The following story

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The following story ( Dutch : Het volgende verhaal ) is a novella by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom , published in 1991 as a Boekenweek present . The mysterious circumstances under which the protagonist of the story wakes up one morning condense into his transition from life to death. On a death trip, he remembers his past and a love that was 20 years ago. The plot is embedded in numerous references to ancient myths and motifs about storytelling, travel and death. In Germany, a review on the program Das Literäre Quartett helped the book to a great sales success and the author to lasting popularity.

Daniel Chodowiecki : Death of Socrates - one of the scenes that the protagonist, who is nicknamed Socrates , always used to present his students with particular passion in class.

content

First part

Torre de Belém in Lisbon

Hermann Mussert wakes up one morning in a Lisbon hotel room, although he is convinced that yesterday evening he went to bed in his Amsterdam apartment as usual . In an unclear state between reality, dream or death, he remembers events that brought him to this room twenty years ago.

At that time, Mussert was a grammar school teacher for Greek and Latin, an unworldly and classical philologist who was baptized " Socrates " by the students and who became intoxicated with the stories of Phaeton's ascension to heaven and Socrates' death. Love only penetrated him once and made him habitual: He started a relationship with his colleague Maria Zeinstra, who made no secret of the fact that she was cheating on her husband, the Dutch teacher and sports coach Arend Herfst, for his affair with Lisa d'India wanted to punish, a highly gifted model student of the high school, with whom the entire teaching collective was in love. Mussert only excludes himself, although he has to admit that she was the only student who made the dead languages ​​and classical myths he taught appear alive and real.

Once again, Mussert walks in Portugal on the paths on which he once accompanied Maria Zeinstra during a congress, and evokes their common past. When he falls asleep in the Lisbon hotel room where they spent one night at the time, he sees himself lying in his Amsterdam bed, wrestling with something in his sleep.

Second part

The black water river Rio Negro at sunset.

Together with a mysterious woman and five other passengers - the Italian Father Fermi, the American pilot Captain Dekobra, the Spanish teenager Alonso Carnero, the English journalist Peter Harris and the Chinese scholar Professor Deng - Mussert is on a mysterious boat trip from the Lisbon suburb of Belém to Belém in Brazil to the "waters of death" of the Rio Negro .

During the passage, Mussert remembers what happened twenty years ago. In one lesson he declaimed the death scene of Socrates in front of his class, actually speaking only to his favorite pupil Lisa d'India, who for him played the role of Socrates' pupil Crito . At the end of the lesson the two of them stayed behind and talked about the immortality of the soul when she suddenly asked him if he would lose Maria Zeinstra when she broke up with Herfst. At that moment they were interrupted by Maria Zeinstra. Lisa left Mussert a letter. But Maria, jealous of her rival, gave him the choice of reading the letter or keeping it. He decided on Maria and never heard Lisa d'India's last words to him. Arend Herfst, who had found out about Mussert's relationship with his wife, was already lying in wait for him in the schoolyard. While drunk, he beat up Mussert, grabbed Lisa, drove off with her in his car and caused an accident in which Lisa d'India died and he broke both of his legs. Both Herfst and Mussert were dismissed from school after the scandal. Maria Zeinstra moved to America with her husband, and Mussert, who henceforth became Dr. Strabo wrote travel guides, never heard from her again.

Meanwhile, the journey across the Atlantic is becoming more and more like a journey through the dead. The ship has reached the mouth of the Amazon , and while it slowly glides up the river and crosses over to the Rio Negro at Manaos , one of the seven travelers is allowed to tell the story of his death every evening before he is led away by the woman with a tender gesture: Carnero tells of a test of courage with a friend in which he was run over by a night train and killed; Harris was stabbed by a jealous rival in a bar in Guyana for dating a black prostitute; Captain Dekobra fell into the ocean from a great height after getting into a cloud of volcanic ash with his plane ; Father Fermi was hit by an ambulance at the end of a pilgrimage and was fatally injured; Deng took his own life because he was humiliated and displaced during the Chinese Cultural Revolution .

