The white fortress

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The white fortress (Turkish original title: Beyaz kale ) is the title of a 1985 novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk . It tells the story of two men from the Christian-Western and the Muslim-Eastern world, who were confronted as master and slave in Ottoman Istanbul in the 17th century and, in their scientific research, increasingly their personal and cultural cooperation in partly friendly, partly tense cooperation Losing identity until they eventually switch biographies and continue each other's résumé.

The Hodscha advises Sultan Mehmed IV in the Topkapi Palace as supreme magician. The narrator later takes on this role.

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Capture

On the way from Venice to Naples, the galley of the 23-year-old narrator, who studied astronomy , engineering and painting in Florence and Venice , is hijacked by a Turkish ship (Chapter I). In Istanbul he initially had to drag stones as a slave to build the wall. Since he pretends to be a doctor and cares for the wounded, he earns some money and enjoys some privileges. A senior official, Sadik Pasha, learns about this and has him treat his asthma. Since he believed in the healing power of the pills administered, he felt better and after a while commissioned the young scholar, as assistant to a hodja , to organize fireworks for the wedding of his son with the grand vizier's daughter.

Master and slave

After success, the narrator hopes to be able to return to his home country and experiments with his superior on new explosive mixtures for rockets, different colored fire wheels, spraying cascades, etc. (Chapter II). On the banks of the Golden Horn and on cardboard ships that slide by, they build towers and giant illuminated puppets and use them to stage play scenes, e.g. B. Dragon fights or a burning of Satan. For ten evenings, these performances delight the audience and impress the Pasha .

As a result, a doppelganger relationship arises between the narrator and the hodja, who have a similar appearance. At the beginning of the experiment, both of them have little experience and are familiarizing themselves with their area of ​​responsibility by applying theoretical knowledge to Istanbul colored powder. A relationship of affinity and repulsion develops, with the hodja gradually adopting the thoughts and knowledge of his slave for his idea of ​​promoting the development of his country through modernization. In this process he finally reduces the different traditions to the core and discovers great similarities and similarities. Conversely, a corresponding adjustment takes place in the case of slaves, so that they eventually swap home and family. The background to this is the discussion at the Sultan's court about the agreement of western scientific methods with Turkish religious traditions and the struggle of the various factions over their influence on the ruler.

Levels of Approach

  • Cape. II. The Hodscha and the narrator receive the order from the Pasha to organize a splendid fireworks display. To do this, they are experimenting together on new types of rockets.
  • Cape. III. The Turk found out about the Venetian's fields of knowledge (e.g. astronomy, engineering), invented an astronomical planet model and a prayer clock, which he presented to the Sultan, but encountered resistance from the traditionalists at court and among the population.
  • Chapter IV. The hodja wants to know everything about the slave and the way of thinking of the "others" and lets him write down his childhood memories in order to compose an animal lexicon for the young sultan.
  • Cape. V. This is followed by a look inside the human being: above all, under the cloak of fiction, the playful surrender of their sins.
  • Chapter VI. The Hodscha uses the developing harmony in thinking to project its dark side (the fear of plague death) onto the other.
  • Cape. VII. After the Christian's flight to Heybeli Island, which the Hodja saw as treason, the Turk brought him back to Istanbul to do something against a plague epidemic on behalf of the Sultan. In doing so, they cleverly change the interpretation that everything is Allah's will and enforce their quarantine method against the strictly religious Islamist view.
  • Cape. VIII. After the success, the Hodja becomes the supreme magician and hopes to implement his plan of science with the Sultan.
  • Cape. IX. While the Hodscha is working on the development of a new cannon, then an armored war machine for the campaigns, the narrator wins the ruler's trust during his visits to the seraglio and takes part in court life and festivities. This intensifies the disintegration of his identity: in a dream he foresees the exchange of places with the hodja.
  • Cape. X. During the campaign against Poland, the Hodschah had to admit his failure in front of the impregnable fortress of Doppio : He did not find out the truth about their supposedly different thoughts through the forced confessions of the Christian and Muslim peasants, nor did he achieve the conquest with his invention. He swaps his biography with that of the narrator and flees into a new life in Italy.
  • Cape. XI. The narrator, on the other hand, continues as Hodscha as the supreme magician and advisor to the ruler in Istanbul, marries and becomes a father. With the Sultan he discusses the question of identity and the difference between cultures. Then he retires to his country estate in Gebze and writes this book.

analysis

Historical background

The novel takes place during the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV. Between 1648 and 1687. Pamuk adopts some details from the history for his fictional design in addition to the government and social system: While the ruler prefers to hunt, his grand vizier , Köprülü Mehmed Pascha, leads and his son Köprülü Fâzıl Ahmed Pascha wars against the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg Monarchy and extends their European possessions on the Balkan Peninsula. Pamuk takes on the sultan's disinterest in politics and his ability to be influenced by the seraglio factions to characterize the character in the novel. The palace coup of Mehmed grandmother Kösem Sultan , called the novel "Kösem Sultan", 1651, which is strangled as regent for the minor grandchildren after their defeat and the end of their office, with the allusion to the as Weiberherrschaft designated guardianship of women and Mothers for their underage children and sick husbands were included. In order to free itself from their paternalism, the hodja tries to urge the ruler to take over the government. The armed conflicts with Venice lead to the capture and enslavement of the narrator at the beginning of the novel. In the penultimate chapter, the protagonists take part in the campaign against the Polish Ukraine in the 1970s.

