The dead (crash)

The dead is a 2016 published novel of the Swiss writer Christian Kracht . Kracht's fifth novel won the Swiss Book Prize in 2016.

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In Die Toten, Christian Kracht tells the interwoven story of two protagonists - the (fictional) Swiss director Emil Nägeli and the Japanese ministerial official Amakasu Masahiko in the 1930s . Amakasu intends to form a "celluloid axis" parallel to the political axis between Japan and the German Empire. And so UFA boss Alfred Hugenberg sends the Swiss Nägeli to Japan to shoot a horror film or "scary film" as he calls it. The result is a novel plot that alternates between the two protagonists without letting them come into direct contact. Nägeli's lover, the actress Ida von Üxküll, who at the end of the novel - like the protagonist Amakasu (though by the hand of a certain Charlie Chaplin) - spectacularly passes away from life, is the element that unites the two men. On the one hand, the novel is fed by scenes that can be called grotesque and guest appearances by people from contemporary events of the 1920s and 1930s, not least from the world of film, and it is divided (as detailed below) into three equally weighted segments. But it is not least the long, rather introspective passages that look into the protagonists' past that give the novel a rhythm. The plot of the novel is framed in a completely different type of film (than the one ordered by Hugenberg) that Nägeli ultimately shoots: The film seems to anticipate the nouvelle vague and is called - “the dead”.

reception

In his review , literary scholar Moritz Baßler sums up the wealth of allusions, which is not uncommon for Kracht, and the large number of figures from contemporary history such as Charlie Chaplin , Lotte Eisner , Putzi Hanfstaengl and Siegfried Kracauer , as follows: “You could create a 'Die Toten' Wiki set up (as for Pynchon or Wallace ) [...], but the text works, thanks to the realism effect and the good actors, just like that. ”The literary and media theorist Oliver Jahraus also emphasizes that Kracht's novel, the The transition from silent to sound film takes place and takes on a relatively abstract level of reflection when, in describing the cinematic, he “does not make [his] very own medium, language, invisible, but on the contrary, exhibits it and draws attention to it through it. We call this procedure style. "

According to Kracht's novel, formally follows the structure of the Japanese Nō theater and is accordingly divided into three parts: Jo-ha-kyū .

Awards

• Swiss Book Prize 2016
• Hermann Hesse Prize 2016

expenditure

• Christian Kracht: The dead. Kiepenheuer and Witsch , Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-462-04554-3 .
  • Christian Kracht: De døde. Pelikanen Forlag , Stavanger 2017, ISBN 978-82-93237-86-0 . Translated by Sverre Dahl
  • Christian Kracht: Οι νεκροί. Εκδόσεις Παπαδόπουλος , Athens 2017, ISBN 978-960-569-766-2 . Translated by Tsalis Vasilis
  • Christian Kracht: De Döda. Substitute Förlag , Stockholm 2018, ISBN 978-91-87891-72-4 . Translated by Anna Bengtsson
  • Christian Kracht: The Dead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux , New York 2018, ISBN 978-037-413-967-4 . Translated by Daniel Bowles
  • Christian Kracht: De døde. Gyldendal , Copenhagen 2018, ISBN 978-870-225-018-3 . Translated by Madame Nielsen
  • Christian Kracht: Les Morts. Editions Phébus , Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2-7529-1153-7 . Translated by Corinna Gepner
  • Christian Kracht: Umarli. Wydawnictwo Literackie , Krakow 2018, ISBN 978-83-08-06571-6 . Translated by Ryszard Wojnakowski
  • Christian Kracht: Мертвые. Ad Marginem , Moscow 2018, ISBN 978-5-91103-441-2 . Translated by Tatiana Baskakowa
  • Christian Kracht: 망자 들. 을유 문화사 , Seoul 2020, ISBN 978-89-324-0489-9 . Translated by Taehwan Kim

Web links

• Review notes on Die Toten (Kracht) at perlentaucher.de
• The dead on the website of the Kiepenheuer and Witsch publishing house

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christian Kracht receives the Swiss Book Prize , Roman Bucheli, Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 13, 2016.
2. ↑ Lucas Marco Gisi: Only good things about the dead. In: University of Zurich . Retrieved on February 1, 2018 : “Against the background of a competition between the silent film led by Charlie Chaplin to the championship and the emerging sound film (and even the Nouvelle Vague color film prefigured by Nägeli), the“ celluloid axis ”between Tokyo and Berlin is straightforward emblematic of the relationship between camera and machine gun. " 
3. ^ Moritz Baßler: Between Settlement and Decomposition . In: the daily newspaper of September 13, 2016.
4. ↑ Oliver Jahraus: Style and media reflection in Christian Kracht's Die Toten (2016) with a sideways glance at Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). (PDF) 2016, accessed January 3, 2017 . 
5. ↑ Jan Drees: A work that leads into the dark . In: Deutschlandfunk from September 11, 2016.