The tower (Tellkamp)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The tower is a novel by Uwe Tellkamp that was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2008 . As narrative voices three related persons act from a predominantly from the educated classes of residential villa district of Dresden in the last seven years of the German Democratic Republic to the fall of the wall. The novel contains aspects of the social and key novel as well as the historical novel . He describes different milieus of the GDR and their connection such as youth movement , education system , military , health system, the circle of literary creators as well as neighborhood and family.

action

Dresden in April 1985, view from Blasewitz over the “ Blue Wonder ” to Loschwitz
Dresden in April 1982, Prager Strasse
The ruins of the Frauenkirche in February 1985
Ruins of the Residenzschloss and the Taschenbergpalais in October 1985
Posters for the demonstrations in Dresden in autumn 1989

The novel consists of two parts, The Educational Province and The Gravity . Its action takes place between December 4, 1982 and November 9, 1989 in the GDR , especially in Dresden. The focus is on the educated middle-class residents of the residential area above the Elbe in Loschwitz - Weißer Hirsch around the Plattleite, in the book on Turmstrasse. Their story, which stretches over almost 1000 pages and strings together different episodes with hundreds of characters like a kaleidoscope , is told from the perspective of three protagonists: the EOS student and later NVA sergeant Christian Hoffmann, his father Richard Hoffmann (senior physician in the surgical clinic of the Medical Academy Dresden ) and his uncle Meno Rohde, a biologist who works as a lecturer for a renowned publishing house.

Christian Hoffmann, 17 years old at the beginning of the novel, wants to become a doctor. For this purpose, he not only has to pass an excellent high school diploma, but also get involved in society in the sense of socialism. In order to secure his place at university, he is de facto forced to extend his military service in the National People's Army to three years through voluntary military service. On the one hand, he feels an inner distance from the GDR system (like most members of his milieu), but on the other hand, he does not want to attract attention. Nevertheless, he tends to be "stupid". At a military customer bearing a novel from the Nazi era is found with him, and he almost relegated is; During his time in the NVA, after the accidental death of a comrade, he made himself liable to prosecution by making insubordinate statements to his superiors, which earned him a stay in the NVA military prison in Schwedt , forced labor and an extension of two years. Nevertheless, Christian, who was initially considered a “mother's boy” by the NVA, succeeds in becoming an inconspicuous “Nemo” (“nobody”). When he was supposed to support a police operation against a demonstration on October 3, 1989, in which his mother also took part and was beaten, he refused to accept the system, but was only "punished" with inside staff.

Richard Hoffmann, Christian's father, is successful at work. At the beginning of the plot he celebrates his 50th birthday and receives from the well-wishers, i. H. his family and colleagues, gifts that are difficult to obtain in the GDR's economy of shortage. Later, a youthful sin committed decades ago, the denunciation of his friend Manfred Less at the Ministry for State Security , becomes his undoing . This makes him just as susceptible to blackmail as his affair with Josta Fischer, a secretary to the rector of the University of Dresden , which also includes the medical academy . Another affair with Christian's girlfriend Reina undermines his role model role towards his son. Richard Hoffmann is cut by Manfred Less and worn down by the increasingly precarious supply situation in the GDR. State organs destroy his capital investment, a vintage car, because he has not told them about the planned escape of an engineer and his wife. This makes him mentally ill and has to be treated as an inpatient. His wife Anne, who herself became active in the opposition scene, forgave him for his antics at this point and is defending him. Later, in October 1989, Richard Hoffmann joined the protesters.

Meno Rohde, son from "red nobility", d. H. of communists who were trained in Moscow during the Nazi era, and brother of Richard Hoffmann's wife Anne, studied biology. Since he could not make a career as a scientist because of his proximity to the Protestant Church, he turned professionally to literature. In the 1980s he worked as a lecturer in a Dresden publishing house: On the one hand, he had to observe the requirements of bureaucratic cultural policy; on the other hand, he is personally close to the authors who are harassed by the censors. His point of view serves to describe the GDR's cultural scene in detail. Meno recognizes very well that fleeing into a niche society is no solution; however, he too avoids “showing one's colors”. Nevertheless, although he was a "mere observer", he was beaten by police officers on October 3, 1989. Meno Rohde keeps a diary, mostly written in poetic language, from which longer and longer passages are inserted into the novel.

