The quiet American

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Quiet American (original title: The Quiet American ) is a 1955 novel by Graham Greene . He describes how the British newspaper correspondent Fowler gives up his journalistic neutrality and interferes in the Indochina War by participating in a plot to murder the American CIA agent Pyle. He had driven a fatal political development with the best of intentions, which Fowler wants to prevent - but at the same time Fowler also has a private interest in Pyle's death, since the two are competing for the same woman.

The first German-language transmission comes from Walther Puchwein and was published by Zsolnay-Verlag in 1956 . This version was later revised and supplemented by Käthe Springer . As part of its re-edition of Greene's works, the Zsolnay-Verlag published a complete new translation by Dietlind Kaiser in 1995. The book is widely regarded as a clairvoyant description of the situation in Indochina at the time , in particular the incipient American commitment personified by Pyle, which culminated in the disaster of the Vietnam War about a decade after the book was published .

The book, widely criticized as anti-American in the US , was the reason why Greene was under constant surveillance by US intelligence agencies from the 1950s until his death in 1991. The British newspaper The Guardian found this out in 2002 on the basis of government documents it had received under the Freedom of Information Act .

content

The British Thomas Fowler lives as a foreign correspondent with the local young lover Phuong in Saigon at the time of the Indochina War , towards the end of the French occupation. He has estranged himself from England and his wife, from whom he may want to divorce - but perhaps the announced divorce is just a ploy to bind his lover to him, because Fowler's wife is refusing to divorce because of her Catholic faith.

Fowler experiences the French colonial war against the Việt Minh (an alliance of national and communist forces for the independence of a united Vietnam ) as a lonely reporter who has hitherto tried to achieve “objectivity” and “neutrality”. He meets the young American Alden Pyle, who is enchanted by the visions of a book by York Harding. Although he was only in Vietnam for a short time, he believes that the solution to the war lies in supplementing it with an indefinite third party . Pyle, a CIA agent disguised as an employee of the US trade attaché, now wants to build this western-oriented “third force” to support democracy by supporting the terrorism of a warlord by supplying plastic explosives for bomb attacks against civilians.

The young American falls in love with Fowler's Vietnamese lover, after a lengthy “fair” competition he relaxes her with a promise of marriage and saves Fowler's life during a joint visit to the front. Fowler's Vietnamese contacts inform him of the American's subversive actions, and Fowler lures Pyle into an ambush in which the American is murdered by the Viet Minh, serving both the national cause and the reconquest of his beloved - a doubly "silent American", the worked for the terrorist underground and is dead by the time the narrative begins.

The novel frequently alternates between the top tier of the police investigation into the American's murder and the flashbacks that tell the love triangle between Fowler, his Vietnamese lover, and Pyle. Fowler's contribution to the death of his rival only becomes clear on the last pages.

interpretation

Greene described the participants in a very far-sighted, sometimes visionary way at a time when the US was just beginning to get into the Indochina War. With open eyes he sketches the tableau of forces: the broad support of the Viet Minh by the population, the survived colonial claims of the French and the global, arrogant and unscrupulous US strategy in terms of the choice of means.

The CIA officer Edward Lansdale is often seen as a role model for the fictional character of Alden Pyle. When it was first screened in 1958, he influenced the director so that the US agent - in a twist of the portrayal in the novel - is portrayed as a hero and the British journalist Fowler as a shady character. Graham Greene was outraged and described the film as a " propaganda film for America".

In a frequently cited interpretation, the three main characters Phuong, Pyle and Fowler are seen in the sense of a parable as representatives of the political actors of the time: Fowler stands for the old, powerless European colonial powers whose time in Asia is up, but who do not want to admit it. Pyle stands for the incipient engagement of the USA, which completely misunderstand the situation and naively initiate a fatal development. The young Vietnamese Phuong represents the Vietnamese people for whom the two foreign actors are vying. Der Spiegel wrote in 2002 on the occasion of the remake of the novel :

"Because" The Quiet American "is not just about wooing in a three-way relationship. Greene's novel is a parable on the entanglement of misguided idealism with terrorism, on the confrontation between American sense of mission and European melancholy. (...) It is the premonition of the horror that was still ahead of Vietnam with the later massive American intervention that makes Graham Greene's text so oppressive. And which also gives the film a very topical [note: the invasion of Iraq by the USA was imminent in 2002] political dimension: the danger of slipping into a war that cannot be won even by a superpower armed with high-tech weapons . 58,000 GIs died in this conflict and more than three million Vietnamese. "

