A long night

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A Long Night is the title of a novel published in 2000 by the German writer Martin Mosebach .

Ludwig dreams of the palm garden as the "earthly paradise", the "land of his childhood [...] [and] the climax of his childhood happiness": "[A] ll manifestations of life developed out of the palm garden", right up to the Garden of Eden was created in which the "only person in the world [...] had occupation and entertainment with the animals in the park" and "on the edge of the Palmengartenweiher [...] [looked at] his reflection".

Course of action

The novel, set in Frankfurt , tells the story of the relationship between Ludwig Drais and Bella Lopez and unfolds an image of the eroded educated bourgeoisie after the 1960s in the tension between the generations between lifelong dreams and pragmatism.

First chapter: early days

The 27-year-old Ludwig Drais did not pass his law exam and is now looking for a job. The, albeit unsigned, painting by Liebermann's “Strand bei Zingst” gives an impetus to give it a try as an art dealer. So far, nobody has been interested in buying it because, as his landlady, Frau von Schenkendorff, tells him, the painter's unfinished work had fallen into the sand and in some places he had impressed himself on the fresh oil paint. In the picture, "[t] he total futility to paint outdoors [...] is expressed". So she wants to leave it to her tenant for 2000 marks. Drais sees this as an opportunity to earn a lot of money and immediately looks for a secretary to build up the business.

He has to experience the unsaleability of the picture in two attempts. He visits the couple van Twillebeeckx, who are known to their mother. The man is a lawyer and has just been on a trip to Pakistan on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry as part of a project “Encounter with European, American and Asian partners” . It is his duty to the cotton merchant Mr. Khan to find him "a man in Germany who will boost his business [...] []". Since van Twillebeeckx sees this as a "hopeless undertaking" and wants to conclude the matter quickly, he urges the inexperienced visitor to do this and organizes a contact for him. In contrast, he is not interested in the Liebermann.

Ludwig's second effort with a lawyer who lived in a villa in the Holzhausenviertel and who once offered him to work for him after his exams was similar. Instead of negotiating the picture, he tells him the grotesque story of his marriage. His wife, who was dissatisfied at home, is now finding fulfillment as the driver of a train in the palm garden. After the death of the boat rental company, in whose Swiss house she occasionally stayed overnight during the business trips of her understanding husband, she also took over his duties, with the assistance of the lawyer.

Chapter Two: A day of thirty-six hours

Ludwig visits Ms. Rüsing, an acquaintance of his mother, in her apartment in a bare apartment building near the little wooden house that " Hans Thoma [in May 1883] painted from the window [of his apartment] on Lersnerstrasse".

After this experience, Ludwig gives up his plan to become an art dealer and accepts Twillebeeckx's suggestion. He runs the company "Nephew & Nephew Europe" for Mr. Khan. With his secretary Bella Lopez and her husband Fidi, he is setting up an office with a warehouse for cheap textiles in the basement of an office building on the sprawled outskirts of the city.

Ludwig is now looking for investors for his company capital. First he visits Ms. Rüsing, an acquaintance of his mother. She tells him the story of her life and her, apparently not altruistic, support of young men, mainly assistants in a bookstore, to whom she gives fairy-tale names like Prince Cuckoo . It's worth listening to, she ends up lending him three thousand marks. He receives just as much from his former fellow student, the lawyer Bruno Hütte, who in the afternoons runs the business of his law firm from the restaurant "Zum Purzelbaum".

Bella develops as an idea generator and organizer. She tells Ludwig the new sales strategy for disposable items and prepares the meeting with Mr. Kahn, the first practical test, so to speak. Fidi picks up the manufacturer from the airport. "It all turned out just as Ludwig had imagined [], without having to [] contribute with a single word." The suspicious Pakistani boss asks his employees specifically about their activities, although he listens to them He makes suggestions, but makes the decisions himself, gives instructions to be carried out and announces his next visit. Then Bella takes him to the hotel. On her return, she angrily throws two taxi receipts in Ludwig's face. She complains about harassment that she did not reject for business reasons.