In the tower , the educated middle-class milieu, from which Uwe Tellkamp also comes, is described precisely and thoroughly self-critically. The bourgeoisie is poisoned by the “sweet illness of yesterday”, recognizes not only Meno Rohde, but also Hans Hoffmann, toxicologist and Christian's uncle. Time seems to stand still, like a “record with a jump” (Christian's perception), although everything is approaching the turning point on November 9, 1989.

The “bourgeois realism” of the first half of the novel turns into a kind of “ socialist realism ” (albeit without a communist tendency): The inadequacies in production, in the infrastructure (supply, transport and health care) and in the NVA appear here in the foreground. However, these realistic scenes are often replaced by fairytale-like , surrealist episodes (e.g. reading Proust at night as “forced labor” for NVA detainees).

Tellkamp's narrative style

"The Tower" is a montage novel . Formally different text parts with different topics are strung together, often only separated by a blank line, so that the novel resembles a mosaic or a puzzle . At some points, especially towards the end of the novel, the presentation turns into a kind of stream of consciousness , which is repeatedly interrupted by short fade-ins (like the click of a lighter). Uwe Tellkamp adopted this technique from an excerpt from his novel Sleep in the Clocks , for which he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2004.

The novel is predominantly formulated in a personal narrative style , in which external actions, but also processes inside the three main characters are presented from their perspective. There are passages in which verbatim speech is used for conversations on the one hand, but also the technique of experienced speech on the other .

Time and again, Meno Rohde's diary entries are inserted in italics in which Meno appears as the first-person narrator .

The syntax also varies: passages with extremely long sentence periods full of semicolons that revel in images alternate with sections like Chapter 57, which consists of just five words (“Reina?” “Richard?” “- Me too.”). Tellkamp works with omissions, especially when depicting precarious situations, such as in Chapter 20, in which a conversation between Richard Hoffmann and a representative of the Ministry for State Security is presented, in which only the words of the Stasi man are reproduced and Richard's words are each represented by one Empty line to be replaced.

The language used by the residents of the “Turm” is full of “Kunigunde words”, as Meno Rohde self-ironically notes, who thinks that words like “hackneyed” are used by his neighbors, but not by the authors of the books he has to censor. In many places (for example about paper production) and for many of his metaphors Tellkamp uses exact technical terms, but when reproducing the statements of the state organs, he also quotes crass, often vulgar formulations: “Your neat father is a stranger in his spare time. You don't know, but we do. He's banging your friend, Miss Kossmann. [...] Are you flabbergasted, aren't you? You can see. ” Uwe Tellkamp also imitates the official jargon of party functionaries and“ believing ”supporters of the system by quoting or paraphrasing it verbatim . Some characters speak Saxon dialect; their utterances are faithfully reproduced.

Interpretations

Meaning of the title

In an interview with Volker Hage , Uwe Tellkamp answered the question about the meaning of the title of the novel: “Tower is first and foremost the name for the district in which the novel is set. Then the ivory tower is thought of, including the ' tower society ' of course. But one can also think of the Babylonian Tower , which is collapsing, of the linguistic confusion that prevailed at the end of the GDR, the cacophony . "

Some interpreters see a connection between the noun "tower" and the verb "tower": The educated middle class described in the novel tries to enter a kind of "inner emigration" and thus to escape from the reality of GDR society, but this cannot succeed. after all, everyone has to at least “shop”.

Decryption of the key novel

According to Andreas Platthaus , Sabine Franke and Beatrix Langner , Tellkamp's novel The Tower is a key novel . The three journalists decipher the names of some characters in the novel, namely:

The description of the important West German critic Wiktor Hart clearly means Marcel Reich-Ranicki , because Wiktor Hart was his author's pseudonym in the Warsaw ghetto . The section also ends, modifying the final formula of the Literary Quartet, with the words "He helps us to do business when he praises, he helps us to do business when he tears up, we see this question openly when he is silent."

The West German publisher Munderloh from the chapter “Leipziger Messe” refers to Siegfried Unseld from Suhrkamp Verlag . "Munderloh" is the title of a volume of stories by the publisher's founder Peter Suhrkamp .

