Dora brother (book)

Dora Bruder is a book by the French writer Patrick Modiano . In it he traces the Jewish girl Dora Bruder , who disappeared during the German occupation of Paris during World War II and became a victim of the Holocaust . Modiano's book was published in 1997 in the Éditions Gallimard . The German translation by Elisabeth Edl was published by Carl Hanser Verlag the following year .

content

Wanted advertisement in Paris-Soir dated December 31, 1941

In December 1988, Patrick Modiano discovered in an old edition of the Paris-Soir from December 31, 1941 an advertisement with the text:

“PARIS
We are looking for a young girl, Dora brother, 15 years, 1.55m, oval face, gray-brown eyes, sporty gray coat, wine-red sweater, dark blue skirt and hat, brown sporty shoes. Advice requested to Monsieur and Madame Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris. "

- Patrick Modiano : Dora's brother

Modiano knows the area around Boulevard Ornano in the 18th arrondissement of Paris from his childhood and from a stay in the winter of 1965. He recalls the streets and houses in the district. At number 41 on Ornano Boulevard, which was a hotel during the war, he often walked past carelessly. For him, the fate of the Jewish girl who did not return to her convent school after curfew one evening is linked to that of other women who might have been in the same situation that winter, with his own running away in the winter of 1960 and with Jean's escape Valjeans from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables . With these impressions Modiano wrote the novel Voyage de noces (Honeymoon) , which appeared in 1990.

Drancy assembly camp in August 1941

In the following years he traces the real Dora brother further, finds files about her and her parents from Austria and Hungary . He traces their lives up to December 14, 1941, the day Dora's brother disappeared. Only later did the parents report their daughter who was not registered as a Jew as missing. According to a police memo, Dora Bruder returned to her mother on April 17, 1942. The father was already interned at this point . According to the files of the New York YIVO, another attempt to escape the girl ends on June 15, 1942. Only a few days later, on June 19, Dora Bruder is admitted to the Les Tourelles internment center . After two months, she was sent to the Drancy assembly camp on August 13 , where she met her father again. On September 18, 1942, both were deported to Auschwitz . On February 11, 1943, Dora's mother was also sent to the extermination camp.

At the end of the text, Modiano walks through the empty streets of Paris, where he has tried to find the traces of Dora Brother and in which he believes he can feel an echo of her presence every now and then. He never found out what the girl was doing in the weeks when she ran away, where and with whom she was hiding.

“That remains her secret. A poor and precious secret that the executioners, the ordinances, the so-called occupation authorities, the dépôt, the barracks, the camps, history, time - everything that humiliates and destroys you - could not rob you. "

- Patrick Modiano : Dora's brother

interpretation

First-person narrator Patrick Modiano (2014)

Dora Bruder deviates greatly from all the works that Modiano has previously published. It is neither a novel, nor a historical report, nor a biography for which the facts were insufficient. Instead, Modiano writes a non- fictional text based on historical facts and tries to approximate the life of a real person, the girl Dora's brother. The author himself appears as a first-person narrator who documents his search for traces and lets his own memories flow into it. He circles Dora Brother's life through stories that all have a point of reference to her fate, that is, are metonymically related to her, while she herself remains absent. Different "ways of writing absence" emerge from which the narrator composes the picture of Dora Bruders.

The author's methods include questions, hypotheses, and assumptions that, although often do not reveal any reliable findings, nevertheless give the reader an idea of ​​the person Dora Bruder. In addition, Modiano evaluates historical documents, files, registers, police reports. The newspaper clipping that precedes the book also belongs in this category. Towards the end the text moves further and further away from Dora's fate and becomes more associative. Instead of the missing documents about Dora Bruder, there are now parallel fates, those of other deported women from Paris or the young deceased writers Friedo Lampe , Felix Hartlaub and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . Modiano quotes in full a letter from Robert Tartakovsky before his deportation to Auschwitz in June 1942, which he discovered at a bouquinist . Due to the parallel fates, the collective dimension of the event comes to the fore, and Modiano creates a literary memorial to all those deported from France.

