The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge

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The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge is the title of a novel published in 1910 in the form of a diary by Rainer Maria Rilke . The novel was begun in Rome in 1904 and among other things reflects the author's first impressions of a stay in Paris in 1902/03. The work, which was completed in Paris between 1908 and 1910, was published in 1910 and remained Rilke's only novel.

Content, interpretive approaches and appreciation

construction

The work, which is the first in German literature to be radically different from the realistic novel of the 19th century, has no narrator in the conventional sense, has no continuous plot and consists of 71 recordings, which often resemble prose poems and mostly follow one another unconnected. Rilke himself always called the work “prose book” and never a novel . This fact points to the special position of the work in the German-language literature. Its outer shape is the fictitious diary of a fictitious figure named Malte. You meet him in the form of the 28-year-old diary writer from a noble family who is dying out with him and who, after the early death of his parents, has become homeless and without possessions and tries to live as a poet in Paris.

The fragmentary notes consist of an associative sequence of mostly idiosyncratic, sometimes descriptive, sometimes narrative sections that do not have a continuous storyline, but are nonetheless linked by the internal conflicts of Malta and are woven by the poet into a recognizable concept of existence that can be roughly summarized in three parts lets: 1. Maltes Parisian experiences, 2. Maltes childhood memories and 3. Maltes processing of historical events and stories. The transitions between these parts are fluid and cannot be precisely defined. Rilke also uses a fictional editor very discreetly , who only makes himself noticeable now and then through inconspicuous marginal notes.

Many of the entries in the notes are prose poems in their form , but they do not follow one another at random, since their arrangement and the motifs are linked to one another, obeying overarching principles: In the first part, for example, the Parisian impressions are confronted with those from childhood , whereby the motivic ties of the subjective portrayal of death, fear and illness are linked partly antinomically, partly analogously. The contrast, including the hard and precise prose, and the intensity of the intertwined themes and motifs appear to be the most important compositional principles of this new type of novel.

Topics

Malte Laurids Brigge's notes reveal - by exposing the basic experiences of modern existence - some key themes: death and illness , fear and despair , poverty and misery , language and reality , fate and life , identity and roles , artists and society , love and Solitude , the individual person and God . Malte resolves to rethink all these complexes (which he does not name so clearly) and to make them understandable for himself.

The big city as the center of progress

The novel begins in the Paris of the fin de siècle with the notes of the young Malte, who finds the third largest city on earth at the time, just as he could have found London and New York - in the middle of a process of industrialization . This brings both splendor and misery, both of which can be close together. The progress relies on the mechanization , often in the time with anonymity was associated and an increasing disparity between rich and poor.

Malte's first entries already show how he is overwhelmed by the big city reality, which almost everywhere seems to present its ugly and terrible side:

“Well, people come here to live, I'd rather think that this is where people die. I'm out. I've seen: hospitals. I saw a person who swayed and sank. People gathered around him, that saved me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She pushed her way heavily along a high, warm wall, which she sometimes felt for, as if to convince herself whether it was still there. Yes, she was still there. Behind? […] The alley began to smell from all sides. As far as could be distinguished, it smelled of iodoform, of the fat in French fries, of fear. All cities smell in summer. Then I saw a peculiarly blind house; it was not on the plan, but it was still quite legible above the door: Asyle de nuit. Next to the entrance were the prices. I read it. It wasn't expensive.
And otherwise? a child in a standing pram: it was fat, greenish and had a distinct rash on its forehead. It appeared to be healing and not hurting. The child slept, the mouth was open, breathing iodoform, french fries, fear. That was the way it was. The main thing was to live. That was the main thing. ” (9) .