In a life-threatening situation at the front, the rapporteur Fowler, who has always tried to remain neutral, recognizes that his mere presence changes the processes and that he is complicit in the death of other people: a neutral existence between the fronts becomes for him Illusion. So he leaves his role of observer and decides to help with the politically motivated murder of the American: “ Sooner or later you have to take sides. If you want to stay human (...) I was just as committed as Pyle and it seemed to me that a decision would never be easy again. "

The neutral point of view of the first-person narrator Fowler, who describes the American as an “ innocent ” several times, remains unusually sober and “fair” . Pyle appears to him as a romantic - but who goes beyond corpses for his noble goals: “ He was armored to the point of invulnerability with his good intentions and his ignorance. “Greene's open gaze finds a good place in evil (Pyle) as well as a morally lazy place in good (Fowler), because Fowler's murder removes his competitor for the Vietnamese woman's favor. As in other works, Greene tells his story in such a way that the reader does not fall into the trap of simplification.

The character of Pyle is said to be based in part on the real-life CIA agent Edward Lansdale . Greene, however, denied that he based Pyle on Lansdale. “Pyle was a younger, more innocent, and more idealistic member of the CIA. I would never have chosen Colonel Lansdale the way he was then to portray the danger of innocence. ”He insisted that his inspiration was Leo Hochstetter, a young American economic aid worker who the French suspected was a CIA agent and who taught him on a “long drive back to Saigon about the necessity of looking for a 'third force in Vietnam'”. This is supported by the fact that Greene, who worked on his novel between March 1952 and June 1955, completed a draft before Lansdale began his service in Vietnam in June 1954.

In the figure of the Phuong, the journalist and Vietnam expert Peter Scholl-Latour believed that he recognized the typical characteristics of the Vietnamese people, which would have helped them to win over the old and new colonial powers. In his book “Death in the rice field” he quotes the lines “She is not a child. Maybe she is more resilient than you ever will be. Do you know the type of polish that is scratch-resistant? That's Phuong. "

German-language editions

  • Graham Greene: The Quiet American. Roman (Original title: The Quiet American ). German by Walter Puchwein and Käthe Springer. 3rd edition, full paperback edition. dtv (Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag), Munich 2003, 234 pages, ISBN 3-423-13129-2
  • Graham Greene: The Quiet American. Roman (Original title: The Quiet American ). New edition of the works in a new translation (volume 16). German by Dietlind Kaiser. Zsolnay, Vienna 1995, 237 pages, ISBN 3-552-04705-0
  • Graham Greene: The Quiet American. Roman (Original title: The Quiet American ). Translated from the English by Nikolaus Stingl. Zsolnay, Vienna 2013, 254 pages, ISBN 978-3-552-05639-8

Film adaptations

  • 1958: Four Pipes of Opium ( The Quiet American ) - Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz ; with Michael Redgrave , Bruce Cabot a . v. a.). Graham Greene distanced himself from this film adaptation and described it as a "propaganda film for America". According to press reports, the CIA man Edward Lansdale is said to have had a direct influence on the filmmakers, so that in the end Pyle appeared as a hero and Fowler as a shady character.
  • 2002: The Quiet American ( The Quiet American ) - Director: Phillip Noyce ; with Michael Caine , Brendan Fraser , Do Thi Hai Yen u. v. a.)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In life as in fiction, Greene's taunts left Americans in a quiet fury. The Guardian, December 2, 2002
  2. ↑ a b Olaf Ihlau, Jürgen Kremb: A tiger in the leap. Der Spiegel, 47/2002
  3. ^ A b c Matthew Alford, Robbie Graham: An offer they couldn't refuse The Guardian , Nov. 14, 2008.
  4. ↑ Max Boot: Meet the Mild-Mannered Spy Who Made Himself the 'American James Bond'. In: Foreign Policy . January 10, 2018, accessed July 30, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Peter Scholl-Latour: Death in the rice field - Thirty Years of War in Indochina. 1980, ISBN 3-421-01927-4 , p. 221