The underwater cities

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The underwater cities (original title: Orașele scufundate ) is a future novel by the Romanian writer Felix Aderca . Felix Aderca is one of the most important representatives of Romanian modernism.

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The Romanian poet depicts the life of mankind on the sea floor. People withdrew there a long time ago, fleeing from the inhospitable land surface, the sun of which was darkening more and more. The people live depending on an underground volcano as a source of energy and divided according to races in three subterranean cities: the effeminate, spiritual master people, the organized administrative people and the wild, muscular work people, called Marianne. The dependence on the underground source dictates the life of underwater people. But this energy source is also disappearing. After the death of the president, who had been researching a new and independent energy source throughout his life, two opposing positions emerged in government circles: Either push further into the interior of the earth to tap an earthly energy source or use a rocket to pierce the surface of the water, to colonize another planet .

Origin and origin

In the literature, Aderca was one of the first to hypothetically formulate the organic change in people living permanently under the sea surface. The novel “Die Unterwasserstädte” appeared in 1932 in the features section of the magazine Realitatea ilustrata as a sequel. In this novel, Aderca, who is in the tradition of literary modernism and expressionism , posed the question of a new image of man and the dependence on an energy. Against the background of modernity and the emerging fascist-autocratic regime in Romania, Aderca shows an oppressive vision of the future. Even then, energy played a major role, Romania was one of the main oil producers in Europe, and its oil fields were fought over during the First World War .

Felix Aderca published his novel under the name Leone Palmantini with the title XO Romanul viitorului , in German XO The novel of the future . The first book edition appeared in 1936 under the title Orasele inecate by the Vremea publishing house in Bucharest . In 1966 a new edition was published with the title Orasele scufundate . The Romanian edition from 1936 still has a Nietzsche quote as a preamble , which does not appear in later editions. A German translation by Erich Mesch was published in Bucharest in 1970. The 1977 edition published by Heyne Verlag was shortened to include the prologue and epilogue that still appear in the Romanian edition of 1966. In his novel, the author asks what would happen if humanity lived under artificial atmospheric conditions.

Future elements

technology

The science fiction novel contains several scientistic elements. The dying President Pi (reference to circle number Pi) worked until the end on the generation of energy from the nuclear fusion. Furthermore, a tidal power station is mentioned right at the beginning of the novel, as well as a video disk as a kind of video telephone: “On the silver disk , the speed of which you can recognize as a mirror disk, the pale face of engineer Wann can be seen” . Paul Nipkow, who was granted a patent for an electric telescope on January 6, 1884 and pioneered today's television, is considered to be one of the “inventors” of the dismantling and reassembly of images over a long distance.

Aderca mentions television in connection with the broadcast of a dance performance in the underwater city: "Doctor, don't we want to watch the performance too?" Without waiting for an answer, she went to the side wall and turned on the television. Here, too, Aderca anticipates technical developments from the radio transmission of moving images. The television broadcasts, as well as the videophones used in the novel, are genuinely part of the organizational structure of the city, because the underwater cities on the seabed not only require the tunneled train connections described in the novel, but also a perfect telecommunications system.

Energy generation

In the opening chapters of the novel The Underwater Cities everything seems to lead to the desperate search for the missing gas for the nuclear fusion lamp. The sixth chapter “the eighth gas” describes the dependence on energy and the redemption through nuclear fusion : “Instead of the massive turbines that are only with difficulty kept under the water surface, people could use small devices to generate the electricity that was created through nuclear fusion conveniently evaluate on the seabed. " The artificial atmosphere of civilization in the sea with the basic constants such as air and light made available to man is threatening to disappear. The machine-generated and technologically regulated living environment is no better than the earth's atmosphere. But in Aderca's novel the hope of salvation seems to lie only in science: The energy from the meltdown is supposed to save the underwater cities. As the volcano supplies less and less energy and the technology that could save it cannot be found, the only choice left is to advance further into the earth's interior or to colonize a new planet with a rocket. Aderca poses the question of the permanence of an artificial world in the event that the human-made, technology-based world of technical failure does not work.

