Fainting (Semprún)

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The powerlessness ( French L'Évanouissement ) is a novel by the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún , which was published in 1967 by Gallimard in Paris . Eva Moldenhauer's translation from the French original into German was published in 2001 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main.

overview

The Spaniard Manuel Mora, who was born in Madrid in 1924 and has lived in Paris since 1939, talks about his life. Manuel's father was Chargé d'affaires of the Spanish Republic in The Hague in 1939 .

The narrative time runs over two days - August 6, 1945 and the day after. Manuel studied philosophy at the Sorbonne , took part in the resistance against the German occupation in France in 1943 , was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and returned to Paris after his liberation with shaved hair and "an incurable disease from Germany".

Manuel is joined by an almost omniscient narrator, who in this report - as he calls the novel - tells the reader how things will continue with Manuel after August 7, 1945. The second narrator mentions the death of Manuel around 1960 under unexplained circumstances and even more: In 1952 Manuel went back to Madrid and fought underground against General Franco . In 1956 Manuel is still active there. In Manuel's circle the truth of Khrushchev's secret speech is disputed.

content

Only a few of the passages from Manuel's stream of consciousness are outlined in this article .

As a Parisian suburban train pulls into the Gros-Noyer-Saint-Prix station, Manuel passes out and falls off the train because he was almost on the step in the overcrowded vehicle. A transmission cable along the embankment almost cut off one of his ears when he fell. It only hangs on the head. There is no shortage of urgent medical help. Everything is going well. The ear is sewn on the day after the accident, on August 7th, at the Montlignon hospital . Manuel has lived with his family since 1939 near the train station in the Rue Auguste-Rey 47 in Saint-Prix. He has been invited by a friend to Italian-speaking Switzerland for a longer stay for the coming winter , would like to enjoy the January sun in Ascona again and wanted to get a proper passport to enter the Swiss Confederation in the prefecture of Versailles . On the way back, the accident happened.

As Manuel wakes up from his faint, a flood of images comes over him. In 1943 one of the two Gestapo men in Joigny hit him in the neck with a club. On the basis of his papers the arrested person is classified as a member of "the Spanish Red Army" and tortured by the military policemen. In the unlucky year he was hit on the head with the butt of a rifle and kicked with boots by the military policemen. Manuel had been sent to Auxerre prison . The philosophy student now philosophizes about Wittgenstein's sentence Death is not an event in life. One does not experience death and ponders Monsieur Teste . Manuel's thoughts jump from 1943 to the late winter of 1945. As a prisoner working on the list of deaths in the Buchenwald concentration camp's “central file” together with five other prisoners, he witnessed the death of his Parisian sociology professor Maurice Halbwachs in Block 56 . Almost unbelievable - in the stench of this barrack, the professor opposes death with his “happiness”.

Yet another picture emerges - again from the time of the Resistance in 1943. A motorcyclist in black uniform drives past Manuel's hidden resistance group with a submachine gun, stops and loudly sings La Paloma in German. The German with the bright blue eyes hits the rhythm of the song and is shot in the back by a fellow soldier of Manuel. The group loots the dead man's weapon and vehicle.

There are many stories. In 1943 Manuel received an order from the head of his resistance group to execute a collaborator , the widow of the shot Monsieur Prunier. The description of the manner in which he executes the command is unparalleled in memory literature. Speaking of the eloquent description of approaching younger women - the love stories with young Laurence and Lorène are worth mentioning.

reception

  • March 20, 2001, Walter Haubrich in the FAZ : The lies and deceit of spring snow. Jorge Semprún's early novel "Die Ohnmacht" : The reviewer writes: " Die Ohnmacht is a continuation of The Great Journey ."
  • April 23, 2001, in the mirror : Wound of memory. : The reviewer writes: "Manuel is the alter ego of the French-writing Spaniard Jorge Semprún."
  • June 24, 2001, Deutschlandfunk : The powerlessness . Translated from the French by Eva Moldenhauer : The reviewer says: “Jorge Semprún ... joined the Resistance under the cover name Georges Sorel. Captured by the Gestapo, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and survived as a Red Spaniard thanks to the protection of the illegal camp management in the labor statistics . "
  • December 1, 2001, Gregor Ziolkowski in the Berliner Zeitung : In the sunshine . Two novels about concentration camps in 1967 did not fit into the zeitgeist of memory. Now they have been translated : The reviewer makes the temporal confusion in the novel plausible: "The unreal atmosphere of the past , in which the author sees himself and his text transferred, allows or enforces an aestheticization in highlight-like scenes." The reviewer can Jorge Semprún, the understanding for the rejection of his second novel and in a later work the alleged imbalance more or less straightened out, does not follow if he suspects: "In truth, the powerlessness is likely to be the climax of Semprún's literary work."
  • In the pearl is made to two meetings.
  • May 2002, Wolfram Schütte in the magazine for literature and film : The awakening . Jorge Semprun's second novel “Die Ohnmacht”: brilliant prelude to his literary future : In a single sentence the reviewer succeeds in a fairly comprehensive characteristic: “The subject of the book is ... both the moral-existentialist reflection of the resistance (against the German occupiers as well as against the Frankist Spain), as well as the return of the exile and underground fighter to the banality of life. "
  • 2008, Ulrike Vordermark: In her dissertation, the author deals in more detail with Jorge Semprún's communications on the death of Prof. Halbwachs in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
  • 2010, Martin Rooney in Freedom and Justice : Surviving Survival. Jorge Semprún - writer, resistance fighter, opponent of both totalitarianisms : Despite Buchenwald's experience, Jorge Semprún is not an enemy of the Germans. On the contrary, in 1986 he surprisingly encouraged the two German states to reunify in a speech in Frankfurt am Main.

literature

German first edition

  • The faint. Novel. Translated from the French by Eva Moldenhauer. 199 pages. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001 (1st edition), ISBN 978-3-518-22339-0 . (Output used)

Secondary literature

  • Jorge Semprún: Federico Sánchez says goodbye. Translated from the French by Wolfram Bayer. 356 pages. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main (st 2636, 1st edition), ISBN 3-518-39136-4 .
  • Ulrike Vordermark: The memory of death. The experience of the Buchenwald concentration camp at the Jorge Semprúns plant. 289 pages. Böhlau, Cologne 2008 (Diss. 2007 Düsseldorf), ISBN 978-3-412-20145-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 46, 6th Zvu
  2. ↑ used edition, page 62, the 7th ACR
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 62, 6. Zvu
  4. ^ French Gare du Gros Noyer - Saint-Prix
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 36, 1. Zvo
  6. ↑ Tractatus logico-philosophicus 6.4311
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 68, 15. Zvo
  8. ↑ Vordermark, p. 222 ff.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The twenty year old will live another sixteen years. (Edition used, p. 111 and p. 112.)
  2. ↑ In Jorge Semprún's view of Wittgenstein's Vienna there is also talk of Lukács and Milena Jesenská (edition used, p. 63 above).
  3. ↑ In his memoirs Federico Sánchez says goodbye (p. 35, 10. Zvo), Jorge Semprún names the autobiographical character of the novel Die Ohnmacht . The Eve story mentioned in the memoirs can be read in the novel from p. 167, 2nd Zvu of the edition used. The name Eve is mentioned for the first time on p. 174, middle.