Each of the lecturers seems to find his own fulfillment when he looks the woman in the face, a face that only the respective narrator recognizes, but which remains hidden from the others. In contrast to the others, Mussert did not know for a long time what his own story was that he was going to tell. But when the mysterious woman, the last remaining member of the tour company, waves to him and he looks at her, she has the face of Lisa d'India for him, and he tells her the following story .

shape

The original novel, which comprises 92 pages (the German book edition by Suhrkamp Verlag contains 149 pages), is told by the protagonist Hermann Mussert in the first person. It is divided into two parts, which are formally separated and each introduced separately with a quotation, as well as in two time levels: Mussert's (though also narrated) present in a Lisbon hotel and the events of a past 20 years ago. Mussert's prehistory and interim as a travel writer are only touched upon in the story.

The novella has a ring-shaped structure. The last sentence refers to the beginning of the story. The motif of the cycle is taken up again and again, for example in the picture of the dog biting its tail (p. 13) or on the boat trip: “You leave Belém, you arrive in Belém. In this way one still achieves something like the eternal return. "(P. 126)

interpretation

First a note from Nooteboom from an interview with Jan van Damme: “Everyone is allowed their own interpretation, but for me it is a story about death, very simple. A man dies in Amsterdam and sees his whole life go by in a few seconds. That is the basic idea. "

Ancient and modern

Bust of Socrates from the Vatican Museums

For the classical philologist Mussert, antiquity is spiritual home and refuge. He identifies with the nickname Socrates, with which his students mock him, and even sees a physical resemblance to the great philosopher . “Socrates without a beard and with glasses, the same lumpy face that nobody would ever think of philosophy if we didn't happen to know what words those bacon lips under the blunt nose with the wide nostrils had spoken and what thoughts arose behind this thug's forehead . "(P. 31)

Mussert uses antiquity to fend off modernity and restore classical order in his life. The Metamorphoses of Ovid are for him "my Bible, and it really helps." (P 28) newspaper articles on political news he has "just better lot in Tacitus read," and he immediately returns the appropriate passage so. (P. 18) He glorifies the precision of Latin and despises the “hustle and bustle” and “confusing babbling” (p. 19) of modern languages. Arend Herfst as a Dutch teacher and also a modern poet assumes the position of a natural opponent, about whom Mussert repeatedly expresses himself contemptuously: “He spoke [...] about nothing and was therefore incredibly popular. A real poet and then another one who trains the school's basketball team ”. (P. 34) When Lisa d'India presented him with one of her poems, which were also written in a modern style, he was disappointed with his favorite pupil, which is rare: “It had no form , it resembled modern poetry”. (P. 95) Against the natural sciences , Mussert, caught up in mythology , takes an instinctive defensive stance: the biologist Maria Zeinstra “knew everything I didn't want to know”. (P. 101)

When love penetrates Mussert's life and makes him an "ordinary person" (p. 39) for a short time, Mussert learns that real life is nothing like "what words, verses, and books had prepared me for." P. 40) Later he confirms again: "No book that I have ever read has prepared me for this [...], so real people deal with such nonsense." And it helps him, who does not happen to be "die Extension of my bookcase ”(p. 70) does not indicate in reality that“ Horace would have written brilliant poems about such banalities ”. (P. 119)

love

Just as Mussert and Herfst oppose each other as antipodes, this applies in a similar way to Maria Zeinstra and Lisa d'India. The biologist Zeinstra is a modern person with a focus on reason and natural science, with a "North Holland" (p. 67) style. Lisa d'India embodies the Mediterranean. She is the daughter of Italian guest workers and, like Mussert, is fond of antiquity and ancient languages.

