A leaping fountain

A jumping fountain is a novel by Martin Walser . It was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1998 and is one of the most important books of his late work.

The focus of the autobiographical novel is the five-year-old Johann, son of an innkeeper couple in the Swabian village of Wasserburg on Lake Constance , Walser's birthplace. His poetically inclined father encourages the child's musical disposition, while the practical-thinking mother leads the “restoration” and joins the NSDAP in 1932 out of business interests .

In the novel, Walser not only gives an authentic description of the living conditions at the time of National Socialism ; The simple, peasant, sometimes bizarre figures give the reader an insight into the rural and small-town community. In doing so, Johann's sensitive world of thoughts, which he, inspired by his father, tries to organize in a "tree of words" for example, is confronted with the looming catastrophe, for example in his friendship with Adolf, who comes from a Nazi family.

Memory model

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The historical background of the Second World War penetrates the family's life in a depressing way towards the end of the novel with the news of the death of Johann's older brother, but plays only a subordinate role in the plot. The novel mainly tells about Johann's development, his childhood and youth, his first love, and finding his own language. In the program Literarisches Quartett , which was broadcast on August 14, 1998, Walser had to put up with the criticism that Auschwitz played no role in his novel . In this way, the writer was indirectly brought into the vicinity of the trivialization of the time of National Socialism or even of historical revisionism . In his speech on the occasion of the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in October, Walser tried to take a public position against these allegations, but achieved the opposite: Now, in addition, allegations of latent anti-Semitism were made against the writer. There was a month-long discussion in the media, which went down in history as the " Walser-Bubis Debate " and was continued in the discussion about the novel Death of a Critic (2002).

With his novel, Walser did not want to criticize the time of National Socialism directly , but rather to record his youthful experiences in a literary way, unencumbered by later political interpretations. To avoid misunderstandings, he pointed out this writing intention on the first page of the book:

“As long as something is, it is not what it will have been. When something is over, you are no longer who it happened to. However, one is closer to it than to others. Although the past did not exist when it was present, it now imposes itself as if it had existed as it imposes itself now. But as long as something is, it is not what it will have been. When something is over, you are no longer who it happened to. When that was what we now say it was, we didn't know it was. Now we say that it was like this, even though we didn't know anything about what we are saying now when it was. "

For this reason, the writer tried to restore his ignorant children's perspective, which is why he does not tell information about the National Socialist crimes that only became public after the war in the novel. He tries to be as realistic as possible with the picture of the time of National Socialism portrayed in the novel, whereby Martin Walser created above all an example of personal examination of conscience.

The rural scenario also expanded the memory space because, in contrast to Grass's Tin Drum , which is located in the city of Danzig, it shows how National Socialism left its murderous traces outside of the theaters of war. There were also victims in Wasserburg: the disabled, opposition, homosexuals and soldiers.

The novel is one of Martin Walser's greatest successes, for which, in addition to the historical subject matter, the numerous character studies and the easy and fluid narrative style compared to other late works are responsible.

Others

2007 Martin Walser has much of his manuscripts as a premature legacy to the German Literature Archive in Marbach given. Parts of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, including the manuscripts of marriages in Philippsburg , Das Einhorn and Ein jumpingenden Brunnen .

Web links

• ISBN 3-518-39600-5
• Memories of a childhood during the Nazi era or how much did Martin Walser need to know about the horror of that time? From Tilmann Moser . Deutschlandfunk, Cologne, December 11, 1998.
• Formation of self-awareness. On Martin Walser's Ein jumping fountain (attempt to free the novel from the context of the peace prize speech) by Arata Takeda . In: Germanistische Mitteilungen 56 (2002), pp. 27–47. (PDF file; 168 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Press report on the press portal.
2. ↑ Article in the FAZ.