The appearance of historical scenes and episodes “like ghosts” in red is my name and The White Fortress explains Pamuk with his own ambivalent attitude towards Western Europe: “I always like to return to the wonders and beauties of the Ottoman past, not only, because I rediscover many forgotten treasures there, but because it is a safe haven that protects me from the storms of western influences [...] Basically, I am much more interested in Ottoman literature and culture than Ottoman history. My historical imagination enables me to come to terms with the love-hate relationship that connects me to Western culture. "

Western-style modernity and Islamic tradition

Pamuk also determines his position between eastern and western cultural tradition: “non-western”. This “other” tradition is a constant source of inspiration and originality for me. It is a challenge to look at classical Ottoman-Turkish-Islamic culture through “western eyes” in order to connect it to something that it is not and never was. My novels consist of such a combination of images, stories, ideas and textures that come from two different sources of civilization. ”In this polarity, Pamuk feels related to the Russian Dostoyevsky ,“ who, like [he], is in constant struggle on the edge of Europe lives with European ideas [...] In it he not only recognizes his own position, because “large parts of modern literature [are] grown out of this agonizing tension [...]: to be a European and at the same time to feel a great disgust for it ".

Science and religion

The starting point of the White Fortress is a military conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice with pronounced good-bad-enemy images. On the one hand, the Turks feel superior to their enemies as winners, but have deficits, and thus feelings of inferiority, compared to the sciences of the Tuscan high culture. Accordingly, the relationship between the protagonists begins with a master-slave hierarchy.

After the success of the fireworks display, the Pasha offers the narrator to release him if he becomes a Muslim, because Islam is a much higher belief. Even at the third request, when someone threatens him with the head, he resists and the Pasha gives it to the Hodja. At first he ignored his external resemblance to the Christian and observed him during their conversations about the star system, the Ptolemaic cosmography : “He seemed to be playing his game with me, subjecting me to a little experiment and learning something from it that remained hidden from me because During these first days he always looked at me as if he were learning something new and would only become more inquisitive with what he had learned. But then he seemed to have scruples about taking it a step further to deepen that knowledge. And this absurd breaking off, that was what depressed me ”.

The hodja would then like to find out from his new slave everything that he has learned at the Italian universities and what he thinks about it: "Together we would research, find together, move forward together." Like the bigger, superior brother, he teaches the smaller, until the difference in knowledge is evened out. Then, however, the Hodja assumes the spiritually dominant position by claiming that “he possesses a naturally given, deeper knowledge which he describes as worthless in the majority of the books.” Using the example of Slaves are shown the import of Western ideas into the Ottoman Empire. He helps the Hodja to think and research, and in the first year he devotes himself to astronomy , then builds a telescope using lenses imported from Flanders, develops a heliocentric planetary model in contrast to the Ptolemaic model , invents a prayer clock with a complicated gear mechanism (Chapter III) and presents the progressive Pasha, who has returned from exile, the “model of the universe” with a “pompous and poetic text”. But the Turkish scientist has difficulties in finding understanding for the new apparatus in his country. In addition, one doubts that they are the result of his independent development. The Pasha, like the Sultan later, suspects that the European "taught him these things", as if "he was looking for a guilty party [...] and as if he by no means wanted to admit that his beloved Hodja could be this guilty party."

The traditionalists fight at the Sultan's court, z. B. the astrologers Hüseyin Efendi and Sitki Efendi, against the influence of European ideas and the Pasha, who is interested in Western knowledge, is afraid of falling victim to this group. Like the sultan, he reacts to the audiences of the two scientists once friendly, then angry. You are interested in the new knowledge, but at the same time shy away from further application. So the Pasha breaks off the showing of the clock and advises the Hodja: “Get away from him! With poison, if you want, and set it free! Then you will have your peace and quiet! ”On the other hand, he rewards the Hodja like a prince, instructs him to“ invent a weapon that will make the world a dungeon for our enemies ”and convey the idea of ​​the ruler, adapted to the ruler's childhood Models in seraglio . The narrator remembers, in temporally superimposed impressions, of the "approaching child]," this sounding instrument is like a magic box that [wants] to learn to understand ". This must have been "a picture of happiness", "as the fairy tale illustrator paints it, for such fairy tales as [he] was told in [his] childhood". At this moment the narrator and the hodja are indifferent to religious differences: what matters is not “whether the boy can distinguish between science and sophism , but only that he is able to understand something. [...] that there is a logic behind what [happens] to the stars. "

In the following time the Hodja wins the trust of the little sultan through dream interpretations and correct prophecies of a conspiracy of the Kösem Sultan against him in the seraglio as well as predictions about the health of his favorite animals, lions, leopards and tigers, and hopes to be able to raise him in his sense . He also ponders the ignorant about what is missing in the brains of these "fools". "The way to the essentials of knowledge leads through understanding the reasons for their stupidity, leads through the recognition of the condition in their heads and a way of thinking that aligns with it." Discouraged by setbacks in his educational efforts both with the children of the estate at Gebze and am Sultan's court he increasingly believes that he is different from his people, "that he [is] different from them."

