The have-nots

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Die habenichtse is a novel by Katharina Hacker that was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2006 . He was awarded the German Book Prize.

Action overview

The main plot of the novel takes place in the years 2001 to 2003 in Berlin and London , where the author confronts groups of people from different social classes and attitudes towards life:

  • A family on the verge of livelihood and their lonely children Dave and Sara,
  • 28-year-old Jim from the milieu of drug addicted prostitutes and criminals who dreams of a bourgeois life, who is uncontrollably aggressive in his temper,
  • and the German couple Isabelle and Jakob from the affluent bourgeoisie, who are still looking for personal orientation as well as familiarity and stability as partners.

The first third of the novel (Kp. 1–17) prepares this juxtaposition and the resulting conflict situations by alternating individual chapters, mainly in personal narrative form , exposing the protagonists Isabelle, Jakob, Andras, Jim, Sara and Dave as well as their caregivers and in Informing reviews of their biographies. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 in New York serves as a reference point for the various storylines and as the trigger for the Jakob-Isabelle story and her London adventure in 2003.

Prehistory (2001-2002)

The novel begins with the move of the Saras family and their older brother Dave to Lady Margaret Road in the north of London's Kentish Town (Kp. 1 and 13). In their neighborhood, Jim goes into hiding for some time in his friend Damian's apartment (Kp. 4) to hide from Albert's gang. He slipped into the criminal scene as a drug addict and became financially dependent on Albert and his assistants: They forced him to steal and prostitute (Kp. 17) and use him as a dealer. He lived with the also drug addict and physically and psychologically neglected 25-year-old Mae Warren from Albert's environment, who disappeared after he had beaten her and cut her face with a knife (point 30) (point 4). Since then, he has been looking for her and, while continuing to sell drugs, dreams of liberation from addictions and a better life together (Kp. 10, 12).

The third, around 33-year-old Jakob and Isabelle Metzel, clearly sets itself apart from these milieus. You studied in Freiburg, work as a lawyer or as a designer and partner in a graphic agency (together with Peter and Andras, after Hanna, whose assistant Isabelle worked as their assistant, bequeathed her shares in the company after her death five years ago) in Berlin like a typical single life in her student days: without fixed partnerships and children, at a distance from her parents, in changing shared apartments and groups of friends in private - professional networking. In, fading in their biographies, retrospectives (Kp. 2, 3, 5, 7, 9) this group of people is portrayed, some of them a one-sided dance of love (e.g. the gallery owner Magda → Isabelle's colleague Andras (Kp. 6) → Isabelle → Alexa or Jakob) connects with each other: Isabelle is not yet firmly established in her personality ("Something was always slipped out of her"), has heterosexual relationships on the one hand and lives with the homosexual photographer Alexa in Berlin on the other: ("as if wires were taut [... ] to another life in which Isabelle slept with Alexa, not with Jakob ”).

Jakob has been friends with Hans since his time in Freiburg (Kp. 3). Here you can also find homoerotic aspects, at least on the part of Hans ("they were almost considered a couple. Even Jakob didn't know why Hans stayed alone"). At a party he arranged for him to meet Isabelle again, with whom he had a brief affair 10 years earlier in Freiburg and who has been his dream woman since then, and the next day they begin a relationship that he sees as fateful there he left New York before the attack because of that appointment, while his colleague Robert was killed. Soon afterwards they set up an apartment (Kp. 11) and marry with a small group of friends (Kp. 14). A year and a half later, Jakob (Kp. 7), instead of Roberts, moved to London for a year as a lawyer for property issues and restitutions, together with the Bentham law firm, to represent the claims of expropriated owners of real estate and land in the former GDR . Isabelle accompanies him to the row house in Kentish Town , because as a graphic designer she is not tied to her office in Berlin (Kp. 9).

London (2003)

The three storylines are connected by mutual observations: Isabelle takes the neglected girl next door, who is lagging behind in development, whom the parents hide in the apartment during the day and leave alone (chapter 33), first as a template for her picture stories (chapter 26), then takes care of she takes care of Sara (Kp. 29) and provides medical care (Kp. 38). Jim becomes aware of Isabelle through her resemblance to Mae and initiates encounters with her. Sara's brother Dave, who temporarily looks after his sister, seeks refuge several times with Jim from his violent stepfather (c. 30). In memory of his own childhood, he lets him spend the night in his apartment.