The lawyer Joffe, who appears in Book 1, Chapter 34 (The Askanische Insel), is apparently the (East) Berlin lawyer Dr. Friedrich Wolff is based. In the novel, Joffe moderates the television program "Paragraph". Wolff was actually the presenter of the GDR television program "Alles was Rechts ist". In the font logo of this program, the "S" of "everything" and "what" merged into a striking paragraph. Joffe is also a surname of Jewish origin, which Tellkamp also gives a reference to Wolff, whose father was Jewish. In connection with Joffe there is also a reference to the connection between the literary lawyer Sperber and the real lawyer Vogel, when Joffe Meno Rohde explains the “district heating pipes” (probably a picture for the DM payments from the Federal Republic to Vogel): “You saw the pipes. Well, these are district heating pipes. You lick a little, it deviates heat, that's all. In winter we have no snow here - and that's why some rare birds are our guests. "

With the writer Judith Schevola Angela Krauss could be meant. By the stamp dealer Malthakus Horst Milde should be meant.

According to the logic of this “decoding”, Christian Hoffmann should be Uwe Tellkamp's alter ego. In fact, the biographies of both men have many points of contact. Christian Hoffmann was born three years before Uwe Tellkamp; Due to his birth year 1965, Christian's service with the NVA could end in November 1989 despite the extension. From the age of birth Fabian Hoffmann, Christian's cousin, or Christian's brother Robert would be better suited to function as Tellkamp's alter ego. Tellkamp does not claim that he himself was arrested in Schwedt. Stephan Rauer commented on this: “Tellkamp and Christian both had on October 28th. Birthday, Tellkamp in 1968, Christian in 1965. Tellkamp no longer had to serve exactly these three years. To put it somewhat nastily: there was a little 'post-heroization' here. At the center of this autobiographical novel, which Tellkamp did not negate even in the preliminary note, is a non-autobiographical story of victims. "

The experience of the author Tellkamp, ​​who was almost 40 years old when the novel went to press, was incorporated not only into the portrayals of Christian Hoffmann, but also into those of his father Richard (Tellkamp worked as a doctor until 2004) and Meno Rohdes (just a mature man who ran the literary business knows from within, can describe it as knowledgeably as it does in the novel). Uwe Tellkamp is said to have said that he could “answer all readers who claim that I only told stories autobiographically and that Christian was my alter ego: Why? You have the name Tellkamp in the book. And it has nothing to do with the Hoffmanns. ”In fact, on the occasion of a power failure in Richard Hoffmann's clinic, the novel contains the comment“ ... Tellkamp is informed ... ”with which Tellkamp creates a strange loop in a certain way . In general, Uwe Tellkamp states with reference to his novel: "Each character is composed of various others, but has real role models."

Not only the characters in the novel are deciphered, but also the locations: the “Thousand Eyes House”, for example, is located on Hietzigstrasse; the fence depicted on the cover of the original edition of the novel belongs to this villa. The model for the “Karavelle” house is the Art Nouveau villa in which Uwe Tellkamp grew up. "Waldbrunn", the "capital of the Eastern Ore Mountains ", the place where Christian Hoffmann visits the EOS , obviously means Dippoldiswalde .

In general, the impression that one only needs to decipher the names of people and places that appear in the novel and thus obtain reliable information about the reality of the years 1982–1989: On the non- aligned map on the inside of the book cover of the original edition is printed, the Semperoper has been placed in the middle of the Elbe, and the funicular and mountain suspension railway, in reality less than a kilometer apart, are supposed to be in the south-west and north-east of Dresden. Andreas Platthaus shows other changes. So it turns out that Tellkamp's “inner reality” is not identical to the topography of the real Dresden.

It should also be taken into account that Tellkamp's texts are “works in progress”: over time, he changes the fictitious “reality” he is writing about, often unnoticed by the reader. For example, Richard Hoffmann's cousin is still called bookmaster in the advance publication of the first chapter of the novel Der Turm in den Losen Blätter (as in the extract from the novel from Sleep in the Clocks ), and according to a Tellkamp text dated February 12, Mrs. Zwirnevaden In 2005 a studio on the third, according to Der Turm, on the fourth floor.

"Speaking Names"

With the help of the name selection, Uwe Tellkamp not only encrypts the "real names " of the people he (possibly) actually means, but he often selects " speaking names " for his characters.

