The ferryman's night

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The night of the ferryman (original title: La nuit du passeur ) is a novel by the French Germanist Jean-Pierre Lefebvre . The French original was published in 1989 by Denoël and the German translation by Annette Lallemand in 1992 by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag .

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The action takes place in February and March 1967 and begins in Heidelberg , where Jonas Fieber is a French lecturer at the university . He lives on Neuenheimer Ufer , so he has to cross the Neckar on his way to work . Since the next two bridges are a bit away, he usually takes the ferry across. On a day in mid-February, the ferry service seems to have been suspended for some unknown reason. Fieber knows the ferryman Werner Linzer through conversations during the crossings and through occasional chess games and pays him a visit later because the suspension of the ferry service seems strange to him. He finds him dead in Linzer's hut and although the signs point to suicide, Fever is skeptical. The police quickly shelved the case. The responsible commissioner is kicked away, which increases Fever's skepticism.

Fieber finds out that Linzer was the treasurer of an organization for expellees , the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft . In this position, he seems to have secretly collected the names and addresses of former Nazi greats over the years , who have now returned to key positions, although they still cling to National Socialist ideas. What Linzer was aiming for with his data collection remains unclear; the protagonists of the extensive network of former Nazis are trying with all means to get hold of Linzer's records. After his murder they are looking for a. his mother can not find the notebook you are looking for. Finally, Fever manages to take the notebook - he finds it hidden on the ferry. He takes it to Paris , where he has it copied by his old teacher and friend Léon, who works at the Bibliothèque nationale .

Fieber then returns to Heidelberg mainly because of his girlfriend Libu. He is under increasing pressure there, and the kidnapping of his girlfriend shows him how serious his opponents are. Fieber decided to react just as drastically: he kidnapped the mother of the former high-ranking Nazi Manfred Koch and brought her and Koch's little daughter Uschi to France. His pursuers are hot on his heels, but he manages to get the two of them to a difficult-to-access hut in the deep wintry Savoy so that he can later exchange them for Libu as hostages.

The abductees are exchanged in the French-Italian-Swiss border area with the help of a helicopter. Following the successful release, Fieber and Libu take a trip through France and stop in Bordeaux , among other places , as spring has arrived. They return to Germany, where the murder of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967 heralds the time of the militant student movement. What ultimately happens to the names and addresses from the ferryman's notebook is not shown, direct effects on the network of old Nazis are not described: "They were only roused once again, worldwide." (P. 345 of the German edition)

Analysis and Background

With the relocation of the setting from Heidelberg to Savoy, the pace and character of the novel also change. A criminal story becomes a politicizing action drama, which is interspersed with numerous colportage elements. Fieber now acts in the style of left-wing terrorist groups of the 1960s and 1970s, treating his two kidnapping victims nonchalantly like political prisoners. He is a little nicer to the underage Koch daughter, but she gets otitis media , and by not having a fever treat her medically, he risks her life. All in all, the conspiratorial measures taken by Fever are described with transfiguring impetus, such as the meetings with his former fellow students Rabah and Spiros on the residential campus of his former Paris university. In between, the course of the French parliamentary elections of 1967 is described and commented on again and again.

The novel is divided into 33 chapters. The narrative flow is conspicuously interrupted in two places, in chapter 13 by a documentary Auschwitz poem (pp. 141–146) and in chapter 26 by “a sleep story for children”, which is about the little seal Usch and the Jonas the little cook. Daughter Uschi tells the story (pp. 266–279).

Lefebvre himself was a lecturer at the Romance Department at Heidelberg University from 1965 to 1967. The Ferryman's Night is his only novel to this day.

expenditure

  • Jean-Pierre Lefebvre: La nuit du passeur. Novel. Paris: Denoël 1989. ISBN 2-207-23592-0
  • Jean-Pierre Lefebvre: The ferryman's night. Novel. Translated from the French by Annette Lallemand. Frankfurt / M .: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1992. ISBN 3-596-11017-3

literature

  • Arnold Rothe: Farewell to a Myth? Heidelberg in the French novel after 1945. In: Heidelberger Jahrbücher 41 (1997), pp. 109–132, here pp. 121–126.
  • Hans T. Siepe: Shadow of the past , review of the novel in documents. Journal for the Franco-German Dialogue , ISSN  0012-5172 , Issue 6/1992, Volume 48, p. 543.