The Turkish woman
The Turkish woman is the title of a novel by the German writer Martin Mosebach , published in 1999 and awarded the Heimito von Doderer Prize for Literature .
Course of action
A 35-year-old with a doctorate in art history falls in love with the Turkish woman Pupuseh Calik in Frankfurt , travels to her home country and spends a few weeks in the province of Isparta in the western Taurus Mountains . that is, as he calls it, in the landscape of ancient Lycia . In “ I-form ” and in the style of the language of mythologies, fairy tales and classical history, he tells and reflects, with his typical theoretical, labyrinthine circles, the intercultural relationship in connection with the experience of a foreign country.
Frankfurt (cp. 1 - 10)
Professor Ryschen , the narrator's doctoral supervisor who is about to retire , arranges an assistant position with career prospects for the scientist who has been protected by the academy system (scholarship at the Hertziana in Rome) at the renowned New York antiquarian Hirsch (Kp. 1, 2, 4 , 5, 6), which he should start immediately. He is unsure whether this will improve his position or whether he is just exchanging the dependency on a caregiver ("I entered a new floor of my life with Hirsch, but did not leave the building in which I had previously sat in the basement as a worm." ), but sees the possibility of liberation from faculty and city: "Now it was a matter of surrendering to fate, like a talented dancer surrenders to the guidance of her partner".
In this situation of reorientation, the protagonist, who has little experience in dealing with reality, falls in love with the Turkish girl Pupuseh, called Jasmin by the water house woman, a new employee in the Hüssein laundry (Kp. 3, 5), whom he calls "black." Silhouette "discovered behind the windows of the shop (Chapter 6) and invited to dinner, which she refused. Finally, while walking through the city, which is becoming more and more insubstantial from the center to the “no man's land” of the periphery (Kp. 7), he happens to see the girl among Turkish women and the like. a. of a Kurdish woman who works in his hairdressing salon in a plane tree grove at sunset. This image of “being integrated into an environment” impressed the isolated modern city dweller, he fantasized about a life together (“It was as easy as nothing in the world to break through the invisible wall”) with her in New York (Chapter 8 ) and sees in the accidental compliance with her enigmatic gesture messages a fateful confirmation of his wishful thoughts : He goes to the hairdresser Zeynab , Pupuseh's cousin, who is already informed about his advances and arranges a meeting. This does not take place, however, because the still married laundry owner has recruited her to her uncle Muzafer Calik , her guardian, and she has been brought back to Girmeler to be on the safe side , as the head of the family has other marriage goals (Kp. 9, 10). Zeynab warns the art scholar against seeking a direct connection with Pupuseh and gives him the address of a friend, Gülen Kocabas , from the neighboring village of Yakaköy , who would forward the letters to be sent to Zeynab.
At the airport, he suddenly decides not to travel to New York, but to Antalya without “explaining the inexplicable with something inexplicable” .
Lycia (Kp. 11 - 30)
Exploring the country
On the plane, the protagonist meets a retired interpreter (the dragoman ) who has worked for the post office in Germany for a long time and offers him to take him to Yakaköy, which is near his town. Since he suspects that the German archaeologist wants to start digging again in the vicinity of the village, which the latter confirms with relief (cp. 11), he drops him off in front of Nihat Kocabas' house , where the researchers used to be well paid Guests stayed. One of his five daughters is Gülen , Pupuseh's girlfriend (head 12).
