The unfinished

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The Unfinished is a novel by Reinhard Jirgl published by Hanser in 2003 . It tells the story of three generations of a Sudeten German family who were expelled from Komotau in the summer of 1945 , first settled in a village and then in a town between 1946 and 1988 in East German Altmark , and ended at the turn of the millennium with the last childless descendant in Berlin .

content

The novel consists of three parts: The first two - "Before dogs and people", "Under glass" - are carried by a personal narrative attitude , in the last "Jagen Jagen" Reiner K. appears as a first-person narrator .

"Before dogs and people"

Eight provided with numbers chapters it comes to the so-called wild expulsions that use directly with the end of the war in 1945 and the subsequent refugee trek with rides on freight trains through occupied Germany and temporary accommodations in bearings to a destination in one of the occupied zones out peels .
Three women, Hanna, in her mid-forties, mother of a daughter and widow of a Czech since 1940, her unmarried sister Maria, who is ten years younger than her, and her seventy-year-old mother Johanna, were of German origin on a late summer day in 1945 after a loudspeaker announcement within 30 minutes with a maximum of eight kilos Arrive luggage per person at the Chomutov train station, where freight trains are used to assemble treks.

Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia : Displaced Sudeten Germans with hand luggage waiting for their removal

The refugees wear white armbands with which they have to identify themselves as Germans. The Czech militia takes care of the process. The three women get to Munich and could get off there without Johanna; But because they are convinced that those who turn their backs on their family are no good (pp. 9, 10, 20, 152) and therefore want to stay together, they go via Dresden to Leipzig and from there to Magdeburg , where they are for January and In February 1946 he was forcibly committed to a bombed-out house. The job search fails, so that they are sent on with others to Stendal and finally on the northwestern edge of the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ) in the Altmark from the last train station with a cart to the village of Schieben and in an attic room in a manor for appropriate agricultural work Find accommodation.
From there, Hanna can finally go in search of her daughter Anna, who was 18 at the end of the war and who was interned as a high school student for forced labor in the countryside . She repeatedly travels back and forth through the Soviet occupation zone to the closest German-Czech border town of Reitzenhain to the Komotau , where she searches for her daughter “ in this camp of refugees, thieves, military disabled returnees, pimps and smugglers ” (p. 24). Anna had narrowly missed her family on the day of eviction. Because according to schedule, she could have supplied herself with fresh laundry at home, but on the way home she witnesses events that are holding her up: On the outskirts of the town, prisoners are being held in the stadium, former SS men and collaborators , and “ residents and militiamen are just there to kill the captured SS men & collaborators with iron bars & stones ”(p. 14). Anna is driven away, the loudspeaker announcements listening to the expulsion, hides her armband and is in the guard of honor at the local Czech Gaffer gauntlet of the driven to the streets of German descent. " In order not to attract attention, she too cheered the beatings on the displaced persons, shouted her way into the street corridor " (p. 19) and returns to the camp because of Czech militia posts in front of her house. The scent from the late summer gardens that envelops them is mixed with the smell of “ charred human fat (...); the bodies of the slain were burned in the stadium ”(p. 19). In the camp she is exposed to constant rape at night , but one night she secretly receives a message from a Czech from her mother for Reitzenhain that she should go there so that Hanna can pick her up. Anna manages to escape from the camp and take the train ride to Reitzenhain, where she rents a room and waits for her to come into contact with her family. There she met a young former SS soldier, Erich, who was supposed to be on the eastern front " half a year before the end ", had to guard a death march of concentration camp prisoners , was involved in a massacre, deserted and was careful because of his blood group tattoos must behave. With Anna, with whom he falls in love and who he will miss (p. 78), he would like to stay together and organize his life in the post-war period. But Anna was picked up by her mother in the summer of 1947.

"Under glass"

The second part covers the years 1947 up to the uprising of June 17, 1953 and shows how the family tried to make a living in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), while the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was concerned with “construction ”To which all“ are called ”(pp. 81, 84). The main setting is Birkheim, the easily identifiable district town of Salzwedel (see p. 83f.), Whose street names structure Part 2 as chapter headings.
Hanna succeeds in registering her daughter Anna in the grammar school in Birkheim, where, against all negative predictions of the authoritarian director, in Hanna's eyes a “ BeDeM-Suppjeckt ” (p. 105), she will make up for everything that has not been missed and in 1949 will take her Abitur. To save time, Hanna managed to get her a room in Birkheim, while she tried to find a place in Birkheim in the payroll department of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) because she was already working as a secretary for the Deutsche Reichsbahn in the Sudetengau with her sister . Before a position becomes available in Birkheim, however, she has to move to Magdeburg because there is a vacancy there. In the same house in which she was quartered with her family in 1946, she got " 1 room, bare, the window panes smashed, hardly any furniture, no stove " (p. 91). In addition, a sullen widow who said at the time: “ No one can stop refugees and thin shit ” (p. 8, 91). The widowed agency manager proposes to her in vain. Because Hanna sticks to the oath of loyalty she took at her husband's grave, namely that she will never belong to another man. In addition, she continues to hold on to her “ back to home ” (p. 130). The office manager can still help her move to Birkheim and find a new room.

