The Journey (Romanessay)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The journey is an unfinished novel essay by Bernward Vesper . The collage of records and notes book was his autobiographical character a valuable document of the 68s - generation . Vespers sat in it and a. with his father, the Nazi poet Will Vesper , and his former partner Gudrun Ensslin .

Emergence

The book title Die Reise is to be understood as an ambiguous motto. On the one hand, a real journey should provide the background for the book, while Vesper's personal development should be understood as a kind of life journey. Travel also means the mind-altering drug trip; TRIP was discussed as one of the original book titles .

The author Bernward Vesper approached the März-Verlag on August 23, 1969 with a letter in which he announced the writing of a novel essay. This should describe a 24-hour LSD trip, in the course of which both “notes from the momentary perception” appear as well as reflections on the past 30 years in the author's life. This first writing should then be re-dictated in further trips with the help of tapes “until a final form is achieved”. The ambitious project was delayed not least because of the loss of sanity in February 1971 Vesper. In his own words, he was "slowly freaking out". In connection with this, he was sent to a mental institution for observation, where he committed suicide in May 1971. The publisher of the March publishing house Jörg Schröder edited the unpublished manuscript in 1977 and also obtained the final edition . The manuscript of the journey is in Museum of Modern Literature seen in Marbach in the permanent exhibition.

shape

The book has no continuous storyline. It consists of a series of childhood memories, anecdotes, sections called “simple reports” and subjective-political assessments of the situation in Germany , experiences with LSD, mescaline and hashish . According to their own information, certain sections were written down under the influence of hashish of various qualities ("Black Afghan, Green Turkish, Green Lebanon, Red Lebanon, Schimmel-Shit von P."). The narrative tone changes between poetic and political, between ironic and furious. Most of the texts are written using the stream of consciousness narrative technique . The text was one of the first to introduce full lower case letters into German literature.

reception

A few months after its publication in 1977, the book received a great deal of attention that was not initially expected. The reason was the group suicide of RAF members in Stammheim in the German autumn (the night of death in Stammheim ). Vesper's former partner Gudrun Ensslin and her partner at the time, Andreas Baader, were among the dead .

"His individual writing reflects the collective failure of the generation that set out in the mid-1960s to change the petrified society of the western industrialized countries and that today, it seems, are left empty-handed with little more than impotent hope."

- Uwe Schweikert in the Frankfurter Rundschau, blurb of the issue of two thousand and one

The book has been called the key text of the New Subjectivity .

In 1986 Markus Imhoof made a free adaptation of the book under the same title .

literature

  • Georg Guntermann: Diary of a journey into the inside of the author. Attempt to Bernward Vesper's novel essay Die Reise . In: Journal for German Philology . Vol. 100, 1981, No. 2, pp. 232-253.
  • Frederick Alfred Lubich: Bernward Vespers The Journey - The Downfall of the Modern Pikaro. In: Gerhart Hoffmeister (ed.): The modern German picaresque novel. Interpretations. Amsterdam 1985/86, pp. 219-249.
  • Frederick Albert Lubich: Bernward Vespers The Journey . From the Hitler Youth to the RAF. Search for identity under the curse of fascism. In: German Studies Review. Vol. 10, 1987, number 1, pp. 69-94.
  • Andrew Plowman: Bernhard Vesper's The Journey . Politics and Autobiography between the Student Movement and the Act of Self-Invention. In: German Studies Review. Vol. 21, 1998, pp. 507-524.
  • Roman Luckscheiter: The revolutionary intoxication. Bernhard Vespers novel The journey and the psychedelic consciousness from 1968. In: Helmuth Kiesel , Dieter Dollinger (Ed.): Rausch (= Heidelberger Jahrbücher. Vol. 43). Springer, Berlin et al. 1999, ISBN 3-540-66675-3 , pp. 273-292.
  • Gerrit-Jan Berendse: Writing as bodily harm. On the anthropology of terror in Bernhard Vesper's Die Reise . In: monthly books. Vol. 93, 2001, pp. 318-334.
  • Ulrich Breuer: Tell yourself. Understand yourself (Bernward Vespers Die Reise ). In: Christoph Parry (Ed.): Text and World. (= Saxa. Special Volume 8). Vaasa (Finland) 2002, pp. 116-124.
  • Sven Glawion: Departure into the past. Bernward Vespers The Journey (1977/79). In: Inge Stephan, Alexandra Tacke (Hrsg.): NachBilder der RAF. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20077-0 , pp. 24-38 (preview) .
  • Thomas Krüger: "... makes the blue flower red!" Bernward Vesper's Die Reise and the Roots of the “New Subjectivity”. In: Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies. Vol. 47, 2011, number 3, doi : 10.3138 / seminar.47.3.349 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jörg Schröder (ed.): Editions-Chronologie I (correspondence with the März-Verlag). In: The journey. Novel essay. Last hand edition. March at Zweiausendeins, Berlin 1977, pp. 600–624.
  2. ^ Charity Scribner: After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy. Columbia University Press, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-231-16864-9 , p. 44 .
  3. ↑ Claudius Seidl : Hitler's Hippies. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , March 13, 2005.
  4. ↑ Thomas Krüger: "... makes the blue flower red!" Bernward Vesper's Die Reise and the Roots of the “New Subjectivity”. In: Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies. Vol. 47, 2011, number 3, doi : 10.3138 / seminar.47.3.349 .
  5. ↑ On this Julian Reidy: Baader, Vesper and Ensslin in the cinema. In: Germanica. Vol. 53, 2013, number 2, pp. 163-179 (abstract) .