After these happy coincidences, the narrator develops a strategy for an unrecognized approach to his beloved: He does not want to hike on the street, but through the open terrain to Girmeler (Chapter 13). In an “odyssey without a plan” he ends up in the ruins of an ancient Roman theater, “Girmeler [on the other hand] has disappeared.” He begins to sense his situation: “What you can [see] within your grasp here disappears a few steps and then [t] after a few more in a different direction in the distance. This [is] a bewitched land. "
A real archaeologist, the Scientific Council a. D. Justus Palm , who quartered himself in an old little house that expanded a burial chamber carved into the rock and who continued to pursue the officially broken excavations as a hobby. In a later conversation (Kp. 20, 21) he saw through the secret intentions of the main character and advised her, knowing Muzafer's plans: “This is no place for non-binding love adventures. […] You can see how deep you are still in the unreal […] leave your pump panties [= pupuseh] in Ali Baba's cave […] don't bring them out into the world ”. In him the narrator finds his leader in the foreign land (Kp. 14, 21). He brings him back from the wilderness and makes him, like Nihat's brother, the tailor Ibrahim , with the landscape around Yakaköy, e.g. B. the cave with the sulfur thermal spring (Kp. 18), the peculiarities of the people and their culture (Kp. 20, 26) known, z. B:
- Two young engineers, Ünal and Turhan , who attended an animal breeding academy in Germany, now want to build trout breeding tanks on the Taurus slopes on their own responsibility. A water law serves as the basis, which Ünal receives as a dowry for a marriage agreed by his father with Muzafer Calik (cf. 15). The protagonist, who does not yet know the name of the bride, is impressed by the clarity and "woodcut-like simplicity" of the speeches of both technicians. In comparison to his two-dimensionality, it becomes clear to him: “These two young men had something that you had to have here. Without this clearly defined form of the person, I would in the long run look very unfavorable in the eyes of Pupuseh, maybe not at all ”. “But,” he wonders, “can you just want to become? […] None of this could work without Pupuseh. She was the transformer. "
- The civic Kemal Ataturk - celebration (Kp. 16) in a school, to which the rural population arrives as in processions with tractor and cars and is grouped into a structured image of society, where he sees Pupuseh in national costume on the "women's hill", give the narrator another insight into his adventure ("Maybe it was impossible what I wanted, but it wasn't foolish") and into the traditions of the country: "How can you, as an outsider, talk about such firmly established worlds, about which you know nothing, because what is visible in each case is only the very uppermost surface under which the actual body and organism are located, which cannot even be guessed at. "
- Palm leads the protagonist to the "Meeting of the Veterans" (Kp. 21): "Here you can see what is considered paradise on earth in Turkey, an idea of paradise realized in time". Men and women of the hierarchically organized society camp separately on the wooden terraces built on stilts in a natural idyll of shaded streams and canals. “Muzafer sat cross-legged on the central divan. He nodded graciously when he saw me. […] These camps in the countryside were a great erotic dream. […] To lie here with Pupuseh, to await the twilight, to see the colorful lanterns soar over us, to drink and kiss, as it would then be said in the Persian anacreontic , that would be the summit, that would be the fulfillment of a whole Life. But such dreams were in contrast to my real environment. They were a different people, not the descendants of Hafez. "
- In the courtyard of his hosts Nihat and Seliha , he observes the rural life of the family (Kp. 23) and the group work in baking flatbread and canning tomatoes (Kp. 17), where Pupuseh also helps with the women of her family.
- Pupuseh's brother Fazli , the guardian of the cave (Kp. 18) takes him to the village of Girmeler (Kp. 19), which is built from hewn stones and remains of columns from the ancient Greek Sidyma : "The [...] chiseled ornaments of the lost buildings [...] had become the building blocks of a disorderly peasant economy, which innocently built its house caves [...] out of precious stones. ”Against this pieced-together historical background, he sees Pupuseh walking through antique doorposts“ in a far more European context than all German schools would have at once can convey ".
Liberation or Abduction?
