The cherries of freedom

The cherries of freedom. A report is an autobiographical story by Alfred Andersch published in 1952 , which covers the years 1919 up to his desertion on June 6, 1944.

content

The report, written between January 1951 and June 1952, has the motto “I only build on the deserters” from André Gide's diary entry from May 11, 1941 and consists of three parts.

"The invisible course"

The first-person narrator begins with a reminder of the end of the Munich Soviet Republic , when, as a 5-year-old, he sees columns of arrested "rabble" - according to his father - moving from the window of his parents' apartment to Munich's Oberwiesenfeld. There everyone, as he imagined when he was 14 or 15 years old, was shot on the garage wall of the company “Kraftverkehr Bayern”. He is moved by the question of how someone feels who shoots someone and why he doesn't ask them to flee quickly into a doorway on the way to being shot. But these are thoughts that hardly concern him in his otherwise clockwork childhood and early youth. In the memory, suburban tenement houses, barracks and the high school that dropped out in the lower secondary (grade 8) due to poor performance in Greek blur in a feeling of boredom. For him, confirmation becomes a purely mechanical act that is performed on him. He attributes this to the fact that he later left the Lutheran Church and no longer joined any other religious community. He experiences his father as someone beaten in the war and by the Soviet Republic, who would feel most comfortable in his role as a captain and who leaves the family in debt. Ardent supporter of Hitler and Ludendorff and involved in the Hitler coup , he neglects his trade. After a war injury broke out and a leg first had to be amputated, the narrator witnessed his father's death over two years.

By reading the works of Lenin , Upton Sinclair and the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne, he fell under the spell of revolutionary thought and resistance to National Socialism . When he became a youth functionary and head of organization in the KPD, he noticed more and more how his enthusiasm was dissolving in the party's workers' economy and cell bars. The party seems to him to freeze in bureaucracy, to prevent free will and thus paralyze him too, who wants to be "spontaneous, free, lively and revolutionary" (p. 38) and attack the SA . Inactive, undisguised and without a cover address, he was quickly the victim of persecution by the National Socialists in 1933 and interned for three months until May in the Dachau concentration camp , where he heard the first shots of executions that the SS men with the sentence "shot while trying to escape" comment (p. 43). He was arrested again in September 1933 in connection with the excavation of a communist printing house. The interrogating officer believes his alibi, so that he can leave the Munich police headquarters in the evening. He knows that he will no longer work for the party.

The professional activity of the narrator consists of activities on minor employee posts in offices in the book trade. He hates her and feels affected by a hidden persecution neurosis and deep depression. He sees his way out in art or in cycling trips, which saved him from boredom as a teenager. When Brigadefuhrer Theodor Eicke threatened the narrator that he would shoot him when he was interned again in Dachau, the narrator responded “with total introversion” (p. 46). He loves Rainer Maria Rilke's poems from the Book of Pictures , writes poetry himself and makes the acquaintance of Dr. Herzfeld , who subjects his poems and his understanding of art to harsh criticism and exhorts the narrator to first read more and more variedly. Art is not just aesthetics , but stands for a state of tension that creates moods (p. 49).

In 1938 he worked in a factory for photographic paper in Hamburg and designed advertisements. For a short time he finds someone to talk to in the technical director who runs the scientific laboratory. The man dies of a heart attack when he learns that he has to leave the factory as a “ half-Jew ”.

"The desertion"

On June 6, 1944, “my very little private July 20 ” took place for the narrator (p. 74). It seems to him as if his life had come to the point "on which it had kept its course invisible to me" (p. 59), namely its unit, which was set up for Italy to fight the Americans advancing from Rome, leave in southern Umbria near the Arno. He does not feel obliged to anything by his comrades. Comradeship does not bind him; he rather fears it because it deprives him of his loneliness. So he finds that his comrades strengthen his anarchist feeling, which makes it easy for him to say goodbye. He considers them to be "banned - not under oath" (p. 101). The opponent to be fought is not his, but hers. In 1940 he himself laughed inwardly when he swore the oath, even though he still believed in a German victory under Hitler: "Back then I gave the sewer rat a chance" (p. 90). He sees desertion as the appropriate answer to compulsory military service and the commanded oath.