Mussert draws his love for Maria Zeinstra from the ivory tower of his worldly aversion. He says, “For the first time in my life I had come near what looked like love. Maria Zeinstra belonged to the free people and took that for granted, she was extremely direct in everything, I felt as if I was now for the first time dealing with the Dutch, or with the people. ”(P. 69) Your relationship he sums up: “She showed me an area that was closed to me. That was still it, but now at least I had seen it. "(P. 72) But at the same time this form of love profaned him:" And now I was in love and thus became a member of that bland, thrown together association of synchronized machines, that I allegedly hated so much. "(p. 29)

Lisa d'India is far less real for Mussert than Maria Zeinstra. True to Plato's motto : "Love is in him who loves, not in him who is loved" (p. 69) Because of its name, Mussert associates it with the music of Sigismondo d'India, although it does insists that her father is a metalworker, which Mussert only sees as her attempt to "make the distance between herself and the music as large as possible." (p. 41) Musserts differs from his physical love for Maria Zeinstra excessive affection for his pupil of a purely spiritual nature, in the truest sense of the word platonic . After a school lesson on Plato's Phaedo , Maria Zeinstra reaches for Lisa's book and realizes: “Plato, I can't fight that.” (P. 118) This is finally true when Mussert does not recognize Maria Zeinstra in the faceless woman, but Lisa the Elder 'India.

travel

Earth and moon photographed from Voyager 1

A central motif of the novella is travel. After his discharge from school, Mussert became a travel writer , an occupation that Nooteboom also pursued for a long time. Mussert self-ironically mocks “these so-called literary travel writers who absolutely have to pour their precious souls over the landscapes of the whole world in order to astonish good citizens in speechless astonishment.” (P. 18) Mussert's pseudonym Dr. Strabo refers to Strabo , a historian from ancient Greece , whose literary work is not given great importance. For Mussert, too, his travel writing is of no importance, earning money, which keeps him from doing more important things, such as his translation of Ovid.

Instead of earthly journeys, Mussert dreams of the "excitement of great journeys" (p. 21), by which he means space travel . On his last evening in Amsterdam, he takes a photo to bed that the Voyager spacecraft took from a great distance from Earth. He admits: “I had a special relationship with this traveler because I had the feeling that I had traveled with him myself.” (P. 20) On the voyage, Mussert later had the experience of himself like a Voyager from Earth to solve, higher than Neil Armstrong and higher than Socrates, "who believed that one would see paradise if one only rose high enough above the earth" (p. 130)

Voyager already connects the motif of travel with that of death: "The traveler himself floated away for all time" (p. 23). This connection is made even clearer by the boat trip from Belém, the suburb of Lisbon, to Belém in Brazil, which becomes a voyage of death for Mussert and the other passengers. It is reminiscent of the journey on the Charons ferry across the Acheron into the underworld of Greek mythology . Mussert is curious about the destination of the journey, because "it must have something to do with fulfillment." (P. 142)

Passage of time

Two Lisbon clocks illustrate the different course of time in the novella: One ("a strange little building [...], almost a stone shed made entirely of clock, large, round, white, with mighty hands") shows it "Hora Legal", the official time and pretends with legal authority to forever indicate the "non-existent now". (P. 45 f.) The other is just a hundred meters away in a bar, a pendulum clock that runs backwards. It resembles Mussert's internal clock overlaid with memories, for whom "time is a riddle, an unrestrained, immoderate phenomenon that eludes understanding and to which we have given the appearance of order for lack of better options." (P. 47) Maria Zeinstra sums up the dilemma: "If you cannot tell the time of science and that of your soul apart, there is only confusion." (P. 47)

This “confusion” in time occurs with Mussert's death. It hasn't been late since he went to sleep in Amsterdam. Mussert asks himself: “What kind of time is it when time doesn't move?” (P. 79) Without a passage of time, spatial changes such as his relocation to Lisbon are possible. On the boat trip every concept of time dissolves completely, "Time did something with the visible world until it was just a fleeting, long thing that could be stretched more and more slowly." (P. 87) Time shrinks and expands, the passengers keep disappearing for indefinite periods of time. You have long been “beyond time”. (P. 104)

