A man in the house

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A man in the house (1991) is the short debut novel by the poet Ulla Hahn . Like her later novels Das Verborgene Wort (2001) and Aufbruch (2009), it is set in a small town in the Rhineland near Cologne. Due to its delicate topic (frustrated woman raping her cowardly lover) and the author's fame - Ulla Hahn, married to the SPD politician Klaus von Dohnanyi , had recently been named by Marcel Reich-Ranicki as one of the best contemporary poets - A man in the house was discussed very controversially in the specialist literature when it appeared and even commented on in the tabloids.

Ulla Hahn, 2009

content

The divorced goldsmith Maria Wartmann lives in a small Catholic town in the Rhineland and has had a secret relationship with Hans Egon (Hansegon), the local sexton and choirmaster, who is married to the wealthy heiress of the sausage factory and does not want to risk a divorce despite promises to the contrary . When Hansegon even announced one day during Advent that he wanted to travel with his wife again, Maria took action. She lures her lover to a dignified farewell dinner in her home, mixes sleeping pills with the champagne, puts him in her bed, gags the unsuspecting victim and ties him to the bedpost with gold shackles that she forged especially for the purpose. For eight days, from the 1st to the 2nd Advent, just until the "delights of repetition" set in, the sexton now becomes the object of her vengeance and desire. She infuses him with pureed delicacies through a small hole in his gag , tickles his artist's ear with church chorels and classical music, reads to him from Goethe's fable and verse epic Reineke Fuchs , but above all she pampers and stimulates him with all the sex games that the two of them also do had already practiced in various hotel rooms up to now, only that it is no longer he, but she who sets the tone: She “enjoyed her power, enjoyed submitting Küstermann while kissing. It was sweet to be on the side of the perpetrators. ”It is not without sadism that she reminds him of all the small humiliations that she had to endure under him: She stuffs the relevant mementos into his death mask , which she had made for this purpose has placed it next to the bed so that he cannot take his eyes off it.

Meanwhile the rumor mill is seething among the ladies of the town: Where was their choir director? Did Mr. Egon go away without his wife? Maybe burned out? Had he even been murdered? He has always been a bit strange. - The least concerned is his own wife, of all people, "Egon was cheerfulness itself." She too seems to be enjoying her new freedom.

After the sexton has gradually become visibly leaner and lethargic under Maria's torture and the garbage bag in his death mask has been fattened to the brim with embarrassing memories, his tormentor decides, satisfied, to free her victim, who has meanwhile become completely helpless, from his bonds, to drive him to the bank of the Rhine and abandoning there like an annoying pet.

“Monday morning the newspaper reported that the sexton had been picked up near Cologne, neglected, hypothermic, soaked. Despite his weakened condition, he defended himself with the last of his strength when they tried to remove the plaster from his mouth. Finally, his wife, who was hurriedly brought up, succeeded in doing this with a jolt, whereby the man, according to the paper, broke out into a painful neigh. Since then he has been silent. "

shape

The text declared as a "novel" is, strictly speaking, a novella in terms of its form . This also includes the use of thing symbols typical for this genus , such as the gardenia , which as a flower of romanticism here takes on an almost opposite function and appears again and again in crucial places. The most important thing symbol that runs through the novel like a red thread is the death mask that Maria von Hansegon made and placed next to him. While she only gagged his mouth with a thin esophagus, she hollowed a huge mouth into the mask, through which she threw all those mementos over the course of the one-week martyrdom, which are supposed to remind of the hypocrisy of their time together. In this way, Maria forces her sexton to swallow in effigy all the reproaches that have accumulated over the years and that she is now stuffing into this larva. After the mask has done its job, Maria strangles it with a tie, but continues to live as a lucrative Christmas business: “Maria's runners-up for the festival were hammered masks with wide open mouths, made of silver, of gold. They were hanging on many women's necks under the Christmas tree, even men did not spurn them ”- so the last sentences of the novel.

As is also characteristic of a novella, the text is satisfied with only a few, very brief flashbacks and mainly tells of a single unheard of event : It thrives on the provocative idea that the conventional relationship between man and woman known from love literature is radically upside down and consistently plays through his topic with all of its nuances, often deliberately nauseating. Obscene is wrapped up ironically. Maria talks to her "Hansegon" like a "stubborn child" and sometimes slips into the role of a dominatrix , sometimes that of a nurse, so that nursery rhyme and fecal language appear combined. Ulla Hahn's descriptions teem with literary allusions, indulge in indulgent exaggerations and effortlessly contrast poetic acrobatics and sarcastic reality. The author's style is clearly shaped by her similar uncompromising poems, which she composed earlier. The structure and narrative style, however, are ultimately just as conventional as the main character. Maria is not a politically ambitious emanze, feminist or even goddess of revenge , but remains the disdained single who would like to be a wife.

True to the motto of the novel, borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, “What you don't talk about aloud is not there,” Maria's revenge turns into a mere language game, an epic experiment. And that turns out harmlessly, although there are always very daring. The bedroom, in which more than two thirds of the novel is set, soon loses the character of an idyll and turns from a fragrant love adventure playground into a literally unpleasantly smelly hell. And what at first seems erotic and in places pornographic is used with these same means, albeit frozen for calculation and meticulously cold, for the obscene exposure of the supposedly romantic coexistence of the sexes. The reader, however, in his initial expectations similar to the fictional character Hansegon himself, is invited again and again by the amused tenor of the novella to see through its artificial, playful character and ultimately digest the whole thing as harmless entertainment, despite numerous unsavory characters.

reception

The novel A Man in the House caused a real media hype when it was published. The specialist criticism rarely found words of praise. Many saw the story as unsuccessful and contradicting itself. Others, on the other hand, praised the bizarre part of the story and were fascinated by its breaks, since it was only through them that the thematic hypocrisy would be adequately reflected.

The passages of the novel in which the author has to leave the bedroom perspective in order to be able to include the echo of the outside world are seen as particular weak points. To do this, she repeatedly uses the figure of the naive little Bärbel, a niece of the victim who is in love with her teddy bear, who tells her great friend Maria, teichoscopically , but linguistically not very authentically, of the reactions of the sensational small town ladies . Such criticism, however, overlooks the fact that the author not only needs this couple (Bärbel and her teddy bear) as a narrative makeshift, but rather obviously wants to create two positive analogy and contrast figures to the two negative protagonists (Maria and Hans). So Maria in Bärbel and her incomprehensible mother recognizes her own childhood: a reflection of the innocent girl she once was and who also suffered from her mother. And the battered cuddly toy, "its fur dirty, its muzzle rubbed smooth from the numerous caresses", undoubtedly has a symbolic resemblance to Hans Egon, who is described at the end as an "awkward jointed doll", as "warm hide, stuffed with limp meat."

Publications

as a paperback

Individual evidence

  1. A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 141.
  2. ^ A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 72.
  3. A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 134.
  4. A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 148.
  5. A formulation that is at the center of the Goethic definition of the novella
  6. A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 10.
  7. Compare above all those poems that Ulla Hahn published in her first poetry anthology Herz über Kopf (1981).
  8. ^ A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 64.
  9. A man in the house , dtv edition (see above), page 144.