The dogs and the wolves

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The dogs and the wolves appeared in Paris in 1940 with the French title " Les chiens et les loups " and is the last novel published during Irène Némirovsky's lifetime . It was released in Germany in 2007 and continues the (re) discovery of Némirovsky's work, which began with the posthumous first publication of “ Suite française ” (2004 / German 2005), from which in 1930 and 1931 David Golder and “ Der Ball ” started German had appeared. “ The dogs and the wolves ” tells the story of Ada Sinner, who was born in a Ukrainian Jewish ghetto at the beginning of the 20th century , emigrated to Paris with relatives in 1914 before the outbreak of World War I , but in the 1930s as a stateless person from France is shown. While her husband goes to South America with his mother, her lover stays in Paris with his French family, she gives birth to her first child in a hotel in an Eastern European country for which she has received a visa .

content

The novel is written in an experienced speech with occasionally hinted authorial sprinkles (cf. introduction of chapter 6 or beginning of chapter 12: "It is characteristic of the Jewish spirit that ..."), so that the author from the perspective of each The focus is on a person who can develop a network of actions around the main character Ada Sinner.

Chapters 1 to 11

The first third of the novel is set mainly in the lower town, in the Jewish ghetto of an unspecified Ukrainian town during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II until May 1914. The five-year-old orphan Ada Sinner lives there with her father and maternal grandfather . Ada gets to know the world outside the ghetto when her father, who works as a middleman for all common goods in Ukraine, visits customers through the city quarters from the hell of those condemned in the ghetto to the middle-class city to the upper class at the height of the “residences of the elect ”. Jews can also live there who, through their wealth, have succeeded in using bribes to obtain the right to live outside the streets assigned to them. The family is completed when their father Israel brings his newly widowed sister-in-law with their daughter Lilla and their son Ben into their home. For the sister-in-law - Ada's aunt Rhaissa - this is a forced social decline. Because as the wife of a printing shop owner, she had already belonged to the "normal mortals" of the middle class in the middle town halfway up the upper town. Aunt Rhaissa reminds her brother-in-law of the members of the Sinner clan who live with the “elect” and whose success Israel's grandfather played a major role in, while Ada's maternal grandfather, a handsome old man, set his ambition on learning, the ghetto for had escaped an educational trip through Europe and is now writing a book about " Shylock's Character and Honor Rescue " (p. 17). Ada has access to his library. With her older cousin Lilla, Ada goes on excursions out of the ghetto, so that they come to the upper town near the estate of the Sinner family of bankers. There she notices a boy in a cream-colored suit made of raw silk with a shimmering collar: His name is Harry Sinner. From then on, he becomes her admired companion and conversation partner in her fantasy world. Her cousin Ben, as old as Harry, sees himself challenged by him. Because Ada reveals his name because for her he would be the better leader of the children's society that she had thought up with Ben. This children's society should consist of all children of Russia including the children of the tsarist family and should leave the adult world with their worries in favor of a distant country. On the run from a pogrom directed against the ghetto , she leads Ben to the upper town, which means that the banking family takes care of the family in the ghetto and supplies Israel with orders. In this way, Israel's family can move up to the middle town and have the children taught by a French companion and their talents promoted. In an event of the " Alliance française " - Ada is now painting. “She spoke French now; she could curtsey; she was now 'like the others' ”(p. 74) - she is officially introduced by Mme Mimi to Harry, who shrinks from her like“ a well-groomed dog ”from“ the hungry howling of wolves ”(p. 85). When Mme Mimi wants to return to Paris, Ada and her aunt Rhaissa join her with Lilla and Ben, because France, unlike Russia, promises young people a better future. Israel Sinner will send money to France until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution .

