The midday woman

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Die Mittagsfrau (2007) is the most successful novel by the German writer Julia Franck (* 1970) to date . Based on the protagonist's perceptions, he tells the life story of Helene Würsich alias Alice Sehmisch, from her childhood in Bautzen at the beginning of the 20th century , the 1920s as a young adult in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, to her life as a wife and mother during the Nazi regime . In the prologue and epilogue of the novel, however, Helene's son Peter takes center stage. The prologue follows Peter on the day when Helene leaves her seven-year-old son alone at a train station in the turmoil of the post-war period. The epilogue tells of how Peter experienced an attempt by his mother to visit him for the first time ten years later.

When Franck opens the novel in the prologue with the scene of such a child abandonment, this must count as the premise of the novel. Based on the abandonment of a child, Franck designs a social and development novel that focuses on a German-Christian-Jewish woman. The novel deals with the emergence, denial and fragility of identity and its familial, political and religious conditions. Based on the events described, the novel provokes moral and ideological questions about self-determination, educational opportunities and survival conditions during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism.

The title of the novel is based on the Slavic legend of the midday woman .

The novel was awarded the 2007 German Book Prize. It has been translated into 37 languages, including German and Danish Braille , and has sold over a million copies worldwide.

content

The prologue of the novel begins in the immediate post-war period in Szczecin, which was badly damaged by bombing . Seven-year-old Peter, from whose point of view the prologue is being told, survived the bombing raids in the summer of 1944 and early 1945, but lost his school friend Robert in the process. Peter is often left alone in the shared apartment by his mother "Alice", who works in shifts as a nurse. He discovers a letter from his father stating that the wife and son left during the war and started a new life. In the summer of 1945 Alice promises her son that they too will "disappear". But when Peter returns home from school early on that day, he involuntarily witnesses his adored mother being raped by Russian soldiers on the kitchen table. During the subsequent escape in overcrowded trains towards Berlin, mother and son have to change trains in Pasewalk . Alice asks her son at the train station to wait a moment because she wants to buy tickets, but she doesn't return to Peter. The child longingly spells out his mother's name: Alice. It is only much later that the reader will learn that this is not her real name. At this point the novel changes the narrative perspective for the first time: Her life is now described from Helene's point of view, which one day leads to the decision to take on another name and, much later, to that of separating from her child.

Helene, born in Bautzen in 1907 , grew up with her sister Martha, who was nine years her senior, in a middle-class and cramped environment. Her father Ernst Ludwig Würsich runs a small print shop. He idolizes his wife Selma, but her mental health deteriorates with age. As a Silesian Jew , Selma is avoided by the townspeople; she is considered a “stranger”. Selma is increasingly isolating herself from her own family and society, and in the end hardly ever leaves her room, which is her only refuge. When the parents were once called to school because of the striking intelligence and learning speed of their little daughter Helene, the news did not evoke any benevolent response from them. Higher education is not provided for girls in the middle class. Selma ignores her daughters or treats them with impatience, anger and coldness. She has mourned her four sons for years because she lost each of them after their birth. She has a massive passion for collecting simple and bizarre objects and is increasingly losing touch with reality. Helene in particular seeks closeness to her mother, but this is not granted to her.

During her mother's outbursts of anger, the much older Martha tries to protect her little sister. Against the neglecting ignorance of the mother, the daughters form a kind of emergency community. They give each other closeness and security and share a thirst for knowledge and the beginning of their sexuality. Martha explains the mental absence of the mother by saying that she is "blind to the heart". When the father has to go to war, both of them actively take care of the financial support of the family: Martha works as a nurse in the hospital, Helene only does the bookkeeping and inevitably takes over all the work in the small print shop, while the mother is in a twilight state of mental health resides secluded on the upper floors.

The First World War completely destroyed the family. After six years, the father returns home seriously injured. He lost an eye and a leg without ever being involved in combat. He has severe inflammation in the stump of his leg and his fever suggests that he has typhoid . The mother closes herself off to the dying father until shortly before his death and leaves the care to the daughters. It was at this time that Helene, who was already being taught many medical aspects by her sister, discovered Martha's incipient addiction to morphine. Here at the latest there are signs that Helene will worry more about Martha than she can take care of the much younger Helene. When the inflation brought the printing shop to a standstill in the years after her father's death, Helene also learned to be a nurse, but both sisters' salaries were barely enough to support their mother, the housemaid Mariechen and themselves . Helene turns out to be a talented nurse, she dreams of studying medicine, but for which there is no high school diploma, access or funds.

Finally Martha and Helene seek contact with a distant aunt, Fanny Steinitz, a cousin of their mother who lives in Berlin. After some correspondence, Fanny asks the girls to come to her. Since the mother's financial situation seems to be temporarily secured by an inheritance, the daughters leave her behind with Mariechen in Bautzen and leave for Berlin for a first visit.

In the house of Berlin's aunt Fanny, a wealthy Jewish lady, the sisters meet the bohemians of the twenties , artists, established and failed existences, cocaine and lavish party nights. Martha gets a job as a nurse and makes contact with her childhood sweetheart Leontine, a doctor who practices at the Charité , teaches at the university and lives in a pro forma marriage. A passionate love affair develops between Martha and Leontine, of which Helene often becomes an involuntary witness because she shares a room with her sister. Thanks to her aunt, Helene got a job in a pharmacy and attended evening school for her Abitur. The stay in Berlin soon lasted for years, during which the girls were informed by letter from Mariechen about the mother's condition and tried to secure her livelihood in Bautzen from a distance.