His image of the beloved merges more and more with the mountainous landscape and the people of their province, he is increasingly aware of his fairy-tale ideas on the one hand, and the differences in their ideas about life as well as the few commonalities on the other hand (chapter 22) and his mood changes from day to day (Cp. 23). In a volume from A Thousand and One Nights (Kp. 22) borrowed from Palm , he reads the “Letters to the Absent Beloved” and erotic descriptions and projects them onto himself and the Oriental, who as a laundry worker only appeared in “disguise as a city nymph ”. At one point the protagonist sees himself as the girl's liberator from the patriarch's dictate of marriage, the option of escaping to the emancipated civilization in Frankfurt or New York emerges in his fantasies: “Should I kidnap Pupuseh? Kidnapping was a big, Romance word, when I gave her a flight ticket to Frankfurt, I didn't kidnap her. She then made use of her freedom to go where she wanted. That was the end of the twentieth century. "
On the other hand, she seems to him, in a natural acceptance of archaic rituals, to have merged with the women of her village built on ancient foundations in front of the mountain panorama and not to have the “entire milieu and cultural background of a German, consisting of infinite particles”. Despite his reservations and attempts to make a realistic assessment, he continues to dream of conquering it and surpassing the rival engineer (chap. 22): With the help of his fairy tale reading, he imagines oriental feelings, thinking and advertising, and buys in Kemer (chap. 25) a gold chain as a gift (“It was not beautiful, but presenting it would be an impressive gesture. It has now been bought.”) And ponders: “What did Ünal say to his bride, whom he would lead to his house with her mountain water source ? I was afraid that was not a man of compliments. "
The whole time the German academic is in telephone contact with Zeynab, with whom he exchanges ideas, who advises him and brings him Pupuseh's message that he should come to the Bayram sacrificial festival in Girmeler (Kp. 24, 25). There she whispers to him the meeting point for a conversation after she has completed her task of handing the knife to the Imam for killing the billy goat. In this situation she is no longer “the girl from the laundry” for him: “[T] he was now a disguise under which she had contacted [him] in order to lure [him] into previously untrodden territory “So far he has assumed that she is“ in a certain dissent ”with her surroundings and“ seeks refuge ”with him. Now he sees that it was wrong.
Pupuseh's applicants
Hüssein suddenly appears in Yakaköy in Nihat's courtyard (cf. 26). The narrator fears that he will recognize and unmask him as a rival, and lets Palm drive him on his motorcycle to the village of Gelemis , near the sea (Kp. 27), in order to come from there to the secret meeting in Girmeler. ( Kp. 28) At about eleven o'clock in the morning he wanders to the indicated grave ruin and awaits his lover. The girl replies trance-like, automaton-like and helplessly three times with “Yes?” To the confession of love. After she has disappeared into the dark again, the protagonist sums up: “What a dialogue! […] I know - she was drawn to me with great force. I just wasn't the only force pulling on her. […] And so the forces were canceled and Pupuseh stood in her seat as if enchanted, unable to move, waiting for this stalemate to be released. “The short rendezvous is ended by the arrival of Hüssein and the laundry owner tells him (Kp . 29), before he dies of a heart attack, the history: Before they came to Frankfurt, there was a dispute between two applicants who both made claims to the beautiful Pupuseh, so that after a scandal to calm the scenery, they went to Germany to see Hüssein's family who fell in love with her and also wooed her. The girl had shown him interested in marriage, but traditionally reluctantly referred to her guardian. However, he was turned away by Muzafar, because he wanted to marry his niece to the engineer Ünal the day after tomorrow. The narrator now knows "what exactly [his] chance would have been when Pupuseh came to [him] and gave [him] the only possible opportunity to find out what she was really feeling," and that willingness would have required his activity.
So after Hüssein's funeral and Pupuseh's wedding (Kp. 30) he travels to Frankfurt with the feeling of "allowing a future back", where he is picked up from the airport by Zeynab.
References and comments
- ^ Mosebach, Martin: Die Türkin. Berlin 1999.
- ^ Mosebach, Martin: Die Türkin. dtv 2008. ISBN 978-3-423-13674-7 , p. 5. After this edition, as in the following, cited.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 34.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 57.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 77.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 53.
- ↑ The described scenery around the “ chiricoesque ” basilica resembles the Holy Cross Church of the Center for Christian Meditation and Spirituality of the Diocese of Limburg on Bornheimer Hang .
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 70.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 70.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 94.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 126.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 122.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 186.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 186.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 190.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 139 ff.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 140.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 149.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 143.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 196.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 197 ff.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 176 ff.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 173.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 191.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 206.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 187.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 206.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 234.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 206.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 231.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 270.
- ↑ Mosebach, p. 281.
Web links
- FAZ : The carefree bloomers March 23, 1999