  • “ The old man from the mountains ” (actual name: Raschid ad-Din Sinan) is the name given to a leader of Shiite assassins in the Middle Ages who had no qualms about killing people “for the just cause”. However, Altberg is not necessarily a hardliner: He defends Judith Schevola, for example, when she is supposed to be excluded from the “Association of Intellectuals”.
  • “Eschschloraque rümschrümp” was already called a “ coffee bar” in Berlin-Mitte before 2008 . Both the beginning of the word "Eschschlo" and the anagram "chschlora" suggest that "Eschschloraque" stands for "asshole". In the novel, Eschschloraque is the one who forms the counterpoint to the looming "turnaround" in the run-up to the end of the novel by advocating the inhuman ideology according to which ordinary citizens are "moles" who do not deserve the "daylight" .
  • The name "Judith Schevola" refers

Literary and artistic role models

According to the interpreters, the following authors and musicians are said to have influenced the content and form of the novel:

  • Johann Wolfgang Goethe : The idea of ​​an educational novel , realized as a prototype in Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship years , forms the basis for the overall concept of Tellkamp's novel. A “tower society” already appears in Goethe, and the term “pedagogical province” (heading for the first block in Tellkamp's novel) comes from Wilhelm Meister's years of traveling .
  • ETA Hoffmann : The “fairy tale from the new time” with the title The golden pot begins with an exact, “realistic” description of Dresden around 1800; the action ends in the fairytale world of Atlantis. Tellkamp imitates the play of the romantic Hoffmann (also the family name of the main clan in his novel) with the reader, whom he also often leaves in the dark about whether an event is fictitious or real. One episode of Tellkamp's novel mentions the performance of a dramatized version of the Golden Pot in Dresden in the 1980s. In May 1989 the opera Der Goldene Topf by Eckehard Mayer premiered in Dresden , libretto by Ingo Zimmermann based on ETA Hoffmann. In retrospect, the entire GDR appears to Uwe Tellkamp like the principality in which Prince Paphnutius rules (in Klein Zaches called Zinnober by ETA Hoffmann). Ingo Schulze describes ETA Hoffmann in his essay "Night Thoughts of One Who Fallen from the Place" as the founder of the "Dresden Myth". How strongly Uwe Tellkamp is committed to the role model ETA Hoffmann is clear in his essay The German Question of Literature : “Father of all better literature on the problem [GDR] is, in my opinion, ETA Hoffmann, in whom the (night) dreams in reality proliferated. The further this little country sinks in the Maelstrom of time and history, the more it will, I believe, take on the features of a tower in Atlantis. "
  • Wilhelm Hauff : As in the fairy tale The story of Kalif Storch , the residents of the Turmstrasse district “transform” when entering it (“Mutabor” - “I will be transformed” - is - as the motto in the Hauff fairy tale - is the title of chapter 2 of the novel): Dutiful citizens of the GDR become educated citizens who seem to have dropped out of the present.
  • Richard Wagner : The novel's “overture” is based on that of a Wagner opera. Niklas Tietze regularly puts on Wagner's opera Tannhäuser . Tellkamp once described himself as “ Wagner's librettist ”.
  • Jules Verne : The main character in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Captain Nemo. "Nemo" is Christian Hoffmann's nickname in the second half of his time in the NVA. Christian's uncle Meno (an anagram ) is also called "Nemo" by the drunken woman Honich. One of Christian's greatest crises is that, as a tank commander, he fails to drive the tank safely through the Elbe like a submarine during a night maneuver. Uwe Tellkamp confesses that Jules Verne was one of the favorite authors of his youth.
  • Thomas Mann : The tower is often compared to Mann's novel Die Buddenbrooks , which also contains a detailed family history. Nevertheless, Der Turm draws a negative on this: If the Buddenbrooks go down as a family in an up-and-coming environment, the Hoffmann family's environment disintegrates with the GDR. Christian Hoffmann sees himself as a kindred spirit of Tonio Kröger during his school days . The isolation of academics in the Turmstrasse district on the mountains above the Elbe is often compared to the situation of the people on Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain .
  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Richard Strauss : Christian has the feeling that the “Marschallin” from the opera Der Rosenkavalier is still alive in the Turmstrasse district . This corresponds to a double anachronism : at the beginning of the 20th century Hofmannsthal tried to bring 18th century Vienna to life in his opera, and this opera is "brought to mind" in the final phase of the GDR era.
  • Marcel Proust : The motif of the search for lost time runs through Tellkamp's novel. In one episode, members of the NVA penal battalion have to read Proust's mammoth work on the night shift.
  • Heimito von Doderer : As in the novel Demons , Tellkamp also has a "countdown": If Doderer is on June 15, 1927 (the day the Vienna Justice Palace burned), Tellkamp's novel ends on November 9, 1989, the day the wall came down.
  • Hermann Hesse : The company on Tellkamp's "Magic Mountain" is like glass bead players in Hesse's novel of the same name. The title “The Pedagogical Province” of the first part (originally going back to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister ) is borrowed from this novel .
  • Franz Kafka : In an interview, Uwe Tellkamp expressly describes the conditions on the “Coal Island” as “ Kafkaesque ”.
  • Ernst Jandl : The last statement of the district party secretary Barsano quoted in the novel reads: “What an illusion”. With this, Uwe Tellkamp alludes to Ernst Jandl's poem lichtung : “some mean / right and left / you can't change / who is an illtum” . The fact that right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism are closely related can be seen in the novel by the anti-Semitic failures of some leading “communists” with a National Socialist past in autumn 1989.
  • Günter Grass : The entire novel deals with the thesis expressed in the novel Ein Weites Feld (1995) that the GDR was a “ commode dictatorship ”, which Tellkamp expressly contradicts. Tellkamp treats his characters in a similar way to Grass: he uses them again in a wide variety of works. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Tellkamp explicitly compares the effect of his novel on the German public with that of Günter Grass's novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) from 1959.
  • Durs Grünbein : The lyric poet, who was also born in Dresden, coined the term "Musennest": "Dresden: from this musennest comes the offended sense of beauty, the early childhood grief."