For Helene, staying in Fanny's apartment is becoming more and more torture. Martha's growing addiction to morphine and the relationship with Leontine separate the sisters from one another. In addition, Helene suffers from the sexual harassment by Erich, a lover of Fanny's, unnoticed by the other residents. On her nineteenth birthday, Helene met the student Carl Wertheimer in a Berlin club and fell in love with him. Helene and Carl share a passion for literature and philosophy, they chat in literary quotations, discuss philosophical questions, and have a mentally and sexually equal relationship. Despite their very different origins (he comes from an upper-class and noble Jewish family who is based in the south of Berlin on the elegant Wannsee, is the son of a renowned astronomer and is looking forward to a no less great career as a philosopher, she comes from the simple bourgeois Bautzen, is a half-orphan after the death of his Protestant father, whose printing works fell victim to the inflation, and the only halachically Jewish woman because of her Jewish mother) Helene moves to Carl in the student attic, where they still live together without a marriage certificate. When Helene suspects she may be pregnant, she secretly undergoes an abortion with Leontine's help, without Carl's knowledge. Even though she agreed to marry Carl, a child would stand in the way of her study plans. This already indicates the conflict in which Helene will later find herself as a mother. Within the relationship, Helene feels a stranger when Carl talks about his upper-class origins and his family and is therefore only ready to get to know his parents after some time. A few days before the planned visit to her future in-laws, Carl Helene excitedly calls the pharmacy, he wants to meet her in the middle of the day. Helene suspects that he would like to give her the ring for engagement. On the way to their date, Carl is hit by a car and dies.

After Carl's death, Helene falls into a deep depression . When Martha had to go to a rehab clinic soon afterwards, Helene was alone with Aunt Fanny and Erich in the Berlin apartment. She finds work in a hospital and moves into a nurses' home. She does not make contact with her colleagues or other people. It is the beginning of the 1930s, the National Socialists gain influence and come to power. When the engineer Wilhelm persistently woos her, she initially behaves repulsively. Helene learns that her mother has been admitted to a closed clinic in Pirna . Together with Wilhelm, she goes to visit her mother, finds her in a miserable condition, but is not allowed to take her from the clinic. During the visit, Helene not only experiences her powerlessness, but also suspects - together with the reader, who has to recognize the systematic research and killing institute of the National Socialists from historical knowledge in the clinic - that she is in danger. As the daughter of a Jewish woman, Helene is known to the National Socialists as a so-called half-Jewish woman, a first-degree hybrid. She is not allowed to freely choose a job, study or marry a German. Most half-Jews, like Jews, were disenfranchised and had to do forced labor by the end of the 1930s at the latest, many of them were imprisoned in labor camps, some in concentration camps. On the return journey on the train, Helene agrees to Wilhelm's marriage proposal, for which he will get her the new name Alice and false papers. Wilhelm is an enthusiastic engineer and apparently sympathizes with the political ideas of the National Socialists. Wilhelm moves to Stettin with his bride, where new professional challenges await him.

On the wedding night, Wilhelm realizes that Helene did not enter the marriage virgin, whereupon his image of her and thus their relationship fundamentally changes. He feels duped and snubbed. From the first day of the marriage on, he humiliates and abuses Helene, who does not meet his conservative expectations. He would like to own and rule her, her sexual freedom and education are repugnant to him. Wilhelm justifies his wife's “misconduct” with her Jewish origin; a betrayal of Helene would endanger his own existence, which is why he tries to preserve the appearance of marriage and its Aryan origin. With her wedding, Helene apparently shed her old identity - she became Alice Sehmisch and increasingly lost contact with her old life and with herself. In the years that followed, this loss of identity was accompanied by a loss of language. The formerly inquisitive and literature-loving Helene complies with the traditional wishes of her husband and from now on mainly pursues domestic duties. When Helene becomes pregnant despite many precautions and against her will, Wilhelm announces with contempt that he does not want to take care of “her brat”. After the birth of Peter, Wilhelm spends more and more time outside the family, until he finally leaves them completely. During the war years, Helene worked as a sister in a Szczecin hospital, where more and more war wounded and wounded arrived. After a number of letters and years of hoping for an answer, Helene found out from an encrypted letter from Leontine, who wrote her under a false name, that Martha had been deported and that her mother "died in Großschweidnitz of acute pneumonia". The reader suspects that she was murdered in the killing center. Helene sacrifices herself in shift work for her work and patients, often taking on two shifts in a row; in this way she largely bypasses her own and private life; She provides her little son with the essentials, formally caring and conscientious, she cleans, cooks, sews him clothes, gives him to kindergarten during the day and a neighbor's care at night when she goes to work, and leaves him when he comes to school , often alone in the afternoons and at night (which was common in those days when women had to work and their children became “key children”). She cannot share physical and spiritual closeness or even warmth with her son any more than with another person. She cannot give her son Peter the answers he has asked for, cannot explain to him where she spends her days or why he should not sing ridicule rhymes against Jews. If he learns their true identity, he could endanger both lives. Helene's silence goes hand in hand with a growing inadequacy that she herself experienced half powerless, half reflexively, but in any case felt desperate and sobering, which has auto-aggressive features and reminds her of her mother's behavior. From today's perspective one would say that Helene is suffering from depression or trauma (due to the loss of Carl), possibly also from burnout . It becomes clear to the reader as well as to Helene herself that she is neither willing nor able to look after her child appropriately. After the end of the war, she made very careful arrangements to abandon her child. She just can't talk to him, instead she hides the address of the uncle on his father's side in his luggage. Mother and son leave the now Polish city and Helene leaves Peter sitting on the platform without saying goodbye (prologue).