Queuing for Baumkuchen in GDR times

Back in Birkheim, she has to realize that her daughter Anna leads a life of her own that runs counter to her ideas of family cohesion. While she still seems convinced that Anna's Abitur, which Anna has to achieve against all opposition, is a “ advance guarantee for the actual return home ” (p. 131), for Anna the Abitur means that she can make herself independent. She goes to the interpreting school in Leipzig. Because there is a need for interpreters not only in the GDR, but above all in the Allied offices in the West, where there are certain conditions to get there (p. 148). Anna prefers to work in statistics for the magistrate in Birkheim, while she wants to open up opportunities for herself by belonging to a party: “ If you weren't in any party, then you were Garnish. And then my mother & I thought about what to do. EsEhDe is out of the question. (...) So my mother: off to the TseDeUh - I to the party of my boss: to the end of the pede ”(p. 149). She was placed as an interpreter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from now on lives in East Berlin , where she takes up further language studies, then changes to the State Insurance Company until her retirement, for which she initially frequently travels abroad for business negotiations.
In Birkheim as in Berlin, Anna receives an unannounced visit from Erich, whom she met in Reitzenhain. He trades in technical equipment and foreign exchange and earns well. While he is inconvenient for her in Birkheim because she expects a visit from her secretly fiancé, a classmate “ from so-called manor house ” (p. 137), Anna and Erich are very close again, which is reflected in the intense embrace However, when Erich becomes violent (p. 137 f.), they live together longer in Berlin after Anna found him a job as a janitor in the Foreign Ministry. When someone happened to discover his tattoo while showering and he had to fear denunciation, he went to Munich and left Anna pregnant.
At the beginning of January 1953 her son was born in a difficult birth: " 1 Beginning:? Mine ..... Nobody's son, from = the beginning stubborn & tough like old meat & old stories ..... " (p. 152) . While the boy is quickly placed in a day nursery and Anna continues to work as an interpreter, Hanna comes to Berlin every weekend. In the meantime, she and her sister and mother have moved into a vacant, spacious official apartment - “ 1 one-room apartment with kitchen ” in the two-story building in the attic of the Birkheim goods handling facility (p. 152). She takes her grandson there with her when he falls seriously ill in the day nursery, is given up there, but recovers in Birkheim. While there is an uprising in Berlin on June 17th and a state of emergency is imposed, three women worry about him, and home has become something for them that is “ further than death ”. “ So home is strangers on a few square meters in Birkheim's goods clearance, Bahnhofstrasse 9 ” (p. 154).

"Hunt Hunt"

The last part makes the hospital stay of Anna's son, the almost 50-year-old narrator Reiner K. during the last six days of Charité , from which it because of inoperable stomach cancer in the chemotherapy is released. The chapter headings are exact dates and times for the beginning and the respective beginning of the continuation of his story, which he would like to give his wife in letter form when she will pick him up from the clinic.
Reiner K., whose name is derived from p. 157 f. and 244 results in the composition, without ever naming himself, ordering his life (p. 208). He believes that during the realization of his dream, namely after the fall of the Wall, he gave up the disgusting profession of dentist and opened a bookstore, the cancer developed at the same time: " Every step is a strange step in one's own armor to happiness ... .. "(p. 164). Because pain and realized dreams contribute to the destruction of his “ EISERNE RUHE mask ” (p. 158 and 162). For the books that were not allowed to be read in the GDR and new " books that remained in the dark " (p. 163), which he has in store for an expected readership, the buyers in his bookstore have not adjusted, so his wife The product range has been expanded to market.
As the happiest time of his life, he remembers his childhood up to the age of 12 in Birkheim: “ Birkheim =! My-home. "(P. 207). His great-grandmother, whose death and burial he experienced impressively as an 8-year-old, gave him important information (p. 155). The hammer blows as a sign of farewell, with which her coffin is closed, accompany him further (pp. 174, 200, 207–210, 215). Grandmother Hanna is his caregiver and is always there for him, which goes so far that she takes him out of kindergarten where he doesn't like it and instead lets her spend time with her at work in a corner in the pay office. There he uses crayons on the back of old forms to process what he has heard from “ the homeland-Komotau den-Nazis & der-Expulsion ”: “ Abstruse monsters awakened in me, massacre scenes floor by floor in bizarre rented houses, mercenaries & hangmen under red hoods with slits for the eyes, all of which were destroyed on other floors of these torture houses ”(p. 176). He encounters dying in a different guise while preparing for Christmas when his grandmother crucified a rabbit on the door frame to strip its hide. In the Christmas midnight mass he panics when he looks at the cross with the crucified Christ and thinks he discovers that the worm-eaten face is missing the right eye. He escapes from the church and later has to explain to grandmother and Maria what drove him away: he watched the cattle being loaded and could not bear the violence the workers treated the cattle; one of them smashed the jawbone of an unruly ox with a blow of the club, so that he fell down with his forelegs buckling. The narrator threw a stone at him and hit him in the eye. His colleagues searched in vain for the stone thrower because, as a 9-year-old, they did not consider him capable of doing anything like that. Rubbing his face with dirty hands, the worker contracted tetanus and died shortly afterwards. (While telling the story, the narrator tells his wife what he thinks of his act: Whoever “ torments the creature is 1 of the far too many born from the series of all zeros (...) Although THEY waxed again like the Hydra heads, stayed a bastard through my stone! less in the world.: I regret not! having been a stone more often "[p. 204].)