The trigger for his desertion is no less the fear of having to die in the fight against an opponent who is not his, but that of his comrades. The fact that desertion itself is an act of courage that threatens him in a different way is secondary to him. For him, it is about not being a “living corpse” and enduring the web of courage, fear, reason and passion and in the “mood as the breath of our spirit” (p. 84 ff.) A correct decision for himself and only for himself hold true. He seeks support in a god whom he asks to let him escape into the wilderness (p. 114).

"The wilderness"

Because of an alleged breakdown of his military bicycle, the narrator lags behind the troops and describes the excitement of June 6, 1944 in the very short final chapter. He strikes sideways into the fields and meets a young Italian farmer, who outlines the possibility of how he is going could approach the Americans from the flank in order to be taken prisoner. He gives him his bicycle, throws his carbine into a grain field on the way and finds a wild cherry tree. He picks and eats the “ ciliege diserte , the abandoned cherries, the deserter's cherries, the wild cherries of my freedom”, but the next day he and other prisoners have to collect the bodies of the bombings and fighting in the area that have been lying around from the camp Throwing them into pits at the Nettuno cemetery.

Narrative means

In the headings of the chapters, the first two parts show the two focal points that the author is concerned with. “The invisible course” is subdivided into “The Park at Schleissheim”, “Spilled Beer”, “Balled in Your Pocket” and “The Ferry to the Halligen”. While the plot progresses ostensibly, which the narrator tries to summarize in a short report style by trying to omit the subject in the grammar of the sentence - the first sentences are: “I don't know exactly what time of year the Munich Soviet Republic fell. It's easy to determine. Spring, I think. Was, I think ... “- the narrator catches himself again and again, that he can't keep it up. Because it is always about the reproduction of his moods and reflections, where he has to go further. You are beyond the scope of the pure report. The headings listed in the first part outline the invisible course whose goal the narrator claims to have been deserting in the second part. The Schleißheim park becomes his vanishing point when he can no longer stand in the confines of the middle-class family with his suffering father. The spilled beer and the beer stains on the tables in the meeting rooms of workers and KPD functionaries become an expression of gloomy waiting for something to happen. In his attempts to break out into the foothills of the Alps by bicycle, which he always undertakes alone, he sensed “the possibilities of life, knew that behind the life I was living at the moment there were a thousand other lives waiting for me” (p. 32). In Hamburg, following the ferry boat on the Halligen with his eyes, he flees from the time when the person he was talking to died in the factory.

In the second part - "The desertion" - the concept of chronological reporting, which the narrator tries to adhere to, is abandoned. The report makes a jump to the year 1944, when the narrator at Pentecost (!), A week before the date of his desertion and the simultaneous landing of the Allies in Normandy on June 6, the goal of his invisible course becomes clear, namely “final to be alone]. Alone and free. Except law and order. Taken from the night and the wilderness of freedom ”(p. 60 f.). From this point on, alternating between reflection and report, he circles the circles around his decision to desert that have become narrower since joining the Wehrmacht in 1940. These circles include reflections on “The Comrades”, “The Fear” and “The Oath”, so the chapter headings. In two places the narrator steps out of his narrative role as an author himself more explicitly when he speaks of the task of “my book”, namely “to describe a single moment of freedom” (p. 71, here: p. 84). In a review in the Spiegel it was said that a "novel mixture of autobiographical report, caustic criticism of time and existentialist freedom meditation" made the style.