In times of crisis, researchers are needed again, but have to assert themselves again against prejudices. For example, the Sultan wants to hear from the Hodscha a prediction about the course of the plague and uses this situation. First, in his prophecy, he exchanges the “angel of death” as the causative force for “Satan”, who may be fought as an opponent of Allah . Second, the narrator has officials collate the deaths in the individual districts in order to identify the centers of the contagion and isolate them through access restrictions and quarantine measures. This will bring the epidemic to an end. Sitki Efendi now has to hand over the office of the supreme magician at the court to the Hodscha, who temporarily gains influence on the Sultan and interests him in science before the court party of “fools and copycats” recovers (Chapter VIII).

As the influence declines, however, the hodja doubts the realization of his great plan for a science and sinks into a mood of catastrophe. Both researchers describe in a book their vision of the fall of Turkey compared to the happy life of the people in Venice and hand over their work to the Sultan in order to shake him up. The Hodja was then given the task of constructing a cannon (Chapter IX) that would far exceed the firepower of all current artillery pieces and, later, an armored war machine. During this time the Sultan invites the narrator and wants to know from him what part he has in the ideas and work of the Hodja. He suspects that the European taught him things. At the same time, the narrator and the hodja reflect in this context on the possibility of obtaining information about the competing countries through representatives of the state and of corresponding with the scholars in Venice and Flanders. This idea is entirely in the spirit of the Venetian, who is not actively involved in war weapons research and is rather motivated to use his science for fireworks and the fight against the plague.

Doppelganger motif

For the ambivalence described above, Pamuk chooses the doppelganger motif often used in literature when designing the protagonists in the White Fortress : As in one of the best-known examples, Dostojewski's The Doppelganger , the main characters are identical or similar in appearance. One of the two is increasingly dominating the other and pushing them out of their roles in business and society. In Pamuk's novel, this motif is expanded: In addition to the personal identity, the cultural-religious identity is also split up. In contrast to Dostoyevsky's helpless Jákoff Petrówitsch Goljädkin, the older man who is driven into psychiatry by the younger, career-conscious and supple opponent, the relationship between the Venetian and the Turk is more differentiated. Through their changeable partnership with rival position battles, they discover the human core common to the various forms of society and cultures. Images of the enemy and positions of superiority lose their effect through such intercultural encounters and disputes. As a result, their environment is interchangeable: after the inner rapprochement, the protagonists separate and slip into each other's biographies. The Hodja flees to the realm of his dreams, Venice. The narrator stays in Turkey. With the biography they also swap the sociocultural environment, whereby they both conjure up imaginative stories from their inner space of retreat, the realm of their freedom, and thereby maintain a certain independence.

Compared to other novels, the plot of the White Fortress , with a strong reduction in personnel, is largely internalized, especially since the doppelganger, brother or twin motif in a psychoanalytic interpretation as an inner conflict and split consciousness of a person, as two sides of one personality or two Aspects of their being and, transferred to society, can be interpreted as intercultural communication. “They talked [at the pasha's table] in general about the creation of people in pairs, remembered exaggerated examples, twins mistaken for one another by their mothers, equals who shrank from one another at first sight, but then each other as if bewitched, could no longer have separated, to brigands who appeared instead of innocents. "

Look in the mirror

In the second phase of the approach, the hodscha is interested in the life story of the slave and has the animals in the family garden in Tuscany described (Chapter IV). The reason for this are two treatises, "On the Life of Animals" and "On Oddities in Creation", which he presents to the Padishah with fantastic illustrations reminiscent of mythical creatures .

This interest is intensified when a new book project by the Hodschas without the assistance of the slave, whose, in his opinion, imperfect simple ideas he criticizes, stagnates on his own self-doubts. Now he wants to find out from the Venetian the "thoughts of those" others "who [ had taught the narrator] all this wisdom, in those compartments in [his] brain, in those knowledge drawers ":" What might they think in this situation? "

One evening he asks a central question of Western philosophy: "Why am I what I am", but an inner voice tells him: "I am what I am". The narrator advises him to think about the “being of the self” and, like the “others”, to look in the mirror much more often than the local people . But the slave knows that his master “cannot think about anything” without him, and he explains the difference to the Tuscans: “Only because they were able to think for themselves without further ado, they made progress in this matter. [...] What he is can only be found out by each person, but he, the Hodja, lacks the courage “The Hodja demands such a demonstration from himself first: He should write down who he is. Thus, the slave begins to record his childhood transfigured in memory (chap. V.) and thereby animates the hodja to do the same while they sit opposite each other at the table. In this way, they exchange ideas about their family relationships and their training.