Modiano also repeatedly addresses the limits of collective and individual memory. A feeling of emptiness that Modiano creeps while walking through the old quarters, whose houses have long since been demolished, is representative of the oblivion that threatens the victims of the Holocaust. Memory cannot recall people and their lives, they are only indirectly available as traces. Nevertheless, the book does not end with oblivion, but with the statement that the absence of Dora Brother has inscribed itself for the narrator in the city of Paris, its houses and streets. After reading the book, the reader will also feel reminded of the girl in certain areas of the city.

reception

Dora Bruder is considered to be one of the main works of Patrick Modiano, in part also as his best-known book. For Ursula März it is “his most intimate and most defenseless and perhaps his most important work”: “a great literary attempt at a memorial for an unknown Jew”. Even before the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, Dora Bruder was one of those works which, according to Tilman Krause, “brought him a loyal German audience”. The translator Elisabeth Edl called Dora Bruder her favorite Modiano book. It is “a book of rare beauty and great sadness that you will never forget.” “Between the precise topography of the city and the wide imaginative space”, for Joseph Hanimann “an archaeological place of past events” is being created. Mohammed Aissaoui considers the last sentence of the book to be one of the most beautiful sentences in literature.

In 1999 Westdeutscher Rundfunk produced a radio play based on Modiano's model. Rüdiger Vogler , Ingrid Andree , Axel Gottschick , Sybille Schedwill , Johannes Steck and Bruno Winzen spoke . Editing and direction are by Norbert Schaeffer .

On June 1, 2015, a street in the 18th arrondissement was inaugurated as the Promenade Dora-Bruder in memory of the victims of National Socialism in Paris . The street is located on a disused section of the Chemin de Fer de Petite Ceinture between Rue Leibniz and Rue Belliard near the Porte de Clignancourt metro station . During the ceremony, Modiano described Dora Bruder as a symbol that keeps the city alive of the thousands of children and young people who were deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

expenditure

• Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . Editions Gallimard, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-07-074898-7 .
• Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl . Hanser, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-446-19287-5 .
• Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl. Droemer Knaur, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-426-61813-3 .
• Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl. dtv, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-423-14182-6 .
• Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . French text with German explanations. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-019908-4 .

literature

• Birgit Schlachter: Notations of absence. Jewish-French literature after the Shoah . Böhlau, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-29405-2 , pp. 195–247.

Web links

• Ursula March : Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . In: Deutschlandfunk from March 23, 1998.
• Joseph Hanimann: eyes gray-brown, face oval . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 12, 1998.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Patrick Modiano: Dora Bruder (2001), p. 7.
2. ↑ Patrick Modiano: Dora Bruder (2001), pp. 166-167.
3. ↑ Birgit Schlachter: Notations of absence. Jewish-French literature after the Shoah . Böhlau, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-29405-2 , pp. 196-198.
4. ↑ Birgit Schlachter: Notations of absence. Jewish-French literature after the Shoah . Böhlau, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-29405-2 , pp. 198-205.
5. ↑ Birgit Schlachter: Notations of absence. Jewish-French literature after the Shoah . Böhlau, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-412-29405-2 , pp. 205-207.
6. ↑ Tilman Krause : Everything you need to know about Patrick Modiano . In: Die Welt from December 10, 2014.
7. ↑ Fokke Joel: Holding on to the dreams from back then . In: The time of October 9, 2014.
8. ↑ Ursula March : Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . In: Deutschlandfunk from March 23, 1998.
9. ^ Tilman Krause: Fremdeln with his own biography . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from August 30, 2007.
10. ^ Elisabeth Edl: Patrick Modiano: Dora brother . On the website of the dtv Verlag .
11. ↑ Joseph Hanimann: eyes gray-brown, face oval . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 12, 1998.
12. ↑ Mohammed Aissaoui: Patrick Modiano: bientôt une rue Dora brother à Paris . In: Le Figaro of January 20, 2015.
13. ^ Dora brother in the ARD audio play database .
14. ↑ See article Promenade Dora-Bruder in the French Wikipedia .
15. ↑ Denis Cosnard: A Paris, une promenade Dora brother en mémoire des victimes du nazisme and Patrick Modiano: “Dora brother devient un symbols” . In: Le Monde from June 1, 2015.