Third chapter »Zores«

In the shimmering afternoon heat, the protagonist discovers the aesthetics of the street “swept empty by the oven wind”. "The end of the long high house fronts, the side aisle of the main station with its round, glazed sandstone gable, could now have been a southern market hall. [...] Ludwig suddenly saw Münchener Strasse like a painter".

After successful business deals with Wellerskamp in Aachen , which saved his company for the first year, Ludwig moved into his first apartment in a tenement house in the Holzhausenviertel. Fidi and Bella are allowed to lodge in his basement. In the evenings he enviously looks down from his attic room at her basement window with the knotted red curtain, which finally loosens and [hides] the “cozy peep box”, and dreams himself into the role of the lover.

In the office, his employee has an overview and can print business cards with the title “Assistant Director”. "Recently [] she has even been traveling for the company" to present the "Canadian [] lumberjack shirt" to Mr. Wezcerek in Fürth .

As in the second chapter, one follows Ludwig's path through the city and his visits to his sick father, who is now being looked after by the unemployed brother Hermann, to Bella's mother and Mr. Koschatzki.

Erna Klobig, Bella's mother, lives in the station district. She has ordered Ludwig urgently in order to seek legal advice, because in all Aldi branch stores their house ban was issued "because they twice something has made [] go along." She her for telling the boss's daughter 68 generation not atypical changeable life story as bohemian .

Ernst Walter Koschatzki is one of his creditors who lent him two thousand marks for his planned business trip to Pakistan. Ludwig has known the "time critic", "political analyzer" and "German [n] in post-war Germany " through his parents since he was a child, when he read his essays in the radio series "Vom Geist der Zeit". Now he is concerned about his edition of the work, the concentrate of forty years of writing and thinking, and his fame. He develops his philosophy of life for the young Drais and has him report on the trip that has not taken place. Ludwig succeeds in doing this with imaginatively decorated second-hand information. Koschatzki, a caricature of the ivory tower - columnists , praised the visitors for the authenticity of his account.

Chapter Four: In Shops

Fresco Bathsheba goes to David by the Italian painter Francesco Salviati from the 16th century. Hermann gives Bella a vision to read that reflects her own situation. It is about King David , who sees Bathsheba bathing , brings her to his castle and makes him his lover. He arranged the death of her husband Urija , whom he had placed in the first row in the battle before Rabba . Bathsheba becomes one of the king's wives. As a punishment for their actions, the first child of the two must die after birth. In the parallel plot, Ludwig observes Bella from his window before their liaison begins, wishes Fidis dead and lets him drive away in his car while drunk. Bella tells him about a bleeding that caused them to lose their child.

Ludwig and Bella have been dating for a few weeks now and meet in their apartment when Fidi is out, but without discussing this situation. “A competition of its own [has] broken out between Bella and Ludwig: whoever began to love earlier.” Drais thinks little about the future: “Ludwig [] always lives on the hope of the next time. The past does not exist, and the present [is] either an intoxication that is never fully experienced or an agonizing waiting. "Bella sees their love triangle as" irrefutably factual. [...] it [depends] on getting Fidi out of the house. If Fidi [is] there, then [is] also the great obstacle of love. "

Just as daydreaming, Ludwig's businesses develop by chance. He meets Twillebeeckx at the club for lunch. Ludwig, who is in the camp with Bella, cannot follow his demand for an appropriate participation in the prosperous business instead of a finder's commission. A fly in the restaurant reminds him of another that has settled on the left breast of the lover slumbering "floated away into the dream worlds". That is why he answers the offer with “blind impudence. I think I didn't understand you correctly […] I should read all of this in peace. ”Twillebeeckx is impressed by the young man's quick professionalism.

Ludwig experiences that contracts are concluded even without his presence. While he was waiting for Mr. Khan in Brussels, he learned from a telephone conversation that the company boss had mixed up the dates and had now discussed business matters with Bella in Frankfurt. They are celebrating the sale of 350,000 lumberjack shirts to a Swedish company. On the one hand, Ludwig believes when looking at the Brussels cast iron figure "Vierge de l'Apparation" that "[how] this queen of the light [...] Bella depends on him", on the other hand he fears that her undertakings with Mr. Kahn "he would depend on Bella will definitely never know. "

After Ludwig's return from Brussels, both the father's illness and the hitherto carefree, romantic relationship become dramatic. The Lopez invited Raoul Bächle, Werner Le Floh and Rudi Stüvels, old students and young entrepreneurs balancing back and forth between university and business, and members of the Paris Nuss Club, to an evening with a card game in his apartment. While Ludwig is having fun with Bella in the basement, Fidi loses 450 marks in the game, which the boss gives him as an advance so that he doesn't have to leave his wife to the winners as a deposit. Ludwig suspects some connections through Bella's remarks: "I will never get rid of Fidi [...] I will never be free."

