The revenants

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The revenants is the title of a novel by Werner Helwig . Among the five Greek novels by the author, the work is considered "the artistically best book".

content

The setting of the novel is a mountain monastery that is difficult to access

A small Greek village is destroyed. The residents had put up stubborn resistance to the violence of the foreign rulers who ruled the country. Seven survivors escape to an empty Thessalian mountain monastery and use cunning to defend themselves against the overwhelming forces of the besiegers. During the night while they are awake there is a story. The people, among them the former priest Angelos Vlachos, conjure up the spirit of ancient Hellas and struggle for inner freedom, whereby everyone slowly changes until outer freedom is finally saved by the bold act of the boy Tahir, who calls partisans to help .

Form and reception

The subject of the book is the resistance against bondage. In his novel, Helwig gave the village that resisted the name "Ochi" (modern Greek: no). The author connects current events with a mythical fable. The stories told by those at risk of death have a healing function; in them there is a “moving mixture of naive vitality and hard cleverness developed from ancient times into today”. These semi-wild village Greeks live "real and with highly personal gestures in Helwig's art of portrayal, although this is anything but naturalistic or even just realistic," as Die Zeit wrote and which emphasized the novel's narrative art with lyrical tones. Heinz Schöffler saw in the revenants in the “mastery of composition and the conciseness of the poetic word, probably the artistically best book” of the author. The magazine Hochland viewed the novel more critically ; she wrote that Helwig succeeded in grasping the “Homeric simplicity and wealth of intuition of these people, as long as he remained in her circle of thought. But where he tries to give final statements , for example in the sermon of the orthodox priest, he exceeds his possibilities and those of the material. "

expenditure

  • The revenants. Novel . Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1952
  • The revenants. A novel . Revised after the first edition published in 1952. Hegner, Cologne and Olten 1960
  • (under the title :) The Outlaws. A novel . List Tb No. 273. List, Munich 1964
  • Nieugięci . Translated into Polish by Sławomir Błaut. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warsaw 1967

Quote

One of the internal narratives begins:

“You come, you go. One came from the east and went west. One came from the west and went east. They met in the middle of the way. Greeted each other, said their names, compared their knives. One of them was engraved: 'I am your only friend.' The other was engraved with: 'I am the mouse that gnaws at the roots of life. "

- Werner Helwig

literature

  • Rolf Bongs : Reflections of Noah's Ark . In: Die Welt of November 21, 1961
  • Werner Illing: From family to existential novel. Werner Helwig: The revenants . In: Hochland , Munich, No. 6, 1952/53, ISSN  0018-2966
  • Erik Martin : Werner Helwig's Greek novels . In: the icebreaker . Witzenhausen, No. 4/1988, ISSN  0342-1597
  • Inge Meidinger-Geise : The revenants . In: Welt und Wort . Literary monthly, Tübingen, issue 1/1953
  • Heinz Schöffler: Werner Helwig. A portrait of a writer . In: Weltstimmen. World books in outline . Franckh, Stuttgart 1954, Volume 23, pp. 337-341

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In: Weltstimmen. World books in outline . Stuttgart 1954, p. 340
  2. ↑ In: World and Word. Literary monthly . 1/1953
  3. ↑ Here quoted from the dust jacket of the revised edition from 1960
  4. ↑ In: Weltstimmen. World books in outline . Stuttgart 1954
  5. ^ In: Hochland , Heft 6/1953, page 76
  6. ^ First edition 1952, page 117