Rilke describes synesthetically how the 'smell' of poverty and the images of disgust, illness, misery and dying penetrate the defenselessly exposed Malte. These are the smells of the city - and they seem to surround the viewer ("The alley began to smell from all sides"), to rise to a paranoid delusion ("All cities smell in summer"). They are the core of socialization and thus inescapable ("The child was asleep, the mouth was open, breathing iodoform, french fries, fear"), when "inhaled asleep" they do not even allow them to be visualized, leaving the individual in complete powerlessness - and the fight against all others, because "the main thing was that one lived" - whereby the change to the impersonal "one" deserves special attention. Already in the third part of the book of hours - " On Poverty and Death " (1903) - Rilke summarizes these findings:

»People live there, white-flowered, pale ones,
and die in amazement from the difficult world.
And no one sees the gaping grimace
to which the smile of a delicate race
is distorted on nameless nights.

They walk about, degraded by the effort
to serve senseless things without courage,
and their clothes
grow withered on them, and their beautiful hands age early.
The crowd pushes and does not think to spare them,
although they are a bit hesitant and weak -
only shy dogs, which
do not live anywhere, go after them quietly for a while.

They are given among a hundred tormentors,
and, yelled at by the beat of every hour, they
circle lonely around the hospitals
and wait anxiously for the day of admission. "
(Works 1, 102)

The processing of unworthy living conditions in crowded cities filled with smells and noise, which is reminiscent of Jacob Riis ' How the Other Half Lives. Studies Along the Tenements of New York (1890) focuses on a process of increasing de-individualization. If individuals are still recorded as “rubbish, shells of people that fate has spat out”  ( Malte , 37) , the contemplating ›I‹, defenseless and at the mercy, increasingly no longer finds those other ›I's‹ to which it is then the realization of the affinity of fate could result in solidarity, but faces an anonymized mass. When individual beings step out of this indifference, they appear as machines close to the assembly lines (like the doctors (48f.) ) Or only conspicuous because of their autistic secondary worlds and tics (like the ›hopper‹  (56ff.) ).

Malte as a close observer and persecuted

All that remains for the narrator is to observe, to look. But this looking, poetic demand and poetological program alike, as it permeates the recordings in its entirety, is no longer found unbroken, no longer as a mastery in perception that the art of nature seeks to reproduce, but rather - the Rilke- Often interpretations - even as a symptom of a clinical picture - this in turn arose out of a reflex of self-defense: When Malte sits with his poet in the Bibliothèque Nationale (35f.) , This is for him salvation from a phantasy of persecution, from a double paranoia even if one looks closely: namely, of the fear of being persecuted by the poor in the city, and of the underlying fear of being surrendered to misery, of bearing an invisible stigma, of smelling of poverty.

Nevertheless, this position remains the only one that is still possible - for both Malte and Rilke. When the young Brigge demands of himself that he “should start working now that I am learning to see”  (21) , there is always a doubt in the background: “[…] and others will not be able to read it. And will they even see what I am saying? «  (121) . A question that is entirely justified in an environment in which the next misery seems far enough not to be noticed. Rilke now gives the answer that calls for this question in the notes in a simple and unique way: the abstract, the metaphorical is just as concretized as the inanimate. In contrast, the living, the concrete is removed and abstracted:

“I saw a man somewhere pushing a vegetable cart in front of him. He shouted: Chou fleur, Chou-fleur, the fleur with a peculiarly cloudy eu. Next to him was a square, ugly woman who nudged him from time to time. And when she nudged him, he screamed. Sometimes he screamed of his own accord, but then it was in vain and he had to scream again immediately because you were in front of a house that was buying. Did I say he was blind? No? So he was blind. He was blind and screamed. When I say this, I'm falsifying that I'm embezzling the car he was pushing, I'm pretending not to have noticed that he was calling out cauliflower. But is that essential? And if it were essential too, doesn't it matter what the whole thing was for me? I saw an old man who was blind and screamed. I have seen that. Seen. ”  (41) .

