Germany for free
Germany free of charge , subtitle: On foot and without money through an affluent country , is a travelogue by Michael Holzach that appeared in 1982 and soon became a bestseller . As a cult book of the dropout culture and travel novel, which not only describes a hike through West Germany, but also the search for one's own identity, it has been the trigger for numerous similar works and has, among others, Christian Kracht's novel Faserland (1995) and Roger Willemsen's trip to Germany (2002) influenced.
content
The only 33-year-old reporter Michael Holzach , who was already established at ZEIT and GEO , wandered through the whole of West Germany and back in 1980 without money - "through a world in which everything revolves around marks and pennies." Dependent on his feet, one With a good nose and the pitiful eyes of his dog Feldmann , he defies summer heat and continuous autumn rain for six months and experiences the world of the sedentary from an unusual perspective.
The journey takes him from Hamburg through the Lüneburg Heath , the Weserbergland and Sauerland over the Ruhr area to the Austrian border to a small alpine pasture in the Allgäu . From there it continues to Munich and returns to Hamburg via Kitzingen , Schweinfurt and along the then inner-German border .
Farmers let the vagabond sleep in their barns, partly for free, partly for work. Others ruthlessly chase him off the farm. Tipper brothers teach him the arts of begging. A huge tank is targeting him in the Lüneburg Heath . A proud village beauty falls in love with the tall wandering bird, kidnaps him to a night shooting ball and cries herself on his shoulder. During a NATO maneuver in the Bielefelder Senne he becomes a double agent for a ration of broad beans with bacon . When he took a refreshing nude bath in an idyllic babbling brook in the forest near Paderborn , he was accidentally almost shot by the game warden. The Cistercian monastery Marienstatt in the Westerwald accommodates him "like the Savior himself". Gypsies behind the embankment in Hildesheim give the starved man a generous meal and crouch with him, plucking the guitar, by the romantic campfire. A pastor, on the other hand, disregards the commandment of charity and calls the police.
It is not uncommon for him to spend the night outdoors when it rains. Shivering with the cold, he crawls into his damp sleeping bag. On other days he feels “like in a land of milk and honey”: Twenty drug-addicted women on rehab in the “ Asylum Aplerbeck ” follow their maternal instinct and smuggle him into the soft bed of a fellow patient who is away from home. A “friendly manslaughter” and “a whole horde of tattooed prisoners” from the Castrop-Rauxel prison bombard him with food. He feels "how good it is for men to be able to help someone to finally not be a sinner, but a benefactor".
At a fair in Heilbronn he works in a shooting gallery under the thumb of a nagging and suspicious old woman. For the Westphalian traveling circus Leonardi, whose children's performance in Kitzingen “there was a lot to laugh about because almost nothing worked”, he helps with assembly and dismantling and feeds the animals. In shelters for the night in big cities, he learns from the homeless what it means to have to tap and "slowly die".
The focus is on the reflection on life in the 1980s: the hollow lifestyle of the affluent society , the guest worker problem , nuclear power plant protests and the aftermath of the Nazi past come to life. The author has a very personal criticism of society and repeatedly questions his own journalistic profession, which is ultimately the fate of marginalized groups and their description.
In addition, the reader learns a lot of original things about the different landscapes of West Germany. However, since Michael Holzach is traveling without money and has to spend most of his time getting himself and his dog board and lodging, his wandering himself soon fades into the background. Instead, the book becomes more and more a self-critical consideration of its fictitious homelessness, a self-doubtful question of meaning and a confrontation with one's own past, present and future.
shape
What sets Holzach's travelogue apart from others is, in addition to the authenticity of the content and linguistic ease and versatility, its numerous literary qualities. 175 days over country roads, forests and meadows; on the run from routine life, the non-everyday encounter with everyday German life and one's own loneliness; Adventure, luck, misfortune and privation - all of this fits together in the area of tension between the bourgeois world and lost livelihoods to form a documentation of a thoroughly novel-like structure.
The leitmotif is the " search for lost time ". Again and again it is a matter of finding yourself in the traces of the past, of being able to process the wounds of your own childhood, youth, "good old student glory" a second time and to be able to tick off as finally healed when you reunite with the former stations in life.
Significantly, the six most important points of reference of his journey are the six most important places in his own past. The structure of the travel novel into its 6 "parts" corresponds formally to these six stations:
- the boarding school and country school home at Solling in Holzminden , where he spent 11 years of his life and which he pays a visit both on the way there (part 1) and on the way back (part 6),
- the Ruhr University in Bochum , where he studied sociology for 5 years and lived in a room in the dormitory (part 2),
- the villa of his (now deceased) father in Bergisch Gladbach (part 3),
- little Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse , where he was passed around with different relatives for the first six years (after his parents divorced and separated from his sister) (part 4),
- the apartment of his mother (who traveled to Sylt at the time of his stay ) in Munich (part 5),
- Hamburg, the starting point (part 1) and end point (part 6) of his hike, where he and his girlfriend Freda moved into an apartment in the Eppendorf district close to the city.