Father Drais has returned to Frankfurt from the Black Forest sanatorium, where he felt better for a short time and where he drew new hopes. Ludwig and Bella visit the family. Here he sees the familiar people from a different perspective. Once he and Bella sees “the apartment through the eyes of a stranger.” But Bella also appears different, so that the protagonist thinks: “Maybe there are no clearly defined characters at all, maybe people [behave] like chemicals that in connection with various substances […] [transform]. "After Ludwig's visit, Bella criticizes Ludwig's attitude towards his parents," [S] some descriptions [are] distortions ". He "constantly mixes feelings in his descriptions - he is what he accuses women of: emotional." Above all, he is doing his mother an injustice.

In conversation with his brother, Hermann is interested in his business of love affairs, he judges the affair with Bella as adultery with his strict church teachings and, even after Ludwig's justifications with the changed societal morals and Bella's unhappy bond with her irresponsible husband, he sticks to his attitude firmly. In contrast to Ludwig, Bella likes Herrmann's "indestructible philanthropy [...] Ludwig, on the other hand, does not have a good heart, he is a rascal, ice cold and angry". She feels “immediately understood” by Hermann. He tells her about his church clubhouse and gives her a typescript from his parishioner Emma Brust: "My seventeenth vision " to read. It is about a parallel case to their situation, namely of King David, who, out of love for Bathsheba, sends her husband Uriah to death in battle.

The next evening, Ludwig goes out alone with Fidi to clarify their relationship. But this takes over the direction. Drinking beer and sparkling wine in Hermione's "Minnies" bar on the outskirts of the old city area ends for both of them in the landlady's bed. Instead of the intended discussion, Ludwig is informed that Bella is expecting a child who does not fit into their plans, and that he, Fidi, has the chance to become a machine lessor instead of his temporary work. His suspicion that the rival knew about the affair was confirmed shortly afterwards: Suddenly, he was on the terms of him, the boss, and Ludwig's cufflink, which had been lost in the basement apartment, fell out of his trouser pocket. While he is walking home, the drunk Fidi roars away in the car. When Ludwig arrives in front of his house, Bella is on the way to the hospital to see her husband, who died in an accident.

Chapter Five: Red Flames

With Fidi's death, "[is] also his basement room blown out the soul flame". Bella disposed of his possessions and after three days moved into Ludwig's apartment. She wants to finish quickly with the past, but she does not succeed. The widow tries to reconstruct the circumstances of the accident on the city highway: Was it an accident or suicide? She asks Ludwig why he did not ride in the car and used his authority as boss. Fidi's death has destroyed their naively carefree relationship and is not without consequences. This is also illustrated by the subject of the dead child in comparison to the Bathsheba story. When Bella Ludwig reported a bleeding to Ludwig and suspected that she had lost a son, "[d] his remark [...] sounds like a final and already overcome renunciation" and confirms his feeling of estrangement from his girlfriend.

The death issue continues in Ludwig's family. His parents have finally lost hope of a cure. Ludwig now comes to visit more often, stays a long night and tells his father about his company. B. Mr. Khan's opaque business policy. So he gets closer to the family again. Even though the father moves away from them more and more, they have the feeling that something connects them. "They [are] satisfied to be together."

During this time of death and burial, Bella negotiates the lease for representative rooms, meets Mr. Khan, and goes on business trips. When Ludwig returns to his apartment, he meets Erna Klobig, who explains to him that, as a failed student, he and Bella did not go together. She suggests that he furnish his apartment with her furniture so that Bella can enjoy this “seductive garçonnière”. Mr. Khan could receive. Ludwig should support her plan that Bella marry the widowed Pakistani. He gets angry, shakes her and throws her out of the apartment.