Chapters 12 to 30

With the death of Harry's father, his family also moved to Paris, where two uncles - Salomon and Isaak - continue the banking business under the tutelage of Harry. The chances for Rhaissa and the three children entrusted to her care are less good. Rhaissa and all family members run a tailoring business, which Ada and Ben can only avoid when Ben, when he comes of age, can convince Ada to marry him. Lilla seeks shelter in a Parisian vaudeville . Ben gets the necessary marriage papers for the underage Ada, and the two set up a life of their own, in which Ben takes care of the necessary maintenance and Ada can continue to draw and paint. She doesn't love Ben, but gets involved in the purely purpose-based community proposed by Ben. She has known for some time that Harry lives one arrondissement further, namely in the posh sixteenth. She has already seen him standing on a balcony with a tea dance and looked at him “greedily” with her deep, sharp painter's eyes: “'The Jewish type', she thought, 'sickly, intelligent and sad. Can he please those rosy blond girls? ' (...) I could (...) become an old woman without having spoken to you, or on the contrary, marry someone other than you, but I will never forget you. I will never stop loving you ”(p. 102 f.). With bitter irony, she sees Dante and Beatrice in Harry and themselves, who can later become Samson and Delila (pp. 150, 207).

At the same time as Ben and Ada, Harry is planning his wedding, but has to court and fight for his future wife Laurence longer because he, as a stranger - “whether Slav, Levantine, Jew,” says Laurence's father, who doesn't know “which one of them Words repelled him more ”(p. 125) - cannot marry into the respected local banking family Delarcher so quickly. This is connected to the Sinner Bank, but the Delarchers feel an almost physical dislike for Salomon and Isaak because of their "quiet, creeping, cat-like walk" and other peculiarities (p. 126). Although Laurence doesn't like a “ Capulet Montagu ” story, she resists her father's negative attitude, so that after his reluctant reluctance to give in, she gives Harry her first kiss (p. 131). But she does not find a proper relationship with Harry's love, which she calls "your oriental love, your wild love" (p. 155). In a dispute with her mother-in-law about questions of upbringing, she indicates that her young son is not concerned with the soft ideas of the Jewish race, but with "perseverance, the sacrifice, the control of body and soul" (p. 199 ).

Ada succeeds in drawing Harry's attention to herself through the evocation of childhood spent in Ukraine, which she portrays in her pictures. Harry confesses to Ada that her appearance on the run from the pogrom is one of his "most tangible childhood memories", "one of the sharpest that pierces me even now and that I see again in dreams" (p. 150). In her poor apartment, he admires her way of life, namely "not needing relationships, toilets, or the perfect décor" "that Laurence loved so much" (p. 203). Harry wants to marry her. His mother sees a curse in the relationship, namely Ada's attempt to drag Harry down to the "lower town". Laurence recognizes "a dark call of the blood" (p. 201), which makes her resign and agree to the separation. Ada, on the other hand, hesitates because she is sure of Harry's in a completely different way: “You can forget me, turn away from me, leave me, you will always be mine, only mine. I made you up my love You are much more than my lover. You are my creation. Therefore you belong to me, almost against your will ”(p. 203).

Meanwhile, Ben's business has been taken into the confidence of the old Sinner uncles, who pull their strings behind Harry's back. Ben's work seems to promise them higher chances of winning for the bank than Harry's deliberate behavior. Ben takes highly speculative actions on international markets, especially with the insecure nation-states in Eastern Europe that have emerged since the First World War . Due to an excess of imponderables, Ben gets everything out of control, so that he forges signatures, but cannot stop the collapse of the Sinner family and his arrest is imminent. Laurence's father's long-established banking house Delarcher is ready to intervene if this can save Laurence and Harry's marriage on the one hand and the bank's reputation on the other. In order to forestall the scandal and a lawsuit, it is ensured that Ben and all members of his family are expelled from France and have to leave the country within eight days.

