The galley (Ernst Weiss)
The Galley is Ernst Weiß ' first novel , published in 1913 by S. Fischer in Berlin.
The 26-year-old Viennese physicist Dr. phil. Erik Gyldendal can neither understand women nor get along with his parents.
time and place
The place of action is Vienna. Röntgen discovered X-rays in Würzburg in 1895. At the end of the novel it turns out that Erik had experimented with the rays for seven years. At the end of this period, the novel is about a year or so. So 1905 can be taken as the approximate year of the action.
physics
The banker Gyldendal finances the research of his only son Erik. The talented young physicist researches the effects of X-rays on animals. Erik's laboratory includes a. X-ray tubes (84), a Rühmkorff inductor , an electrometer and an electroscope.
action
Erik is constantly researching diligently. His results are recognized by the luminaries among the Viennese physicists. Erik is allowed to lecture for a few hours a week at the University of Vienna to a small audience: the talented physicist writes on the blackboard with mathematical hieroglyphs - the results of his research. The reward is not missing. Erik becomes an associate professor. The experienced physicist has never touched a woman. There he met the beautiful young Russian Dina Ossonskaja during his lecture. Erik must have this racial woman because the "beast of sex" torments him. The physicist spoils everything with his stupid talk. Dina is just waiting for a word in the direction. That doesn't come and the relationship falls apart. Prior to that, Erik had worked with the young, perfectly healthy Slovak chambermaid Bronislawa Novocek in a similarly clumsy manner. Bronislawa had expected a little tenderness, but the clumsy had fallen upon the sturdy Bronislawa. The country girl had outnumbered the townspeople in night wrestling. From the dream. Bronislawa quit the next day. The love affair with the orphaned Helene Blütner goes deeper. For the first time Erik experiences the joys of physical love. Did Helene get pregnant from Erik's "cruel caresses"? The doctors say no: radiation researchers are unable to reproduce as a result of years of experiments. After a falling out with his mother, Helene supports her lover financially with her modest savings. Erik can continue research. But the goal does not stay with the faithful Helene, but instead approaches her spoiled sister Edith, the future violin virtuoso. Erik thinks that this is now the great love. The bad end follows immediately: Doctors diagnose inoperable skin carcinomas on the right forearm of radiation researcher Erik. In addition, gland metastases have already established themselves in the armpit. The alternative to an immediate forearm amputation is death in at most one year. The budding soloist Edith is not up to this truth. Erik remembers Helene. She comes, but only wants to be a comrade, i.e. a nurse. Helene is now engaged and wants to get married. Erik cannot sleep the night before his operation. He injects himself a lethal dose of morphine . As Erik dawns over, he sees his parents approach his bed; the dear parents, whom he understood just as little in the good life as the four young women Bronislawa, Dina, Helene and Edith.
shape
The description of the psyche of the young scientist, especially the illumination of his relationships with the five women in the novel, is successful and therefore very readable. The heavily applied coloring is surprising. Unfortunately, however, Galley is used in the novel as a metaphor for Erik's being chained to his parents. Together with the daring use of this symbol, which is a bit out of the way in the global romance context, a weakness in form becomes apparent: the narrator uses the word “galley” just as the character Dina Ossonskaya once uses it. Exactly one time is too much. The commentary on the “scene that now follows” also seems awkward.
dimension
In the middle of the novel about the life and death of the physicist Erik, the reader comes across a formula from classical mechanics : v = gt² / 2. Certainly g means the acceleration due to gravity and t means the time . The right side of the equation has the dimension of a length . On the left, however, there is not the usual symbol for a length, but incorrectly that for the speed .
Self-testimony
Ernst Weiß wrote to Martin Buber on July 5, 1912 : "The basic idea was: ... People are bound to one another ..." and "The second idea: The hero [Erik] ... is the most brutal egoist." This leads to his "isolation". From this Erik flees "into death".
reception
- On February 8, 1914, Kafka wrote to Grete Bloch: "You have to put your head through the constructive elements that surround the novel like a grille, but then you can really see what is alive until you are blinded."
- According to Berthold Viertel , “despair is inexorably written down with twitching scarcity”.
- The "novel happening" is "overloaded by the subjectivity of the descriptions" and the "storylines" are not "closed".
- According to Wendler, the "attitude is impressionistic - addicted to life - close to death".
- Albert Ehrenstein calls Erik a "knight of death".
literature
source
- Ernst Weiss: The galley. Novel . 191 pages. Collected Works, Volume 1. Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-04272-6
expenditure
Secondary literature
- Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Ernst White . Issue 76 of the magazine Text + Criticism. Munich, October 1982. 88 pages, ISBN 3-88377-117-1
- Margarita Pazi : Ernst Weiss. Fate and Work of a Jewish Central European Author in the First Half of the 20th Century . Vol. 14 of the series of Würzburger Hochschulschriften on modern German literary history, Ed. Anneliese Kuchinke-Bach. Frankfurt am Main 1993, 143 pages, ISBN 3-631-45475-9
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . S. 658. Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ White p. 47
- ↑ White p. 41
- ^ White p. 155
- ↑ White p. 45
- ↑ White p. 96
- ↑ White p. 97
- ^ White p. 162
- ↑ White p. 31
- ↑ White p. 32
- ↑ White p. 37
- ↑ White p. 114
- ^ White p. 157
- ^ White p. 187
- ↑ White pp. 51,100,187
- ↑ White p. 84, 16.Zvo
- ↑ White p. 99
- ↑ White p. 112
- ^ Pazi p. 5.6
- ↑ a b Pazi p. 8
- ↑ Pazi p. 6.7
- ↑ Wolfgang Wendler: The philosophy of weightlessness . in: Arnold S. 21
- ↑ Margarita Pazi: The death motif in Ernst Weiss . in: Arnold S. 60
- ^ Pazi p. 139