The discovery of the sky

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The discovery of the sky ( Dutch : "De ontdekking van de hemel") is the title of a 1992 novel by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch . He describes the intense friendship of two men whose biographical intermeshing is influenced by two angels in order to bring the two tablets of the Ten Commandments back to heaven and thereby cancel the biblical covenant between God and man. With the humor that is typical for him, Harry Mulisch shows his encyclopaedic knowledge, his ways of thinking and seeing and at the same time paints a picture of society in the Netherlands from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Structure and content

The novel has two narrative levels: two angels control and comment at the same time on the lives of the two Dutch friends Max Delius and Onno Quist. The inhabitants of the earth do not know that they are part of a divine plan which aims to dissolve the covenant between God and man. Harry Mulisch divides the process of dissolution into four sections: The Beginning of the Beginning , The End of the Beginning, and The Beginning of the End and The End of the End . These are each framed by dialogical scenes in heaven, which overlap with the earthly plot at the beginning and end of the sections (only at these points does a first-person narrator appear).

The novel mainly tells of the lives of four people who are related to each other in different ways:

Max Delius
The astronomer and womanizer, the son of a Jewish mother and a Nazi born -Offiziers on 27 November 1933 struggles with the Nazi legacy of his family: his father has betrayed his wife and her family to the Nazis and was responsible for their transport to the concentration camp responsible . Both his professional and domestic life are shaped by aesthetics and almost compulsive principles of order. His relationship with women seems chaotic at first and in complete contradiction to it, but it also follows a fixed rule: He has to have a wife every day, almost never the same. Thanks to his good looks and upscale lifestyle, he is successful. Since he was conceived on the same day as Onno Quist, he is "related in nature" to this fundamentally different man - and forms a deep friendship with him. The friendship between the two is overshadowed by Max's affair with Ada, with whom he had a brief liaison before she turned to his friend Onno. The guilty conscience and the doubts about the fatherhood of the child that Ada gives birth only disappear with the years in which Max becomes convinced that Quinten can only be Onno's child due to his outstanding abilities. In the 1980s Max is struck by a meteorite, so that he can no longer announce his greatest scientific discovery, the discovery of the (divine) sky.
Onno Quist
He is the "enfant terrible" of a respected, conservative family of politicians. Considered by nature with a great talent for languages, he does not use it to secure a befitting existence, but lives in total chaos in a filthy basement apartment, his greatest passion is deciphering old scripts. The encounter with Max Delius changes his life fundamentally: The relationship with his girlfriend Helga breaks up. Onno discusses science, religion , philosophy and politics with Max , about God and the world, in the aphoristically pointed way of two intellectuals who communicate on the same wavelength despite their great differences in natures. Through Max Delius, Onno got to know the left student currents and became politically active. Through Max he met Ada Brons, whom he later married. When his linguistic ambitions ended in a dead end, he continued family tradition and made a career in politics. He takes up the relationship with Helga again. When she falls victim to a robbery and he does not make any progress politically either, he decides to disappear from the scene. Years later, he and his son Quinten find each other "by chance" in Rome, the two of them track down the hiding place of the mandatory tables and kidnap them to Jerusalem. Onno realizes through a "chance" encounter in town that Quinten is Max's son. Looking back, he recognizes the connections, the futility of all of his and Max's guilt feelings they had with regard to fifths.
Ada Brons
The cellist and daughter of a bookseller is the connecting figure between Max and Onno, with whom she has a complicated love triangle. The relatively short relationship with Max, after all one of the two monogamous phases in his life, fails due to the fact that Max's friendship with Onno is more important than the relationship with Ada. She then turns to Onno and, as his wife, brings some order into the linguist's chaos. During a joint stay in Cuba , Ada had intercourse with both Max and Onno. her son Quinten is conceived in the process; it is not initially clear who the father is. While she was still pregnant, Ada was seriously injured in a car accident in which Max and Onno were also involved and fell into a coma. The child survived and was born by caesarean section a few months later. Her mother Sophia injects Ada with an overdose of insulin after 17 years in a coma, from which Ada dies.
Fifths quist
Since Onno doesn't have time to take care of fifths himself due to his political obligations, he accepts the offer from Max and the widowed grandmother Sophia, who want to raise the child together. Max has a strange relationship with the mother of his former girlfriend who is only ten years older than him: during the day she is his friend's mother-in-law, at night she comes to him as a mysterious lover. This double life, which lasts seven years, is the second monogamous phase in Max's life. Quinten is an unusual child, not only endowed with the appearance of an angel, but also with intelligence, curiosity and a special kind of perception. However, he does not find success and friends in school, but with the families who live in the same house; these are enough company and teacher for him. At the age of 17, he left school prematurely to go in search of his father in hiding, whom he eventually found by chance in front of the Pantheon in Rome . There he fulfills the task for which the threads of life of the three protagonists have been intertwined and influenced: Together with his father Onno, he steals the two tablets with the Ten Commandments from the Sancta Sanctorum . They then flee to Jerusalem, where Quinten destroys the two tablets with the Ten Commandments on the Jerusalem Temple Mount; the rubble is finally disposed of by the garbage disposal . The connection between heaven and earth is thus broken, the angels have fulfilled the mission of the “boss” with the help of the people they have chosen. The world now has a pact with Satan.