Chapters 31 to 33

In the short final part it becomes clear how many people living in France, whose “air of happiness” also spoiled Ada (p. 205), fear for their right to stay as non-naturalized foreigners and have to reckon with a deportation notice due to a crisis: in the eyes of the Locals are all Jewish rabble, adventurers, emigrants and those who have come here (p. 217). Ben has gone to South America and asks his mother to have children. Canada, Brazil and Venezuela are mentioned in the conversations of the people with whom Ada is still in contact as addresses for possible refuge. She herself receives a visa for a small country in Eastern Europe that is shaken by civil war and strikes. Their first child, Harry's son, is born in a hotel in which mainly exiles from Central Europe live - many medical students and midwives (p. 248). A roommate - expelled first from America, then from Germany; two sons in another European country and a daughter in another, the husband in the concentration camp (p. 247) - stands by her side when Ada enumerates her riches: “The painting, the little one, the courage. (...) 'We feel good,' said Ada. "

subjects

Social conflict potential

Against the background of the final catastrophe of the Second Thirty Years War , Némirovsky places the people she portrays in contexts of action that express the general social crisis:

  • Poverty and wealth in revolutionary Russia, which in Némirovsky's perception can make the poor "greedy" and wolves both in the material (Ben) and in the emotional area (Ada) and which trigger the migration movements from Eastern Europe to the West (cf. stateless persons );
  • Adaptation to society (Isaak and Salomon Sinner, Ben and Harry on different levels each) or voluntary outsider in art in the "air of happiness that one breathes in this country" (Ada);
  • the rejection of adaptation and the xenophobia that erupts at any time in the French national society, which has also been unbalanced as a result of the global economic crisis and which seems ready to quickly sacrifice its civilizational standard.

Subjects in the literary motifs

Némirovsky reshaped her subjects with literary motifs , which she incorporated into her plot structure right from the start when she bases the social stratification in the Ukrainian city on the model of Dante's afterlife in the Divine Comedy and describes the overall Jewish living conditions in the tsarist society . Or when she dresses Harry as a dandy or as an Eton student (p. 83) and lets his name be identical to that of Dorian Gray 's fatherly friend , Lord Henry Wotton (= Lord Henry or Harry). The desire for love towards Harry expressed in Ada is immersed in the memory of Dante and Beatrice in an aura of minnesong , as Shakespeare knows, for which the proverbial " balcony scene " from Romeo and Juliet , which Némirovsky describes in Chapter 13, stands for of the first excursion by Ada to the villa of the Sinners in Paris evoked in detail. The social criticism expressed by Oscar Wilde and generally in the fin de siècle finds its echo in Némirovsky when art, as Ada understands, becomes an individualistic substitute for religion in a civilizational-materialistic secularized world.

Orientalism , exoticism , l'art pour l'art bring the forms of expression that emerged in the 19th century as romanticizing movements of escape and longing to the concept of Western secularization, for which the poem " Le vase brisé " by Sully Prudhomme in the novel and 1906 published and in 1931 with Josephine Baker made famous chanson called " La petite Tonkinoise " (p. 71). Némirovsky, however, highlights the duality of these points of view. If the immediate interests and emotional states of the people are touched, they turn into xenophobic prejudices from aggressive arrogance. As is the case with Laurence, when she describes Harry's desire for love as too “wild” and “oriental” (p. 155) or pretends to fear his “extremely unpleasant hysterical side” (p. 161). This side can also be expressed in Harry's mother in contrast to her correct and disciplined sisters-in-law, who wear strict English costumes and whose cultured heights she has not yet climbed, when they "knead their ring-covered hands, clink their eyelids, moan," sigh, in short, must express in a spectacular way the feelings "which oppress her and which were serious, deep and simple" (p. 119 f.). - Ben relies on his uncles' oriental natures and their greed, which he believes he senses under their European civilization (p. 166). At the same time he can accuse Harry in an angry argument of the "European fuss" when the latter urges caution, but behind his words of "success, victory, love, hate" he only sees the echo of the money he has already earned. - Némirovsky shows ironic criticism of the admiration of Ada's pictures by Harry's European civilized friends when she lets them perceive them as “a wild and strange, but true poetry”. In Ada's studio, she is drawn to admiring exclamations "like in a zoological garden in front of a rare wild animal in its cage". “What you do is so authentic, of course wild! And that's exactly what is delightful! ”A woman who studies Ada through her lorgnette finds“ something Dostoevsky-like ”about her. - The expulsion notices issued in large numbers then show how a society in a crisis unexpectedly distanced itself from its stereotypes of the admired “wild”, “oriental” and “exotic” and only included “alien art ” or “ degenerate art ” Perceives images of Marc Chagall and also targets the “ foreign nationals ” themselves, for whom the concentration camps mentioned by Némirovsky are set up across Europe (p. 247), if they can no longer emigrate.