The moment of dying seems to go on forever. Harris, a fellow passenger who was stabbed in a bar in Guyana , "had time to embark in Lisbon and travel with us, and still this death blow had not gotten to its destination" (p. 137) ) For Captain Dekobra, the moment of the crash of his plane lasted a year, "during this time he could have written a book with his memories". (P. 139) The passengers have nothing more to do than tell their stories, "and it seemed as if we had more time for it than we could use." (P. 137)

Death and metamorphosis

Hendrick Goltzius : Phaethon

Although the initial situation at the beginning of the novella still seems puzzling, many early allusions already point to the death motif, which becomes the central motif in the second part with the voyage from life to death. As soon as he falls asleep in Amsterdam, Mussert thinks of death. (P. 26) When he wakes up in the Lisbon hotel room, it happens “with the ridiculous feeling” that he may be dead. (P. 9) He lies “dead quiet” there, in “deadly fear” (p. 11), yes he is unwilling to “call history a matter of life and death”. (P. 9)

The three lessons that Mussert looks back on also deal with death. In the biology class in which Mussert is sitting in, Maria Zeinstra shows a film in which the carcass of a rat serves as a mating site for grave- digging beetles. With these pictures, "an inkling of death crept into the school class, the connection between killing, mating, eating, changing, the voracious, moving chain with teeth that is life." (P. 56) In two prime hours his In ancient language lessons, Mussert shows his class scenes from Greek mythology. In Phaeton's Ascension to Heaven from Ovid's Metamorphoses , he himself becomes the son of a god in front of his class, who crashes in his father's sun chariot: “I feel the darkness pulling me down” (p. 64). The second hour deals with Socrates' death after Plato's Phaedo . And again Mussert dying in front of his pupils, drinking the cup of poison, his gaze sunk “into the eyes of Criton, which are the eyes of India [...] I stop where I stand and die and read the last ones Lines in which a great cold comes over me ”(p. 115).

At the end of both lessons the question of the immortality of the soul comes to the fore. But the sober Maria Zeinstra cannot reach Mussert with this question: “You are great at talking. And now I want a schnapps. ”(P. 68) Only after the second school lesson does he find the right person to talk to in Lisa d'India. She is “so young that you could talk to her about immortality” (p. 146 f.) Mussert confesses that he does not believe in the immortality of the soul, but it is very strange “that we think about immortality can. "(p. 117)

However, there are numerous references to the detachment of the mind from the body in Nooteboom's novella. Mussert sees the dying man in his Amsterdam bed, who is really himself, like a stranger. (P. 79) He watches the fight with Herfst from above, “as if I didn't belong”. (P. 124) On the voyage by ship he wishes to be able to fly, “to detach myself from all the others, into the deep darkness.” (P. 98) Finally he succeeds in implementing his Voyager fantasies. He experiences "how my separated self down there slowly, hesitantly, joined the procession, while up there I rose like a balloon to ever greater heights". (P. 129) Only for the narration at the end of the novella does he have to "go back to my place, into my strange body." (P. 130)

Mussert is transformed by death. In view of the biology film about the gravedigger (see above), “Killing, mating, eating, transforming” form a chain for him. (P. 56) In the morning in the Lisbon hotel room he discovers in his reflection: “Now another element had been added, something that I couldn't interpret.” (P. 33) In the streets of Lisbon he recognizes: “No fire in the world would transform my matter, I was already transformed. ”(p. 72 f.) On the voyage, the bodies of the passengers dissolve. "Our bodies seemed to be in constant doubt about whether they wanted to be real or not, I had seldom seen a group of people who were so missing, every now and then entire knees, shoulders, feet disappeared" (p. 130 ), before they are finally carried on by the faceless woman, "with a gesture of infinite tenderness". (P. 134)

Tell

Fernando Pessoas sculpture in front of Café A Brasileira in Lisbon

Nooteboom's text is a story in two senses, not only as a genre, but also in that it is actually told by Mussert , as the last sentence makes clear: "And then I told her, then I told you the following story ". (P. 147) The reference to the addressee and the change from the third person to a direct address can already be found at an earlier point in the story: “I'm glad that the others are gone and that I can only tell you even if you are someone from my story yourself. But you already know that, and I'll leave you like that. Third person, until it becomes too difficult for me. "(P. 40)