The epilogue, again based on Peter's perceptions and told around the time of his 17th birthday, describes Peter's life on his uncle's farm near the Baltic Sea in Gelbensande, Rostock district. Peter is needed by his uncle and aunt to help out on the farm, but at the same time they reproach him for his presence; for them he is an additional eater who is only disapproved of. Now, after ten years, Helene announces her first visit, she would like to see her son. Peter hides from his mother in the attic of the stable and watches her arrival, he does not follow anyone's calls and lets her leave without showing herself.

Biographical background

The biographical starting point of the novel is the life story of Julia Franck's father, which she had already edited in her short story "Streuselschnecke" in relation to his death. Franck's father, who was born in Stettin in 1937, was abandoned by his mother on a platform a few months after the end of the war in 1945. Julia Franck researched that her father's mother had died in 1996 and never spoke about the abandoned son in the second half of her life:

“There was this incident in my family - and I explicitly say an incident - because the story is missing. My father was born in Szczecin in 1937. He and his mother left for the west in 1945 in the course of the expulsion. On the first platform west of the Oder-Neisse border, she asked him to wait and said that she would be back soon. She never did. It shaped my father a lot. He was a very subtle and intelligent person. He died of a brain tumor at the age of 49. At that time I had only just gotten to know him. I often visited him in the hospital, we discussed a lot, but never talked about his mother. When I had my first child almost seven years ago, it became a burning question of what could have led a woman to abandon her child and be convinced that he would be better anywhere else than she was. ..] At the end of the nineties I went looking for this grandmother and found out that she died in 1996 near Berlin. Distant friends of my grandmother told me that she had lived with her sister in a one-room apartment for decades and neither of them had let anyone into their lives. She never mentioned a child. I find the decision to absolutely deny motherhood and attachment to a child both strange and unsettling. I wanted to investigate and find a story for this woman. "

- Julia Franck : Interview with Die Zeit , 2007

Like the protagonist Helene, Julia Franck is of Jewish origin, which she seldom explicitly emphasizes in her journalistic publications. However, her literary work is testimony to her exploration of her Jewish ancestry, attitude, and identity.

subjects

The midday woman can be read in the context of contemporary debates about motherhood and has triggered such. As in other of her novels, Julia Franck presents female characters who can hardly or hardly want to fulfill their task and role as mother, at least not in the form that is expected of them. Society's expectations of mothers are thematized from the beginning of the novel, as Helene's plot conflicts with our basic assumptions about motherhood: the mother always takes care of her child; it puts his needs above her own; and she puts the existence of her child above her own (survival) life. In the prologue there are indications that Helene is poor; but she is not struggling to survive. The Second World War is over, and there is, despite all the difficulties, legitimate reason before are hoping that better times. So why does Helene leave her child behind? Has something bad happened to her that prevents her from going back to Peter? Is there a reason for their actions that Peter cannot understand? Or is she simply a bad mother who puts her own needs above her child's well-being (a conclusion that leaves the institution and myth of motherhood untouched)? Starting the novel with Helene's “tremendous act” enables Julia Franck to put the reader directly into a confrontation with his own concept of motherhood: He thinks through various possibilities without achieving objective clarity. The construction of the novel enables empathy as well as a reading that condemns Helene, and thus implicitly addresses social thought patterns, past and current. In interviews Franck also pointed out that the nucleus family is changing drastically at all times in the world under the influence of bondage and violence in dictatorship and war. She mentions that her novel was read with a completely different understanding in Croatia, since the orphanages there were also full after the war, and not because the mothers and fathers were dead or had left their children out of sheer pleasure. Rather, experiences of violence and war could have a damaging influence on the bonds between men and women and their children. Franck also referred to the many women who fled the GDR and other dictatorships and left their children behind for freedom. Often in the hope of being able to catch up one day, but without any certainty about it. The author does not judge Helene's decision in the novel, does not evaluate it at any point in time, but provides several options for interpreting her behavior. Criticism of a certain type of mother can be read out, namely the selfless mother who only exists for her children. The novel questions whether it is a “natural” part of a woman's life to want children and, if in doubt, to care for them alone, whether motherhood is an irreversible condition. The novel shows motherhood as a social construct, it poses the question of the compatibility of education, work and motherhood alone, as well as motherhood. Becoming a mother appears as an unwanted act (which it sometimes was at a time before reliable contraception, when marriage as well as unwanted pregnancy such as the birth of a child could determine the body and life of a woman), both with Helene's mother Selma, as well as with Helene herself. Apparently Helene does not (yet) have the supposed innate need to have children or to be close to her child. Society defines womanhood, especially at the time of the midday woman's act, as the ability to give birth and raise a son, which Selma fails to do, and which irritates Helene when she is stopped by a woman on the train to be proud of her Peter . As a woman, Helene remains restricted in her way of life and her educational endeavors. After Carl's death, she appears increasingly in the requirement of her roles as daughter, wife, mother and nurse. Possibly she sees her child as an obstacle to limitless professional commitment; this can also be read in the context of current discussions. In interpretations of the novel, Helene is perceived almost exclusively in her role as a mother, which seems easier than deconstructing the institution of motherhood itself. Helene's failure as a mother lies more in the expectations of the readers than in her inability and refusal to care for her child.

