A murder everyone does

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A murder commits everyone is a 1938 published novel by Heimito von Doderer . The work tells the life story of the textile engineer Conrad Castiletz.

content

youth

Conrad Castiletz grows up as the only child of his parents, he is also called "Kokosch". The father is a cloth merchant and a little older, the mother twenty years younger, the family is wealthy. So it happens that Conrad hardly noticed anything about the First World War in his younger years and he lacks nothing. He goes to a good school and is a mediocre student. In his free time he plays in the floodplains on the edge of a canal and catches water creatures, with or rather next to peers of proletarian origin who are foreign to him and to whom he is. When he once got involved in their rough games, it ends with the fact that he smashes a trapped snake on a bank stone. In his rather conceptless way of thinking, he resolves: "No more newts !"

Mediocrity also determines Conrad's further life, who is neither particularly clever nor particularly hard-working. He's never offensive, but gets along well at school and later with his career as a textile engineer by driving on laid tracks .

When he was fifteen, he was sent to visit his aunt. For Conrad, this trip on the night of July 24th to 25th, 1921, is very exciting. He rides on the night train in a compartment in which some young people form a boozy, funny group, but notices, although he is left out and likes it, that he basically doesn't like her loose manner. A fellow traveler comes up with the idea of ​​playing a prank on the lady sitting alone in the next compartment. A medical student unpacks a skull from his suitcase, which is supposed to scare her off with a walking stick in front of her compartment window. Conrad will happily hold the stick; not entirely safe for himself, as he notes, because the train is entering a narrow tunnel. The next compartment remains silent, but Conrad thinks he heard a scream, and soon the young people lose interest.

Conrad's life goes on as normal, he gets older, falls in love with a girl, a seamstress by the name of Ida. An older friend, hired by his parents as a student assistant, tells him that this girl is not befitting and that he should break the relationship, which he does immediately. Some time later he heard that Ida had passed away.

Maturity and death

After completing his training, his father sends him to meet friends in Württemberg so that he can gain work experience there. He was warmly welcomed by the wealthy Veik family of manufacturers , in whose textile factory he was placed, and began his career there, which prepared him for management tasks. During this time Conrad also met the manufacturer's niece, Marianne Veik; the promising young man marries the good match .

One day when he saw a picture of a girl in his father-in-law's library, it immediately captured him. He learns that it is his wife's sister, Louison Veik, who was murdered during a train ride, a case that has since been filed as unsolved by the authorities. Conrad resolves to enlighten him himself, an undertaking that he pursues with growing eagerness and in which he first learns that he was on the same train as the murdered woman on his journey at the time. His wife, who has always been jealous of her sister, feels reset by his interest in the dead, turns to other, mainly sporting interests, and travels for weeks in a company of other athletes. Conrad is approached several times about this situation, but shows no reaction and lets the development drift.

In the end, a chance encounter clears up the murder for Conrad. During a business trip to Berlin, he is approached by a Mr. Botulitzky, the man who was a medical student in the compartment at the time and made the skull available to Conrad: The conversation with him reveals something terrible to Conrad: It is himself who is raising his wife's sister has conscience. His future sister-in-law Louison Veik was sitting in the next compartment on that teenage train ride. She was so frightened by the joke that she passed out. She had been standing by the open window of her train compartment, half tipped out of this window and hit her head against the edge of a wall in the tunnel. Louison Veik was killed by the blow that threw her body back into the train compartment, which led investigators to believe she was the victim of a robbery on the train.

When Conrad returns home after his illuminating and all-changing investigation, he notices that his wife is cheating on him. So he stays with a friend. A resident of the house wants to commit suicide there at night with gas; it ignites in an explosion that Conrad falls victim to.

Text genre

On the surface, the book is an exciting detective novel with a somewhat long history.

On a deeper level, however, it is about Conrad's development and attitude to life . Because he, conformist and opportunist , always does what is expected of him and what is beneficial to his career, he remains hollow inside and does not develop any character . The preoccupation with the murder case symbolizes his search for identity . The Enlightenment, however, shows in two ways that he himself laid the foundation for his misfortune. This also closes the circle at the beginning of the novel, the first sentence of which is: “ Everyone gets their childhood turned over their heads like a bucket. Only later does it become clear what was in it. But it runs down on us for a whole life, because someone can change clothes or costumes as they want. "

expenditure

  • Heimito von Doderer: A murder that everyone commits. Novel . CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1938. ( The books of the nineteen 41)
  • Heimito von Doderer: The narrative work in nine volumes . Volume 4. A Murder Everyone Commits . CH Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39895-2

filming

The director Claus Peter Witt filmed the novel for television in 1979. It played Joachim Dietmar Mues (Conrad Conrad), Claudia Butenuth (Marianne Conrad born Veik), Erich Schellow , Herbert Steinmetz , Benno Sterzbach , Henning Schlüter , Dieter Prochnow , EO Fuhrmann , Monica Bleibtreu u. a.

reception

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Detective Did It; EVERY MAN A MURDERER. By Heimito von Doderer. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston from the German, . In: The New York Times . April 5, 1964, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed December 22, 2018]).