reception

Ulrike Künnecke calls the novel “a great rediscovery”: “Irène Némirovsky is only slowly becoming known in German-speaking countries. This may also be due to the fact that her brilliant descriptions of people and milieus can hardly be read in this country without deep anxiety. As successful as the portraits of the Jewish writer are, the line between sharp irony, a biting, dissecting look and traces of anti-Semitism is sometimes frighteningly narrow in her descriptions. Perhaps it would take more than sixty years before it was even possible to read Némirovsky's fascinating novels here, today - and from scratch. "

For Bernhard Walcher, in Literaturkritik.de it is a “breathtaking novel” in stylish language with a broad literary-historical horizon. "And again and again she (di Irène Némirovsky) knows how to trace the darkest abysses of the people in detail and psychologically convincing, without bringing charges - which she, like no other, would have had the right to do."

Arno Widman writes in the " Frankfurter Rundschau " about the "strength of magic" one of the most important authors of the first half of the 20th century in this novel too. “She takes possession of the reader. It nests in him so that he can no longer distinguish where his thinking ends and that of the author begins. It makes us more sensitive and wiser. She does it by all means. There is a sweetness in Némirovsky's stories, such a powerful desire for a happy life, for the beautiful sentence, the fairytale tone, that it would be unbearable if there wasn't the reality of annihilation, the experience, in every line and between almost every word of blind, angry hatred intervened. And vice versa."

Remarks

  1. ↑ The quotation is based on the 2007 edition published by Knaus Verlag in Munich.
  2. ↑ Access to Moscow and Saint Petersburg is completely forbidden for Jews (p. 84).
  3. ↑ When Harry complains about the speculative building erected behind his back at Salomon (p. 192) and says that "this secrecy that you can feel in your environment (...) is the cause of so much hatred", he replies with pride and irony: “Do you think you scare me? Poor child! Have I seen anything other than hate so far? He is one of the elements that shaped my life. Is the fish afraid of the water? ”Harry's impression remains that his uncles didn't like“ that you could see through them ”(p. 194).
  4. ^ In their foreword to the novel " Le maître des âmes " (1939, new 2005), the Némirovsky biographers Philipponnat and Lienhardt point out how French doctors defended themselves against foreign, allegedly underqualified competition in 1933 and 1935. This becomes the subject of Némirovsky's fictional character Dario Asfar, the Levantine doctor who was initially unwelcome in French society , also a “loup affamé” (= starved wolf) (cf. p. 23 in the preface to the 2006 paperback folio). Némirovsky recalls this with the exiled medical students in the Eastern European hotel (p. 248).
  5. ↑ Ulrike Künnecke
  6. ↑ Bernhard Walcher
  7. ↑ Arno Widman

literature

Secondary literature

  • Hans Sedlmayr, loss of the middle. The fine arts of the 19th and 20th centuries as a symptom and symbol of the times , Frankfurt a. M. - Berlin - Vienna: Ullstein 1985 (10th edition). ISBN 3-548-34291-4 .
  • Oswald Spengler , The Downfall of the Occident . Outlines of a morphology of world history , Munich: dtv 1997 (13th edition, first 1923). ISBN 3-423-30073-6 .
  • Martina Stemberger, Irène Némirovsky. Phantasmagoria of Strangeness , Würzburg (Königshausen & Neumann) 2006. ISBN 3-8260-3313-2 .