Just as the addressee switches from the third to the second person and back again, Mussert himself, as the narrator, often takes an observing point of view. Mussert's perspective remains unclear, especially at the beginning of the narrative. He himself asks the question whether he “was the one who was at stake here” (p. 13) and he does not know how to say whether he or someone else is acting: “since he, whoever he was, I too said to himself [...], I remembered the following “[...]. (P. 14) Even later, Mussert repeatedly switches to the third person in his reports. In the course of the narrative, not only does the narrative change, Mussert itself, but also the form of the narrative goes through metamorphoses, narrative attitude and narrative levels also change. The classical philologist cites models for his narrative style: the Historiae des Tacitus (p. 49) as well as Fernando Pessoa and his "soul transformations of the alcohol-addicted poet, of the flowing, multifaceted self". (P. 61)

What survives the narrator in the end is his narrative, is the poetry itself. Mussert realizes on the journey of death: "The longer the journey lasted, the more real everything seemed to become that I had once presented to the class as poetry." (P 94). And even before that he was convinced: “Only what is written exists”. (P. 40) With its last sentence the narrative refers back to its beginning, to the infinite sequence of narrations. It is thus also a subsequent story as a result of the many stories told before. "A journey, of course into the realm of the dead and at the same time into the heart of poetry, where the stories live longer than those who tell them."

Position in the complete work of Nootebooms

The following story references Nooteboom's earlier work in many places. Mussert himself states: "The world is a single incessant cross-reference." (P. 125) First and foremost, Nooteboom's activity as a travel writer should be mentioned, which he portrayed in the fictional character of Dr. Strabo satirizes. Like The Following Story , his travel essays are “Attempts to put into words the always intangible element of time. Try to see the transcendent through the visible ”. The description of the boat trip to Belém goes back to a real trip that Nooteboom undertook to Suriname in 1957 and which he recorded in his travelogue The Prisoner in Love and later processed in the poem Gran Rio . The trip had a great effect on the young Nooteboom: "During the day I had to work hard and in the evening there was [...] the oppressive starry sky, the constant waves, the voices of the others with their stories".

Nooteboom often refers to the antique classics . Thus, already in his debut novel, Philip and the others the metamorphoses quoted Ovid, and in rituals Inni Winthrop references Phaeton when he addresses how man is thrown into a meaningless world. The Platonism pervades Nooteboom's work from his uncle Alexander, Philip and the other on Alfonso Tiburón de Mendoza, in the Dutch mountains , to the evocation of a "Platonic electronic computer" in rituals . Death and parting also always play an important role for Nooteboom. In rituals they are ushered in with a tea ritual. The farewell in the death scene of Socrates is also ritualized in The following story . In the Berliner Notizen , Nooteboom gives information about his personal handling of farewells and their literary processing when he confesses on his departure from Berlin, “that it is actually not possible, that I am so firmly interwoven with what has happened here that I can no longer detach myself from the fact that I have to stay, see and write ”.

Hermann Mussert is a typical Nooteboom protagonist. He's a bachelor with an obsessive passion, in his case for the classical languages. In this he resembles Taad's father and son in rituals or the photographer Arnold Pessers from Mokusei! . In Nooteboom's travelogues The Detour to Santiago , Nooteboom remembers in the 1986 short story The Past Is Always Present and Not Present of his Latin teacher, Father Ludgerus Zeinstra. His descriptions reveal that he can be considered a role model for the figure of Hermann Mussert. At the same time he lends his name to his lover Maria Zeinstra, and the verses of Ovid chanted by the teacher play a leading role in The Following Story . In an essay, Nooteboom explained why he gave his protagonist the surname of the Dutch fascist leader Anton Mussert : “The name was a perfect fit for this book. I wanted someone who has everything against him, my Mussert is small, bald, a cynic, and to top it all, he also has the wrong name. "

