The lost one (novel)

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The Lost One is the title of a 1998 novel by Hans-Ulrich Treichel , which describes a family fate in the post-war period from the perspective of a boy. While on the run, his parents lost his older brother when his mother, terrified of Russian soldiers, had laid him in a strange woman's arms. Feelings of guilt and the search for the prodigal son determine family life. The book title can be interpreted as an allusion to the biblical parable of the prodigal son .

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Hans-Ulrich Treichel's novel begins with the description of a photograph showing the prodigal son Arnold on a woolen blanket. It is the only memory of the parents of their first son, whom the mother laid in the arms of a strange woman while fleeing when they were suddenly taken out of the refugee convoy by Russian soldiers.

The narrator, the little brother of the lost one, only slowly learns the real facts. First his parents tell him that the older brother starved to death while fleeing. But when he learns from his mother that his brother is still alive, he fears a competitor who could dispute his place in the family. He has long felt that the parents' interest in the prodigal son is at his expense: When looking at the photo album, the mother's gaze rests on the only picture of the firstborn for a long time, the pictures of the younger son are quickly turned over, and the person pictured appears here always strangely fragmentary, is largely obscured in every picture by objects or other people. Nobody really looks at it.

The little brother follows the repeated failures of his parents in the search for what has been lost with a naive glee that expands into a distant view of the family's development, financial advancement, repressed feelings of guilt and fears. Despite the increasing desperation, the parents function perfectly as climbers in the economic boom of the 1950s. Through tireless diligence, the father rose from grocer to meat wholesaler, his own cold store was built, and for the boy the successes manifested themselves above all in bigger and bigger cars. Unfortunately, the independent father has no time for vacation trips, and on Sunday excursions the narrator always gets sick and vomits into the car to the desperation of his father.

Eventually, the parents come across foundling number 2307 and there are good arguments that this is the prodigal son. Traces of the National Socialist racial madness emerge as the parents' bodies are constantly being recorded and measured, from the boy's point of view frightening processes of strange comedy. But although the parents keep making new efforts to prove that this is the prodigal son, they fail because of the authorities and their dubious demands on the similarity. When the father, excited and overtired, returns with the family from one of these examination appointments and finds his cold store cleared out, he suffers two heart attacks that lead to death.

As a result, a connection develops between the mother and a local police officer, which the narrator observes suspiciously despite his initial sympathy for the hat and the service pistol. The officer is persuaded to give the mother the address and name of the foundling, who now works in a butcher's shop. Mother and son drive there with the police officer and are confronted with what has been lost through the shop window. The narrator is appalled by the resemblance, but the mother turns away. You drive back.

Biographical background

Hans Treichel himself grew up as a child of displaced persons, and there is also a lost brother in his family. The real mother kept the loss a secret from Treichel and his brothers until shortly before her death in 1991. Already in the collection Von Leib und Seele Treichel had literarily addressed the expulsion of his parents, the dreary life in the small Westphalian town and the mechanisms of exclusion towards the expellees. In her review in the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit , Doris Neujahr writes that Arnold's loss stands pars pro toto for a comprehensive, elementary loss.

Hans-Ulrich Treichel himself sees his writing as an examination of his own biography, as a search for truth:

".. I think I'm looking for the truth about myself, for the real story. … One always thinks that there is the reality of experience and then there is the invention or the constructed memory. I doubt the reality of the experience, the authenticity status of the subject. I'm not so sure how real my experience is. In other words, I only get a sense of biographical continuity and substance when I invent something to add to my empirical life. I only become autobiographical when I write. "

- Hans-Ulrich Treichel : You want to be told about variants of your own life, Hans-Ulrich Treichel in conversation with André Hille. In: Kulturmagazin Kunststoff, issue 7, August 10, 2007

The experience of silence at the Sunday table, the family secret of the prodigal firstborn son, the trauma of the parents were "a huge burden of overwhelming experience" for him and at the same time an "empty space" that writing "prosthetically" compensated for.

subjects

Ford Taunus 1954
Opel KAD A

From the point of view of the child's narrator, the novel touches on a number of topics from the post-war period without going into them systematically. First of all, there are displacement and flight from the east, rapes by Russian soldiers and the loss of relatives. The reader suspects that the ubiquitous hatred of Russians is not only due to this displacement, but that the narrator could be the biological result of the rape by a Russian soldier. The body measurements and the behavior of the physicians also give an idea of ​​gloom about their past.