And while the man is still vaguely described in a scattered list of features, the description of a building follows immediately afterwards:

'Will it be believed that such houses exist? No, they'll say I'm falsifying. This time it is truth, nothing left out, of course nothing added. […] Houses? But, to be precise, they were houses that were no longer there. Houses that had been demolished from top to bottom. What was there were the other houses that had stood next to them, tall neighboring houses. Apparently they were in danger of falling over since everything next door had been taken away; for a whole scaffolding of long, tarred mast trees was rammed diagonally between the bottom of the rubble and the exposed wall. […] You could see her inside. On the different floors you could see walls of rooms to which the wallpaper was still stuck, here and there the beginnings of the floor or the ceiling. Next to the walls of the room there was still a dirty white room along the whole wall, and through this the open, rust-stained gutter of the toilet pipe crept in unspeakably disgusting, worm-soft, as it were digesting movements. Gray, dusty traces remained on the edge of the ceilings of the paths that the luminous gas had taken, and they turned here and there, quite unexpectedly, around and ran into the colored wall and into a hole that was black and ruthless was torn away. Most unforgettable, however, were the walls themselves. The tough life in these rooms had not been crushed. It was still there, it held onto the nails that had remained, it stood on the broad rest of the floor, it had crawled under the approaches of the corners where there was still a little bit of interior space. You could see that it was the color it had slowly changed year after year: blue to a moldy green, green to gray, and yellow to an old, stale white that rots. But it was also in the fresher spots that had been preserved behind mirrors, pictures, and cupboards; for it had drawn and traced its outlines and had been with spiders and dust in these hidden places that were now exposed. It was in every strip that had been peeled off, it was in the damp bubbles at the bottom of the wallpaper, it swayed in the torn scraps, and it was exuding from the nasty stains that had formed a long time ago. And from these walls that had been blue, green and yellow, which were framed by the fractures of the destroyed intermediate walls, stood out the air of this life, the tenacious, sluggish, foul air that no wind had yet dispersed. "  (41f.)

And within the ailing architecture, as scraps of memory stamped into the stone work, the images of the former residents emerge, the misery emerges in its shimmering concretion:

“There stood the midday and the illnesses and the exhaled and the year-old smoke and the sweat that breaks out under the shoulders and makes the clothes heavy, and the fade from the mouth and the foul smell of fermenting feet. There was the sharpness of urine and the stinging of soot and gray potato smoke and the heavy, smooth smell of aging lard. There was the sweet, long smell of neglected infants and the scent of fear from the children going to school and the sultriness from the beds of male boys. And there was much added to it that had come from below, from the abyss of the alley that evaporated, and other things had seeped down from above with the rain that is not clear over the cities. And some things had happened in the weak, tame house winds that always stay in the same street, and there was still much there, of which one did not know the origin. "  (42)

The observation now ends in an almost organically palpable description of the ›stuffy‹ ambience, “always in the same street”, with “house winds”, as can already be read in the book of hours :

"There children grow up on window steps that
are always in the same shade
and do not know that outside flowers call
for a day full of space, happiness and wind -
and must be children and are sad children."
(Works 1, 101)

And yet the transition to the New Poems can already be found here , to that thing poem , which should then (also) be inextricably linked with Rilke's name. The description of the can lid (144–146) , which can be read as a poetic reflection at the same time, offers a beautiful lining . This is preceded by (134-140) - as a further example of Rilke's view of his fellow human beings - a description of a neighbor who intends to save his time in the material sense of the word by limiting all kinds of activities to the least amount of effort, but then to At the end of the week he discovered that he had completely used up the time allotted to him - so that, demoralized by the ease with which time ran through your hands, he stayed in bed and recited Pushkin and Nekrasov loudly. Because only poems are timeless - this is also a poetological statement.

Maltese childhood as a counterpoint to big city life

The depraved and anonymized city life is now contrasted with the childhood of Malte, which is visited in two large passages (71–106 and 110–130) and several small chapters. Here the notes are still often in the thought circle of the book of hours . In the country - because this is where Malte grew up - you die another 'real' death:

“You could tell from my grandfather, the old chamberlain Brigge, that he was dead. And what kind of a guy was that: for two months and so loud that you could hear him all the way to the outskirts. "  (14)

And yet, with all the sharpness of contrast with which the Moloch city ​​stands out from this, this childhood also remains vague: It is by no means the lush paradise that was once lost, but rather a last fortress that had to be visited in dire need.