interpretation

Harry Mulisch interweaves various topics and plot complexes:

  • From his own biography, topics such as guilt and dealing with the Nazi past can be found in the figure of Max Delius in particular .
  • Ada Brons' coma focuses on active euthanasia , which was hotly debated in the Netherlands at the time of publication.
  • The cause and effect of the student revolution in the Netherlands are particularly thematized in Onno Quist's political career .
  • Mulisch devotes a literary excursion to Cuba, for example, to the contrast between communism and capitalism , which leads to considerable entanglements between world views in the form of different groups of people.
  • The amorous connections and encounters are very reminiscent of the often assumed tolerance of the Dutch and raise the question of the depth and basis of family structures on both sides of traditional marriage .
  • Mulisch is said to have worked parallels from his own biography into the figure of Max Delius , and those of his friend Hein Donner into the figure of Onno Quist .

The work provides a variety of associations from Western mysticism , and in particular also reflects Kabbalistic traditions. These religious themes are in stark contrast to the world of empirical science. In general, the work lives primarily from the encounter of opposites.

Awards

On March 11, 2007, The Discovery of Heaven was voted the best Dutch-language book of all time as part of a campaign by the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad .

filming

The Dutch director Jeroen Krabbé filmed the book in 2001 with Stephen Fry as Onno , Flora Montgomery as Ada and Greg Wise as Max , Neil Newbon as fifths, 16 years old, as well as Gillian Barge as Onno's mother and Diana Quick in other roles . The Discovery of Heaven , the original title of the Dutch-British co-production, is considered the most expensive Dutch film production of all time and won the Golden and Platinum Film Award at the Dutch Gold and Platinum Film Festival. In 2002 he was nominated for the Golden Calf at the Nederlands Film Festival . The Golden Calf for Best Screenplay went to Edwin de Vries for The Discovery of Heaven .

Book editions

  • The discovery of the sky. Novel. From the Dutch by Martina den Hertog-Vogt. Carl Hanser, Munich et al. 1993, ISBN 3-446-17377-3 .
  • The discovery of the sky. Novel. 22nd edition. Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-499-13476-4 (paperback edition).

Radio play adaptation

literature

  • Johanna Spitaler: The relationship between literature and astronomy using the example of Harry Mulisch's De ontdekking van de hemel . Thesis. Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, 2013 ( Online [PDF; 1.5 MB ]).
  • Jürg Laederach : The discovery of the sky. What a game of creation! With Harry Mulisch it remains open whether the author or God is telling the story, in: Die Zeit No. 34, August 16, 2012, p. 50.

Web links