It has been agreed with his mother Anna that he will return to her and to Berlin when he is promoted to the 5th school year. Anna is now also married, so that she offers her mother the guarantee of a “ proper family ” (p. 182, 206), although she does not like her son-in-law, especially since he only seems to have married Anna, eight years older, because of her apartment because that way he was able to get permission to move to Berlin (p. 187). Hanna does not agree that her grandson will be adopted by him and that he will take his name. The narrator doesn't like to call him "father" either. His attempts at upbringing are aimed at making him absolutely dependent on the truths proclaimed by the SED and immunizing him against everything Western. The marriage ended in divorce after a few years. However, the man remains in the apartment, which is divided in two by a clothesline and blankets hung over it, until an opportunity arises to get rid of him for possession of writings that are harmful to minors. The narrator concludes that " the fathers (...) of the children are not even worth the contempt " (p. 189), which he finally transfers to his mother in a softened form - " The mothers are hers To forget children ”(p. 242) - with which he constantly falls out, sometimes even wants to hit them and“ stops in the dread of physical contact with his own mother ”(p. 240). At the age of 18, he immediately moved into his own apartment. He himself cannot imagine being a father and does not want to play the father for his wife's daughter from his first marriage. He also “doesn't want to give up any more meat” (p. 162), and when his wife asks him to have a child after an argument, he never sleeps with her again (p. 196). On the evening he got to know each other, he already had the impression that he was not reaching his future wife with his story, so that he felt the " fear of the ruthless in one = everyone near " (p. 178).
Hanna and Maria both died shortly after one another in 1988 after they had to change their apartment again in Birkheim. Anna and the narrator, for whom Birkheim belongs to the past, have her buried in Berlin: " In Berlin-Friedrichsfelde on a few cm² in the U.ABT N IV, No. 158 " (p. 245). Anna lives alone with the third cat in her apartment. Now and then the narrator hears " either unwilling or retired = sedate noise " from her (p. 242).

The narrator's bookstore is on Senefelderstrasse, Prenzlauer Berg.

From the hospital, the narrator went to his bookstore last night through a back entrance to smell the unread books once more. When he leaves, he opens both burners of the gas stove that is there to prepare coffee, so that a cool, sharp, poisonous smell spreads quickly in the rooms of the bookstore. If his wife forgot to pick him up at the clinic at 8 a.m., as promised, and instead went to the bookstore, following her habit, she shouldn't turn on the light. The narrator notes: “ In the whole city on this morning I believe the smell of gas as a heavy cloud ... ” (p. 250).
His last writing takes place at 30 minutes before 8. It takes up the thought of the spreading gas smell with a lexicon quotation on cancer growth: The human defense system fails against it in the final stage.

Themes and motifs

In the title of the book and the headings of the three parts, the themes are indicated which are underlying the plot and which carry it as a leitmotif .

Book title

The depicted people cannot complete themselves because they are repeatedly forced or self-induced farewells and obligations (p. 157: “ THE FAREWELLS & THE DUTY ”; p. 208: “ - 'parted duty -, -' parted duty “) Leaving familiar relationships behind without having realized oneself in them, because they are prevented from doing so by various other things or by obstinacy. This is most clearly stated with Hanna, Anna and the narrator. With regard to the narrator, for example, his wife says in a fit of anger in the face of the badly doing book trade that she recognizes his grandparents in him: “ Your strength is your ruthless weakness. (...) What your grandmother's homeland Komotau is to you is homeland books. You damn bastard: In what grave did you swear as an oath your guilty feelings ”(p. 196).