Autobiographical traits

The extent to which the poet's own childhood can be found in the work must remain open. Rilke himself has often protested against an all too careless parallelization - even if this often seems to be obvious. Already the description of the mother of Maltes, but even more that of the grandmother (98ff.) Allow insights here. However, the processing of Rilke's long and long stays in Paris (since 1902) is evident in the records. Some passages can be found almost verbatim in letters to his wife Clara Rilke-Westhoff .

Literary classification

Rilke's work marks the beginning of a contemplation of reality that is reminiscent of Robert Walser and Franz Kafka , who wrote at the same time, as well as the later James Joyce , albeit entirely different in technique and representation. Influences of Baudelaire's poems and the decadence literature can be identified, and Rilke also uses assembly techniques by letting the narrator report in memories or reflections. Outwardly, the work is laid out in the form of a diary, but the narrative structure is not linear, the entries follow a thematic-motivic arrangement and are linked analogously or antinomically . Ulrich Fülleborn describes them as "prose poems". The novel can thus be seen as a trailblazer for the modern novel, comparable to Proust's In Search of Lost Time . A term that Tsiolkovsky for Joyce's, but the first time at Schnitzler fileformat stream of consciousness (stream of consciousness) coined may also be applied to Rilke: The world is on the " epiphany " of the disclosure and always already Offenbartsein in all its misery - only looking is to be learned:

“Because that's the terrible thing that I recognized her. I recognize all of this here, and that is why it goes into me so easily: it is at home in me. "  (43) .

reception

The book was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books and also in the 100 books of the century by Le Monde .

Translations

The work was partially translated into French just one year after its publication in 1911 . A complete translation was done in 1926 by Maurice Betz . The book was translated into Polish by Witold Hulewicz in 1927, into English by Mary D. Herter Norton in 1930 and into Czech by Jan Zahradníček in 1933 . The last translation into Arabic for the time being was in 2017 .

expenditure

literature

  • Brigitte L. Bradley: To Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge. Francke, Bern 1980. ISBN 3-7720-1441-0 .
  • Hartmut Engelhardt (Ed.): Rilke's notes of Malte Laurids Brigge. Materials. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1984, ISBN 978-3-518-38551-7 .
  • Dorothea Lauterbach: The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge. In: Rilke manual. Edited by Manfred Engel , Dorothea Lauterbach. Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-01811-3 , pp. 318-336.
  • Huiru Liu: Finding context. Rainer Maria Rilke's “The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”. Lang, Frankfurt 1994. ISBN 3-631-45343-4 .
  • Helmut Naumann: Collected Malte Studies. On Rilke's "Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge". Schäuble, Rheinfelden 1993. ISBN 3-87718-818-4 .
  • Rainer Maria Rilke: The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge. Annotated edition, BasisBibliothek 17, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2000 ISBN 978-3-518-18817-0 .
  • Dieter Saalmann: Rainer Maria Rilke's “The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”, a die roll after the absolute. Bouvier, Bonn 1975. ISBN 3-416-00977-0 .
  • Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann (Ed.): Malte-Lektüren. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1997. ISBN 3-7995-2150-X .
  • Anthony Stephens: Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge. Structural analysis of narrative consciousness. Lang, Bern 1974. ISBN 3-261-00888-1 .
  • Ralph Olsen: The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. Identity-relevant fundamentals of the death issue from an aesthetic perspective. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2004 ISBN 3-631-52940-6
  • Saint-Hubert : Rainer Maria Rilke et son dernier livre. P. 34–39, as a foreword to André Gide , transl .: Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge (excerpts). In La Nouvelle Revue Française , No. 31, Juillet 1911. Gallimard, Paris; Reprint ISBN 9782071030568 ; as .pdf ISBN 9782072389801 (pp. 39–64)

Web links

notes

  1. ↑ The Book That Was a Century Late. In: Fann Magazin. Retrieved February 21, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Online at French Wikisource (only the Rilke text)