"Carefully written off" in their article titled raises Dorothea Dieckmann from the Neue Zurcher Zeitung Uwe Tellkamp indirectly plagiarism before: The discussion of the Antiquarian Paul Dienemann have Tellkamp almost verbatim from the tape published in 2003 , the last of the Mohicans of Jens Wonneberger depreciated. Tellkamp countered the accusation with the remark that Wonneberger did not invent what he represented, but that both authors related in their own way to real events in the second-hand bookshop. Tellkamp had already said in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung in March 2009: "I still know the second-hand bookshop very well, including the owner."

According to the Dresden author Jayne-Ann Igel , passages in Tellkamp's tower show clear similarities to Stefan Wachtel's book Delikt 220 about imprisonment in the Schwedt military prison .

The novel in the context of Tellkamp's oeuvre

Sleep in the clocks

Story 2004

In 2004 Uwe Tellkamp published the independent story Sleep in the Clocks , which he presented as an extract from a novel of the same name (to be published later). He won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for presenting the excerpt . Fabian and Muriel are the same people in the story as the twin pair Fabian and Muriel Hoffmann in the tower ; The other two “voices” of the story, Arno and Lucie Krausewitz, also appear in the novel. “Niklas Buchmeister”, who loves books and records, is apparently identical to Niklas Tietze in Der Turm . In an early version of the first chapter of this novel, the name “Buchmeister” can still be read, where “Tietze” is written in the final version. Also in the revision of the story for the novel, the character is called "Niklas Tietze".

Continuation of the novel The Tower

The heading The Tower. The Sleep in the Clocks above the map, which is on the inside cover of the original edition of the novel The Tower , already indicated in 2008 that the material of the novel The Tower should be supplemented by a novel entitled Sleep in the Clocks Tellkamp 2008 in an interview with Der Spiegel confirmed that The Tower was "part of a larger novel project". Beatrix Langner describes the text from 2004 called “extract from the novel” as “a preliminary stage” to the novel “The Tower”.

In 2009, Uwe Tellkamp stated that the follow-up novel should cover the period between November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down , and October 3, 1990, the day that Germany's national unity was restored . In 2010 it was announced to the public that the novel would be titled "Lava". What is meant by this book title becomes clear in an article that Uwe Tellkamp had published on April 3, 2010 on the occasion of Helmut Kohl's 80th birthday on the subject of "Wende in the GDR 1989":

A volcano had erupted, lava ran down paths, into abysses, tough, hot, devastating, but also fertile.