Edo Reents said in his review in the FAZ:

“When we talk about family, we usually have two questions: Where can you leave your child during the day? And what if the parents no longer understand each other? Now a thirty-seven year old from Berlin comes along and shows us what happens when something is wrong with the ties between parents and biological children, which we consider to be much more elementary than the most established patchwork structures. We already know from the Bible that children are abandoned, and we know even worse from the child murder stories of the eighteenth century - but what it is like when a mother just doesn't love her child is seldom discussed in literature; it is more of a material for the mixed reports in the newspaper. Julia Franck's novel Die Mittagsfrau mixes up the terms that we have meanwhile formed under the fire of well-meaning political prose of “family” that we no longer know what it is and whether it still exists. [...] Julia Franck's book is not a story of laughter and factuality on the constant theme of recent years; Rather, it shows that literature can negotiate something that the non-belletristic approach is reluctant to get involved in: sharpening our eyes for abysses for which neither the progressive nor the backward is a category and which cannot be reached by considerations of social desirability "

- Edo Reents : The Cold Heart, 2007

The lack of an emotional bond between parents and children is also a core theme of the novel: It shows an example of what happens when children grow up without a loving approach, when they are emotionally neglected. As is often the case in Julia Franck's work, the fathers in The Midday Woman are increasingly absent, cannot or do not want to fulfill their role; traditional family relationships do not exist.

As a child, Helene was consistently disregarded by her mother. Whenever the mother, whose psychological disorder could be due not only to the death of her sons but also to the systematic social exclusion, comes into contact with Helene, she treats her daughter coolly and negatively, sometimes even cruelly. In response to the unfulfilled longing for a maternal bond, Helene developed an ambivalent emotional state towards her mother very early on. She loses the most important caregiver of her childhood, her older sister Martha, to morphine addiction, the first person with whom she begins a free love affair, Carl, to death. This death seems to be the most important turning point in the novel. Helene's grief and depression after this loss changed her, the former inquisitive and happy girl, the lovingly affectionate and romantic, hopeful young woman Helene with her curiosity and love for medicine, literature, philosophy and Carl, is as if extinguished after his death. After these experiences of loss, it seems, Helene no longer succeeds in a free and deep love relationship, neither with her future husband Wilhelm, who soon despises, abuses and leaves her out of disappointment, nor with her son, from whom she has to conceal her true identity. Different scenes in the third part of the novel describe the stages of Helene's demarcation from her son as well as her flight into the overzealous fulfillment of professional duties. Apparently she has been working on the verge of resilience for years and usually spends two shifts in a row in the hospital, besides doing the household chores, cleaning, cooking, sewing, as if she deserves her survival in the form of joyless and indulgence-avoiding expenditure and the necessary denial of identity. Already in the prologue it becomes clear how Helene is raped by Russian soldiers, and what devastating effect the desecration has on the one hand for Helene and on the other hand for the child witness Peter: shame and powerlessness on both sides, and especially with Helene, the humiliation experienced apparently intensifies this physical rejection of her son as well as her own speechlessness. The topic of female emancipation is negotiated through the relationship with the sister: Martha and Leontine are the ones who awaken in Helene a sense of independence and self-determination. The emotional and erotic intimacy with Martha (and partly with Leontine) is central to Helene's development and contrasts with the violence and coldness of her own mother. However, the sisterly relationship is shaped by Martha's age advantage of nine years: She exercises control over Helene, who organizes her life almost entirely around Martha and builds her identity on the relationship with her. For Helene, the pain over the separation from her sister is only alleviated through the relationship with Carl. As a woman, Helene remains restricted in her lifestyle, often powerless in her decision-making freedom and dependent on men. This culminates in her marriage to Wilhelm, when he rejects her and finally describes her as an animal because she is no longer a virgin. The contrast between wife and whore is just as evident to him as the distinction between masculine and feminine - you can only belong to one of the two categories. In one scene when Wilhelm asks his wife to take care of the pimples on his back, she hesitantly searches for the right words to inform him about the pregnancy. In her doubts she regards herself as the parasite that probably damages the German national body: "The Jews as worms, the parasite is me, Helene just thought it, she didn't say it."

Another theme of the novel is Berlin during the Weimar period and the years of transition to fascism . The reader wanders through the Berlin nightclubs with Helene and takes a look at the confusing scenery of rich and poor, of visual artists and writers. In the dialogues the debates of the time are touched on: DADA, the poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler , but also the construction of the Reichsautobahn and the beginning of National Socialism and its anti-Semitism .

