The lead night

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The Night of Lead is a novel by the Hamburg writer, organ reformer and music publisher Hans Henny Jahnn . It is his last and shortest prose text that has been translated into several languages ​​and is probably the author's most widely read prose work. It is about a nightmarish wandering that leads to the protagonist's psychological self-awareness .

History of origin

Hans Henny Jahnn planned a romance novel entitled Everyone is overtaken , but it remained in the drafting stage. Presumably it was never completed because "in none of his works homosexuality is expressed as openly as here". He wrote to his friend and fellow writer Werner Helwig that he was afraid he would not be able to publish the novel because he would not consider anyone and “find no oddity objectionable.” The novel was published posthumously in 1968 as a “fragment from the estate”. The night of lead is an internal narrative of the planned novel, which appeared separately as a novella during Jahnn's lifetime (1956).

content

In a kind of dream sequence, the story of the young Matthieu is told, who is abandoned by an angel in one night and who now roams through an unknown, gloomy and deserted city like a nightmarish. When he gets into a house, he meets the prostitute Elvira, who tries to seduce him. It becomes clear to him that he is succumbing to a hallucination: under the make-up, your body is empty or consists only of blackness. On the street he meets Anders, a younger doppelganger of himself, who leads him into an underground apartment. Anders has an abdominal injury that was inflicted on him by a boy who tried to penetrate his body. Matthieu is destined to murder his doppelganger, who represents his former self. He bares his large open stomach wound and tells of the eerie residents of the city. Matthieu kills Anders in the crypt by stabbing his arm in the wound. When he realizes that he is walled in in darkness, he panics. He is finally carried away in the arms of the angel of death Gari.

Analysis and reception

The Jahnn biographer Thomas Freeman describes The Night of Lead as “ Kafkaesque prose in a surrealistic symbolic language”. The work, taken to the extreme, contains three typical Jahnn themes: the erotic, the sacred and violence; Jahnn's text is “an art that radically takes on what has been eliminated, what has been rejected”. The literary critic Uwe Schweikert writes that it is the intensity of the "visual and linguistic visionary violence that pulls the reader under its spell and thus allows them to participate". This late work found relatively wide distribution and translations, especially in France; it was also edited musically. The graphic artist Klaus Böttger created a cycle of etchings on the themes of the work.

Quote

“ This nightmare, presented in its sparse diction, reads like another variation on Jahnn's great themes: the loss of faith, the doubts about the benignity of creation, the experience of exclusion and the angels reminiscent of Emanuel Swedenborg . "

- Jan Bürger

expenditure

German publications

  • Wegner, "the mainzer series". Volume 2, Hamburg 1956.
  • Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1960.
  • Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1962 (special series dtv, vol. 5).
  • Library Suhrkamp. Volume 682. Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-518-01682-2 .
  • Contained in: Hans Henny Jahnn: Works in individual volumes . Volume of late prose . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1987. ISBN 3-455-03631-7 .
  • With 12 printed etchings by Klaus Böttger and an afterword by Wulf Piper. The Bear Press, Bayreuth 1988.
  • Contained in: Hans Henny Jahnn: Jubilee Edition , Volume 8. Short prose and essays . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-455-10323-5 .
  • v. Hase and Koehler, Mainz 1994, ISBN 3-7758-1322-5 .
  • Library Suhrkamp. Volume 1318. Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-22318-6 .

Translations

Musical adaptation, reading, exhibition catalog

  • Hans-Jürgen von Bose : Composition. Kinetic action in six pictures . Ars Viva Verlag, Mainz 1981
  • TV movie. Film adaptation of the ballet by Hans-Jürgen von Bose based on the novel. Ballet choreography: Heinz Spoerli. 1985
  • Exhibition catalog. Master class for stage and film design, University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Vienna 1987
  • Hans-Jürgen von Bose: The night made of lead. Suite . Compact disc and booklet. SWR. Wergo records, Mainz 1993
  • Asmus Tietchens : The night made of lead . CD. Walter Ulbricht sound foils, Hamburg 1994
  • Reading. 2 CDs. Speaker: Alexander Khuon , Torsten Feuerstein. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-455-30475-6 .
  • Radio play, edited by Alexander Schuhmacher. Audiobook Hamburg 2011, 2 CD.
  • Jakob Diehl: Composition for ensemble freely based on the novel "The Night of Lead" . 2008

literature

  • Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-455-08608-X .
  • Jan Bürger: The stranded whale. The immoderate life of Hans Henny Jahnn. The years 1894–1935 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-351-02552-1 .
  • Reiner Niehoff: Hans Henny Jahnn. The Art of Exceeding Matthes & Seitz, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3-88221-833-6 .
  • Horst Bienek: Afterword. In: Hans Henny Jahnn: Die Nacht aus Blei, dtv, Munich 1962.

Web links

The night made of lead in the German National Library

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan Bürger: The stranded whale Berlin 2003
  2. ^ Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . 1986
  3. ^ Letter to Werner Helwig in: Alternative . Journal of Poetry and Discussion. No. 16. Berlin 1961
  4. ^ Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . 1986
  5. ↑ Reiner Niehoff: Hans Henny Jahnn. The art of exceeding . 2001
  6. ↑ Uwe Schweikert: Uncover the meat . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 9, 2002
  7. ↑ Flying sparks. France discovers the work of Hans Henny Jahnn . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from September 19, 2000
  8. ↑ Walter Sauer : The strange dimensions of lead and light ... reflections on Hans Henny Jahnn's 'The night of lead' and the etchings by Klaus Böttger . In clam heaps No. 27/28. Viersen 1989, ISSN  0044-2496 .
  9. ↑ Jan Bürger: The stranded whale. The immoderate life of Hans Henny Jahnn. The years 1894–1935 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2003, page 353