Part 1

In the heading “ Before dogs and people ”, the preposition “before” is decisive . Displacement is done to people by people who have lived together for a long time. Some become the objects of the other in the gauntlet, which means a different compulsion for the onlookers whom Anna meets than for those on the trellis, because Anna roars with them, although she ought to be on the side of the watched. In the massacre in the stadium, people get in front of people and on the prisoners' death march, in addition, in front of the Scharführer's Dobermans . But also starved dogs attack the weakest of the pack in Reitzenhain as a pack and chase him to death.

Part 2

The phrase “ under glass ” expresses a separation, as if the events described were taking place under glass and as if there were an uninvolved outside observer who only acts as a witness. What happened in Birkheim in the post-war period and the founding phase of the GDR under the auspices of a new beginning supported by the SED is only “ brittle whitewash ”. “ Underneath, the old, permanent, immersed - merely provided with dry-like coroll arias of these = other gentlemen, sorcerers' apprentices in uniform, etc. Forget the magic word again: so broom & water flood -:! Nothing new under the sun, all fart long the same thing ”(p. 85). And Birkheim continues to play “ STADT (...) and HISTORIE full of seriousness from officially named documents from the 12th century ” (p. 84). In the people, too, the ancient remains, so when in an avoidable dispute Hanna and her Magdeburg landlady " like 2 exes from prehistoric times left in this cave their millions of years of enmity " (p. 117). In this way, “ faces like a face ” can be “ punched into flat sheet metal disks ” and “set in motion ” (p. 145, 168).

part 3

Under the heading “ Jagen Jagen ” continues what Erich in Reitzenhain has to fear, namely to be hunted and caught while in hiding (p. 78), whereby the occasion takes a back seat. Hunting is expressed in the repeatedly mentioned greed, with which it is hoarded , so that “ people and meanness have long since become synonymous ” (p. 9). It is " greed for a lot of unlived life, the voice in the feet " (p. 165). Greed, however, leaves everything unfinished and ultimately changes the postponed desires. The narrator feels a lot that has not been fully lived in himself (p. 208), and he sees his “ reading haste through books ” stemming from his haste “ past the life of others ” (p. 215). After all, in the end, it is cancer that leads to rampant growth in the final stage and everything changes to it (p. 251).

reception

In the German-language feature pages of the press and radio, the novel received mostly positive feedback. Timm Menke, who teaches at Portland State University in Portland (Oregon) and is a specialist in Arno Schmidt's work , registers the author's “pitch-black, inconsolable image of man”. In terms of language, Jirgl has created its very own cosmos. What seems chaotic at first glance turns out to be " a filigree and strictly composed text " for the reader . Jirgl used the typeface for different perspectives and narrative voices. “ In general, at Jirgl, the characters become carriers of meaning in a semiotic field. "

But the novel has also led to different readings and a controversy between Harald Welzer and the German didactic specialist Clemens Kammler. Harald Welzer examines the scene of the death march of the concentration camp prisoners with Erich as a participant and insinuates that Jirgl is about " merciful powerlessness " for one of the perpetrators, namely Erich, about " making the crime disappear in a morally indifferent off-screen ". In contrast, Kammler emphasizes that Welzer did not unconditionally engage in Jirgl's artificial language because he only perceived it as a reading barrier. In doing so, however, he misses the field of association that clearly includes " the crimes against European Jews (...) in the narrative space ". The problematic relationship to the generation of perpetrators, which Welzer Jirgl accuses, cannot be tied to a figure like Erich. Such a position ignores the narrator as the son of Erich with his experience as “ nobody's son ”. To interpret this figure as a symbolic representation of the grandfather de-Nazified in the collective memory of German families seems implausible to Kammler.

expenditure

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ It is quoted from the dtv paperback edition from January 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-13531-3 . - In addition to the long sought “return home” and the principles of “decency and pride”, family cohesion remains the leitmotif for Hanna's actions.
  2. ↑ Birkheim as Salzwedel (accessed October 28, 2010)
  3. ↑ Allusion to Goethe's ballad The Sorcerer's Apprentice
  4. ↑ Guido Graf on R. Jirgl
  5. ↑ See compilation of reviews , accessed on October 28, 2010.
  6. ↑ Timm Menke, Reinhard Jirgl's novel “The Unfinished” - Breaking a taboo or a late memory? In: Glossen, magazine for literature and art in Germany since 1945, October 2004; on this also Carsten Gansel / Pawel Zimnik (eds.), The “Principle of Remembrance” in the German-language literature of the present after 1989 , V&R, Göttingen 2010, p. 488.
  7. ↑ Harald Welzer, Nice blurred. About the boom in family and generational novels. In: Supplement to Mittelweg 36, No. 1, January / February 2004, Hamburg Institute for Social Research , p. 58 f. - online
  8. ^ Clemens Kammler, literary learning in the culture of remembrance. Comments on a task in German lessons. In: Unique items from Essen. 26, 2005, p. 99 f.