On December 29, 2012, Tellkamp announced to the public that he was now planning to name only the first section of his new novel Lava ; the entire novel should be entitled Sleep in the Clocks . In this novel, Fabian is to be added as a further voice, who tells the events from a "present" to be determined in more detail in the form of flashbacks. "This narrator remembers the story of his sister Muriel, who is Christian's cousin, who comes to the 'tower' in the work yard , a small marginal figure." In the meantime, Tellkamp has decided to call the entire novel Lava . Tellkamp gave a preview of this novel, which was originally due to appear in 2015, in the form of an essay published on “Day of German Unity” in 2014 , the plot of which will not end until 2013, however. Spring 2020 was named as the new release date; it has been postponed to 2021. Uwe Tellkamp cites the main reason for the delay that the publisher found a novel with a narrative time spanning decades in one volume to be too extensive. That is why the novel Lava no longer contains the time from 2015 onwards. In 2021 there will be a book with the title Sleep in the Clocks. 1. Volume: Lava - open novel, or: News from the Chronicle. appear. The period from 2015 onwards will be dealt with in a second volume entitled Archipelago . But it is not finished yet and will therefore be published later.

“Schwarzgelb” as an MDR contribution and as a chapter in Der Turm

For the 800th birthday of the city of Dresden, Uwe Tellkamp wrote a text that was broadcast by MDR Figaro on March 31, 2006 with the title black and yellow . A revised version of this article (most important difference: the sister by the hand of the father is not Muriel, but Anne) can be found as a chapter of the same name (Chapter 28) in the novel. The use of the name "Muriel" in the first version is an indication that the scene was originally intended to be incorporated into the planned novel Sleep in the Clocks .

This is also supported by the fact that the chapter mentions a woman Zwirnevaden who makes paper cuttings. Uwe Tellkamp had an episode with this woman on February 12, 2005 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the devastating Allied bombing raids on Dresden in “ Welt ” under the title Fairy Tales of the Paper Cuts. Mrs. Zwirnevaden, published the time and February 13, 1945 . In this version, too, the first-person narrator is accompanied by Muriel. At no point in the novel Der Turm, however, is there a constellation in which Christian and Muriel Hoffmann appear as a couple; the constellation “Muriel and I” is reserved for the text fragments from the complex Sleep in the Clocks / Lava .

reception

By October 2012, 750,000 copies of the novel had been sold, with it being published in over 15 countries.

In the Dresden district of Weißer Hirsch , the number of guided tours for tourists has increased sharply after the publication of the novel The Tower . Tour guides carry long lists with them, with the help of which they can assign a real building with street name and house number to each house in the novel with page number.

Robert Schröpfer is astonished to find that "the citizens of the city [Dresden] treated the writer, who created a monument for them with his novel, with a strange mixture of suspicion, resentment and morose".

Tilman Krause wrote:

“The man who does not take part in love feasts and feasts probably wrote the novel of the decade with the 'Turm', which has now been awarded the German Book Prize. The ultimate novel about the GDR, this ridiculous Soviet satrapy on German soil. From the point of view of those who did not doubt for a second that they were against it. That alone is, after all the wishy-washy of Christa Wolfs , Volker Brauns , Christoph Heins and tutti quanti, an almost redeeming act. So clearly anti-communist, so full of cutting contempt for the proletarian and petty bourgeoisie, who were allowed to spray their poison in the eastern part of this country for 40 years, no one who comes from these latitudes has broken the stick. "

Magda was much more critical in her blog entry for Der Freitag :

"It is great literature, it echoes all over the country, but I think a collection of style exercises is not a novel yet."

However, the two reviewers for the critical edition disagree :

“The KA reviewers Fabian Thomas and Stephan Rauer are less in agreement:“ Poetic memorial to one's own past ”(Thomas) or“ over-ambitious novel ”(Rauer)? "A convincing panorama of the contradicting GDR society" or "a case of the collective misjudgment of professional criticism that is rarely unanimous"? "

In September 2010 the stage version of the novel was premiered at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, directed by Wolfgang Engel , and in November 2010 a second version by Tilman Gersch followed at the Staatstheater Wiesbaden .

Awards

The Nordkurier in Neubrandenburg awarded Uwe Tellkamp together with the Mecklenburg Literature Society the Uwe Johnson Prize 2008 on the grounds that the novel unfolds a "multi-faceted panorama of the last seven years of the GDR, broken in the lives of numerous figures".

In October 2008 the novel was awarded the German Book Prize. The reasoning stated: “Uwe Tellkamp's great pre-turn novel 'Der Turm' sketches the panorama of a society that is stumbling towards its end in a wealth of scenes, images and forms of language. Using the example of a middle-class Dresden family, he tells of adjustment and resistance in a worn out system. The novel is set in a wide variety of milieus, among schoolchildren, doctors, writers and political cadres. Uwe Tellkamp sends his rebellious hero Christian Hoffmann on a journey into hell, from his enclave to military service up to the prison system of the NVA. Readers will discover the aromas, idioms and mentalities of the late GDR like never before. The events are inexorably moving towards November 9th ”.