Then the hodja is also interested in thinking, assuming in principle that the "others" are the bad ones. He wants to confirm this black and white picture by forcing the narrator, who is tied to the chair, to confess his sins. He also tries to ask questions from him that he can no longer remember. In this way he experiences his personality image, which is mixed from true and imagined occurrences. In the next step, the slave seduces the Hodscha with the suggestion that he could also invent lies to supplement the darker pages of his own life story. In doing so, he encourages them to reflect on their own positive assessment. The Hodja notices “that these dreams are devilish traps that would drag him into the darkness of deadly knowledge”, but he too is fascinated by the idea of ​​getting to know each other perfectly. Ultimately, however, he reacts to his own self-accusations with fear of losing his self-respect and security, and he tears up his records. But now he no longer despises the narrator and considers him an equal. The slave's therapy is illustrated in a dream: During the time of the plague, he dreams of people “[under] the trees of the forest that was [their] house, [...] in possession of secrets that [they] have been keeping for years wanted to know, and whoever found the courage to penetrate the darkness of the forest could become their friend […] and [they] learned [thousands of little things] with ease ”.

Later the two communicate like twins, have the same dreams, the Hodscha admits his fear of the plague, thinks back to the story-telling grandfather and wants to know whether people in the heavenly land of the slave always live as happily as described in his memories. (Chapter VI.) Looking together in the mirror, the narrator compares their approach since the beginning of their acquaintance: “At that time I saw someone I should have been, but now I thought he had to be someone like me. So we would both be one! Now that seemed to be a perfectly natural truth. "

Dominance fights

In the course of the process, there is an equalization in individual phases of cooperation, which, however, as in Dostoyevsky's doppelganger story, is interrupted by a dispute over rule. The Venetian wants to use his newly achieved position again and again to free himself from the role of serving: He tries to overturn the self-confidence not only of the Hodja, but also of his people, "by proving the evil in them. . "But the Hodscha does not want to admit his own occupation in the thought battle and sees himself as a conqueror: He has taken possession of the narrator's soul, and so [...] he finally knows what [the slave] thinks, so he thinks, what [this] knows. ”“ He claims [] to see the world with [his] eyes now, he finally understood how [...] “those others” thought and felt ”. On the other hand, the slave would know him less well. On the other hand, he speaks of the identity of both persons in order to “step outside of oneself and look at oneself from the outside” and to transfer one's own fear of death from the plague to the other. Accordingly, the Hodscha uses his increased knowledge to apply his idea of ​​science in the military field and to demonstrate it by a victory of the Turks over the enemy, while the narrator prefers to get involved in fireworks and fighting the plague.

The outbreak of the plague in Istanbul initially gives them the opportunity to fight for each other's inner world. While the narrator after Giovanni Boccaccio assumes a contagious disease against which people can be protected by isolation, the Hodscha initially sees it traditionally as "the advice of Allah, and if he is destined to die, then the person dies." One can learn from this "fearlessness". He demonstrates this to him by means of a swelling discovered on his own body: an insect bite or a plague bite?

Conflict of roles and identity crisis

The narrator notices that the conversations with the hodja transform his memories over time and the listener has saved his messages in different versions. The Hodscha thinks of the slave's Tuscan childhood as an “unreal dreamland”: “His [own] life had slipped out of [his] control and was carried off to other places by his [the Hodscha's] hand. [...] his journey as my self to my homeland had both simple-minded and whimsical-comical sides that it did not seem entirely convincing to me. But the logic in the details confused me again: It would be possible, I wanted to say, my life could have turned out that way too. [...] So I just listened in amazement to the deeds of my ego in my old world, about which I had longed for years, and forgot about the fear of the plague. ”Much later, during the war preparations in Edirne (Chapter X.), During a visit to the Hodscha's parents' house in a slum area with "ash-gray, depressing streets", the connections become clear: The Hodscha sees the cheerful Tuscan childhood as a counter-image to his own, of the arguments with his stepfather, the "Quilt makers" overshadowed life. Whose questions "Why did you come, you crazy guy? […] Why couldn't you die? ”Point to his incomprehension towards the young person interested in spiritual things, who left the family and went to Istanbul. When the narrator later, in preparation for his book about his new life, searches Edirne for traces of Hodja’s descriptions of the past, he cannot find any. As in his own story, the memories cannot be fixed in reality.

The narrator's wish for a different identity, however, is initially incomprehensible to the narrator and he is confused, as he is about “the stupidity of the Sultan [...] about his own dear“ fools ”, about“ ours ”, the“ others there "About the desire to be someone else" speaks, and he flees to the island of Heybeli (Chapter VII.) For fear of the plague, lives there for a time with a Greek fisherman and thinks about his resemblance to the Hodja and a Return to Italy after.

In the rapprochement between the two, this separation is a step backwards, because the flight leads the annoyed Hodscha back to his old idea of ​​the division of people into “righteous” and “guilty”; conversely, the narrator feels after the plague and the ascent of the Hodschas excluded and neglected from the court as the supreme magician, and reacts jealously to the fact that one ascribes the success solely to the Hodscha in which he sees himself. In addition, it is becoming increasingly clear to him that he is uprooted and that, even if he managed to escape, he would not simply be able to resume his old life in Venice.