The short third part aims to outline the “Nu of Freedom”, in which the harshness of consciousness “turns against fate and sets a new fate” (p. 126). To emphasize this moment of freedom, a new break in chronology is required when the narrator shifts the act of eating cherries as the fulfillment of the moment of freedom into the last sentences. Before that, however, he underlines how brief this moment of "the absolute, irresponsible, freedom surrendering to God and nothing" (p. 127) of eating cherries was by anticipating in detail the events of the next day, since he was a prisoner of war of black US - Soldiers are escorted to the battlefield with other prisoners to bury the countless corpses.

reception

The reviewer of the magazine Der Spiegel assumes that the book will "cause a sensation". The lecturer, magazine editor and literary sponsor Hans Georg Brenner considers the book to be "the most essential human statement that war and pre-war produced in Germany: the sovereign person in the crossfire of social constraints, from whose chain reaction we are apparently supposed to continue to suffer". And Heinrich Böll sees the book as "a boon for everyone who hasn't forgotten to think after 1933".

These extremely positive statements are to be understood against the background that desertion or desertion has long been a controversial topic and deserters have long been considered "comrades", traitors and cowards and only very few deserters like Andersch's first-person narrators dared to confess publicly. Claus Leggewie reports in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on December 4, 1981 about the "raging" of a monument dispute over the installation of an additional plaque on the memorial for the victims of fascism in Kassel with the sentence: "We are closing all soldiers in our homeland who are no longer wanted to participate in the war and were therefore sentenced to death by the National Socialists, included in our grief. They are also worth not to be forgotten ”. On May 1, 1987, under the heading “Dishonorable - still”, the Bremen attempt to erect a memorial to “the unknown deserter” was also written in Die Zeit . Only in the present characterized as the “post-heroic age” does a more relaxed discussion seem possible.

Wolfram Wette deduces from the difficult dealings with deserters and “ disruptors of military strength ” that their recognition by the majority of the obedient would have meant “that they should have questioned their own behavior, which was exclusively based on military obedience and a sense of duty, as problematic”.

The narrator is aware of this connection, because in the “Comrade” chapter he speaks about General Hans Speidel in the “latest historical moment” and protests against his finding when Speidel speaks about Rommel's offer of an armistice to the Western powers that such action - for Andersch desertion - in "metaphysical responsibility only the highest military leader could be qualified, justified and obliged, not the individual soldier and officer who could not have such high insight". The narrator's short, ironic comment on his own “high insight as a single soldier” in his “wilderness feeling”: “I had decided to run away. It was clear. "(P. 74)

literature

• Alfred Andersch: The cherries of freedom. A report . Zurich 1968
• Winfried Stephan (Ed.): Materials on "The Cherries of Freedom". To a book and its story . Diogenes Taschenbuch 23345, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-257-23345-0 .
• Wolfram Wette : The Wehrmacht. Enemy images, war of extermination, legends . Frankfurt am Main 2002
• Roland Mager (Ed.): Documents. Revue mensuelle des questions allemandes. No. 4. Rottweiler Verlagsdruckerei, Rottweil April 1953. pp. 289–416 (in French)
• Beate Brenner: "When the war was over ..." Approaches to the German state of mind after the end of the war in 1945. Interdisciplinary, contextual teaching models for selected epic texts (= language and literature studies , volume 5), Utz Wissenschaft, Munich 1998, ISBN 3- 89675-411-4 (Dissertation University of Munich 1998, 262 pages).

Remarks

1. ↑ In the following, the paperback edition by Diogenes (1968) is used.
2. ↑ Materials (2002), p. 60.
3. ↑ Materials (2002), p. 58.
4. ↑ Cf. Group 47 and Helmut Heißenbüttel: "My" or "the" fifties. ( Memento of the original from March 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Materials (2002), p. 68.
6. ↑ Materials (2002), p. 128.
7. ↑ Research from 1991 confirmed the people, dates and places given by the narrator as being consistent with Andersch's own desertion: materials (2002), pp. 23–36.
8. ↑ See Herfried Münkler: Heroic and post-heroic societies
9. ↑ Wolfram Wette, deserters and "Wehrkraftzersetzer", p. 166, in: Wolfram Wette, Die Wehrmacht. Enemy images, war of extermination, legends, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, pp. 165-168.