Migration and the question of identity, female as well as cultural, political and religious, are also dealt with in the novel. As the child of a Jewish woman, Helene is also Jewish after the Halacha, for Hitler "half-Jewish" and therefore in danger of having no future in Germany as a so-called valid Jew. As was often the case in assimilated and mixed marriages at the beginning of the century and up to the year '33, Helene's parents had no further thoughts or worries about the Christian or Jewish identity of their children after their baptism. The National Socialists met with a decisive and inhuman ideological “sorting” of genetic, religious and cultural conditions that determined which life is worth living, who is allowed to study and work under which conditions or who is forced to, who is allowed to marry whom and with whom to have children. The midday woman is about the assignment of identity, the value of a life, the conditions of survival in this inhumane epoch. In this context, a detail is important that was not clearly deciphered in the reception of the novel. The clinic to which Helene's mother was admitted is not just any clinic, but the Pirna-Sonnenstein sanatorium , which became known as one of the most horrific Nazi euthanasia centers after the war . When Helene visits her mother there, it becomes clear in Selma's lucid delusion that her Jewish ancestry, her illness and the alleged heredity of all this led or will lead to her internment, her forced participation in experiments and her death. In this situation, Helene becomes absolutely conscious of her powerlessness (her attempt to get her mother out of the clinic is doomed to failure) and of her own endangerment (according to Hitler's laws, her otherwise ambiguous identity as a German, Jew or Christian is clear). Under the impression of this encounter, she agrees to Wilhelm's marriage proposals on the way back on the train. The midday woman works through the topic of identity stringently. The novel shows how this can be adapted, denied and invented, not in order to achieve free happiness, but in order to survive, in bondage and in denial of true origin and assigned identity. Identity is a process; it is formed along predetermined and breaking points. With the figure of Helene, Julia Franck creates a missing portrait of a woman of Judeo-Christian, German origin and a corresponding identity crisis in German post-war literature, in which Jews have only appeared as “good victims” up to now, and tells about the complex conditions and ruptures and damage caused by National Socialism also for the survivors.

Intertextual references can also be found in the novel.

A parallel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre can be seen in the relationship between Helene and Selma and in Selma's mental illness and her isolated life . As with Bertha in Jane Eyre , the mental disorder leads to isolation, and salvation from fate is only possible in death. Like Bertha for Jane, Selma also seems to be Helene's dark double - Selma is trapped in her room, where she surrounds herself with feminine trinkets, while Helene's fate seems to be determined by her being a woman.

In addition, motivic conclusions can be drawn about the Medea material. As in Medea , a desperate rage grows in Helene. When this reaches its peak, she gives up on her child. And in her desperate marital situation, reduced to the role of wife, falling out of favor after a (previous) love affair, and being rejected or abandoned by her husband, Helene Fontane is similar to Effi Briest .

The midday woman provokes more questions than the novel gives answers. In contrast to polemics or statistics, Julia Franck can use the form of the novel to illuminate and discuss the complexity of her questions.

Literary form

Julia Franck puts the distanced narration in plastic pictures and scenes in the foreground of her writing. The narrator remains in a sober position, leaving the psychological interpretation and evaluation of the event to the reader. This pictorial quality regularly leads to filming plans, which so far have often proven difficult.

In an interview with Die Zeit in 2007, Julia Franck said:

“In all of my books up to now, at some point in a review, the thought of making a film came up. This is due to the imagery of the language. I create images so that the reader has the feeling that he sees these people, where they are, how they move, how they speak. This vivid narration comes about through a relatively strict narrative gesture, which means that I don't look for any psychological explanations for their behavior on the surface of the text. I let the reader see things with their inner eye. "

- Julia Franck : Interview with Die Zeit , 2007

The prologue of the novel follows the situation and the perception of Little Peter and describes very closely the time around the end of the Second World War in Szczecin. After his mother has left him, there is an abrupt change in time and perspective. The story of Helene's life is now told. The connection between these events and the prologue only becomes apparent very late. The novel closes with a condensing epilogue, which in turn follows Peter's perception.

The novel is built like a three-part song or triptych , with the three parts, which chronologically portray the girl, the adolescent and the adult Helene, each set in different locations, Bautzen, Berlin and Stettin. The first part focuses on Helene's relationship with her sister Martha, with her father and mother. In the second part, during the golden 20s in Berlin, she meets Carl Wertheimer, becomes his girlfriend and lover and loses him; the incipient National Socialism appears in a few places in the novel. In the third part, Helene enters into a marriage of convenience with Wilhelm, ends up in a violent and loveless marriage from which her son Peter emerges. The novel is supplemented by a prologue and a corresponding epilogue opposite, even opposing, the three parts described in chronology and perspective.

While the prologue and epilogue strictly follow the perception and direction of view of Peter, Helene's son, the three inner parts of the novel are described solely from Helene's perception and gaze. The three-part inner novel relates to the surrounding prologue and epilogue like a look to a contra-perspective or a speech to contradiction. According to the typological model of narrative situations according to Franz Karl Stanzel , one would speak of an authorial-personal narrative perspective; the categories of Gérard Genette following one would see in the novel a heterodiegetischen narrator at work who mainly (but not exclusively) internally to Helene and in the prologue and epilogue to Peter focalized is.

reception

As in Franck's earlier novels, the midday woman polarized and provoked extremely different, sometimes contradicting reactions in the feature pages, which were characterized by both enthusiasm and rejection. Even days before publication and in the first few weeks afterwards, a competition arose in the evaluation and assessment of the literary conception and properties. In the thematic and moral focus of the consideration, the question of why Helene Peter and a mother in general abandoned her child was initially discussed. That which is morally incomprehensible provokes. Is she a victim and a perpetrator at the same time? The social and family roles of a woman in her time as well as the ideological mother image then and now are also discussed in many of the reviews. Helene's German-Christian-Jewish identity and the difficulties arising from it, including self-denial and falsification of her name, are only mentioned in a few reviews, especially since the figure in it does not correspond to any known literary cliché. The midday woman is referred to as a portrait, but also as a social and (opposite) development novel.

