The Zwille
"The Slingshot" is a 1973 published novel by Ernst Jünger . It is set at the beginning of the 20th century and is about the student Clamor Ebling, who comes from the village to a boarding school in Hanover . He is not up to the demands of the school, an older student forces him to steal and perform various pranks, including with a twin .
The author's late work is one of his more relaxed, less martial works. A number of typical Jünger themes appear in the novel, such as a pictorial, non- causal perception , the relationship between conservatism and modernization or the importance of weapons. The school setting and the accumulation of sexual themes are unusual.
content
Part one: how did he get here?
Clamor comes to Hanover from the village of Oldhorst to attend high school there. He is constantly afraid and plagued by feelings of guilt, and on the way to school he always expects catastrophes. He does not speak correct Standard German, does not know the expressions of classmates and has problems with the subject matter. “Clamor found it difficult to separate cause and effect” (p. 14). He feels isolated during the breaks. “It didn't even have its place below, let alone above” (p. 25).
Clamor's mother died giving birth, and his father, a miller's servant, was hit by a blow while working . The miller provided for Clamor's livelihood, the village priest for his admission to the grammar school.
Several sub-chapters deal with the Oldhorster village pastor. He remembers how his wife ran off with a vicar and how he was bullied by his violent and deceitful son Teo. He wonders if sending Clamor to high school was the right thing to do.
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Second part: the pension
In the pension, Clamor comes to a room with two other boys from Oldhorst, the much older pastor's son Teo and Buz, the son of a large farmer. Through violence and manipulation, Teo Clamor and Buz force him to serve as "bodyguards". They spy on various teachers and other people for him. Teo uses the knowledge gained for extortion and to protect against pranks.
Teo is fascinated by a twin that is on display in an arms dealership. Several of his actions serve to raise the money for them.
Third part: target exercises
The three of them shoot the window panes of the sadistic teacher Zaddeck with their twins. Clamor is caught doing it. Previously he had addressed the drawing teacher Mühlbauer as "Mr. Prolet" without knowing what this meant. The two violations lead to his dismissal. Zaddeck's behavior is revealed when a student who has been mistreated several times hangs himself.
Mühlbauer, who values him as the only teacher because of his way of perceiving and painting, and his wife finally adopt Clamor.
structure
The main story, how the three boys get to their twins and use them, is rather brief like a novel. Only numerous slots that are only loosely connected to it, z. B. about the village priest, teacher or classmate, make the description appear broader and more novel-like. The longest about the village pastor in the first part takes up about a seventh of the whole novel. Here the perspective of the pastor's first-person narrator also changes.
The novel begins with a general description of Clamor's fears on the way to school. The prehistory of the village is told in many small retrospectives. Jünger often uses anticipation to build up tension. A place in the rectory is mentioned several times where a picture once hung. Only several pages later does it become apparent that the pastor's wife, who left him, must have shown it. The "cabinet" is also mentioned several times before it becomes clear what exactly it is.
Dozens of short reflections on topics that keep cropping up in Jünger's work (see individual aspects below) are skilfully embedded in the action in short inserts and linked to descriptions of people. The perspective often approaches the characters in the novel such as the professor, Teo, Clamor and others.
The contrast between Clamor and Teo
While Clamor feels helplessly exposed to dangers lurking everywhere, Teo spies on his fellow human beings in order to be able to blackmail them and develops perfidious strategies to talk his way out of it if his actions are discovered. If Clamor represents an anxious and cautious one, Teo represents a calculating, ruthless extreme.
When Clamor tells Teo how he was once pushed aside by a guard on a prisoner transport, Teo explains how he should have complained. He climbs deeper and deeper, Clamor should have faked an epileptic seizure: “When the prisoners hear that, they smell the morning air. You infect them with your madness. They attack the guards, kill them, take their pistols and sabers, and tear off the pickets. Then you go to the spinners, call it a day, set the factory on fire. Then you can pillage the city ” (p. 119). In addition to the egoistic element, Teo's destructive element is most clearly evident here.
Unlike Clamor, Teo shows no sympathy, for example in view of the mistreatment of Paulchen Maibohm by Zaddeck.
Common to both is the ability to visualize. Clamor “saw more the juxtaposition of the images in space than their sequence in time” (p. 14). “When the colors blinded him, the noise deafened him, the ecstasy of silence came over him” (p. 114), says Teo. However, with Teo this only happens temporarily and without Clamor's fear.
Teo is fascinated by weapons. "He is driven by a tendency to do things that are hurtful, dangerous, deadly", thinks his father, the village pastor, and: "That is not to be confused with the healthy pleasure young people have in arms and in danger" (p. 71). Clamor is also afraid of guns. Instead of hitting others, he injured his thumb several times by holding the Zwille incorrectly.
Possible autobiographical aspects
The novel can hardly be interpreted autobiographically. The main character Clamor, with his ignorance and fearfulness, is hardly an image of a disciple. Teo's stay in Egypt could allude to Jünger's breakout into the Foreign Legion , but the episode is so clearly portrayed negatively that it is more useful as a contrast to it than as a processing.
At most, the three Oldhorster boys, sitting together in the “cabinet”, represent individual aspects of Jünger, Clamor with his pictorial perception, Teo with his thirst for knowledge, Buz with his enthusiasm for soldiery. At the same time, however, all three are clearly set apart from Jünger, so that they are primarily literary fictions and hardly any autobiographical figures.
