The other side of the silence
The Other Side of Silence is a novel first published in English by André Brink in 2002 under the title “ The Other Side of Silence ” and published in German in 2008 by Osburg Verlag in Berlin. It tells the story of Hanna X., who applied in Bremen in 1902 for reconstruction work in German South West Africa , but already experienced a martyrdom on the voyage, on arrival in Swakopmund and on the journey to Windhoek , for which she experienced four years later Takes revenge.
content
The narrator has decided to give Hanna X. a story and to tell it, for which he initially had no more than a first name after his research in Bremen and South Africa. In the historical representations he consulted, he misses the individual faces and fates that are covered up under dates and lists of facts. This applies both to the male figures who set the tone in German South West Africa, and even more so to women and a figure like Hanna X. (p. 205).
The reader is repeatedly made a witness to how the author not only brings himself in at the beginning of some chapters as an external first-person narrator and collects his materials, but also how he reflects on what the most likely moments in the course of events could be, which then be carried out on the level of the personal narrative situation in experienced speech . He follows this procedure in the two parts that make up the novel. The first part encompasses the story of Hanna X. from her childhood and youth to her decisive experiences in South West Africa, whereby no chronological order is adhered to, but scenes from Africa and Bremen alternate; the second part covers the few months of their campaign of revenge against German colonial troops through the desert. It ends in Windhoek.
First part
The author believes that Hanna X. was born around 1875 and was between twenty and twenty-five years old when she left for Africa. After her birth, she was deposited on the threshold of the children's home "by the children of Jesus", was raised there, attended school and was then placed as a maid in various families from the orphanage for a fee.
The orphanage is a compulsory institution in which the smallest violations of the required discipline are punished with hours of reading the Bible, corporal punishment, food deprivation or arrest. In the case of worse offenses, Hanna has to go to the parsonage to undergo the moral instructions of the pastor, which as a rule lead to Hanna's abuse in the search for the "hiding place of the devil" (pp. 75, 99).
She finds refuge with her fantasy friends Trixi, Spixi and Finni, whose voices entertain her. Other bright spots arise when she can evade supervision for a short time and meets children playing on the Weser or finds refuge with a teacher who treats her almost like a daughter. Her friendship also accompanies her through her maid days, which she begins when she is twelve. She tells Hanna travel stories and lends her books. She is enthusiastic about Johanna von Orleans , the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and finally also about The Sorrows of Young Werther . The teacher also stands up for Hanna so that she can escape her humiliating role as a maid, and helps her with her application to come to German South West Africa.
In 1902 Hanna begins the crossing with one hundred and ten women. She is one of the “common girls who are promoted to third grade at state expense” (p. 108). That means at the same time that the sailors want to have fun with them and do them violence. The arrival in Swakopmund and the onward journey by train to Windhoek put an end to the remaining illusions of overseas, sea, palm trees and meaningful life. Famished men, who see women as their own, immediately make them their prey, want to find a suitable woman for themselves and test their willingness during the train journey. Hanna can refuse you, but comes across an officer who violates her: “'If I fuck a woman,' says Captain Böhlke of the Imperial Army in a voice that is as smooth and sharp as a fine steel blade, 'then she stays fucked. ' And then he fucks her ”(p. 196). When she bites against him the second time, she is handed over to the soldiers for punishment. She is brutally mutilated down to her sexual characteristics, her tongue is cut out and her face is disfigured into a grimace. With some other women who do not meet the male demands of the colonists, Hanna X., close to death, is brought on a transport cart to the “Frauenstein” in the rocky desert, a building from the early days of European colonization: “The prison, that Monastery, the madhouse, the poorhouse, the brothel, the ossuary, the first circle of hell. But also asylum, home and terminus ”(p. 23). Before she got there, however, she had fallen from the cart unnoticed, was picked up by Nama and nursed to health selflessly and in solidarity.
In the “Frauenstein”, supported by the church, she finds a young friend, Katja, who was the only one of her family to survive the armed conflict and to avoid a massacre by Ovambo . She learns to communicate with Hanna using gestures. When the troops set off on a punitive expedition against the Nama station in the “Frauenstein” and set up a “collective rampage” (p. 53) on the women living there, Hanna kills an officer who wanted to rape Katja.
Second part
In Katja, exposed to the rape, Hanna recognizes herself: "What happened here today, what you tried to do to little Katja, woke her from her dead sleep" (p. 200). This self-knowledge is deepened by a long look in the mirror. For the first time Hanna takes a close look at her body, which has been mutilated down to its gender by the soldiers, and becomes certain that she can still feel.
It is hatred that she can finally allow (p. 201). With a Luger , which she took from the officer who was killed, she leaves the "Frauenstein" and Katja joins her. You come across a shackled Herero who was mutilated in her language in a “German way” by his German master, a farmer, and who is exposed to death in the desert. The two women look after him and they manage to nurse him back to health. He speaks German so that communication is possible. On the farm, Hanna helps him take revenge and thus allies with him. As they move on, having armed themselves with the farm's rifle and ammunition supplies, some of the abandoned farm workers join them. They arrive at a mission station, where they stay longer. There, too, more Africans join the group, but also the disappointed and humiliated wife of the head of the mission station, so that there are finally ten of them.
In confrontation with Katja, who sees Hanna only driven by blind egotistical revenge and hatred against “the whole German Reich, the whole world” (p. 293, 381), she tries to explain what motivates her. By saying goodbye to “Frauenstein” they “entered precisely that part of existence from which there is no hope of return”. Stories for orientation such as “ The Bremen Town Musicians ” or the voices of the Maid of Orleans are no longer available for this “madness” (p. 293 f.).
