The fear of Beethoven

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The fear of Beethoven is a short story by Wolfgang Hilbig , which was written in 1981 and appeared in 1985 in the author's second volume of prose in Frankfurt am Main.

The first-person narrator, born in the early 1940s, takes German guilt for the Holocaust on himself. The story is unbelievable on the one hand, but true on the other hand: Eckart calls the three texts collected in the 1985 first edition (see below) " ghost stories " as the successor to ETA Hoffmann .

content

In search of the grave of a young woman who was "slain not so long ago" in her residential area, the German first-person narrator, who goes by the strange name of Gerardo Cebolla, comes across cemetery A .. hofer Strasse in south-east Berlin in 1981 to an estimated 70-year-old flower seller. The latter sells that first-person narrator, a writer who works as a boiler heater in an East Berlin laundry, a West Indian subterrania - the underground. The seller warns that the orchid must be watered according to regulations: Raw pieces of meat must swim in the warm water.

From the rest of the talk, the writer concludes that the old man must know more about the young woman and her grave. He visits the flower seller in his apartment. Direct hit: The dead woman is the old man's daughter. During her lifetime she was employed at the post office nearby.

The flower seller pretends to know his visitor from the height of summer 1942. The then 19-year-old SS man had picked up Jews for deportation by truck . The writer must dismiss this as nonsense; calls his year of birth 1941. Undeterred, the old man reveals further details from his vita. His aristocratic ancestors, a branch of the Seckendorff family, had invaded the Curonian Lagoon with the Teutonic Order centuries ago . And after the attack on Poland - he wore the brown uniform - Berlin became his doom. The daughter, who has since died, owes her life to a liaison between the old man and a Jewish woman. The latter was part of the above-mentioned transport on that midsummer day in 1942. When, towards the end of the conversation, the old man promoted his visitor to the Sturmbannführer , the award-winning man no longer thought the flower seller was so crazy, but spoke - conjured up by a bottle of alcohol - incomprehensible things about his cremation squads.

shape

The split in personality between a writer and his doppelganger, an SS man born twenty years before him, unsettles the reader. In addition, the reader waits in vain for the solution to the criminal case concerning the postal worker.

Wolfgang Hilbig is hesitant to come up with his big topic: In the cemetery mentioned above he reads the inscription “Death is swallowed up in victory.” Then he quotes a word from Goebbels , goes into the “ movement ”, speaks of the organization VVN and the Nuremberg Laws .

The allusive fable is much more complex and ghostly and ghostly than sketched above. For example, a manuscript by the protagonist and its whereabouts in the mail play a certain role. What does the slain postal worker have to do with the matter? The author is silent. And Wolfgang Hilbig overrides the logic more than once. The old flower, music and synaesthesia lover wants to see Beethoven in one of his concerts there on the Curonian Lagoon. Even more: Both would have composed together on the Baltic Sea beach. Apart from exchanging the centuries - Beethoven on the Memel ? The well-read writer is not aware of this.

reception

  • Genia Schulz notices a “flow of text with an obstinate course” and hits the core of the confused story: “Historical guilt that weighs on the following generations is archived in linguistic images.” Schulz lands a second hit when characterizing the dominant doppelganger motif : Doubling plays the main creative role “in the moment of seeing oneself” of the first-person narrator.
  • In the text, the Holocaust is linked to the fantastic according to Todorov's postulate of indecision. After reading it, looking at the title of the story, the question arises: Who is afraid of Beethoven? The Lithuanian Nazi , as Loescher calls the old florist, is not afraid of Beethoven. Quite the opposite - in a lengthy dialogue with the writer, he professes to be a Beethoven admirer. However, Wolfgang Hilbig makes every direct statement ambiguous by subsequently asserting the opposite, or at least questions it by means of endless, senses-confusing trappings. In the Beethoven case, the old man believes that today's (around 1981) interpreters of Beethoven can only hear falsifications. The writer also wants to hear Beethoven. According to Loescher, only the young SS man - the writer's double - remains as a person whom the title could target. Loescher also quotes a suitable passage. There the old man claims that he turned away from the "movement" precisely because of its hostility to the spirit.
  • The author creates an eerie atmosphere. ETA Hoffmann greets with his comment on the effect of many Beethoven pieces of music. Bärbel Heising translates the Oscar Wilde quote at the beginning of the text: “Because everyone kills what they love. But not everyone dies afterwards. "The story is based on the knitting pattern " Ritter Gluck " :" The idea that the impossible is part of reality is at the center of the story ... "
  • The sometimes diffuse text corpus allows for interpretation: The author interprets the Subterrania as a myth of German history. Da Loescher more soberly describes this wondrous plant as a “creative instance that constitutes text”. The first-person narrator accommodates his opponent, as it were - whether it is a doppelganger, a second-born self or a ghost of the past. Bordaux notices an advance of the gruesome and vampiric in the narrative - for example, when it comes to the role of the old man as a spectator during “the deportation of the Jews, among whom his wife was”. It murders a "political collective".
  • Steiner interprets the text in context with stories from Wolfgang Hilbig that were written at a later time.

literature

Text output

  • Wolfgang Hilbig: The letter. Three stories ( description II . The letter . The fear of Beethoven). S. Fischer Taschenbuch (Collection S. Fischer Vol. 42), Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-22342-3 . 233 pages (first edition).
  • Wolfgang Hilbig: The fear of Beethoven. P. 261–311, in: Jörg Bong (Ed.), Jürgen Hosemann (Ed.), Oliver Vogel (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Works . Volume stories and short prose. With an afterword by Katja Lange-Müller . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-033642-2 .