While some reviewers perceive Franck's language as sober, bloodless or cool, see the figure of Helene portrayed as provocatively cold, almost objective and distant, others are disturbed by Franck's style, which in turn appears to them mannered, too ambitious or unsuccessful. Some reviewers are reminded of the language used in popular novels like Hedwig Courths-Mahler's romance novels , especially in scenes where Helene and Carl meet and chat. It is worth mentioning in this context an exchange of blows between the critic Hubert Spiegel and Julia Franck in the program "Literatur im Foyer" on January 5, 2008. On a comment by Spiegel, in which the latter used the language in the relevant scenes of the midday woman with that of Courths -Mahler compared, the author countered by pointing out that it was quotations (by Else Lasker-Schüler , Gottfried Benn, etc.) in which Helene and Carl talked, as it was a kind of parlor game at that time and among educated middle-class children. Since quotations under three lines do not have to be marked, there is no reference to this in the book.

The reviews can be summarized as follows:

Mathias Schreiber is fascinated by the novel Die Mittagsfrau , which in his opinion is right on the shortlist of the German Book Prize 2007. Over three generations and beyond the Second World War, Julia Franck designed both the portrait of half a century and the life of the nurse Helene. She is a multi-layered protagonist who can transform herself from the sympathetic heroine to the “selfish, cold-hearted witch” - and yet always remains one and the same person. For Schreiber, a psychological masterpiece in which the author “interweaves emotional layers and interactions meticulously and then painstakingly unraveling them again, almost with relish” and narrates with piercing realism. "The most amazing title of the autumn of books."

- Mathias Schreiber: Düstere Lichtgestalt, Der Spiegel, September 17, 2007.

According to Elmar Krekeler, Die Mittagsfrau tells the story “of a destructive century and a mother's emotional blindness” . The novel, which is rightly on the shortlist of the German Book Prize, is a largely clichéd and kitsch-free mixture of the autobiographical tale of Helene Würsich's life and a contemporary history novel, which, however, never intrusively includes social events. The autobiographical references - Franck tells, among other things, of the childhood war trauma of her father, who died early, would never be brought to the fore, the author wanted to "understand history, people, especially women, tell about them and their fate and reconstruct a lost past". For Krekeler, Die Mittagsfrau is a novel without islands of warmth, which tells from a cooled but compassionate distance and with appropriately controlled language. “ The midday woman is the impressively well-rehearsed story of blindness to the heart, of falling silent, of being wiped out, of being burned out. In the end there is nothing left. Nothing can be told anymore, nothing works, there is nothing left to give. ”A novel that calls for a film.

- Elmar Krekeler: The Cold Heart, Die Welt, September 29, 2007.

According to Katharina Döbler, whose review is already being printed in ZEIT five days before the novel is published, the first sentence of Die Mittagsfrau fails : The will to linguistic art sounds too clearly here than one can bear for the entire novel. But it continues differently, the prologue "develops into a wonderfully coherent and linguistically completely unstilted story of an eight-year-old about the end of the war". Overall, it is a sensitively told family story. Julia Franck succeeds again and again in special scenes full of violence and cruelty, Döbler finds “this author's fine feeling for sensuality, dependency, love, power and humiliation” admirable. Franck showed sensitivity when telling the story - and yet the novel occasionally slipped into cliché, just as the tone and sentences were often not quite right. The novel is missing something to remove it from a film coming to terms with the past in the main program. Here, have Lady Midday everything he needed: "He is hot and cold, cruel and idyllic, sensual and factual."

- Katharina Döbler: Peter's mother, Die Zeit, September 5, 2007.

Edo Reents writes about the novel if it weren't already so worn out, The Midday Woman could be called an “anti-family novel”. “What it is like when a mother doesn't love her child is seldom discussed in literature; that is more of a material for the mixed reports in the newspaper. ”Julia Franck succeeds in mixing up our concepts of family properly and in sharpening our view of the depths of humanity. With Helene Würsich, we would not have to deal with an insane protagonist - she simply has a heart that has cooled down over time. The novel tells of this development over four decades without sentimentality - an example of “great realistic, relentless prose”. Reents finds Franck's passages about Berlin and love weaker: The cosmopolitan atmosphere seems predictable and constructed, the conversations of the short but strong love between the philosophy student Carl Wertheimer and Helene sound wooden. It would look quite different with the description of the unhappy marriage that Helene entered into after Wertheimer's death: “The sober harshness in which this marriage is portrayed is one of the highlights of the novel, which otherwise avoids any partisanship at a sovereign narrative distance . ”Despite small stylistic flaws, this is a great novel about silence.

- Edo Reents: The Cold Heart, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 10, 2007.

According to Nico Bleutge, Die Mittagsfrau is about something fundamental: "Julia Franck seems to want to tell a general story of dying love and mental cooling." The author makes the cruel deed of the protagonist understandable by explaining her life story, the atmospheric in space and time between the First and Second World War was involved. Bleutge praises the precise research that becomes clear in anecdotes, landscape sketches and technical details. In terms of language, Franck tries to approach the speaking and writing of the time - which, according to Bleutge, evokes a “graceful expression”. He is bothered by the fact that the characters in the novel do not simply “refuse to look” but “shy away from it”, not simply “cry”, but rather “tears escape their eyes”. It reminds him of a bad entertainment novel of the twenties.