“After the authorities have found a child who roughly matches the description of the parents, a lengthy identification process begins. The text consistently uses Nazi vocabulary and metaphor: The child found is persistently called 'the foundling 2307'. In order to determine his "blood relationship" with the rest of the family, Prof. Liebstedt uses elements of race theory accordingly. The footprints and head circumference of the "foundling 2307" and the rest of the family are meticulously measured and compared. Prof. Liebstedt takes the pliers and screw clamp, measures the "relative jaw width" and much more. "

- Amir Eshel : The grammar of loss, p. 8 f.

From the child's narrative position, however, this appears as puzzling and convoluted as it must have appeared to the children of the post-war period: as omnipresent but incomprehensible background noise. The horror is there, but mostly clauses and grotesque. The profound repression becomes clear in the parents' encounter with a hearse driver who enthusiastically praises the hygienic quality of the new Heidelberg crematorium over lunch . “Everything stands and falls with the ovens. If the ovens were no good, the whole crematorium was no good. ”The director of the crematorium had proven this by nibbling on a piece of bone in front of his eyes.

The novel also portrays the desperate will for social advancement that moves the narrator's parents. From the child's point of view, the achievements of this ascent, the growing cars and the constant new conversions and extensions of the parental home appear rather negative. The old, winding half-timbered building with its secrets becomes a sterile box, the plastic smell of the vehicles makes the boy feel sick.

Despite all efforts to gain a foothold in the present, the horrors of the past weigh on all family ventures. As well as parents functioned well in the economic life of the post-war period, shadows are clearly visible on people.

“The life of the family, it is the fifties, revolves pathologically around the act of desperation from back then and has grown into the mother's guilt complex. There is no happiness possible with this vacancy in the family, this horror vacui, which makes the mother increasingly despair of herself. It is tragic that as a result, the second-born son, the narrator, does not get his right. "

- Lutz Hagestedt : On guilt and shame and how it came about, review
TV 1958

The “brackets out of“ guilt and shame ”paralyze family life and prevent any closeness between parent and child. Treichel demonstrates this with relish on television evenings, for example when mother and son freeze in shame in the face of harmless tenderness or when the father interrupts the son's enjoyment of television by constantly new work assignments. Emotions are only possible in extreme situations, such as on the father's deathbed, but these situations are also immediately interrupted and disturbed.

The boy reacts to the oppressive family world mainly with disgust and vomiting. The ceremonial "pig's brain meal" that the father regularly stages, the "consumption of blood soup or blood cake" really disgusts him, even though the traumatized family is only happy once there, because the parents eat orgies at the slaughtering parties in their old homeland recall.

In her review, Doris Neujahr puts the fate of the displaced in the foreground. For too long, the loss of home has been played down as the bill that has been settled by the new wealth. Attempts to address the suffering of the refugees have always been pushed into the right corner. Only more recent research has revealed the traumatic significance of displacement. The two books by Hans-Ulrich Treichel anticipated a turnaround and, in a certain way, justified it.

Treichel himself names the subject of guilt as an essential element of the novel. His parents' guilt complexes for the loss of their son have added to the national trauma, cemented by the inability to address the experience of suffering. This message of guilt, which is conveyed to the narrator in the novel, was - religiously reshaped - also the main message of his childhood.

Literary form

Through the boy's perspective, Hans-Ulrich Treichel achieves a distance from the adult world. At the same time, there is the possibility of condensation and omission, as the boy only perceives parts of many aspects of adult life.

"Hans Ulrich Treichel evaporates and concentrates until a laconic brew is left - despair that is carefully increased with strictly logical, but increasingly ludicrous operations."

- Jörg Plath

The boy's perspective often creates grotesque and funny effects. When he was asked to read the Bible after his father's death, he was particularly fascinated by the Dead Sea .

review

In his review, Torsten Schöwing diagnosed an almost documentary trait in Treichel's narration. He tells the story "sober and distant", but without losing the "basic literary character". The "sarcastic and ironic tone" reminds Helmut Hirsch of Thomas Bernhard . “Sibling rivalry, marital war, gainful urge to survive, all in one and close together.” In the extensive “reproduction of the racial research results”, however, Schöwing sees “the continuing seething of National Socialist elements in the only superficially denazified Germany of the post-war decades”.

