The third bullet
The third ball is a fantastic novel by Leo Perutz from 1915.
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Count Grumbach, the "Wildgraf on the Rhine", had to leave his homeland Germany in the course of the denominational wars of the 16th century. With some Protestant farmers he flees from the Catholics as far as Mexico, where he finds himself in the war between the Spanish conquistadors around Hernán Cortés and the Aztec natives. Grumbach takes the side of the Aztecs. But the Germans are inferior to the Spanish army, especially in terms of their military equipment, because they lost their weapons in a shipwreck. A pact with the devil finally helps Grumbach to create an arquebus with three balls, which he wins in the game. The latter, however, are cursed: the previous owner, who is threatened with execution because of the loss of his weapon, announces that the first bullet will kill his king, the second his lover and the third bullet himself. In fact, first the Aztec king Moctezuma II , then Grumbach's lover, died from the arquebus in the battle for Tenochtitlán .
The story is embedded in a framework plot : The old count, meanwhile back in Germany as a dilapidated mercenary in the service of the Catholic Emperor Charles V , has forgotten his identity; a sutler gives him a potion that he can use to remember, while another soldier tells his life story. However, he is shot before the count has come to completely, so that Grumbach falls back into oblivion. What happens to the eponymous third bullet remains open until the end of the cleverly constructed novel: Is it the projectile that kills the narrator in the framework plot and thus prevents Grumbach from finding his lost identity again?
interpretation
The Hamburg literary scholar Hans-Harald Müller sees the structure of the novel “in connection with the problematization of ego identity which, as is well known, was one of the defining themes of Viennese modernism. Their experience was the dissolution of the consciousness of the continuity of the person in the incoherence of the life story. ”In the fact that Perutz stages the whereabouts of the third sphere as an ultimately not finally resolvable puzzle, Müller recognizes a characteristic of this author:“ Perutz's contribution to modernization The novel does not consist in stylistic innovations. He brings the novel into a ceaseless movement by dynamizing the structure, by aporias of the interpretation from within. "
The family name of the main character is reminiscent of Wilhelm von Grumbach and his dealings with the emperor and empire ( Grumbachsche Handel ).