At the end of the relationship story, before his trip to Empoli, the Hodscha has the narrator describe his fatherland and family again in detail, then they change their clothes and the Hodscha flees into his new life, as a messenger later reports: He writes Book about his life in Turkey, marries his former, now widowed, fiancée and acquires the old family property.

The narrator, on the other hand, remains behind as Hodscha in Istanbul. After the "flight of the unbeliever", the Sultan protects him from the critics who want to punish him for defeat because he assumes that his slave is the source of ideas for all books and inventions. “It was fine with him to be like her,” he married a young woman and had four children. When asked about rumors that he is not himself, he replies: "What does it matter who one is [...] only what we did and what we will do matters!" He settles into the personality of the Turk and tells the Sultan, for example, about his Italian past life as if he were giving information from the slave's mouth. It seems to him that he is looking at himself from the outside. In characterizing the two scientists, the Sultan mixes or swaps their properties with one another. In private conversations he also names the distinction between "us" and "them" as sophistry, because "people [were basically alike] everywhere in the world, in all weathers and winds". In earlier conversations, the ruler was interested in the past life of the slave and his country and its people as well as "in the insides of [their] heads." And expressed the opinion that "basically every life is the same as the other." At the time, the narrator was shocked by this statement, feared the loss of his identity ("I am I!") And in a predictive dream at a masked ball in Venice was not recognized by his mother or his fiancée, but they kept the hodja who did that Face of his youth for her son or fiancé.

Just in time for the defeat of the Turks in front of Vienna, he retired from his position as chief magician, saving his head, and has since lived on his estate in Gebze, which the ruler once gave to Hodscha as a reward for his writings written for him . Here he finished his book at the age of almost 70.

Literary classification

Pamuk connects The White Fortress personally with his novel The Silent House by having the former Istanbul lecturer and current “encyclopaedist” Faruk Darvinoğlu find a manuscript with the title “Quilt maker’s stepchild” during his research in the Gebze archive in 1982. They now publish his writing, he devotes his sister Nilgun that in 1980, in during a nursing home told, summer holiday spent with her grandmother as a 19-year-old student from the consequences of a political-privately motivated attack their right-wing cousins died.

As in many of his works, the author deals with the East-West cultural debate in Turkey in the White Fortress and lets his characters discuss the tension between tradition and European influences: For example, Sait Nedim (Cevdet and his sons) talks about his annual trips to Europe and the question of why the Turks are so different from the Europeans. While Cevdet and his sons play , The Silent House , Snow , The New Life , The Museum of Innocence in Pamuk's presence, the theme in the White Fortress is projected onto a historical situation , similar to my name in red .

In all of these novels, traditional, Islam-bound forces are opposed to reformers who are oriented towards Western European ideas: Selâhattin Darvinoğlu (The Silent House) sees himself as the educator of the people and wants to free them from heresies based on superstition and mysticism . He firmly believes in the success of his encyclopedia, which should only contain information verified by scientific experiments and with which he wants to lead Turkish society to an earthly "beautiful paradise of the future" according to the model of enlightening, Darwinian- scientific and nihilistic ideas . His son Doğan tries to implement some ideas of his father and developed proposals for agricultural structural reforms . In such plans and their failure, he recalls Refik Işikçi in Cevdet and his sons : He reads economics books , thinks about the Turkish economy and statism and develops concepts to bring more progress to the villages. His friend Ömer uses the engineering skills he has acquired in France to develop Turkey by rail. In the process, he gets into a conflict between profit and morality and retreats to his estate. The third in the circle of friends, Muhittin, unsuccessfully wrote unfortunate poems based on European models such as Charles Baudelaire and then joined a nationalist conservative party. Like the poet Ka in Kars ( snow ), he experiences a main characteristic of the West, the pronounced individuality , in its tendency to loneliness and returns to traditional ways of life from this area of ​​tension. Other protagonists emigrate to Germany, e.g. B. Ka, his lover from the first time in Frankfurt and later married to a kebab and travel agency businessman, Nalan, who cries "for her [...] left ideals" youth, or Osman's dream woman Canan ( Das neue Leben ) , with whom he was looking for a new life on bus trips through Turkey. She gives up this plan, marries a doctor and leaves home with him.

The historical dimension of the East-West theme is shown in red. This is my name using the example of an illumination dispute in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. presents. As in the White Fortress , the protagonists try to win the Sultan for the new ideas: Uncle Karas, as envoy of Sultan Murad III. the individual in Venice Renaissance - portraits met and allows for its rulers make an illustrated book in the new "Frankish" style, while the government Malerwerkstatt Master Osman is committed to the traditional schematized style.

Narrative form

Through the numerous reports of his Italian life and the additions and changes brought about by the questions and expectations of the Hodschas, i.e. through multiple refractions, the manuscript found by Faruk in the archive was created over time.

