A fair for the city of Arras

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A Mass for the City of Arras is the title of the novel by Andrzej Szczypiorski about the events that took place in Arras between around 1458 and 1461 , which was published in 1971 in Polish under the title Msza za miasto Arras and in 1979 in German . Both because of the citizens despairing of the plague and the following religious fanaticism, all moral standards are temporarily lost and lead to pogroms against the Jews, cannibalism, witch trials, murder and manslaughter, arbitrary legal acts and private settlements. The prince-bishop's city ​​lord finally restores order with very mild punishments for the plebeian councilors, who are not only perpetrators but also victims of a Christian fundamentalist .

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The narrator, the young noble Jean, is both a student of the “holy old man” Father Albert , who directs the city council, and at the same time drinking companion of the Utrecht prince-bishop and city lord, who does not believe in God, but in the importance of all passions. After the events of the “great anger”, Jean left the city and traveled to Bruges to settle there. Before the council of his new city, he reports on the crimes in which he participated and was almost devoured by them himself. His monologue is this novel. The focus is not on the actions of the protagonists, but on the arguments about the ideological justification of certain morally borderline decisions. This turns the novel into a drama of ideas that requires the reader to understand the sometimes sophistic arguments.

Both the aged fanatic Albert and his pupil Jean use Christian orthodoxy to underpin their points of view. Albert, who threatened hell, the whisperings of Satan and a repetition of the plague as divine punishment, controls the council that he has expanded to include representatives of the trades and is the pacemaker of excesses. Albert describes the power of his interpretive word as follows: “It is not important what is, but what kind of name a thing has. Everything is like his name. (...) What is violence that you call punishment? Punishment. (…) So I give a name to all the deeds in this city. ”The theme of the novel is this abuse of a religious and political orthodoxy by a small elite who determine the majority of the assemblies out of ideology, out of opportunism and out of cowardice. A later victim wrote about the spiritus rector Albert: “Such as this one are always the worst. They kill sinlessly. ”And if the murderers ever had doubts about their actions, then they probably weren't asking,“ Why did I kill innocent people? ”But they would still be able to calm themselves down by believing that the crimes were committed in good faith to have. Jean submits more and more to the fundamentalism of his teachers and finally participates in arbitrary death sentences before he becomes the accused himself (he is "far too clever to continue living in our city.")

The prince-bishop finally re-established the old order with an ideological procedure that the mad Albert also used: He overturns all judgments and procedures and gently punishes the remaining councilors with their exile from the city: “What happened did not happen and what has been has not been! ”- the cause was not malevolence, but stupidity and the denial of human reason. So the healing power also falls back on the basically same methods of framing to restore a good conscience and peace and order. The intellectual pupil Jean, who was also burdened with guilt, protested in vain against this pragmatic mercy. So in the end he once again lives up to his role as a dogmatist.

interpretation

In his youth, Szczypiorski experienced the German attack on Poland, the Polish underground and the Warsaw Uprising , from where he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin after his arrest . After the victory over fascism, he worked as a journalist in Poland and from the mid-1970s he supported the Polish opposition and the gradual end of the Soviet model in Poland. Despite all reservations about a "biographical interpretation" it can be assumed that the experiences with two dictatorships and their ideological justifications played a role in his choice of the topic.

At the center of the novel is the triad of - here Christian - dogmatics , the bloody excesses based on it and the necessary atonement that follows it: How does a society in which a larger part has participated in crimes live on, how is a common one Future of victims and perpetrators possible? A real attempt at an answer to this important question for the survival of a community were e.g. B. the Truth Commissions in South America and South Africa. Szczypiorski, on the other hand, lets the plot end with the symbolic-political measures of the authorities, the mass and the banishment, although the narrative challenge, the poetic design of the phase of social pacification, only really begins then. With the mass in the city of Arras, a second act of the novel should have started.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: A fair for the city of Arras. Novel . Translated from the Polish by Karin Wolff . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 978-3-257-22414-6 .
  2. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 182 .
  3. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 29, 97, 99, 118, 140, 156, 164 f .
  4. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 38 .
  5. ↑ In some German cities of the Middle Ages there were political struggles of the craftsmen with more or less success against the authorities of their cities. Compare, for example, the report on the guild revolution in Zurich .
  6. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 154 f .
  7. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 141 .
  8. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 29 .
  9. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 184 .
  10. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 134 .
  11. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 187 .
  12. ^ Andrzej Szczypiorski: Mass . S. 188, 192 f., 197 f .
  13. ↑ Ulrich Greiner commented at Die Zeit in 1988 that the novel's strength lies in dealing with the subject of Stalinism without even using the term once. (Compare weblink)