In 2009 Uwe Tellkamp was awarded the German National Prize.

On December 6, 2009 Tellkamp was awarded the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's literary prize for the novel . Bernhard Vogel , chairman of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung justified the selection of Uwe Tellkamp with the "extraordinary [n] epic [n] and aesthetic [n] quality" and with the fact that the novel was against "ethical indifference and political Ostalgie" and for the "freedom and dignity of the human being". In summary, the jury of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung stated: Uwe Tellkamps As a social, educational and contemporary novel, the tower has an outstanding political meaning twenty years after the reunification of Germany. It is a testimony to the literary culture of remembrance that connects history and fiction and cancels what must not be forgotten from the last decade of the GDR. At the same time, it is a document of the freedom and dignity of the individual against attempts at appropriation by an educational dictatorship.

Audio book

The tower was published in 2010 as an audio book by Der Hörverlag . It is a heavily shortened reading version on a total of eight CDs, which is strictly limited to the narrative thread about Christian Hoffmann. The audio book is read by Sylvester Groth .

“For the reading and audio book version, Thomas Fritz and the editor Heidi Böwe consequently only followed the story of high school graduate Christian. Christian is the hardest hit in the whole novel. By concentrating on his fate, the 'GDR survival compromise', as Fritz puts it, is illuminated more intensely. "

- Info about the reading on MDR.de

Movie

The novel was filmed by teamWorx for ARD as a two-part TV series Der Turm . The film first aired on October 3rd and 4th, 2012 on Das Erste . Directed by Christian Schwochow based on a script by Thomas Kirchner , the film was produced by Christian Granderath and Nico Hofmann . The actors include Jan Josef Liefers (Richard Hoffmann), Sebastian Urzendowsky (Christian Hoffmann), Claudia Michelsen (Anne Hoffmann), Götz Schubert (Meno Rohde) and Nadja Uhl (Josta Fischer).

Theater adaptations

literature

Text output

  • Uwe Tellkamp: preprint of the chapter driveway . In: Lose Blätter , Issue 32/2005, pp. 933–939
  • Uwe Tellkamp: The tower. Story from a sunken land. Novel . Suhrkamp. Frankfurt am Main 2008. ISBN 3-518-42020-8
  • Uwe Tellkamp: The tower. Story from a sunken land. Novel . Weltbild-Verlag. Augsburg 2009. ISBN 3-8289-9749-X

