The island of the second face

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Palma today a plaque commemorates Albert Vigoleis Thelen's stay on the island

The island of the second face is the main work of the writer Albert Vigoleis Thelen . The full title reads: “The island of the second face. From the applied memories of the Vigoleis ” .

content

The book describes the stay of Thelens and his wife Beatrice during the years 1931–1936 on Mallorca . The two ended up as bohemian emigrants and fled the island five years later during the Spanish civil war . During these years the couple lived in poor and adventurous circumstances among sometimes dubious characters. It makes the acquaintance of numerous interesting people from all walks of life and, in order to be able to survive, exercises different professions depending on the circumstances, including as a clerk, tour guide, language teacher and hotel manager. In her experiences, the time of Mallorca at that time is reflected as well as the threat posed by the emerging National Socialism .

About the work

Neither a novel nor an autobiography

Thelen's work is difficult to classify. It was - and is still valid for some today - initially as an autobiographical picaresque novel . But the figure of Vigoleis cannot be called Picaro and the book is not a novel either. Thelen plays with the two generic terms in this work, as he associates the autobiographical “I” with his double “Vigoleis” and thus creates a distance to the autobiography when he appears sometimes as an author and sometimes as a hero. In this way, Thelen builds up "a permanent tension between identity and fiction " .

Linguistic style and storytelling technique

Thelen's language is very diverse, he drew from the vocabulary of the six languages ​​he mastered, dug up words and phrases that had already been forgotten and played with the language in creative variations: for example, he found dozens of swear words for his Almost sister-in-law, the whore Pilar , he called her, among other things, "Zaupe", "Hurenstrunzel", "Puttscholle", "Straßenaas", "Schlunte", "horny Schindkracke", "Musche", "Hochkokotte" or "Metze" . Jürgen Pütz has examined and classified Thelen's special vocabulary, he found numerous neologisms in addition to archaisms , technical and colloquial words .

Thelen's spelling is characterized by its many digressions . Again and again his narrative breaks with a keyword and the corresponding story has to be told first. His compatriot Hanns Dieter Hüsch also cultivated this Lower Rhine communication style with its digressions and banklessness in his Hagenbuch stories . Thelen himself described his storytelling technique as "cactus style"; a cactus suddenly blooms briefly in an unexpected place and at an unexpected time, and the places where its offshoots appear cannot be determined beforehand.

Poetry and truth

Palma de Mallorca Cathedral
Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca (Vigoleis tells of the mystically inclined columns in the book .)
In the sacristy of the Charterhouse of Valldemossa Vigoleis describes a supposedly “real nail from the cross of Christ” to a German tour group as “Taeda pestis”, relic of the plague, for lack of knowledge.

The author answers the question of the authenticity of the events and the illustrious group of people appearing in the book in an “instruction to the reader” as a prelude in his book as follows: All the characters in this book live or have lived. Here, however, they only appear in the double consciousness of their personality, including the author [...] In cases of doubt, the truth decides. Much is verifiable and has been documented by his extensive correspondence; among his island encounters were numerous celebrities, such as the British writer Robert Graves , the art collector and patron Harry Graf Kessler and the philosopher Hermann Graf Keyserling .

An anti-fascist book

For Thelen, it was incomprehensible how quickly National Socialism found acceptance in Germany. In many places in the book his strong dislike of the Nazi regime is expressed. The impressive scenes include those in which, as a tour guide, he quickly uses military jargon , when he leads German ship tourists by the nose or by bluffing a refugee who is very unsympathetic to his bank account because he does not allow the Nazis the money. After Franco's putsch, all that remains for him and his Beatrice is the adventurous escape to Portugal.

reception

Thelen read from the manuscript to Group 47 in 1953 . There , as Martin Walser recalled, Hans Werner Richter finished the text with the words: “ We don't need this emigrant in German.” Despite this first judgment, the book nevertheless prevailed - also thanks to an extremely positive review by Siegfried Lenz . Although it was not a bestseller in the usual sense, it has developed, repeatedly discovered by new groups of readers as an insider tip, to this day into a kind of long-seller , which is now considered “one of the great prose books that exist” (Martin Walser). While it was astonishing that a fifty-year-old in 1953 with his debut was discussed in detail and consistently positively by almost all important periodicals, it is also remarkable that the revised new edition 30 years later again triggered a benevolent media response.