Secondary literature

  • Karol Sauerland : Writing against unreasonable demands. S. 44–51, in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text + Critique. Issue 123. Wolfgang Hilbig. Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88377-470-7
  • Jan Strümpel: Bibliography on Wolfgang Hilbig. S. 93–97, in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text + Critique. Issue 123. Wolfgang Hilbig. Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88377-470-7
  • Genia Schulz: Postscriptum. To the volume of stories "The Letter". Pp. 137–152, in: Uwe Wittstock (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Materials on life and work. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-12253-8
  • Uwe Wittstock: The excommunication principle. Hikes in Wolfgang Hilbig's immense prose landscape. Pp. 229–245, in: Uwe Wittstock (Ed.): Wolfgang Hilbig. Materials on life and work. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-12253-8
  • Gabriele Eckart : Speech trauma in the texts of Wolfgang Hilbig. In: Richard Zipser (Ed.): DDR Studies , Vol. 10. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 0-8204-2645-8
  • Bärbel Heising: "Letters full of quotes from oblivion". Intertextuality in Wolfgang Hilbig's work. Bochum writings on German literature ( Martin Bollacher (Hrsg.), Hans-Georg Kemper (Hrsg.), Uwe-K. Ketelsen (Hrsg.), Paul Gerhard Klussmann (Hrsg.)). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996 (Diss. Bochum 1995), ISBN 3-631-49677-X
  • Sylvie Marie Bordaux: Literature as Subversion. An examination of the prose work by Wolfgang Hilbig. Cuvillier, Göttingen 2000 (Diss. Berlin 2000), ISBN 3-89712-859-4
  • Jens Loescher: Myth, Power and Cellar Language. Wolfgang Hilbig's prose in the mirror of the aftermath. Editions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam 2003 (Diss. Berlin 2002), ISBN 90-420-0864-4
  • André Steiner: The narrative self - studies on Wolfgang Hilbig's narrative work. Short stories 1979–1991. Novels 1989–2000. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008 (Diss. Bremen 2007), ISBN 978-3-631-57960-2
  • Birgit Dahlke : Wolfgang Hilbig. Meteore Vol. 8. Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-238-8

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Wittstock (Wittstock, S. 232, 7. ZVO) thinks of the Underground to the mandrake . Bordaux (p. 23 below) writes that this plant feeds "on blood and death".
  2. ↑ Tzvetan Todorov: Introduction to Fantastic Literature. Munich 1972 (Translator: Karin Kersten).
  3. ↑ Heising (p. 49, 8. Zvu) quoted ETA Hoffman. In the Kreisleriana it says: “Beethoven's music moves the levers of fear, shudder, horror, pain ...” ( Beethoven's instrumental music ).
  4. ↑ Edition used.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, pp. 763 and 765 and see also Eckart, pp. 159, 9. Zvu
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 292, 12. Zvo
  3. ↑ Heising, p. 68, 8. Zvo
  4. ↑ Eckart, p. 159, 5th Zvu
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 292, 5th Zvu
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 294, 11. Zvu
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 309 below and see also Bordaux, p. 71 middle
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 310, 19. Zvo
  9. ↑ Bible , NT , 1st letter of Paul to the Corinthians : ( 1 Cor 15,54 EU ), see also King James Version  , 1st Corinthians - chapter 15, verse 55
  10. ↑ Sauerland, p. 49 below
  11. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 151 above
  12. ↑ Loescher, p. 203, 10th Zvu
  13. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 152, 2nd Zvu
  14. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 151, 2nd Zvu
  15. ↑ Genia Schulz, p. 138, 16. Zvo
  16. ↑ Loescher, p. 188, 4. Zvo
  17. ↑ Loescher, p. 222, 6th Zvu
  18. ↑ Edition used, p. 283, 5. Zvo
  19. ↑ Edition used, p. 303
  20. ↑ Edition used, p. 294, 5th Zvu
  21. ↑ Loescher, p. 222, 2nd Zvu
  22. ↑ Edition used, p. 295, 2nd Zvo
  23. ↑ Heising, p. 67, 7th Zvu
  24. ↑ Heising, p. 99, 10. Zvo
  25. ^ Bordaux, p. 49, 14. Zvo
  26. ↑ Loescher, p. 204, 3. Zvo
  27. ↑ Bordaux, p. 226, 7. Zvo
  28. ^ Bordaux, p. 239, 8. Zvo
  29. ↑ Bordaux, p. 240, 11. Zvu
  30. ^ Bordaux, p. 268, 11. Zvo
  31. ↑ Steiner, p. 84 and p. 92 above