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Places of Uwe Tellkamp's novel "Der Turm"  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 858
  2. ^ Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 798f.
  3. ↑ In the end there was a confusion of language . Spiegel online , October 17, 2008
  4. ↑ Martin Ebel: At the end there is a colon. September 21, 2008
  5. ↑ Andreas Platthaus: Time is the devil . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . September 20, 2008
  6. ^ Sabine Franke: In the Dresden Musennest . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . September 25, 2008 ( Memento of February 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ a b Beatrix Langner: Utopia, blackened in time. Story told in Uwe Tellkamp's tower society . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . October 11, 2008.
  8. ^ Tellkamp: Der Turm , p. 473
  9. ^ Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 469
  10. ↑ Stephan Rauer: The mason jar . In: Critical Edition . February 24, 2009
  11. ^ A b Andreas Platthaus: Time Difference: Uwe Tellkamps Dresden . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 6, 2008.
  12. ↑ a b Norbert Jachertz / Gisela Klinkhammer: "The whole topic is still radioactive" . Deutsches Ärzteblatt . March 6, 2009
  13. ↑ a b Guided tours through the Dresden villa district are very popular. Uwe Tellkamp is planning a sequel to «The Tower» PR-inside.com June 22, 2009
  14. ↑ Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 114
  15. ↑ a b Uwe Tellkamp: Fairy tales of the paper cutting. Frau Zwirnevaden, Die Zeit and February 13, 1945 Die Welt . February 12, 2005
  16. ↑ a b Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 350f.
  17. ^ A b Uwe Tellkamp: The German question of literature: What was the GDR? . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 16, 2007.
  18. ↑ Ingo Schulze: "I was an enthusiastic Dresdener". At the start of the 800-year celebration of the Saxon capital - night thoughts of someone who fell out of town ( memento from January 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 31, 2006
  19. ↑ You want to write a spiral like this one day . A conversation with Uwe Tellkamp from Michael Braun. Frankfurter Rundschau . July 7, 2004 ( Memento of October 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Tellkamp: Der Turm , p. 925
  21. ^ Uwe Tellkamp: Adventure in Digedania . In: Märkische Allgemeine from May 14, 2005
  22. ^ Tellkamp: The Tower , p. 950
  23. ↑ Tellkamp: Marketing machinery helped my book. Uwe Tellkamp in conversation with Susanne Führer . Germany radio . October 14, 2008
  24. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Interview with Book Prize Winner Tellkamp: It's not just my price . October 14, 2008
  25. ↑ Durs Grünbein: The first year. Berlin records . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 88.
  26. ^ Dorothea Dieckmann: Carefully copied . Neue Zürcher Zeitung . December 19, 2009
  27. ^ Controversy over Tellkamp's "Tower" . ( Memento of April 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) MDR figaro. January 11, 2010
  28. ↑ Martin Jehle: It was like a bad fairy tale. In: Berliner Zeitung . March 13, 2009, accessed June 17, 2015 .
  29. ↑ Ralf Klausnitzer: The art of higher write-offs. In: Friday , January 12, 2010.
  30. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp: Pre-print of the chapter driveway . In: Lose Blätter , Issue 32/2005, pp. 933–939, here: p. 936.
  31. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp: Sleep in the Clocks (Part 2)
  32. ↑ In the end there was a confusion of language . Mirror online . October 17, 2008
  33. ↑ Silke Pfeiffer: Risen from words . 2009
  34. ↑ A tower called Kohl. Writer Uwe Tellkamp on the 80th birthday of the former chancellor . Picture . April 3, 2010
  35. ↑ In conversation: Uwe Tellkamp - Why are you continuing “Der Turm”? . Interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 29, 2012, accessed April 4, 2014
  36. ↑ Evangelical Lutheran Church Community Dresden Bad Weißer Hirsch: Uwe Tellkamp reads from his new novel "Lava" ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Announcement of an event on April 3, 2014, Community Letter February-March 2014, p. 7 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ev-kirche-wh.de
  37. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp: turning point. Eastern time. In: Berner Zeitung. October 3, 2014, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  38. ↑ Stuttgarter Zeitung, Stuttgart Germany: “Der Turm”: continuation of Uwe Tellkamp is to appear in spring 2021. Retrieved January 27, 2020 .
  39. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: Reading by Uwe Tellkamp in Pulsnitz “Turning to the right you get on your hat immediately”. In: tagesspiegel.de. February 6, 2020, accessed August 21, 2020 .
  40. ↑ Uwe Tellkamp: black and yellow ( memento from March 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  41. ↑ Christina Reinke: Paperback bestseller: "The Tower" on TV boosts sales , spiegel.de, October 15, 2012
  42. ↑ Robert Schröpfer: Dresden is having a hard time with Uwe Tellkamp and his award-winning turnaround novel “The Tower” . Daily mirror . November 13, 2008
  43. ^ Tilman Krause: The strength to resist . The world . October 15, 2008
  44. ↑ Magda: Uwe Tellkamp "The Tower" - a conspiracy theory . Friday . February 19, 2009
  45. ↑ Fabian Thomas, Stephan Rauer: The ultimate reversible novel? One book - two opinions: Uwe Tellkamp's novel Der Turm . Critical edition . February 24, 2009
  46. ^ Uwe Johnson Prize to Uwe Tellkamp. In: Ruhr-Nachrichten of June 21, 2008 ( Memento of September 8, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  47. ↑ Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels: Uwe Tellkamp receives the German Book Prize 2008 for his novel "Der Turm" ( Memento from February 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  48. ↑ www.freipresse.de ( Memento from January 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  49. ↑ Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung: Uwe Tellkamp receives the literature prize of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung 2009
  50. ↑ Info on the reading version on MDR.de ( Memento from October 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  51. ↑ teamWorx homepage: Der Turm (AT) ( Memento from January 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on December 12, 2011.
  52. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from May 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  53. ↑ http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4934:der-turm-uwe-tellkamps-roman-in-john-von-dueffels-fassung-in-wiesbaden&catid=246:hessisches -staatstheater-wiesbaden
  54. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from January 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive )