A fleeing horse

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A Fleeing Horse is a novella by the German writer Martin Walser . It was created in the summer of 1977 as a side work within a few weeks, but after its publication in early 1978 it became Walser's greatest success until then. It has enjoyed a very positive reception from literary criticism as well as strong demand from readers. Within the next 30 years the novella developed into a bestseller with a total circulation of over a million copies.

The novella describes the meeting of two middle-aged couples on vacation at Lake Constance . The two men, former school friends, have had very different lives. While the high school teacher Helmut Halm withdraws from the world with his wife Sabine and finds his happiness in being misunderstood by the world, the journalist Klaus Buch chases after success and social recognition and seeks self-affirmation from his significantly younger wife Helene . In the course of the amendment, both attitudes towards life are called into question. The school friends' argument culminated in a sailing trip on the stormy Lake Constance, during which one of the opponents went overboard.

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Helmut Halm, senior teacher at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart , and his wife Sabine and their spaniel Otto have been going on vacation to Lake Constance for eleven years . They always rent the same holiday apartment with barred windows from the Zürn couple . The image that Halm presents to the world should correspond as little as possible to the reality of his life. He fears that the more others know about him, the more power they will gain over him. He usually gets along with his wife Sabine without big words. There is hardly any sexual intercourse between the two of them, their relationship has assumed a state of calm and immobility that he enjoys. He has decided to read all five volumes of Kierkegaard's diaries as holiday reading .

The well-rehearsed arrangement is disturbed by a schoolmate Helmut Halms suddenly showing up. Klaus Buch is a journalist, obsessed with fitness as well as healthy eating. He is married to the much younger Helene. Immediately he warms up memories of the shared past with Helmut, which the latter, in his striving to be misunderstood by the world, can only endure with discomfort. Against his will, the couples meet for other leisure activities. From the seemingly superior point of view of the spiritually and sexually liberated successful person, Klaus Buch polemics against the uptight and narrow-minded petty bourgeoisie, while Helmut sees himself being pushed on the defensive in defending his way of life. Sabine is drawn to the zest for life that Klaus Buch exudes. Helmut, on the other hand, feels excited as well as embarrassed by Helene's unconstrained eroticism.

During a hike there is a symbolic moment when a runaway horse gallops towards the group. Klaus manages to catch the horse, whereupon he explains: “You cannot stand in the way of a fleeing horse. It must have the feeling that its path remains free. And: a fleeing horse cannot be talked to ”. On one of the following days the two men go on a sailing trip on their own , during which Klaus tries to persuade his friend to have a future together in the Bahamas. The already tense situation escalates when the boat gets caught in a storm. Klaus sees the fight with the elements as a challenge and steers close to the wind. Helmut fears in agony that his friend will overturn the ship. He pushes the tiller out of Klaus' hand, whereupon he goes overboard and is driven off.

After the storm subsided, Helmut returned to the two women alone. Believing that Klaus had died, Helene reveals the mendacity of her life by his side: Klaus was eaten away by self-doubt, did not believe in his abilities as a journalist, saw himself as a failure and a “criminal” who was only fooling the world. He deliberately kept his wife, a trained pianist, small and forbade her to play music in order to feel equal to her. The meeting with Helmut saved him from his hopelessness; he hoped to recover from the reason and balance of his old childhood friend. In the midst of Helene's piano playing, Klaus Buch enters the holiday apartment. Against all odds, he survived the storm, and Helene immediately steps up to his side. The couples split up without Helmut and Klaus exchanging gaze. Halms leave early. On the train ride to Montpellier , Helmut Sabine tells the story of the holiday; his last sentence is the beginning of the novella.

Narrative style

From a narrative point of view , the strong focus is remarkable , which makes things appear from Helmut's point of view and through which the reader gets deep insights into his inner workings.

Position in Walser's complete works

A fleeing horse was a turning point in Walser's work in several ways. The novella turned out to be the bestseller that Walser, although long an established writer, had to wait a long time for. The success with both audiences and critics gave Walser the financial security to be able to concentrate fully on his writing activity.

In terms of content, the novella was often viewed as a departure from Walser's earlier political positions towards a new subjectivity . In his laudatory review, Marcel Reich-Ranicki judged that Walser “apparently no longer had the ambition to change the world with poetry. He just wants to show a piece of this world. One should not expect more from literature. ” Jörg Magenau translated this as:“ He has renounced socialism and is now getting the wages for it. ”Walser himself protested against such an assessment. “Where, where would I have expressed this ambition, where? I have always said: In the best case scenario, an author changes himself by writing. ”At the same time, A Fleeing Horse is by no means an apolitical book:“ When I look at the novella, it doesn't seem to be a private finding like this one Both men, straw and book produce bill in different ways, live competitive attitudes that in a sense eat up the person. ”The political background of the novella is that it can only take place in this way in our society.

Stylistically, a fleeing horse also marked a turning point in Walser's work. Gerald A. Fetz stated in the novella “the more disciplined language, the greater clarity of the plot, the clearly comprehensible fable - there is even ' action '! - the more complete form and the general comprehensibility ”compared to Walser's earlier novels. Joachim Kaiser missed their "a thousand times more contestable, a thousand times more wonderful jungle of souls and words" in the novella. And Martin Lüdke stated that the “steadily increasing entertainment value” of Walser's prose demands a high price: “Walser's recourse to traditional literary forms [novella form] goes hand in hand with recourse to a form of consciousness that has long been broken down. [...] Martin Walser is moving towards the flowing border that separates 'literature' from 'entertainment'. "

As in many other works by Walser, the protagonist from A Fleeing Horse is also equipped with trains by his author. Paul F. Reitze wrote in a review of the novella: “Its main topic is Walser. The person is dismantled and carved into quarters and halves with the sharp aperça knife . ”Walser's proximity to Helmut Halm extends from his midlife crisis - Walser himself turned 50 a few months before the novella was written - to the spatial environment - Walser lives in Nussdorf on Lake Constance - up to the petty bourgeois perspective of Halms. Walser explained about the character constellation in A Fleehendes Pferd : “When I wrote the book, I was of the opinion that with my character Helmut Halm I simply represent my own position vis-à-vis a number of characters that I actually know and that I have summarized in the character of Klaus Buch. ”Other readers saw two sides of Walser's personality in the two male protagonists. According to Hans-Erich Struck, Walser, like Klaus Buch, is a good sailor and, like him, he is particularly sensitive to dependence and insults. For Michael Zimmer, Walser split his biography as a Germanist into the alternative high school teacher and journalist, which he plays through in the novella.

The setting and the staff of the novella recur several times in Walser's work. The author's special relationship to his home on Lake Constance was expressed in the second book Heimatlob , published in 1978 , which combined texts by Walser with watercolors by the painter André Ficus . In 1985, Walser continued the lives of Sabine and Helmut Halm with the novel Brandung and transferred them from their native Lake Constance to California , where Halm accepted a visiting professorship at an American college . Gottlieb Zürn, the owner of the Halms holiday apartment, is the main character in Walser's novels The Swan House , Hunt and The Moment of Love .

History of origin

A Fleeing Horse was created in the summer of 1977 while Walser was working on his novel Soul Work . After a first version of Seelenarbeit was completed at the end of July 1977, Walser said he wanted to "alienate himself as far as possible from what was written [...] in order to work through the novel" and therefore turned to a novella that emerged within fourteen days as a relaxation exercise. Walser called Ein Flehendes Pferd a “summer work that quickly hissed away” and on September 8, 1977 he sent the manuscript to Siegfried Unseld , his publisher at Suhrkamp Verlag . His reaction was positive: "I congratulate you and me and us". The initial print run for the following spring was set at 25,000 copies. In addition, the novella appeared as a preprint from January 24, 1978 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

In the FAZ, of all places, Martin Walser had to accept the harshest criticism of his career to date with his last novel Jenseits der Liebe , published in spring 1976 . Even the title under which Marcel Reich-Ranicki put his review, Beyond Literature , expressed what the critic thought of Walser's last work. Reich-Ranicki judged Beyond Love : “An insignificant, a bad, a miserable novel. It is not worth reading even one chapter, even one single page of this book. ”He lamented the literary decline of Walser, who was once traded as the hope of post-war literature, but now“ can no longer hold the words ”.

reception

It was also Marcel Reich-Ranicki who two years later set the tone for the reception of A Fleeing Horse . Before it was published in the FAZ, he judged that Walser's novella was “his most mature, beautiful and best book”. It was "a masterpiece of German prose of those years, in which Martin Walser proved himself as a master of observation and psychology, as a virtuoso of language". Reich-Ranicki now explained his review of the last book by Walser pedagogically: "The criticism [...] was a last, desperate attempt to influence Martin Walser's writing." In his detailed review six weeks later he added that Walser had " the loquacity overcome and the eloquence regained. In contemporary German literature, the everyday language of intellectuals is seldom captured so precisely and in such a revealing way. "

The vast majority of the more than 130 reviews of the novella published between February and August 1978 followed Reich-Ranicki's enthusiastic request. Achim Ayren judged that “this story could belong to what will be left of a century”. Peter Wapnewski found “a simple, a brittle and sad story. [...] Artful especially in its casualness. [...] A parable of the helplessness of man in the midst of his man-made world of power and potency. ” Reinhard Baumgart emphasized the socio-critical dimension of the novella. She describes "a social system that no longer provides a meaning for life, the Halm only experiences as a production of appearance, the book as a universe of vertigo." Walser succeeded in "a real feat of well-planned and economical", the "close to the squaring of the circle , the narrative objectification of his subjectivity has come about. ” Benjamin Henrichs also applauded a“ novella that would be praised rather sparsely with the word 'masterful'. A reading pleasure that there will certainly not be many in this literary year 1978. ”However, at the end he felt“ something machine-like and sobering ”about an“ extremely artificial ”experimental arrangement and a final chapter that, with its“ most trivial revelatory dramaturgy ”,“ [e ] revealing, but only dreary ”. Günter Zehm went even further in his criticism. For him, "there could be no question that we were dealing with a 'masterpiece of German literature'". Above all, he criticized the list of the novella: “The weights are all too unevenly distributed. The sedate Kierkegaard reader Halm in a clinch with a watery mineral flyweight - something like that just looks strange, and one must suspect that this comic is involuntary. "

A Fleeing Horse became a bestseller. The first edition of 25,000 copies was sold out within a few days. At the end of November 1978, the seventh edition was added with a total of 132,000 copies. The amendment was from the time of their appearance on March 1, 1978 throughout the year on the bestseller list of the mirror and reached in the annual ranking the second place. Twice it was voted first on the SWR best list by a selection of 26 critics . By 2006, 26 editions of the novella had sold over a million copies.

Adaptations

As a prelude to the Meersburg Summer Theater brought to life by Walser and Rolf Hochhuth , the then dramaturge of the Konstanz City Theater Ulrich Khuon wrote a stage adaptation of A Fleeing Horse in 1985 , to which Walser himself contributed a scene with a conversation between the two main female characters. The play begins in the Halms holiday home when they have already met the Buchs and are waiting for their visit. The scene around the fleeing horse has been deleted. Helmuts and Klaus' sailing excursion is the dramatic climax of the play, which ends with Helene's accounting monologue and the return of the missing Klaus. The production in Meersburg proved to be a public success with its world premiere on July 19, 1985 and twelve other sold-out performances. The reviews of the piece were mostly positive. Der Spiegel , however, missed the "love of detail and accuracy that Walser's text demands in its unfolding versatility in the neurotic, obscene and vulnerable if it is not to slip into the declamatory-satirical." The play is still played on many stages today. Walser reworked it for a radio play version that he directed himself. It was first broadcast on March 17, 1986 by Bayerischer Rundfunk .

A few days later, on March 26, 1986, the ARD broadcast a television adaptation of Ein fliehendes Pferd , directed by Peter Beauvais and based on a script by Ulrich Plenzdorf . The actors were Vadim Glowna , Rosel Zech , Dietmar Mues and Marita Marschall . At Beauvais' request, Walser himself had revised the script shortly before the start of production, which he nevertheless felt in retrospect as a “catastrophe” that “only plundered the novella”. Benedikt Erenz, on the other hand, rated the implementation as “true to the book” and “extremely successful film version of a difficult text”.

In the remake of A Fleehendes Pferd from 2007, directed by Rainer Kaufmann, Ulrich Noethen as Helmut, Ulrich Tukur as Klaus, Katja Riemann as Sabine and Petra Schmidt-Schaller as Helene. The film, which was released on September 20, 2007, reached almost 360,000 viewers and has been available on DVD since 2008. He carried the novella into the present much more freely than the first film adaptation and put his focus on an entertaining relationship comedy without socially critical claims. Walser, who contributed to the script, was satisfied with the result: "It is a film artwork of its own kind, not a film adaptation."

literature

Text output

  • Martin Walser: A fleeing horse . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-518-04269-6 (first edition)
  • Martin Walser: A fleeing horse . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-518-37100-2 (the quotations used refer to this version)
  • Martin Walser: A fleeing horse . Full reading by the author. The Hörverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-86717-098-3
  • Martin Walser: A fleeing horse. Play . Collaboration with Ulrich Khuon. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-11383-6

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walser: Ein flehendes Pferd (1980), p. 90.
  2. ↑ Jörg Magenau : Martin Walser , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-24772-9 , p. 357
  3. ↑ a b Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Martin Walser's return to himself . In: FAZ , March 4, 1978
  4. ↑ Magenau: Martin Walser , p. 354
  5. ↑ Magenau: Martin Walser , pp. 354–355
  6. ↑ a b Struck: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 62
  7. ↑ a b c Quoted from: Fetz: Martin Walser , p. 121
  8. ^ Paul F. Reitze: The journey to Philippsburg . In: Rheinischer Merkur of March 24, 1978
  9. ^ Struck: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 61
  10. ↑ Struck: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , pp. 61–62
  11. ^ Room: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 77
  12. ↑ Magenau: Martin Walser , pp. 349–351
  13. ↑ Magenau: Martin Walser , p. 343
  14. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Walser's masterpiece . In: FAZ , January 24, 1978
  15. ↑ Achim Ayren: Who works, does not live. To Martin Walser's novella “A fleeing horse” . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , March 11, 1978
  16. ↑ Peter Wapnewski : Men on the run . In: Deutsche Zeitung - Christ und Welt , March 10, 1978
  17. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart : Survival game with two victims . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1978 ( online ).
  18. ↑ Benjamin Henrichs: Narcissus turns fifty . In: Die Zeit , No. 9/1978.
  19. ^ Günter Zehm : The senior teacher in the clinch with a flyweight . In: Die Welt , March 21, 1978
  20. ↑ Struck: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 67
  21. ^ Kutzmutz: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 78
  22. ↑ Dorrit Riege: A Walser for Winterhude . In: Welt Online , March 2, 2008
  23. ↑ a b Kutzmutz: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse , p. 79
  24. ↑ Nordmann: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse. , P. 83
  25. ↑ Pushed into the water . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1985 ( online ).
  26. ↑ Runaway Horse (1985) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  27. ↑ Eckhard Fuhr: The tremendous luck of Martin Walser . In: Welt Online , September 13, 2007
  28. ^ Benedikt Erenz: Battle on Lake Constance . In: Die Zeit , No. 13/1986
  29. ↑ A Fleeing Horse (2007) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  30. ↑ Film hit list: Annual list (German) 2008 at the Filmförderungsanstalt
  31. ↑ Nordmann: Martin Walser: A fleeing horse. , P. 93
  32. ↑ Premiere on location - star cast at Lake Constance on n-tv.de , September 13, 2007
  33. ↑ The edition differs from the previous one (2003 ISBN 3804417760 ) by a new chapter on the 2007 film and the indication of some newspaper articles on the same subject