The city behind the stream

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The City Behind the Stream is a novel by the writer Hermann Kasack , published in Berlin in 1947 . The existentialist work is in the tradition of Kubin's novel The Other Side and is one of the most important novels in German post-war literature . The author received the Fontane Prize for this work in 1949 . Hans Vogt composed an opera in 3 acts based on the work, which was premiered on May 3, 1955 in Wiesbaden.

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The main character of the novel is the orientalist Dr. Robert Lindhoff, who is traveling by train to a strange city due to an unclear assignment. For him this is puzzling and inscrutable, he meets people who in his memory have actually already died, including his father and his former lover Anna.

Lindhoff is hired as the city's official chronicler to record the city's customs and history. However, these do not reveal themselves to him, the people he meets on his forays do senseless activities, without any recognizable benefit. Eventually the protagonist realizes that he is in a realm of the dead. It is impossible for him to carry out his mandate to write a chronicle, but it writes itself in a supernatural way.

The novel closes in a circle when Robert Lindhoff is back on a train at the end of the novel and, this time dead, travels to the city behind the stream.

Origin and Criticism

Hermann Kasack describes the creation of the work as the result of a terrifying vision:

“ I saw the surfaces of a ghostly ruined city that was lost to infinity and in which people moved like flocks of captured dolls. "

The novel was written in two parts, initially during the Second World War 1942-44, and in the post-war years 1946/47. An abridged version appeared in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel before publication .

The novel is described as one of the most important works of internal emigration , as Kasack, unlike many of his colleagues, did not decide to emigrate from National Socialist Germany.

After its publication, the novel was enthusiastically received and translated into several languages ​​in the years that followed. The ghostly atmosphere of the city, on the threshold between the world and the underworld, was interpreted as a parable for the mood in Germany in the last years of the war. Like other post-war writers, Kasack deals with the helplessness of the individual in confrontation with borderline situations. Linked to this is the question of the nature of one's own existence.

In his essay Between History and Natural History , published in 1982, the writer WG Sebald comments critically on the work:

“ The air strikes that caused the destruction of the cities appear in a doblinic, pseudo-epic style as transreal. "

Sebald notes about the green uniformed figures that appear before the archivist appointed to judge and representing the author, where they collapse:

“ This almost Syberbergian event, which owes itself to the most dubious aspects of Expressionist fantasy, is attempted to give meaning to the meaningless in the final part of the novel, on which occasion the venerable master Magus then explores the intricate preschool of a union of Western philosophy and Far Eastern wisdom . "

And further:

“In the further course of the explanations of the Magus, the alter ego Kasack is led to the insight that the millionfold death had to happen in this excess in order to make room for the forthcoming rebirths. A myriad of people were called up early so that they could rise in time as a seed, as an apocryphal new birth in a previously closed living space. The choice of words and terms in these passages, which speak of the opening up of the shielded region of the Asian field, of European existence and a hitherto closed living space, shows with terrifying clarity how much a philosophical speculation tied to the style of the time is in the attempt the synthesis gives its better intentions. The thesis advocated again and again by the ' inner emigration ' that genuine literature had made use of a secret language under the totalitarian regime only proves to be correct in this case as its code involuntarily agreed with that of the fascist diction. In contrast , the vision of a new educational province, which Kasack expands in a manner similar to that of Hermann Hesse or Ernst Jünger , is of little consequence, as it too is only the caricature of the upper-class ideal of a corporation that is effective before and above the state, that of the ordained fascist elite experienced their utter corruption and perfection. So when the archivist at the end of his story seems to have formed a mark, a small speckled mark, a final rune of fate, at the point that the separated ghost had touched with his finger, then this is a synopsis that can hardly be beaten against the narrative intention developing tendency of Kasack's work, which buries the rubble of time again under the junk of an equally ruined culture. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ WG Sebald: Between history and natural history. Campo Santo 2003 Munich Vienna p. 72ff

literature

expenditure

  • Berlin 1946 (abridged version in the Tagesspiegel );
  • Berlin 1947;
  • Frankfurt am Main 1960 ( Suhrkamp , revised version 1956);
  • Munich / Zurich 1964 ( Knaur , paperback);
  • Frankfurt am Main 1983 (Suhrkamp, ​​"White Series");
  • Frankfurt am Main 1988 (Suhrkamp, ​​Volume 296 of the Suhrkamp Library);
  • Leipzig 1989.

Translations

  • Staden bortom floden , Stockholm 1950;
  • La ville au delà du fleuve , Paris 1951;
  • La città oltre il fiume , Milan 1952;
  • Kaupunki virran takana , Helsinki 1952;
  • The city beyound the river , London, New York, Toronto 1953;
  • Byen og Elven , Oslo 1954;
  • La ciudad detras del rio , Buenos Aires;
  • there is also a Chinese and a Japanese edition.

Secondary literature

This is just a selection; a complete list can be found at the Potsdam City and State Library, see below in the section "Web Links".

  • Hermann Kasack: The city behind the river. A self-criticism , Die Welt (Hamburg), No. 142, November 29, 1947, p. 2.
  • Wolfgang Kasack: Hermann Kasack. "The city behind the stream" in the criticism. A bibliography of the most important articles and reviews. , compiled for the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1952.
  • Lothar Fietz: Structural elements of the hermetic novels Thomas Manns, Hermann Hesses, Hermann Brochs and Hermann Kasacks , German quarterly journal for literary studies and intellectual history 40, 1966, p. 161-183.
  • Ehrhard Bahr: Metaphysical diagnosis of the times: Hermann Kasack, Elisabeth Langgässer and Thomas Mann , in: Gegenwartsliteratur and Third Reich, ed. by H. Wagner, Stuttgart 1977, pp. 133-162.
  • Gene O. Stimpson: Between Mysticism and Science. Hermann Kasack's "The City Behind the Stream" in the Light of the New Paradigm , European University Papers, Series 1–1503, Frankfurt am Main 1995.
  • Mathias Bertram: Literary Epoch Diagnoses of the Post-War Period . In: German memory. Berlin contributions to the prose of the post-war years (1945–1960). Edited by Ursula Heukenkamp, ​​Berlin 2000, pp. 11-100.

Web links