The learned republic

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The learned republic is a dystopian novel by Arno Schmidt ,written in 1957, in which hesatirically describesthe potential consequences of an atomic third world war and the ideal city " IRAS " ( International Republic for Artists and Scientists ).

The title varies a work title by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock from 1774 by including several motifs : The German Republic of Scholars. Your establishment. Your law. History of the last state parliament. By order of the Alderman by Salogast and Wlemar.

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In 2008 - a few years after a nuclear war , Europe no longer exists - the American reporter Charles Henry Winer made two travel reports. He is presented as Schmidt's great-great-nephew, not without real reference to Schmidt's real great-nephew . His experiences are so delicate that he is not allowed to publish them in any living language. That is why he had everything translated into extinct German by a scholar who seems to have misunderstood some things and tried to comment on them in footnotes.

In the first part of the book, the protagonist visits and describes the so-called "hominid strip" in the western United States, which is cordoned off by gigantic walls, and discovers different mutants there that arose as a result of the radiation. A centaur even falls in love with him, other mutants are sexually abused by the guards.

In the second part of the novel, Arno Schmidt designs an ideal city in the form of a mobile island in the mild horse-breadth of the Pacific. The learned republic is conceived as the ideal refuge of world culture from further world wars to come. It is a steel floating island (a map of the island is provided) on which a little over 800 selected scientists, writers and artists - plus many times more staff - from all over the world live and work under ideal conditions. (By the way, you are threatened with expulsion if you have no work of art worth mentioning or no attempt at it after two years.) The island has mainly a 'western', US and an 'eastern', Soviet district. In between there is a precarious neutral zone, also for the administration, with many functionaries from the ' Third World '. USSR and US scientists are secretly doing different human experiments.

About form and content

The formal and content-related bond between the two parts raises many literary questions. Whether Arno Schmidt used the “ lemniscate ” pattern from the prose form test series (in his calculations ) (at the intersection of which both parts begin and end, that is, when he arrives and departed) and whether in part 1 he included the unintentionally created Wanted to distinguish hominid forms from those specifically bred in the 2nd part, remains open. Schmidt took over the design of the floating island including the machines running against each other at the end of Jules Verne's Propellerinsel and Verne is portrayed as the inventor in the IRAS picture gallery.

At the end it is quoted from Hölderlin's Ode An die Parzen - presumably after the edition of Will Vespers adjusted in 1945 by a foreword : "Once I live like gods, and that's all I need", when the protagonist Winer, still appalled by the one on the human experiments carried out on an artificial island, returns to his "American" homeland. The quote is important for Die Schehrten Republik, as Winer remembers at the same time Holderlin and the centaur he loved on the way, Thalja, who represents both mythological and natural beings. She stands in clear contrast to the frozen figures who populate the learned republic without fulfilling their historically necessary task as artists or scientists. The scholarly republic is heading towards its downfall, because its inhabitants cannot overcome the ideological fronts between East and West even after the catastrophe of a nuclear war. Winer, on the other hand, is saved by recourse to the history of literature. Because according to Schmidt's romanticizing understanding, for the duration of the Frankfurt cohabitation Hölderlin and Susette ("Diotima") Gontard, the biographical situation of a poet and the literary product of the Ode to the Parzen, because of their mythological reference , harmonized in an ideal-typical way as did the lovers Winer and Thalja, even if the transformation of Hölderlin's philosophical myth into a sodomite context cannot be overlooked with Arno Schmidt.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Arno Schmidt: The learned republic. Fischer Bücherei, 1965, pp. 79–80.