Relevant voices about the work (selection)

  • Siegfried Lenz "If a book really deserves to be named an event, then this."
  • Paul Celan called the book "a true work of art" . His reading copy (today in the Marbach Literature Archive ) contains around 4,000 underlinings.
  • When the weekly newspaper Die Zeit conducted its survey on the “ Book of the Century”, the Dutch writer Maarten 't Hart Thelen's work and began his contribution: “For a long time I have believed: the greatest book of this century is Albert Vigoleis' island of second face Thelen. A surprising choice? Maybe, but it was one of Thomas Mann's favorite books . He called it one of the three greatest books of the century. "

literature

Text output

German-language editions

  • 1953: van Oorschot, Amsterdam (3 editions)
  • 1953: Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf (6 editions)
  • 1956–1988: several book club editions
  • 1970: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
  • 1981: Claassen, Düsseldorf, Hildesheim (revised new edition), most recently: Berlin 2003. ISBN 3-546-00340-3
  • 1983: Ullstein-Taschenbuch, last 2005. ISBN 3-548-60514-1

Translations

  • 1988: French translation: L'île du second visage, extraits des souvenirs appliqués de Vigoleis . Traduit par Dominique Tassel. Paris: Fayard 1988.
  • 1993: Spanish translation: La isla del segundo rostro . Traducción Joaquín Adsuar.
  • 2004: Dutch translation: Het eiland van het tweede gezicht uit de toegepaste herinneringen van Vigoleis . Translated by Geert van Oorschot. Home academy iib. 2004.
  • 2010: English translation The island of second sight. From Applied Recollections of Vigoleis . Translator: Donald O'White. New Introduction by Iain Bamforth and Afterword by Jürgen Pütz. Overlock Publ. 2012.
O'White's translation was recognized with the 2013 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize .

Secondary literature

Book and magazine editions

  • Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Edition Lithaus, Berlin 2006. ISBN 3-939305-26-X
  • Jürgen Pütz (Ed.): Lauter Vigoleisiaden or The Second Look at Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Special issue that hears . 199. 2000. ISSN  0018-4942
  • Jürgen Pütz: Albert Vigoleis Thelen. Ore world peasants and language swindlers . edition the hear. Bremerhaven 2003. ISBN 3-89701-984-1
  • Jürgen Pütz: In cases of doubt, the truth is decisive . June, Viersen 1988. ISBN 3-926738-01-4
  • Lexicon of world literature. Works A-K . dtv, Munich 1997. ISBN 3-423-59050-5
  • New manual for contemporary German literature . Nymphenburger, Munich 1990. ISBN 3-485-03550-5

Dissertations on the work

The book has numerous dissertations on the subject, according to Ria Hess: Investigations on Albert Vigoleis Thelens “The Island of the Second Face” (1989), Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen (1990), Klaus-Jürgen Hermaniak: Ein vigolotrischer Weltkucker (1995), Germà García i Boned : La segunda cara de la isla de al segunda cara de Albert Vigoleis Thelen (1998) and Michael Neumann: The Picarian Moralist. AV Thelen's anti-fascist novel "The Island of the Second Face" (2000).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Pütz. In: New manual of contemporary German-language literature since 1945 . Nymphenburger, Munich 1990. ISBN 3-485-03550-5
  2. ↑ Jürgen Pütz: Doppelganger of himself. The narrator Albert Vigoleis Thelen . Edition Lithaus, Berlin 2006. ISBN 3-939305-26-X
  3. ^ Ernst-Jürgen Walberg: Two black sheep from the Lower Rhine or cactus style and Flemish banklessness . In: Jürgen Pütz: In cases of doubt, the truth decides . June, Viersen 1988. ISBN 3-926738-01-4
  4. ↑ P. 416-418 of the dtv 1970 edition
  5. ↑ p. 7 in the first edition from 1953
  6. ↑ Discussion at Phoenix on June 16, 2007. Moderation: Wolfgang Herles
  7. ↑ ibid
  8. ^ Siegfried Lenz: A novel - famous overnight . In: Welt am Sonntag of January 17, 1954
  9. ^ Arno Barnert in: Celan year book . 8 (2001/2002). Pp. 175-202
  10. ↑ Maarten 't Hart : My book of the century . In: DIE ZEIT of May 12, 1999
  11. ↑ Honorable Mention to Donald O. White , Goethe-Institut, Chicago, accessed June 11, 2020

Web links