One day a man by the name of Evliya visits the protagonist in Gebze and asks him to fill a gap in his travelogues with information about Italy from his supposedly escaped slave. Like the Sultan, he tells his own memories, enriched by imagination and often repeated, from the indirect position. Then he wrote the book at hand: “What I told didn't seem to be something made up, but actually something that I experienced, it was as if someone else was carefully whispering all the words to me”. This chain of messages ends in the freely formulated, appropriate translation attempts by the editor Faruk (chapter Introduction). The historical anchoring of the biography is also difficult: the encyclopaedist can, through the appearance of the writer Evlya Çelebis, date the writing to the time of Mehmet IV between 1652 and 1680, but in his search for detailed facts it eludes a precise definition and shows a mixture of fiction and fact. It also remains to be seen whether the author of the manuscript used Çelebi as a source or, conversely, if he incorporated the host's notes into his travelogues during his visit to the estate.

When asked about the constant change of his characters, which “melt or […] merge into one another”, Pamuk replies: “Because I firmly believe in the slipperiness of human identity. The boundaries of ourselves are not strong and I am interested in the mystery of the changes. Incidentally, this also applies to nations. The book “The White Fortress” is my modest contribution to the genre of a doppelganger novel by transferring the motif of a character with two selves to a fearful land between East and West - a fear that the Turks have almost elevated to art. [...] I have learned not to treat this fear as a disease like other authors. I say: don't let tradition and modernity collide, let them coexist, don't see it so dramatically, don't believe the politicians who claim that the Turkish identity is only fed from one source. Islamic tradition is not an obstacle to a modern society, not even a secular one. "

Life as an idea

The white fortress is listed as an example in the article on the postmodern novel . One can justify this with the dissolution of a closed novel plot by multiple superimposing of the narrative perspectives to polyphonic structures. Pamuk used this technique of a complicated genesis of a manuscript in several novels:

The author of the novel Schnee is the "novelist" Orhan, who researches the life of his dead poet friend Ka in Frankfurt and his stay in Kars with the help of notes and interviews and presents it personally from the perspective of the protagonist. The former Koran student Fazıl distances himself from Orhan's book plan: “If you let me appear in a novel that is set in Kars, then I would like to tell the reader not to believe anything you have written about me, about all of us to have. Nobody can understand us from afar. "

Red is my name is told by Orhan, the son of the protagonist Şeküre, from the perspectives of individual characters based on the descriptions of his mother, who in turn gathered information from other people. In the last few sentences of the novel, Şeküre relativizes the author's credibility: “He is irritable, moody and unhappy as always and is afraid of doing injustice to those he doesn't like. Therefore you should not believe Orhan when he portrays Kara more absent, our life harder, Şevket worse and me more beautiful and less decent than what is true. Because there is no lie that he would not spin in order to make his story pretty and believable. ”In the White Fortress there is a first-person narrator , but no uniform, authorized version. In the last two novels mentioned, the events in the long period of oral tradition are varied again and again until they are fixed in writing and colored or supplemented by the evaluations of other characters. In the end, the fictitious historical core can no longer be grasped as reality for the reader.

In Das neue Leben the author addresses this uncertainty by having the narrator describe his surreal travels through Turkey and the search for the author of the novel “Das neue Leben” and his sources from an unknown fictional level after his accidental death. The ride ends with the disillusioning result of a collection of random materials. The protagonists' expeditions are associated with a change of identity: on the run from his fundamentalist father Narin, Nahit first went into hiding in Istanbul as a student Mehmet and later in a provincial town as a book writer Osman. The narrator Osman changes from an employee and family man to a traveling dropout. Under the name Ali he sneaks up on the founder of the reactionary movement Dr. Narin, but then, out of disappointment over the betrayal of love by the travel companion Canan, takes on the role of an agent and kills the rival and son Narin, who lives under his name Osman.

As in other works by Pamuk, in this novel the narrator speaks directly to the reader and reveals the alleged intention of the author by warning against modern novels that " aestheticize the pointless [], disappointing [] life with a so-called Chekhovian sensibility". He playfully calls for belief "in the violence of the story [he] told, [...] in the cruelty of the world!", But immediately relativizes this statement by the following assessment of the "modern" described as a novel. Toys, this [r] greatest [n] invention of western culture ”: It was“ no activity for us [that is, the Turks] ”and he himself had“ still not [able] to find out how [he] felt inside this strange place Toys to move. "

These changes in the narrator's positions on the fictional playing field and the fact that reality cannot be fixed correspond on the philosophical level with aspects of constructivism or radical constructivism , according to which an objective world is not recognizable in subjective perception, and is used as a questioning exclamation in the motto of the White Fortress formulates: “To imagine that a person who interests us has access to an unknown way of life, which is all the more attractive to us because of its mystery; to believe that we will only begin to live through the love of this person - what else is this than the birth of a great passion ?! "

The opposite pole to the two protagonists, who try to recognize the essence of people by looking inside, into their thoughts, is formed by the world traveler Evliya, who says on his visit to Gebze, “[we] ought to have the wondrous, the astonishing outside Searching in the world, not in ourselves. Investigating inside ourselves, thinking deeply about ourselves for a long time, only makes us unhappy. […] For this reason the heroes [of this book] could not stand their own selves and always wanted to be someone else. "And in a criticism of the protagonist he adds:" He does not even want to imagine such a terrible world in which people always talk about themselves, about their peculiarities, where their books and stories would only speak of them! ”In the discussion about radical constructivism, this assessment corresponds to the reservations about the solipsistic perspective of an individual construction that leads to cognitive isolation . The alternative to this can be found in the picture of the world traveler: Instead of “locking himself into his own four walls”, “he spent his entire existence traveling on endless streets looking for stories”. This journey, as approaches sought in the human field through communication, is reminiscent of the model the autopoietic feedback .