- Nico Bleutge: Master of craftsmanship, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 17, 2007.

For Tobias Rüther, Die Mittagsfrau is a novel that doesn't get anywhere; a book that is written in an artificial language that never loses its composure. Exactly this would irritate more with each page, since Franck tells of big and cruel topics, but never mentions things by name. They write “padded descriptions” that sometimes slip away into the ridiculous. The author is particularly skilled in describing small events; in a large, social context, their spelling appears succinct. “Why would you want to re-explore how men and women behaved towards each other between the wars, when Irmgard Keun was talking about this seventy years ago - in words that have not aged ahead of time? Why does Julia Franck conjure up the twenties of Berlin in such a bourgeois way, so wickedly, as if she were writing a three-part TV series for Alexandra Maria Lara? intensive or even complete reading of the novel would have involved; He falsely claims that the sisters (or the author) would never remember Selma after leaving Bautzen, which Rüther included the complete passage of Helene's visit to her mother in the clinic in Pirna and the resulting cause for Helene's Hides consent to marriage.

- Tobias Rüther: Come on, let's get deeper !, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, October 2, 2007.

Kristina Maidt-Zinke, who sees Julia Franck as a talented, highly professional narrator, wonders in the face of Die Mittagsfrau why the author has devoted herself entirely to the historical genre. The cruel abandonment of her son should be explained by the biography of the mother Helene - this is clear. However, the development is not credible enough, even if Julia Franck managed to tell of the fate of two world wars and the time in between as if she had been there. In this novel, “their qualities seem a bit as if they were put in the service of market needs. The sensuality, which has been repeatedly praised in her texts, is this time limited to the detailed description of physical processes. ”This is regrettable, because the author brings empathy and imagination.

- Kristina Maidt-Zinke: A macho like an ax in the forest, Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 27, 2007.

The prologue offers an oppressive and atmospherically dense introduction to the novel, which for Christoph Schröder could not keep what he promised in the long run. The novel is too close to the cliché, and its characters - especially the men - are often too little differentiated. Schröder's language is too wooden and bloodless, Franck narrates in script-style scenes in “Backdrops of the Twenties”, all of which have been read before. Nevertheless, the novel was not completely unsuccessful: “These last 100 pages of the novel are his strongest. How Julia Franck describes the intimate hell of marriage with such a selfish, tyrannical and at the same time tearful man; Helene's apathy, now Alice, the increasing anger of Wilhelm, the small and large harassments and humiliations; the indifferent to brutal sexual acts - that is extremely skillful and touching. "

- Christoph Schröder: The dead inner life, Frankfurter Rundschau, September 18, 2007.

For Antje Korsmeier, Die Mittagsfrau expands the topos of mysterious female figures with something new: a mother figure who asks about the depths of the feminine. Julia Franck makes this abysmal understandable: Again and again she comes close to the feelings and perceptions of the protagonist. The broad description of the feelings of the main character Helene is impressive, but in contrast to her, some of the secondary characters seem a bit striking. In some places the author could have done without details, because there is enough tension even without them. “Proximity and distance, to yourself and to other people, are the main problems of the main character. It is impressive how Julia Franck handles this aspect in the context of a narrative perspective of the third person and leads the self-relationship of the protagonist parallel to the identification of the reader. “ For Korsmeier, the midday woman is a skilfully written novel in economical, sober language.

- Antje Korsmeier: Blindness of the Heart, taz, September 29, 2007.

Klaus Zeyringer sees Die Mittagsfrau as a movingly dense contemporary novel, which draws the reader into the action from the very first sentence and at the same time allows a special metaphorical level to resonate, which would be preserved throughout the contemporary and family novel. Julia Franck's descriptions are dense and full of intensity, she tells "without any poetic show of strength, with deep insights into difficult psychological conditions and relationships". According to Zeyringer, the author succeeds in capturing the moods of the first decades of the 20th century and at the same time conveying the individual in the protagonist's experiences. He points out that the German criticism books like put this rapidly among pathos suspicion, but refuted this argument clearly: ". This novel has nothing of false pathos, he tells rousing from a rising tragedy of hopelessness and an existential loneliness" Lady Midday is for Zeyringer an unusual novel of particular density and great linguistic mastery.

- Klaus Zeyringer: Ongoing Escape Movement, Der Standard, September 28, 2007.

Awards

The midday woman was awarded the German Book Prize in 2007 . The jury's statement: “Against the background of two world wars, Julia Franck tells the disturbing story of a woman who leaves her son without finding herself. The book impresses with its linguistic urgency, narrative power and psychological intensity. A novel for long conversations. "

In the English translation by Anthea Bell in 2010, the novel was also on the short list of the Wingate Literary Prize awarded by the Jewish Quarterly and the short list of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize founded by the British daily newspaper The Independent , as well as on the long list at the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award .

Publications

German editions

Translations

The midday woman has been translated into 37 languages, including German and Danish Braille. The novel appears in Egypt, Albania, Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Greece, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Croatia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain (Spanish, Catalan, Galician), Taiwan, Czech Republic, Turkey, Hungary, the USA and Belarus.

Theater adaptation

Volker Hesse's theater version of the novel was premiered on October 9, 2010 under Hesse's direction at the Deutsches Theater Göttingen . Katharina Heyer played Helene.