Through the shared death of the father, the brothers get into conversation and Hermann shows himself to the insecure Ludwig as a closed, mature personality who believes in a mysterious, transcendent world, which he tries to experience with the help of the old Christian rite . He also lays out cards for a " life solitaire " and sinks into meditation . He speaks to Ludwig about her childhood and his endangered relationship. King, queen and jack represent Ludwig, Bella and Fidi. While Ludwig is "no longer so sure about Bella", Hermann asks him about his trust, his loyalty to her. He had crept into the marriage, insincere to Fidi, and although his attempt to oust his rival had failed, that was not an obstacle to living together. Her parents would not have matched either and still had a perfect marriage. Ludwig confesses to him that he wished Fidi's death. His brother suggests that he pray and accompany him to mass for her father the next evening. It takes place in the old rite , and it is “not bad at all if [he] experiences the whole process as something completely incomprehensible”.

In his search for help, Ludwig grabs the “prescribed straw”. He goes to the chapel in a hotel on the edge of a brothel district, helps Hermann, who works as a sexton and acolyte , with the precisely regulated preparation and feels transported back to childhood. When he leaves the church, "the everyday world returns with power." He wants to propose to Bella that Fidi, whose ashes are still kept in the funeral home's depot, be given a proper grave, and ask her to marry him. But he is unable to capture the message of his brother and the hope aspect of the mass “against all reason and all appearance and against all laws of history”.

Literary classification

A long night after the bed , Westend and above Blood Book Festival and the moon and the girl , the third novel of the Frankfurt- pentalogy the writer.

structure

Mosebach's Frankfurt epic can be determined historically and geographically, with location and street information: subdivided into five chapters, the main plot, which in the tradition of the development novel illuminates the personality formation of the protagonists in a crisis situation, generally takes place chronologically towards the end of the 20th century . A triangular relationship is surrounded by different people who talk about their life stories during visits to the central figure Ludwig Drais. In these episodes, the novel is structurally similar to the sequence of scenes in a station drama . The retrospectives incorporated in this way portray the post-war and '68 generation in particular and thematize their images of man and values ​​in comparison. This creates an image of the city that has been changing since the 1970s.

Narrative form

In contrast to the tightly networked structure of people in Westend, which is stretched over the entire plot, a protagonist is at the center of A Long Night , whose story is presented in personal narrative form . In other words, the reader essentially follows the events from Ludwig's perspective . In authorial insertions, partly mixed with reflections of the figures or derived from them, z. B. comments on motifs and forms of representation of the novel or connections between reality and fiction or ironically focused on the question of authenticity.

The illustration of reality

The reality seen from the perspective of the protagonist is increasingly presented to him as fragmentary and unmanageable. He not only doubts the statements of the people, but also his own perception. When Bella talks about her happiness and memories of the beginning of their relationship, Ludwig asks himself: “Who doubts [] that it happened like this []? [...] The truth has [] its hour, Ludwig clearly feels that. One and the same thing would look different at different times of the day, with different lighting. ”“ He remembers little at all. Is there a yesterday? [Isn't that a weak dream? "The narrator intervenes at such points and questions, presumably together with his protagonist, the" historical moment ": Can Ludwig" see anything more precise at all from his observations from his apartment in the basement? " No, the historical moment [...] [exists] only in his imagination, which is understandably heated up by the subsequent events. "The author of the literary work is criticized self-ironically:" The red light [is] only a topos , a rather vulgar one, actually Ludwig's taste does not give the best testimony []. In no novel should the author have switched on the red light in connection with a love scene, such an invention [can] do the whole book. "

After Erna Klobig's dramatic appearance in his apartment, Ludwig thinks uncertainly about mother and daughter and about a possible understanding between the two: "Both [are] daughters of chaos". He also reflects on Fidi's story. "[Isn't] that the material for a moving story?" But he sees the "unbridgeable gap" [...] between literature and life. “Where [are in his reality] the deeds, the clear conscious actions? [...] The more sharply and ruthlessly one examines this vital substance [], the more it [disintegrates] into nothing, since there [is] nothing that can be grasped, represented, or forced into the course of a causality? Coincidences, well-being, malaise, fears, excitements, bonfires and their coincidence and extinction [form] the substance of life. He [is] more volatile than the dust of butterfly wings ”.