History of origin

In 1982 the Dutch Booksellers Association (CPNB) asked Nooteboom if he would be interested in writing one of the gift books published annually by the CPNB for the Dutch Book Week. Nooteboom designed a suitable narrative for this. However, it was not implemented because the CPNB preferred the contribution of the more popular Dutch cabaret artist Wim Kan. It wasn't until Book Week 1991 that the following story was implemented as a Boekenweek present , and Nooteboom commented at the official press presentation of his novella that in 1982 they had been looking for an easily consumable book present, but that serious and sophisticated literature was now being asked again be. He further explained to Joost Zwagerman : “If I had purposely written something simple, it would have been offensive not only for myself, but above all for my readership. I just wrote the book I wanted to write. "

In an interview with Stephan Lebert in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Nooteboom explains the writing process. The subject of travel was given. He chose Lisbon as the backdrop "because for me the city has to do with farewell and reminds me of an ancient theater". On a trip to the Portuguese capital, he refreshed old memories of previous visits going back to 1957 and gathered impressions. Then he wrote The following story in Sant Lluís , Menorca , with no structure, no concept, 500 handwritten words every day. “I wrote and somehow everything came together. It's always like that with me ”. While writing, he had in the back of his mind the unusually large audience of 540,000 people who would receive his book as a gift, “quantities [...] that could fill entire stadiums”. The international sales success of his story was not to be inferior to the Dutch gift edition. On October 2, 1990, Nooteboom completed work on the novella.

reception

Front page of the German-language first edition by Suhrkamp Verlag

The following story received a rather poor reception in the Netherlands . As a representative quote from Carel Peeters in Vrij Nederland : “Everything Nooteboom writes is as elegant as it is highly educated, surprising and astute, but I am not really interested in the main character of The following story . He just makes and thinks, but he leaves me cold. The result is that I don't feel like getting involved in the finesse of the narrative. ”The Dutch writer Connie Palmen even reports in her autobiographical book IM that her partner Ischa Meijer Nooteboom in Het Parool is a“ fluffy, contentless writer in view of the novella “Although she thinks a lot of his work.

In Germany, Suhrkamp Verlag had Nooteboom under contract since his novel Rituale , the reception of which Nooteboom himself summed up succinctly: “Good reviews, no sales.” The following story was translated into German by Helga van Beuningen. Even the reading copy prepared in advance met with great interest and was quickly sold out. The initial circulation for the trade was 5400 copies.

The first reviews in Germany were already very positive. Rüdiger Safranski wrote in Die Zeit : “Cees Nooteboom has wonderfully told a story whose real main character is poetry itself. It cannot end because it can still do something with every end, including death. " Wolfram Schütte certified" Nooteboom's tricky novelistic thought game "in the Frankfurter Rundschau : " A narrative glide over fictional moments in life and intellectual challenges in the face of it of […] death. ” Karl Corino called the story in the Stuttgarter Zeitung a“ metaphysical etude ”and compared it with the paradoxical drawings by MC Escher .

However, the meteoric sales success came only after a meeting in the ZDF telecast The Literary Quartet as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair on 10 October 1991. Marcel Reich-Ranicki praised the story hymnically: “I didn't quite understand the book. I have to read it a second time. But what I understood about the book moved me deeply, and I deeply regret that I have so far overlooked all of Nooteboom's earlier books. Nooteboom is one of the great European writers of our time and this is one of the most important books I have read this year. I am deeply impressed by this Nooteboom. "Nooteboom himself later commented:" In my opinion, the decisive factor was that he said he did not fully understand the following story . "

Immediately after the program was broadcast, the initial edition was sold out, and a second edition sold out that same week. One month after the broadcast, sales were already 25,500 copies, and seven editions appeared within three months. The novella stayed in the bestseller lists for months and still appeared in the 1992 annual bestseller list of Der Spiegel magazine . The phenomenon that a review in The Literary Quartet could have such a strong influence on the sales success of a book was repeated in later programs. For Nooteboom, too, the success with The Following Story was not a singular event. The interest in his works remained sustained in Germany and in the following years also included successful new editions of his earlier works - especially of Rituale - as well as the following publications. To this day, Nooteboom is more popular in Germany than in his home country. This is how the German-language documentary Hotel Nooteboom was made in 2003 - A journey through pictures into the land of words , in which parts of the novel are read.