In his review, Wolfgang Müller writes that the introduction of a 16-year-old boy as a narrator "enables a naive, undisguised, apparently non-ideological view of the details of family life and its social environment at that time". At the same time, Müller criticizes a certain one-sidedness of the narrative and asks himself whether "the really displaced were really all so narrow-minded and backwoods, if not even latently fascist."

Amir Eshel examines Treichel's novel in terms of its “poetics of loss”. In the lost child he sees the “decisive, ongoing historical loss” coded allegorically. Between traumatization, grief and irony, the novel shows people in search of an appropriate language. He sees the loss of the child as a “primal scene”, “threatened, lost, sacrificed children have always been the focus of ethical, theological and philosophical allegories.” Eshel adds that the body of the lost, killed child never marks the beginning of one overcoming grief, the serious loss of meaning in life and the symbolic break in genealogical continuity.

Amir Eshel interprets the loss of the child as an allegory of the genealogical and historical break at the end of the Nazi era. The traumatization of the mother by the loss of the child and the rape appear vaguely as "something terrible" that happened to her. The expellees are in no way stylized as victims, the tone remains laconic, ironically broken, the terrible appears in the form of “a sober report”.

For Doris Neujahr, Treichel's novel is “a subtle history of mentality in the Federal Republic”. She sees the theme of the suffering of the war generation and their oppressive survival strategies as the root of the generational conflict, the "uprising of the sons against their parents" and writes that with this novella Hans-Ulrich Treichel became one of the most important German-speaking authors of the decade.

Text output

  • The lost one. Novel. Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-39561-0 .
  • The lost one. Text and comment. (Learning materials). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-18860-7 .

Arrangements for theater, film and radio

  • In 2003 the director Boris von Poser staged his own stage adaptation of the novel at the Sophiensaele in Berlin.
  • In 2015 the novel was filmed for television under the title The Lost Brother and aired on December 9, 2015 on the First .

Web links

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ cf. Steffen Richter: A teacher for damn good authors. In: NRZ of February 2, 2007; see. also: You want to be told about variants of your own life, Hans-Ulrich Treichel in conversation with André Hille. André Hille, Kulturmagazin Kunststoff, issue 7, August 10, 2007.
  2. ↑ a b c Doris New Year: Tragic Family History. In: Junge Freiheit, 39/99, September 24, 1999
  3. ↑ Amir Eshel: The grammar of loss - lost children, lost time in Barbara Honigmann's “Sohara's Journey” and in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's “The Lost One”. (PDF; 245 kB) In: juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de. Retrieved September 2, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Der Verlorene, p. 106.
  5. ↑ Lutz Hagestedt: From guilt and shame and how it came about, review . Retrieved September 2, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b Jörg Plath: Book tip: Hans Ulrich Treichel: The lost . ( Memento from June 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Deutsche Welle .
  7. ↑ cf. One would like to be told about variants of one's own life, Hans-Ulrich Treichel in conversation with André Hille, Kulturmagazin Kunststoff Heft 7, August 10, 2007
  8. ↑ a b Torsten Schöwing: Phantom of the Post-War Era ( Memento from April 27, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). In: wortlaut.de , Göttinger Zeitschrift für neue Literatur 1999.
  9. ↑ Helmut Hirsch: Always a discovery: childhood. Berlin Reading Signs, issue 6/99.
  10. ↑ Review by Wolfgang Müller, published in Dickinson College ( Memento from June 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ a b Amir Eshel: The grammar of loss - lost children, lost time in Barbara Honigmann's “Sohara's Journey” and in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's “The Lost One” . (PDF) In: juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de , p. 4. Retrieved on September 2, 2018 (PDF; 245 kB).
  12. ↑ Amir Eshel: The grammar of loss - lost children, lost time in Barbara Honigmann's “Sohara's Journey” and in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's “The Lost One” . (PDF) In: juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de , p. 5. Retrieved on September 2, 2018 (PDF; 245 kB).
  13. ↑ in the sense of Michel Foucault
  14. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Der Verlorene, p. 16
  15. ↑ Amir Eshel: The grammar of loss - lost children, lost time in Barbara Honigmann's “Sohara's Journey” and in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's “The Lost One” . (PDF) In: juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de , p. 7. Retrieved on September 2, 2018 (PDF; 245 kB).