Paradise and death motifs

The subject of paradise and death is centrally linked to the triangular relationship Ludwig - Bella - Fidi and the search of dreamy people for earthly happiness in a labyrinthine business world dominated by high-rise buildings, but also with the fates and ideas of other people.

The search for the earthly paradise

The paradise motif pervades the novel from the beginning. Ludwig dreams, evoked by the lawyer’s story of the “earthly paradise”, of the palm garden , the “land of his childhood”. “[Here] the Garden of Eden […], in which the 'only person in the world' suddenly feels' a feeling of inadequacy 'until a' new foreign body […] emerges from him [grows out] '. ”Ludwig unfolds this self-related development, the desire for a companion, in his dream in a dialogue with Bella, whom he tries to reach by telephone before falling asleep.

At the end of the novel, embedded in a conversation with fond memories of Bella, Hermann tells his brother: “The palm garden used to be paradise, Adam and Eve lived in the large swan cave by the boat pond. The snake lived in the palm house and was not at all dangerous at first. But it was getting too tight in paradise. There were too many animals. Then Adam and Eve were driven out and finally the animals had room. They streamed out of the palm garden and spread over the earth. But Adam and Eve "- a biblical, fairy-tale but -" opened a vegetable shop on the corner of Beethovenplatz. "

Sebald Beham's graphic (16th century) from his time in Frankfurt combines the themes of paradise and death . “In this park, which was created for the digestive walkers of the Wilhelminian-era citizens, [] death has found its way into the garden, which [is] not provided at all in the garden without hunting and without predators. [...] The boat rental company [] breathed out his soul in a bad hour and blown it into this scenery and dummy landscape ”.

This motif is varied in Bella's vacation memories of the Kahler See and in the strange story of the lawyer, which begins with the fact that he marries a secretary, about the big law firm, which he entered after a brilliant examination, from the little hard-working “big one To free dark-haired people. “The lawyer [is] far from realizing that he has locked his wife at home []” and that “[the] woman on the sofa [...] is not happy”. Ultimately, she finds her fulfillment as a “constantly moving” locomotive driver in the palm garden. She expands her field of activity as the boat rental company who lives in the Swiss house , in whose accommodation she sleeps during her husband's business trips with his "express approval", hangs herself in the shipyard after the joint birthday party, and she alternates his tasks with her own takes over.

The dissolution of naivety through death

The subject of death, which invades paradise, dominates the novel, especially using the example of the dying father, Fidi's car accident, Ludwig's memory of the colony of ants burning in the chimney, whose queen "opposes suicide" Comparison to Koschatzki's satirical philosophy of death.

After Fidi's death, "it becomes clear that [Bella] is trying to drive a wedge to the root between herself and her past []." But "this shot [impact of Fidi's car] with its elephant-like force [hit] the crystal bell , under which Ludwig and Bella […] were hermetically sealed and thought they had found a definitive form of life. The crystal bell has [] received a crack ”. That means: “Fidi [has] power over Bella and Ludwig.” Death has invaded their apparent paradise and disillusioned their relationship, from which they have ousted Fidi. Bella Ludwig tells us that when we wake up, “I feel the closeness of death so strongly, easy to grasp […], as if it were a butterfly and had already sat on [her] and had just fluttered away again, but not far away, but close, somewhere between [her] and [Ludwig]. She does not experience this nearness of death as something sad. [...] It's like feeling your way along the wall in a fabric-covered room and suddenly noticing that the fabric is receding because there is no longer a wall behind it. "

Koschatzki looks back on his forty years of journalism, his awards and medals. At first he thought of a work edition, but “he is now saying goodbye once and for all to any hope of a spiritual afterlife”: “How old I had to get to become indifferent to me!” Sees in his analysis of Dasein he lives radically towards death: “Dying [is] for him the confirmation of a long suppressed perversion, finally enjoyed in unrestrained lust. The hope of incurable people for a miracle, their tendency to interpret a day without suffering as a sign of recovery, [is] for him comparable to the lying of alcoholics. "