In the novel the way out remains to advance further into the earth's interior. With the last energy reserves, two huge drills are driven. Everything gathers in the new, temporary city of Formosa. The old cities are being abandoned and destroyed. But the hope of engineer Whitt to advance further into the earth's interior turns out to be the wrong path. As a last resort, Whitt now proposes the annihilation of the Mariana Islands. The energy necessary for their maintenance should be used for the drill, which - driven further into the earth's interior - should secure a new place for mankind. Whitt's plan is to flood the ancient city of Mariana, killing the Marianas in favor of the “intellectualized” Haiwaians and Ceylonese. But now an unexpected turn takes place. The engineer in charge Iran, a Mariane, storms the new city of Formosa and buries the Haiwaians and Ceylonese in their city. When everything seems to be in vain, the engineer Xavier finds the last missing element, namely oxygen, with which to power the lamp with the eight cones, the nuclear fusion lamp that will deliver infinite energy. The engineer Whitt remains with the new source of energy, the nuclear fusion lamp, in the interior of the earth in order to found a new human race.

Interpretation and Analysis

In the long tradition of literary drafts for the future, Aderca's novel is one of the negative utopias. An escape utopia is shown. The slowly cooling sun offered no survival opportunities for mankind, so that they had to build an artificial world on the ocean floor that already bears the seeds of destruction. The underground energy source, the slowly cooling volcano, threatens to dry up. Aderca gives his story a conciliatory ending, despite the analogies to racial madness and the will to annihilate. At one point in the novel it can be read: "Everywhere there was a feeling of depression and rigidity like in a forced labor camp."

The scene of a human race fleeing to the sea floor has its roots in the utopia of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the technological society, new utopias appeared alongside Christian ideas of the afterlife that had been effective until then. The concept of the end of the world, which was no longer so easily implemented, gave space for new ideas of omnipotence. Since the life of mankind is endangered by overpopulation and catastrophes and you are threatened with cold death by the extinction of the sun, mankind must leave the earth and move into space. Aderca follows this idea of ​​“escape from the world” with the “setting” of his novel. But Aderca plays more with the anthropological dimension of technology. In the novel “The Underwater Cities” it becomes clear that the engineer Whitt is driven by an additional impetus in his search for the “nuclear fusion formula”. He wants to make the “Marianas”, who have so far been indispensable as energy suppliers as workers in the ore deposit city of Mariana, dispensable by killing all Marianas. The impending demise of the cities in the sea is to be counteracted with a new energy, a new technology, namely the nuclear fusion machine, will become the lifeline of mankind at the mercy of technology.

Motifs Adercas

In 1932, when the novel appeared in the magazine Realitatea ilustrata, not only the political climate but also Aderca's artistic position as a member of the Romanian avant-garde plays a role. His novel is a thoroughly technological novel, therefore and because of its popularity, his book was later labeled as early science fiction. The technology here has an anthropological component, because it ultimately serves to destroy some of the people living in the sea. In summary, the question arises of the cultural imagination of an underwater world in Aderca's novel. In the 1935 edition of the book, Nietzsche quotation is about the creation of a new human being and a new civilization in the guise of a novel that makes use of technological elements. In Aderca's story set in the future, the emergence of new “races” in response to the artificial environment created by man leads to the problem of the hopelessness of a new civilization. The Romanian poet and writer chooses the underwater world as the framework for an artificial environment. The idea of ​​an artificial world created by man suits the superman.

Political background

The Romanian writer leaves the end open in his utopian novel. Either way is possible: saving the artificial world through an invention (nuclear fusion) or leaving it to create a new world on a distant planet. Although Aderca, as a Jew, was under surveillance by the right-wing national guard and was almost murdered by them, according to the diary entries of Mihail Sebastian , a friend and fellow writer, he was toying with their political positions.

