The black Mr. Bahßetup

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The black Mr. Bahßetup is a 1956 novel by the German writer Albert Vigoleis Thelen . When, after the success of his first prose work The Island of the Second Face, the Bahßetup book initially met with great rejection, Thelen discontinued his writing activity for a long time, disappointed.

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the International Court in The Hague, the identity of the clarified Bahßetup on

Thelen, who calls himself Vigoleis, is working on his book The Island of the Second Face and interrupts his activity to accompany Professor da Silva Ponto for a few days in the city of Amsterdam , referred to by the author in the book as Heringsgrat , and in The Hague A lawyer from Brazil who came to the Netherlands for a congress on international fishing rights. For him, Vigoleis is a tour guide and interpreter. This South American “black gentleman” has no papers with him and seems quite helpless; the narrator also at times doubts the professor's identity. Finally the matter is cleared up in The Hague in the International Court of Justice .

Bahßetup

When da Silva Ponto cannot find the hot water tap in the bathroom when he arrives at the hotel, he greets the protagonist, who is called to help as an interpreter, with the English word for bathtub, pronounced Bahßetup. In the following years he was named by Thelen with this expression. Thelen wrote in his “Instructions to the Reader”: “All the characters in this book live or have lived.” Heino Krüger has proven that Bahßetup really existed. He identified him as the Brazilian lawyer Manuel Francisco Pinto Pereira, who lived from 1889 to 1956.

Novel structure and reception

The novel has little action and gets by with a few people; large parts of the work consist of digressions. These digressions have no substantive reference to the actual plot, the author "takes any keyword as an opportunity to criticize the events of the time to tell fictitious or experienced episodes or to discuss philosophical problems." "All these episodes are stretched between the mute melancholy of the black scholar and the inexhaustible eloquence of his companion, who then also writes the book " , said Rolf Schroers in ZEIT and continued, referring to the episodes:" Here the reader is expected to be too much and bored ". Rosmarie Zeller sees in Thelen's spelling in the Bahßetup a "vacillation between fiction and reality", between novel and autobiography. The end of the extensive work, "strangely disheveled and indefinite", is less than satisfactory. The book disappointed some critics; they missed the Mediterranean lightness and the imaginative liveliness that had inspired them in the island of second sight . Not only did the reviews initially make it difficult to distribute the book, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels also temporarily advised bookshops not to sell the book because the dean's office of a Dutch university had threatened an injunction for allegedly denigrating one of its professors .

expenditure

  • Black Mr. Bahßetup. A mirror . Desch, Vienna / Munich / Basel 1956
  • The black Mr. Bahßetup. From the applied memories of the Vigoleis . Heyne, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-453-43024-7
  • The black Mr. Bahßetup. Novel . Claassen, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-546-49087-8
  • The black Mr. Bahßetup. Novel . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-11416-9

Quote

“That was the sympathy of the humanly concerned lawyer, a rare case! For when a lawyer begins to put his heart above the mind, he can soon close his practice, just as a theologian has to leave the pulpit when the mind plays the opposite trick on him and a writer who does not have heart and mind becomes questionable Mortar that knows how to grind language. "

- Albert Vigoleis Thelen

literature

  • Karl Heinz Kramberg : In the Heringsgrat the truth becomes doubt . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 30, 1983
  • Anton Krättli: The black Mr. Bahßetup is returning . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of September 28, 1983.
  • Heino Krüger: Who was Bahßetup? In: Albert Vigoleis Thelen. Ore world peasants and language swindlers . edition die horen, Bremerhaven 2003, ISBN 3-89701-984-1
  • Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Edition Lithaus, Berlin 2006, ISBN 393930526X
  • Lothar Schröder: Vigoleis - a revenant of Don Quixote. An investigation into the literary life of the hero in the prose work Albert Vigoleis Thelens . Grupello, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 9783899780802
  • Rolf Schroers : What's wrong with Vigoleis? Thelen's second novel went badly wrong . In: Die Zeit of December 27, 1956

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The black gentleman Bahßetup. A mirror . First edition 1956, page 7
  2. ↑ Heino Krüger: Who was Bahßetup? In: Albert Vigoleis Thelen. Ore world peasants and language swindlers . Bremerhaven 2003
  3. ↑ Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Berlin 2006, p. 55
  4. ↑ Rolf Schroers: What's wrong with Vigoleis? in DIE ZEIT , issue of December 27, 1956
  5. ^ Rosmarie Zeller: Between autobiography and novel . In: Jürgen Pütz (Ed.): In cases of doubt, the truth decides. Contributions to Albert Vigoleis Thelen . June, Viersen 1988, ISBN 3-926738-01-4
  6. ↑ Ernst Jürgen Walberg: Uppa! Uppapa !. Don Vigo, the black Mr. Bahßetup and the great world theater . In: die horen , No. 134, Bremerhaven 1984, ISSN  0018-4942
  7. ↑ Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Berlin 2006
  8. ↑ Upper case only in the first edition
  9. ↑ Quoted from the Esrt edition. Vienna / Munich / Basel 1956, page 81