With Isabelle's arrival (bp 19) in March, the London adventure and the test of her marriage begins, in which her expectations, individual imprints, deficits ("because something remained unattainable", Isabell gives the impression of "determination" and "relentless [n ] Aimlessness ") and take secrets with you: z. B. Isabelle doesn't dare to show Jakob the erotic photographs that Alexa took of her, and Jakob is strangely uncomfortable after his return from his first visit to London (part 16) from his new boss, the 66-year-old Bentham , about whose personality he is fascinated, as well as about his office in the law firm. ("Jacob seemed shocked when he [= Andras] asked him about Bentham".). The motif of homoeroticism appears again and again in connection with Bentham (Kp. 27, 31) and Jakob is sensitized to his own effect on men through information from his colleague Alistair about his biography. B. on Hans (cp. 25). On the other hand, the boss, who emigrated from Nazi Germany as a Jew, disillusioned him by questioning his idea of ​​restoring property rights and abstract justice that goes beyond the material (Chapter 22): “Why can't he be the sheer equivalent of something? Why insist on something that is lost, why insist on something being healed? Nothing is cured. ”Later, during a short professional visit to Berlin (Chapter 25), Jakob reflects:“ Refund 'was' a farce, where it was ultimately not about places, but about lost life and memory time […] ”He connects these thoughts with the aspect of his own family losses and "wishes [] [...] to slip into a different skin, to reappear clearer, fresher and more vividly than he had never been". In a conversation with Andras he confesses: “I wonder if it was wise to go to London […] It seems to me that something is slipping away from me there, I just don't know what. [...] things change. "

A similar identity crisis is triggered in Isabelle about two weeks after her arrival by Jakob's fixation on his work: “She didn't know what Jakob was thinking of when he was absent.” Jakob thinks about the properties in Brandenburg while she talks to him about the wants to speak large demonstration against the Iraq war. He forgets her appointment to buy shoes and is hardly interested in cultural events that his wife is curious about. In the days of aimlessness, she often has to explore the city alone and is confused about her ambivalent feelings. B. when her Jim, who spoke to her three days earlier in a café, follows her on a walk in the park, approaches her dominantly and arrogantly and suddenly leaves her standing again with contempt. He flatters that she responds to his advances and follows him to his apartment at the end of the novel, when he is already planning his escape from Albert to Glasgow (chapter 37); at the same time, as a married woman from the middle classes, she is the object of his hatred and humiliation . These encounters are contrasted with the fearful and helpless reaction of Jakobs and his colleagues Anthony and Alistair when they are threatened by 5 men after a King Lear performance on the nocturnal street and Isabelle alone saves the situation. (Cp. 24). As with her dream-reality blurring of a triangular relationship with her husband and Alistair (Kp. 24, 29 :), Jacob's mental and spiritual condition is also reflected in trance-like, traumatic odysseys through the streets of the big city, mixed with sexual fantasies that in one Art stream of consciousness can be told (chap. 27). Isabelle realizes that she is "changing []" in London ("She didn't know how and what it meant") and Jakob senses how they are becoming strangers to each other, but he is not sure whether they were closer in Berlin : "Maybe it was just a change in alienation". At the end of the plot, after Isabelle's adventure with Jim and Jacob's return from his second trip to Berlin, this time with Bentham, both stand sobered and helpless in front of the door of their house that has fallen into the lock (Kp. 39).

reception

For the have-nots has Katharina Hacker 2006 the German Book Prize been awarded; she said, according to the jury's reasoning,

“The story of having and being new. Your protagonists are in their thirties, know everything and yet don't know one thing: themselves. They let themselves be drifted and are equally driven. In a shimmering, atmospherically dense language, Katharina Hacker leads her heroes through historical spaces and into problem areas of the most immediate present, her questions are our questions: How do you want to live? What are your values How should and how can you act? The quality of the novel consists in resolving these questions into stories that are not satisfied with the bold answers from politics and the media. "

Due to the historical background of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the Iraq war that began in March 2003 , as well as the meaningful title, the novel has gained additional attention. Her novel was positively reviewed by Ursula in March 2006 in the Frankfurter Rundschau .

literature

  • Jesko Bender: tell 9/11. Terror as a discourse and text phenomenon . 1st edition. Transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-4014-4 , Chapter: Unheimlicher Terror. On the poetics of repression in Katharina Hacker's Die habenichtse , p. 137–188 (Zugl .: Frankfurt, Univ., Diss., 2016).
  • Julia Catherine Sander: Viewer of Life: Drafts of subjectivity in contemporary German-language literature . 1st edition. Transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 3-8376-3127-3 , chapter: “But what did you have in the end?” - Self and world relationships between defense and vulnerability in Katharina Hacker's Die habenichtse (2006), p. 137–216 (Zugl .: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2014).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hacker, Katharina: The have-nots. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2006.
  2. ↑ Hacker, p. 32
  3. ↑ Hacker, Kp. 9, p. 57
  4. ↑ Hacker, p. 21
  5. ↑ Hacker, p. 115
  6. ↑ Hacker, p. 110
  7. ↑ Hacker, p. 56.
  8. ↑ Hacker, pp. 90, 91.
  9. ↑ Hacker, p. 146.
  10. ↑ Hacker, pp. 187 ff.
  11. ↑ Hacker, p. 190
  12. ↑ Hacker, p. 144.
  13. ↑ Hacker, p. 116.
  14. ↑ Hacker, p. 239
  15. ↑ Hacker, p. 264.
  16. ↑ Katharina Hacker receives the German Book Prize 2006 for her novel Die habenichtse , Die habenichtse on the website of the German Book Prize
  17. ↑ Ursula March: Wall to wall with Sara . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of March 15, 2006.