The following story was also well received internationally : In 1993 the book was awarded the European Union's literary prize. At the beginning of 1994 an English translation by Ina Rilke followed, which was also published in the USA at the end of the year and received consistently positive reviews.

literature

Text output

  • Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1991, ISBN 3-518-40396-6 (quotations and page references refer to this edition)
  • Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story . btb / Goldmann, Munich, 2001, ISBN 3-442-72709-X .
  • Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 2004, ISBN 3-518-45616-4 .

Secondary literature

  • Bertold Heizmann: Interpretation aid German: Cees Nooteboom. The following story . Stark, Freising, 2002, ISBN 3-89449-507-3 .
  • Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1995, ISBN 3-518-38860-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wim Hottentot: The death of Socrates as metamorphosis . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 174.
  2. ↑ See section: Bertold Heizmann: Interpretationshilfe German: Cees Nooteboom. The following story . Stark, Freising, 2002, pp. 42-44.
  3. ↑ See section: Heizmann: Interpretationshilfe German: Cees Nooteboom. The Following Story , pp. 20-34, 76.
  4. ↑ See section: Heizmann, Interpretationshilfe Deutsch: Cees Nooteboom. The following story. Pp. 37-40.
  5. ↑ See section: Heizmann, Interpretationshilfe Deutsch: Cees Nooteboom. The following story. Pp. 45-48
  6. ↑ a b See section: Heizmann, Interpretation Aid German: Cees Nooteboom. The following story. Pp. 49-58.
  7. ^ Rüdiger Safranski: The world of Cees Nooteboom . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch, Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 34
  8. ↑ Daan Cartens: Introduction to: Daan Cartens (ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch, Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 13.
  9. ↑ Cartens: Introduction , p. 11.
  10. ↑ Wim Hottentot: The death of Socrates as metamorphosis. In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 173.
  11. ↑ Hottentot: The death of Socrates as metamorphosis. P. 177.
  12. ↑ Manfred Schneider: Impossible Approaches. In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 42.
  13. ↑ Schneider: Impossible Approaches. P. 57.
  14. ↑ Schneider: Impossible Approaches. P. 44.
  15. ↑ Harry Bekkering: Our learning is nothing other than remembering . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 152.
  16. ↑ Cees Nooteboom: I come from Babyloniënbroek . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 3, 2004.
  17. ↑ Bekkering: Our learning is nothing other than remembering. P. 153.
  18. ↑ a b Stephan Lebert: With fantasy against reality . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 25, 1992.
  19. ↑ Reinhard Helling: I am a little reluctant to go anywhere (morning post conversation with the Dutch author Cees Nooteboom) . In: Hamburger Morgenpost, 32/1992.
  20. ↑ Harry Bekkering: Our learning is nothing other than remembering . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 155.
  21. ↑ Connie Palmen: IM - Ischa Meijer, In Margine, In Memoriam . Diogenes, 1999, p. 31.
  22. ↑ a b c Harry Bekkering: Our learning is nothing other than remembering . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 154.
  23. ↑ Carel ter Haar: All of a sudden you know that they exist . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, p. 279.
  24. ↑ a b c Stern No. 40 of September 26, 1996, p. 118.
  25. ^ Rüdiger Safranski: Across the threshold . In: Die Zeit 41/1991.
  26. ↑ Wolfram Schütte: Farewell Performance or: Homo Voyager . In: Daan Cartens (Ed.): Cees Nooteboom, Der Augenmensch. Suhrkamp, ​​1995, pp. 184-185.
  27. ^ Karl Corino: The circular waterfall . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, November 5, 1991.
  28. ^ Annual bestseller: fiction, non-fiction books . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1993, p. 130-131 ( online ).
  29. ↑ Overview of English-language reviews on complete review
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on September 20, 2008 .