A stage version specially written for the Bautzen Theater by Eveline Günther and Beatrix Schwarzbach had its successful premiere on May 1, 2013, directed by Beatrix Schwarzbach and set by Katharina Lorenz at the German-Sorbian People's Theater in Bautzen. Lilli Jung plays Helene.

Annette Pullen also performed her own stage adaptation in 2013 at the Osnabrück Theater. Maria Goldmann plays the young Helene, Monika Vivell the older.

filming

The filming of the novel for the cinema by the Swiss production company C-Film is also in preparation. As a director is Barbara Albert provided the script writes Meike Hauck .

See also

  • Police (West Pomeranian Voivodeship) : Forced laborers were employed in the chemical factories in Pölitz (now Police ) . Wilhelm is busy with unspecified structures in Pölitz. While hunting for mushrooms in the forest, Helene and Peter encounter a train that is being used to bring forced laborers to Pölitz.
  • Nazi forced labor
  • Ancestral passport : Wilhelm illegally procured a forged ancestral passport for Helene in which her Jewish origin does not appear and her name is a new one. Helene needs the "purely Aryan" ancestral passport for marrying Wilhelm, whom she otherwise would not have been able to marry under the Nuremberg Laws , and for her job in the hospital, first in Berlin and later in Stettin.

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ BR Lido “A day in the life of Julia Franck”. Film by Julia Benkert, 2014, https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendung/lido/julia-franck-102.html
  2. ^ BR Lido “A day in the life of Julia Franck”. Film by Julia Benkert, 2014, https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendung/lido/julia-franck-102.html
  3. ↑ The Battle of the Crow . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 2011 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b Letter on Survival . In: Zeit online , October 10, 2007; Interviewer: Susanne Geu.
  5. ↑ For example the debate that followed the publication of the study “ Regretting motherhood ” in 2015 (several years after the novel was published); or those who, in the wake of Anne-Marie Slaughter's resignation as an employee of Hillary Clinton in early 2011 and the publication of her essay "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in the July / August 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine ( http : //www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ ).
  6. ↑ See also Michael Braun's essay “What remains when nobody stays? Raven love, midday woman, forty roses . Images of motherhood and mother novels in contemporary German literature ”in: TRIGON 11: Art, Science and Faith in Dialogue. Berlin Science Verlag, Berlin 2014 ( https://books.google.de/books?id=7C5oBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA146&lpg=PA146&dq=Julia+Franck+Judith+Butler&source=bl&ots=ZZDGhpPrZ0&sig=yxrlWhb7GZRh_F5uUIDCC2RW4Ys&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBGoVChMIveTsvc-XyQIVxFosCh2gaQ0W# v = onepage & q = Julia% 20Franck & f = false ).
  7. ^ BR Lido “A day in the life of Julia Franck”. Film by Julia Benkert, 2014, https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendung/lido/julia-franck-102.html
  8. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated November 23, 2015 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.faz.net
  9. ↑ Julia Franck also addresses the issue of lesbian sibling love in her anthology "Bauchlandung" in the story "Bäuchlings".
  10. ↑ Julia Franck actually dealt intensively with Fontane's character: She wrote an afterword for the new edition of “Effi Briest” published by Ullstein Verlag in 2009.
  11. ↑ http://www.3sat.de/programm/?viewlong=viewlong&d=20080105
  12. ^ Mathias Schreiber: LITERATURE: Gloomy light figure . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 2007 ( online - September 17, 2007 ).
  13. ↑ Book of the Week: The Cold Heart. In: welt.de . September 29, 2007, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Katharina Döbler: Novel: Peterchens mother . In: The time . No. 37/2007 ( online ).
  15. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated November 23, 2015 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.faz.net
  16. ↑ Master of the craftsmanship. In: nzz.ch. October 17, 2007, accessed October 14, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Come on, let's get deeper! In: FAZ.net . October 7, 2007, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  18. ↑ http://www.buecher.de/shop/buecher/die-mittagsfrau/franck-julia/products_products/detail/prod_id/22793297/
  19. ↑ https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/abgestorbene-innenleben-11614712.html
  20. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2016 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.taz.de
  21. ↑ Ongoing flight. In: derStandard.at. September 28, 2007, accessed December 13, 2017 .
  22. ↑ Julia Franck receives the German Book Prize 2007 for her novel Die Mittagsfrau . German Book Prize, accessed on December 9, 2010.
  23. ↑ http://www.irishtimes.com/news/tantalising-impac-longlist-shows-quality-fiction-is-alive-and-well-1.676900
  24. ^ BR Lido “A day in the life of Julia Franck”. Film by Julia Benkert, 2014, https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendung/lido/julia-franck-102.html
  25. ↑ http://www.fischerverlage.de/rights/foreign_rights/book/die_mittagsfrau/9783596175529
  26. ↑ Die Mittagsfrau ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2010 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. at the Deutsches Theater Göttingen; Retrieved December 9, 2010.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dt-goettingen.de
  27. ↑ On the day when the grave slab rain came . Nachtkritik.de , accessed on December 9, 2010.
  28. ↑ http://theater-bautzen.de/07/de/stuecke/S_001729.html
  29. ↑ http://www.theater-osnabrueck.de/spielplan/spielplandetail.html?stid=514
  30. ↑ https://www.c-films.com/in-development
  31. ↑ See also http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/lebensstations/2_137.htm and http://www.geschichte-lexikon.de/nuernberger-gesetze.php