Aderca appreciates the leader of the extreme right-wing Michael Guard Corneliu Zelea Codreanu . Mihail Sebastian noted in his diaries, which cover the period from 1935 to 1944, in 1941 that Aderca regretted the death of the murdered Codreanus and said: “ It's a shame that the Guard were anti-Semitic ... Without anti-Semitism, they would have a place in history been. "

In Orasele inecate is about the impending demise of a civilization that split (racially) in working people, administrative people and art people eke out an existence on the seabed in artificial cities. Felix Aderca worked from 1920 to 1940 as a civil servant in the Ministry of Labor. The internationality of the novel corresponds to more recent research on the understanding of Romanian-Jewish authors than other literary figures, who are shaped by the experience of “Otherness”.

expenditure

  • First printing under the pseudonym Leone Palmantini: XO Romanul viitorului In: Realitatea ilustrata . 1932.
  • First edition: Orașele înecate. Vremea, Bucharest 1936, OCLC 895212930 .
  • New edition: Orașele scufundate. Ed. tineret, Bucharest 1966, OCLC 250151258 .
  • German edition: The underwater cities. Scientific and fantastic novel. German by Erich Mesch. Foreword by Franz Storch. Kriterion-Verlag, Bucharest 1970.
  • Paperback edition: The Underwater Cities. German by Erich Mesch. Heyne, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-453-30431-4 .

literature

  • Mihai Mindra: Felix Aderca: Jewishness and Modernism. In: Studia Hebraica I , 2001, ed. Felicia Waldman, The Goldstein Goren Center for Hebrew Studies, Bucharest 2001, pages 105-113.
  • Hans Joachim Alpers , Werner Fuchs , Ronald M. Hahn : Reclam's science fiction guide. Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-010312-6 , p. 8.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.romlit.ro
  2. ↑ (4 electric generators are driven by ocean waves, p. 17)
  3. ↑ Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media. Berliner Vorlesung 1999, Berlin 2002, page 292. There quoted from Rings, 1962, p. 37
  4. ↑ Aderca, 1977, page 45. For comparison, the Romanian passage in Aderca, 1966, page 67: - Doctore, vrei sa vedem si noi spectacolul? Fara a mai adasta raspuns, sndrepta
  5. ↑ Aderca, 1977, p. 55.
  6. ↑ For a continuation of Aderca's biographical background see: Mihai Mindra: Felix Aderca: Jewishness and Modernism. In: Studia Hebraica, ed. Felicia Waldmann, 1/2002, pp. 105–113.
  7. ↑ Felix Aderca: Die Unterwasserstädte, Munich 1977, page 121. In the Romanian edition of 1966 it says: Domnea o abatere si o stupoare de ocna
  8. ↑ See also the illustration of the book cover in an edition from 1913 at: www.informatics.org/museum/tsiol.html
  9. ↑ Mihail Sebastian writes in his diary entry of January 29, 1941 about riots and murder of Jews in Romania. Aderca had been beaten up, but was freed and kept alive. Mihail Sebastian, 2005, p. 230.
  10. ↑ Mihail Sebastian: Full of horror, but not desperate. Diaries 1935–1944, Berlin 2006.
  11. ↑ Mihai Sebastian, 2006, p. 481.
  12. ↑ See also Leon Volovici's review of AB Yoffe's Hebrew book: In Foreign Pastures. Jewish Writers in Romania, 1880–1940 , Tel Aviv 1996. Volovici explains: " The most striking and well-known illustrations of the drama of double belonging are found in the writings and intellectual evolution of Felix Aderca and Mihail Sebastian, to whom Yoffe dedicates thorough and sensitive chapters ". Leon Volovici: In Foreign Pastures. Jewish Writers in Romania. In: The Jewish Quartely Review, New Ser., Vol. 88, No. 3/4, June-April 1998, pp. 369-371.
  13. ↑ On the title page of this issue the title was misspelled, instead of Orașele înecate it reads Orașele înnecate.