In the novel The New Life , Osman traveled all over Turkey by bus, but without realizing Evliya's knowledge. Rather, his excursion ends with the deconstruction of the idea of ​​the mysterious book and refers the narrator back to the experience of personal perception in the sense of constructivism: “And so I came back to the thought that had long occurred to the reader curious about the teaching example that I was so deeply impressed by the New Life only because the books of my childhood had prepared me for it. But since I, like the old masters of the parable , could not believe in the teaching example set up for me, the story of my life remained entirely my story [...] This cruel result [...] my heart had long since come ”. The narrator of the White Fortress also came to this conclusion in a different way: In contrast to the world traveler Evliya, he believes in his own story: "[W] e must dream again what life and dreams we have lost in order to regain them" . For him it is less about the knowledge of an objective reality and truth, which is already unattainable for him, but more about an imaginative, creative enrichment of life that protects against any dogmatism with its enemy images.

Search for the ultimate goal

In the penultimate chapter (X.) the political and personal relational action intensifies in the Ottoman campaign of conquest against the Poles, overshadowed by unfavorable prophecies. The Hodja has convinced the Sultan "of the superiority of the" others ", of the need to finally get up and take action, of the future and of the inside of our heads" and victory should be achieved with his miracle weapon, but already Difficulties arise in transporting the heavy apparatus through the spruce and beech forests in the rain, and the fighting machine then sinks into the swamp surrounding the fortress.

During the war campaign through the villages, the hodjas increased their efforts on "hunting trips" to find out what was going on in the minds of Christians. In the end, he tries to force the confessions of their sins through torture. Under this pressure he wants to find out "how" they "are made up and on the other hand" we "". For comparison, he also experiments in Muslim villages, but he only hears the same everyday confessions as his Christian neighbors and his belief that he is learning the deeper truth is getting weaker and weaker: “We had moved away, didn't want to listen anymore, but they looked in the rain-washed ghostly light with empty eyes on the wet glass of a gigantic mirror in a gilded frame, which the Hodscha let go from hand to hand. ”Finally the Hodscha tries“ to find out the deepest truth from the dying ”. But the narrator sees "that he [knows] the desperation of imminent death on faces as his own".

This failure of the cognitive endeavors is symbolized, both on the personal as well as the cultural and ontological level, by the unsuccessful siege of the castle with the symbolic name Doppio for the doppelgangers: “I began to think about the path that had brought us here. Everything seemed to be perfect, like the sight of the white fortress surrounded by birds, the slowly darkening mountain wall and the silent dark forest, and I now understood that many of the things that we had experienced for years as by chance were unchangeable, I knew that our soldiers never would reach the white towers of the fortress and that the hodja thought just like me. "

The conquest of the citadel would lead to the highest knowledge, to the answer to the question of meaning. In her description she recalls the impregnable Grail Castle , which is only visible and accessible to the chosen Parzival after a maturation process: “It was on a steep hill, the setting sun cast a delicately shimmering blush on the pennant-studded towers, but it was white, radiant white and beautiful. The thought occurred to me that something so beautiful and unattainable could only be seen in a dream. " For the protagonists, however, the white fortress is more like the motif of the unreachable goal in Kafka's novel The Castle .

There are symbols of the absolute in many Pamuk novels: the color red (my name is red), the snow crystal (the snow), the light angel (the new life). Individual figures in Cevdet and his sons and Dasstille Haus are also based on a Western European ideal of humanity, which they strive to realize for their country with scientific methods, but not achieve.

reception

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the author comments on the history of the reception of his works in Germany and regrets that "[his] novels" The White Fortress "[the first book published in German by Insel Verlag in 1990]," The Black Book " or “Red is my name” only few readers found in Germany. ”He justified this as follows:“ The novel is basically an art form of the middle class in the West, and until recently the western world was not ready for education and individuality of the non-western classes of citizens. Until recently, the Western world was only interested in novels about people outside the West if they were portrayed as their victims. For writers like me, who would rather tell a different story than the old victim story, that makes things a little difficult. "

After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pamuk's early, newly published novels received more attention in the features section and most of the critics agreed with the Foundation Council's verdict, "[i] n his novels" The White Fortress "," Red is My Name "or" Snow " "Pamuk combines oriental storytelling traditions with the style elements of western modernism. […] The unique memory of the author [reach] back to the great Ottoman past […] ”. It is precisely this combination of modern and traditional elements that is often highlighted as a peculiarity in the book reviews: “Pamuk has his own style, as it is expressed above all in his historical novels, with the recourse to the Islamic- Oriental narrative tradition [found] […] [This] fascination […] affects his writing style. Translators occasionally [despaired] from his complicated sentence structures. "Pamuk confirms this and says:" For me, long sentences are no problem "[...]" Especially in Turkish they just flow there. "