“Everyone who made it (di Böhlke) possible” should be hunted down (p. 267) so that “they don't stay fucked all their lives” (p. 201; but also 196, 202, 231 and 403). They manage to overpower a military patrol because they are believed to be harmless and unarmed. When they go to the fort, which is now only equipped with a guard, they manage, with some cunning, to put them out of action and kill everyone. Katja lets one of the soldiers turn her into a woman before she kills him. Hanna explains: “And when it was over, he was still lying on top of me, and that's when I killed him. Because that's what you expected from me. The first part was for me, the second for you ”(p. 345). Full of triumph, they imagine how all the enslaved join their small troop in order to free themselves from their yoke (pp. 349–354). In reality they are being wiped out by soldiers and only Hanna and the pregnant Katja survive (p. 369).
In Windhoek they find accommodation in the house of an old cobbler, where they can take care of themselves and relax (pp. 383–397). Katja locates the molester Hannas, Captain Böhlke. The two manage to be admitted to him. With the Luger pointed at him, which she took from the captain who was killed by her in the "Frauenstein", she reveals herself, and the two women force him to undress before Hanna exposes himself in front of him so that he can recognize her. Then Katja leaves Hanna alone. The captain is shaking, his sphincter muscles fail; but it does not kill him, but leads him in this state out of the barracks onto Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse so that the world will notice (p. 405 f.). Hanna is eventually overwhelmed and arrested. Captain Böhlke kills himself. The resulting process is put down.
Narrative means
The author uses some thing symbols that are repeatedly evoked in both parts.
The mirror
The symbol that is decisive for the action is the mirror , which begins to act as the key to your later self-knowledge at the beginning of the first chapter and then appears again and again at the interfaces of the action (pp. 18, 35, 100, 148, 200, 232, 379 , 403).
The shell
Children who played with her on the Weser give Hanna a shell that creates a whole world when you put it on your ear: "If you hold her within arm's length, you will never be able to guess what is hidden in her, a sea, a whole world of sound, past and present and - who knows - maybe also future. And if you listen very carefully and hold it very close to your ear, then you can hear all of this. Not just from the other side of the world, but from the other side of everything, the other side of silence ”(p. 60). This shell accompanies Hanna all the way to the train to Windhoek, where she is lost to her, but which she continues to accompany with her cosmos as a comforting promise (pp. 60, 68, 179, 186, 188, 246, 260, 407). At the same time, it refers to the “other side of the silence” right up to the end, on which to have arrived is shown in the implied smile on Hanna's mutilated face in the last sentence of the novel.
The hair
Hanna is not beautiful. Her full hair, however, finds admiration - “But you have very beautiful hair” (p. 151) - so that she sometimes catches herself in the “sin of pride” (p. 120). Finally she cuts it off after her desecration and after an attempt to die in the “Frauenstein” (p. 155, 207). Because in the violent hands of Böhlke she learned to hate it (p. 197).
Folklore explains the importance of hair: It is seen as a real carrier of life force. If it is cut off, it is a sign of desecration and lost strength.
reception
- For Michael Schmitt ( Deutschlandradio ) Brink invents a life for Hanna X. in which she mutates from victim to avenging angel. At its core, that is definitely a big hit, but it is also committed and anything but one-dimensional. He stands in the tradition of his earlier works, where he likes to mix history and invention, but in his most successful times before 1990 he was always in the shadow of more respected colleagues such as Nadine Gordimer , Breyten Breytenbach or JM Coetzee . The novel seems fresher to him than Uwe Timm's attempt in Morenga to “ sound out this subject as a critical analysis of colonial conditions”.
- For Deutschlandradio Kultur, Johannes Kaiser reviewed the novel as a moving, angry, breathtaking novel, "a fantastic story that sprang from reality, but extends far beyond it".
- Axel Timo Purr ( NZZ ) perceives Brink's language as seemingly biblical and the plot as an example of a woman's attempt to “escape the cramped lower class existence”. Hanna fails because the image of an ideal, healed and reformed situation overseas, thrown back into the “socially ailing center of home”, was wrong. The second part reminds him in places of a spaghetti western . "Nevertheless, Brink succeeded in shaping a historical splinter into a fascinating magnifying glass whose beam effortlessly penetrates the hundred years and illuminates a form of chess that has not yet been overcome with human destinies down to the roots."
- Ruth Franklin criticizes in the New York Times that, with a few exceptions, German men are presented as monsters, whereas Africans appear wise, stoic and silent. The sympathy between white women and Africans seems to her to be too gullible and too closely based on the style of postcolonial studies. Nonetheless, she sees “ The Other Side of Silence ” as a novel of unforgettable power. Brink's goal could not be to cure the evils of colonialism, but to go to the very core.
literature
André Brink, The other side of silence . Novel. Translated from the English by Michael Kleeberg, Osburg Verlag, Berlin 2008; ISBN 978-3-940731-07-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ At the end the author gives bibliographical references in an appendix.
- ↑ The quotation is based on the edition published by Osburg Verlag in 2008.
- ^ Dictionary of German Folklore , Kröner's paperback edition, Vol. 127, Stuttgart 1974, p. 312.
- ↑ Review by Michael Schmitt
- ^ Review by Johannes Kaiser
- ↑ Review by Axel Timo Purr
- ↑ Review by Ruth Franklin