürrenmatt , first published in 1952 in the anthology Die Stadt. Prose I - IV has been published by Arche Verlag . It is one of his best-known works and one of the " classics " among the surreal short stories.

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The protagonist is a dreamy twenty-four year old student who is described as follows at the beginning of the story:

“A twenty-four year old, fat, so that the terrible behind the scenes that he saw (that was his ability, perhaps his only one) would not get too close to him, who loved it, the holes in his flesh, because it was through them the monstrous could flow in, clogged, so that he smoked cigars ( Ormond Brasil 10) and wore a second over his glasses, sunglasses, and tufts of cotton in his ears: this young man, still dependent on his parents and with nebulous studies at the university busy, which could be reached in a two-hour train journey, got on the usual train one Sunday afternoon, departure fifty-five, arrival seven twenty-seven, to attend a seminar the next day, which he was already determined to skip. "

But on this route, which he often travels, he notices that the train spends an unusually long time through what is actually a very short tunnel , which he normally never really noticed. The student's unrest grows while the fellow travelers are not worried. The Schaffner insured on request, that everything was in order. The 24-year-old pushes through to the train driver , who cannot explain the long tunnel. Together they manage to climb to the locomotive. The driver's cab is empty: the engine driver jumped off after five minutes, but the train driver stayed on board, out of a sense of duty and because he had “always lived without hope”. The locomotive no longer obeys, the emergency brake does not work, and the train rushes faster and faster into the dark abyss. In the end, the student - who initially wore cotton balls and sunglasses - bravely looks at the coming death in the eye, does not look away: "What should we do" - "Nothing (...) God let us fall, and that's how we fall close it. ” In a second version, published in 1978 and now more widespread, the last sentence is missing; the story ends with: "Nothing."

Interpretation and background

The train racing into the abyss can be interpreted as a metaphor for the life of the people, which runs in regular channels and which is approaching a clearly emerging catastrophe (death, nothingness or the unknown). The sudden and inexplicable horror in the form of a train wreck shows this inescapability, from which people hide behind the everyday. The last sentence of the story, contained in the original version, interprets the terrible event as God's will.

With the beginning of the story, Dürrenmatt seems to be parodying the complicated writing style of Thomas Mann's novel Zauberberg . There is also an overlap in terms of content: The Magic Mountain begins with the train ride of a young man who likes to smoke cigars.

The train mentioned in the first sentence of the story, “Departure fifty-seven, arrival seven twenty-seven”, is likely to be the express train from Bern to Zurich that ran at these times in the year the story was published.

The tunnel mentioned in the short story is the Burgdorfer Tunnel. It is the only relatively long tunnel on the old Bern – Olten – Zurich railway line . When the locomotive could be a SBB Re 4/4 I act.

Book editions (selection)

literature

  • Wilhelm Große: The tunnel . In: ders .: Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Literary knowledge . Reclam, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-15-015214-3 , pp. 132-136.
  • Jan Knopf: Friedrich Dürrenmatt: "The Tunnel" . In: Classic German short stories. Interpretations. Edited by Werner Bellmann . Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 135-145.
  • Klaus Zobel: Friedrich Dürrenmatt: "The Tunnel" . In: Christian Eschweiler, Klaus Zobel: Comparative analyzes of short literary prose . Drei-A, Northeim 1997, ISBN 3-925927-05-0 , pp. 67-122.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Official course book of Switzerland, summer 1952 . Management of the SBB General Management, Bern 1952, p. 118 .

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