In connection with the linguistic design, the reviewers appreciate that "[i] in his works [...] it is always about the loss of identity in a culture that is torn between Orient and Occident", that he is "the conflict-laden search for identity between western modernism and Islamic tradition [thematized]. ". In this context of his as “world literature! A brotherhood of book readers! ”Praised literary complete works, his two novels are categorized with historical scenery:“ The symbols of two world orders - Venice and Istanbul - are becoming increasingly interchangeable here [in red is my name]. Already in Pamuk's novel "The White Fortress" the Venetian clergyman mutated into the Hodja and the Muslim became more and more western. "This also expresses the" uncertain Turkish identity ":" The feeling of humiliation by the West and the resulting nationalistic pride, the shame caused by Ataturk's abrupt modernization about the older Turkish, Ottoman and Islamic cultures as well as the anger about this shame - all of this makes the characters of the Turkish Nobel Prize winner for literature experience incredible things: In "Snow", "Red is my name", "That black book "," The new life "or" The white fortress "they are painfully torn between west and east, the own and the foreign, the present and the past, the popular and the extravagant."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pamuk, Orhan: The White Fortress . Translation into German by Ingrid Iren. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2005.
  2. ^ FAZ July 5, 2005. I will think about my words very carefully .
  3. ↑ a b c d FAZ. July 6, 2005. No. 154, p. 35. I will ponder my words very carefully.
  4. ↑ a b quoted from: Ingo Bierschwale: Author between Orient and Occident. Stern, October 12, 2006, accessed December 17, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Pamuk, Orhan: The White Fortress . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-17762-2 . P. 29 f. This edition is quoted.
  6. ↑ Pamuk, p. 41.
  7. ↑ Pamuk, p. 42.
  8. ↑ a b c Pamuk, p. 46.
  9. ↑ Pamuk, p. 49.
  10. ↑ Pamuk, p. 50.
  11. ↑ a b c Pamuk, p. 52.
  12. ↑ Pamuk, p. 53.
  13. ↑ a b c d Pamuk, p. 71.
  14. ↑ Pamuk, p. 75.
  15. ↑ Pamuk, p. 144.
  16. ↑ Frenzel, Elisabeth: Motives of world literature . Doppelganger. Kröner, Stuttgart 1980. ISBN 3-520-30102-4 . P. 94 ff.
  17. ↑ Pamuk, p. 47.
  18. ↑ Pamuk, p. 76.
  19. ↑ Pamuk, p. 77.
  20. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 78.
  21. ↑ Pamuk, p. 78. Reference to Kant's Sapere aude interpretation: "Have the courage to use your own understanding!"
  22. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 100.
  23. ↑ Pamuk, p. 109.
  24. ↑ Pamuk, p. 93.
  25. ↑ Pamuk, p. 110.
  26. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 114.
  27. ↑ Pamuk, p. 96.
  28. ↑ Pamuk, p. 97.
  29. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 112.
  30. ↑ Pamuk, p. 112 ff.
  31. ↑ Pamuk, p. 170.
  32. ↑ Pamuk, p. 171.
  33. ↑ Pamuk, p. 136.
  34. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 191.
  35. ↑ Pamuk, p. 197.
  36. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 199.
  37. ↑ Pamuk, p. 163.
  38. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 164.
  39. ↑ Pamuk, Dasstille Haus , p. 239.
  40. ↑ Pamuk, snow . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 453.
  41. ↑ Pamuk, pp. 11 and 203 ff.
  42. ^ Die Welt October 20, 2005. My grandmother donated ten lira .
  43. ↑ quoted from: Die Welt, October 20, 2005. My grandmother donated ten lira .
  44. ↑ Pamuk: Snow, p. 511.
  45. ↑ Pamuk: My name is red . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 552.
  46. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 288.
  47. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 288.
  48. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 288.
  49. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 288.
  50. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 289.
  51. ↑ Pamuk, p. 7.
  52. ↑ a b c d Pamuk, p. 206.
  53. ↑ Pamuk, Das neue Leben, p. 340.
  54. ↑ Pamuk, p. 209.
  55. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 183.
  56. ↑ Pamuk, p. 178.
  57. ↑ a b Pamuk, p. 186.
  58. ↑ Pamuk, p. 190.
  59. ^ Peace Prize of the German Book Trade: Orhan Pamuk is the new winner. Spiegel, October 12, 2006, accessed December 17, 2013 .
  60. ↑ a b Ingo Bierschwale: Author between Orient and Occident. Stern, October 12, 2006, accessed December 17, 2013 .
  61. ↑ Pamuk receives Nobel Prize. In: Die Zeit 42/2006. The time, accessed December 17, 2013 .
  62. ↑ a b Sabine Vogel: A happy rumor. Berliner Zeitung, October 13, 2006, accessed on December 17, 2013 .
  63. ↑ a b Jörg Plath: The work of love. Frankfurter Rundschau, September 12, 2008, accessed on December 17, 2013 .