For not only chronological but also symbolic connection and atmospheric condensation of his episodes, Holzach uses various linguistic means of a literarily demanding feature : documentation, commentary and reportage, short story, diary note, epic flashback, lyrical mood, dialogic scene and dream-like visions constantly alternate thus reflect the richness of the very different impressions of this autobiographical journey through life.
Death of the author during the filming
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In the spring of 1983 the preparatory work for the filming of Germany began for free . During the search for a motif on the Emscher in Dortmund-Dorstfeld, the dog Feldmann slipped on the concrete embankment and fell into the canal. Michael Holzach jumped after, but was swept away by the strong current, hit his head against a concrete pillar and drowned. His dog, however, was saved by the fire department .
For those who already know about the tragic death of the author in the Emscher while reading it, the book must appear clairvoyant in a terrifying way. As if the author had already suspected that the Emscher, “the dirtiest river in Germany”, would one day become his own grave, Holzach describes it with ever new pictures as the ruinous waters of death. The river accompanies him for more than twenty pages, and at the first encounter he speaks of the “realm of the dead”, “spirits of the dead” and “ Hades ”, later of the “Last Judgment” and several times of the “dead river”, “stinking ones Styx ”and“ Underworld River ”, near which one night suddenly a threatening nausea afflicts him:“ I am terminally ill and have to go to bed! [...] In the end, I reach Dortmund-Mengede more dead than alive. "A young couple who discovered him in the pouring rain and wanted to help him telephoned a vicar:" We just fished a sick hiker out of the Emscher " [...] "It borders on a biblical miracle, but the next morning, poor Lazarus , I am back on my feet" and " I am going down again into my realm of the dead."
Apart from such macabre omens, which refer exclusively to the Emscher, there are a number of other central death motifs in Germany which are unusual for a mere travel report, especially since they determine the tenor of the text and contribute to its literary character. The most striking examples of this - three suicides - are again related to the already mentioned important autobiographical fixed points of the author: the father (parental home), a classmate (school) and the first lover (university) killed each other years ago and an affected Michael Holzach left behind. If he is now following in the footsteps of his past, it is also because he tries to cope with such experiences by re-visualizing them on site.
In contrast to these dark images of death - which ultimately also include the “hell” of some homeless shelters and the depressing desolation of endless rainy weeks - are the few “paradisiacal” natural idylls, spring and summer sketches, with which Holzach the remains of a still intact world into the otherwise quite hopeless Wants to save prosperous lives.
The highlight of these lively contrasting scenes (also in the literal sense) is the Didleralm at an altitude of 1700 meters. There in the Allgäu , not by chance in the immediate vicinity of the state border, Holzach is at the "apex" of his journey. Significantly, however, he only gets into this “other world” after he has let himself be enchanted by the “magical silver moon” and “like a blind man” on a long night march “as if in a trance”, “like a dream walk” and then the next day , sometimes crawling "on all fours", dragging "ever steeper uphill". On this magical mountain , where a “North German high altitude rush” seizes him and you can look far down into the distant plains, the restless hiker thinks he has reached his destination. Here, where he helps the old shepherd Sepp and his thirteen-year-old assistant Leo with the breakneck hunt for cows and sweaty chopping wood, here, where “the days go by monotonously without being boring for a second”, he finally feels “calm down.” Nowhere does he feel he feels livelier and lingers longer than in that heavenly "comfort" of his " Arche Didleralm."
filming
Based on Germany in vain , a comprehensive ZDF television film was made in 1993 under the direction of Werner Masten with the title "On foot and without money" with Robert Atzorn in the lead role, which was broadcast in 1995 in four parts, each around 90 minutes long. Herbert Lichtenfeld's script differed greatly from the plot of the book and the names of the protagonists were changed (except for the Feldmanns).
Text output
- Michael Holzach: Germany for free. On foot and without money through an affluent country . Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe (1982). ISBN 3-455-08706-X . New edition 1993 under the ISBN 978-3-455-10302-1 . Many more editions.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Verena Risse: From A to C and back blog V. Risse Counselor Leisure 2004. (Accessed April 14, 2017)
- ↑ Thomas Hermann: The Model Railroader - Roger Willemsen's "Deutschlandreise." April 2003 on Literaturkritik.de (access April 14, 2017)
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 9–10.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 153.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 122.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 227.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 112
- ↑ The double visit to this boarding school at the beginning and the end of the travel novel thus forms its framework and thus underlines the (also symbolic) importance of this school. How formative the eleven years there were and how much the teachers became a substitute for families is also demonstrated by the fact that Michael Holzach was buried in the cemetery of this same school home in Holzminden.
- ↑ Together with her, Freda Heyden, Michael Holzach published the children's book I'm called Feldmann and I'm a Dog (Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-455-08731-0 ) in 1983, the year he died .
- ↑ Michael Holzach, page 102.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 103.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Pages 112–119.
- ↑ In memory of the author, a street in Dortmund-Mengede was later named Michael-Holzach-Weg after him.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Pages 120–121.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 117.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 202.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 192.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 195.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 201 f.
- ↑ Michael Holzach, Germany free of charge . Page 200 or 202.