Individual aspects
pedagogy
The professor, owner of the pension, takes a comparatively liberal viewpoint that one has to give the students “their own”. "Above all, not too much should be done - it was like cutting hedge" (p. 86). He values Teo's intelligence and occasionally gives him supervision over other students.
The school director and the village pastor stand for stricter views, whereby the pastor considers himself weak and can hardly implement them.
In school, people are beaten “up to the fourth”, usually with a stick on the palms of the hands and behind. However, the math teacher Hilpert, whom Clamor fears most, does not strike right now. Hilpert, who wants to get rid of Clamor because he doesn't understand mathematics at all, and French teacher Bayer, who fears that Clamor is "a hit" for "rowdies" - "you had to be careful" (p. 24) - are opposites in terms of things Rigor and protection.
The eroticization of pedagogy is astonishing. “A shot of pederasty belonged to the grammar school, to the eros of teaching and learning in general” (p. 87) thinks the professor. “In addition, there was the problem of the favorite student, whose endangerment is carried over to the teacher. It ends in a conspiratorial secret, often with erotic echoes. When Herr Mühlbauer stood behind Clamor, looking at his paper, he put his hand on his shoulder or stroked his hair. That did not go unnoticed. " (P. 219)
Conservatism and Modernization
As a conservative person, the professor refuses to connect his pension to gas, electricity or water lines. In doing so, the consumption of the factory sinks the groundwater, which is why the own pump becomes insufficient. On the one hand, he knows that modernization is inevitable: “If you didn't keep pace inside, you were outplayed from the outside” (p. 80), but tries to delay it. To his wife he says: “Mally - there are also men who take a new wife every ten years. That is closer together than you suspect ” (p. 80).
The modernization is also reflected in a group of striking workers Clamor sees on their way to school. When an officer admonishes them: “But you know how difficult we are to take on those from Lodz and Manchester”, one replies: “We are about to change that, Major” (p. 32). The factory workers are called “spinners” here. Possibly Jünger wants to avoid the word “worker”, which he uses differently, as in the essay The Worker .
Believe
Clamor recites verses from hymns while going to school to feel freer. You temporarily dispel his fear. Monday prayer is his favorite school lesson. The village pastor thinks of himself: "I am a bad announcer, precisely because I take the word seriously" (p 74). In Oldhorst faith plays a role, among other things as a consolation for the farmers in the event of death, in the city almost none.
The Oldhorster village pastor thinks at the beginning of the novel: "Nobody can believe that a person is alone" (p. 73). The last sentence of the novel after Mühlbauer adopted Clamor, however, is: “We find and forget each other in the other; we are no longer alone. " (p. 237)
Sexual taboos
A number of sexual taboos run through the novel, which is unusual for younger people :
- Sadism (Zaddeck, a forester near Oldhorst)
- Masturbation (rejection of the village pastor, tolerance of the professor)
- Homosexuality (Dranthé delicatessen, elderly men waiting in front of the barracks)
- Pederasty (Zaddeck, tolerance of the professor, subliminally Mühlbauer - Clamor)
- Prostitution (drunk whores on the way to school)
- Incest (a farmer in Oldhorst)
- Adultery (wife of the village pastor).
Unger's garden, a fallow, overgrown piece of land nearby, is almost a reserve for sexual transgressions, workers and soldiers meet their friends there, prostitutes wait for customers and other things. Ironically, Jünger lets the water in the boarding house, which the professor is proud of, not tap water, but ground water, comes from Unger's garden (p. 80).
language
The language here separates groups of people from one another. Low German is mostly spoken by simple characters characterized as honest, the father, Clamor, Buz, the maid Fiekchen. High German forms a further barrier between Clamor and the environment: "Not only the" would have "and" would ", also the" would have "and" would have "made them no problem" (p. 17). The students who do not belong to Clamor are characterized by fashionable idioms. The character questionable Teo likes to sing ambiguous English and French songs.
What is noticeable is the frequent use of “comfort”, “comfortable” when the village pastor, professor, Mr Bayer, Teo or others feel comfortable.
Criminology
In anticipation of Jünger's detective novel A Dangerous Encounter, there is a subchapter “Criminalia” in the “Zwille” that deals with detective stories . Following Teo's shadowing, it is about how criminals can be convicted, how greedy thieves or too imaginative deceivers give themselves away.
The modernization is also evident here. While thieves may have been caught in Oldhorst, "there was little to combine" (p. 163), in modern society criminals are more identified through research and calculation.
literature
- Ernst Jünger: Complete works in 18 volumes; Volume 18. Die Zwille, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1983.
- Secondary literature
- Danièle Bertran-Vidal: Time structure and socio-historical aspects in Jünger's story Die Zwille. In: Lutz Hagestedt (ed.): Ernst Jünger. Politics - Myth - Art. Berlin 2004, pp. 47–56.
- Joachim Guenther: The Zwille. In: Neue Deutsche Hefte 20. 1973, pp. 131–134.
- Steffen Martus : Ernst Jünger. Stuttgart, Weimar 2001.
- Klaus Prange: The Zwille. In: Frankfurter Hefte 28, 1973, pp. 667-672.