Ludwig contrasts his philosophy about death and the columnist's theory, which has not been lived, with the history of illness and the death of his father, who “is so full of so different lives that he has to die new deaths every day []. His death [is] like a great pyramid to which he has to drag the blocks himself []. "In view of this process, the son asks himself:" [Is] it at all desirable if one could reach the father [...] from the painful State, of its perfection, brought back again []? ”Koschatzkis, on the other hand, expresses his“ death craze ”from his stable health base:“ My physique is firmly anchored in the senselessness of life production. ”

Historical background

Ludwig explains to his brother the changed moral concepts in the second half of the 20th century using the example of the outdated term adultery . While Ludwig's parents are admired by Bella as pillars of a stable, protective family, she herself experienced the uncertainties of an artist-behemien life with changing relationships and tragic biographies: artists who failed with their great plans for fame, who ultimately resort to a middle-class profession.

On closer inspection, figures in the circle of friends of Ludwig's parents also turn out to be phrase-like and façade-like figures, for example Vom Geist der Zeit - author Koschatzki. His ellaborates are mostly ideologically disguised, egoistic testimonies to a vain reflection, unworldly thoughts of a physically healthy person about dying in comparison to authentic suffering. The caricature of the decadent educated middle class culminates in Koschatzki's cruise, during which he will present his essays to the elderly. He is accompanied by Ms. Rüsing, the type of huntress who claims that "[she] has lived in [her] body in alternating partnerships". Her young friends were mostly poorly paid assistants in Frau Müller-Servet's bookstore, whom she gave imaginative names such as a Russian monk or a juggler .

Wool shirts from Hyderabad

The narrator describes the change of the old traditional merchant town after the war into an anonymous business world with constantly changing occupations using the example of the cheap clothing wholesaler "Nephew & Nephew Europe". During his briefing with his German managing director in Frankfurt, Mr. Khan orders that after the first financial successes the basement warehouse with office from Eschborn is relocated to the city ​​center that was “destroyed during and after the war” : “A bend in the street, a corner, a sandstone plinth preserves [] the memory of the evolved lines of the cleared Gothic city . The inner city [is] now wonderfully protected against destruction of any kind. [...] because there is nothing in it that can be irretrievably lost. […] And if the whole city center [disappears] in a crevice, that does not prevent it from [standing] there again two years later in this or slightly differently shaken shape with new concrete stores for Mister Khan's cheap shirts and Monsieur Cartiers expensive watches. […] [N] after the fire in the synagogues in 1938 [is] now the whole city destroyed, its soil […] made sterile. "

On the outskirts of the big city, Ludwig sets up a warehouse for cheap textiles that are produced by two hundred six-year-old children on sewing machines in Hyderabad . While he has a bad feeling about this thought, Bella takes a forward-looking American philosophy of life: "Make the most of it!" And advises him: "You have to think positively". He shouldn't ask "whether you need what he offers", but should develop sales ideas, e.g. B. present different articles according to color in “gift boxes”. The market strategy sums it up in a paradox : "You buy what you don't need in order to receive what you definitely don't need".

It's tough business against global competition. On his first visit, Mr. Khan asks immediately about the chief buyers of large trading houses who have been contacted, "disdains to hide his mistrust of Ludwig", as his predecessor cheated on him, gives instructions: "You have to learn [...] learn, learn, learn. Or “He claps his hands, ie. that is, Ludwig's soap bubble bursts. Then he reads her future from Bella's hand: “I see everything […] I see the men, I see the children, I see the money, the illness and death. [...] Evil is coming. It's actually already there. I am silent."

When Bella presented the "Canadian [] lumberjack shirt" to Mr. Wezcerek in Fürth, the latter confirmed that it fits on the pallet, i.e. that it is the right size, but it is one mark too expensive for him, "exactly the mark" that the two hundred Children in Hyderabad “with the untiring, skilled hands” received during the day. The chief buyer recommends his “trade secret”: “Just let two threads run through the loom instead of four”. [...] Who cares about quality! The "Canadian Lumberjack Shirt", which is called "Boy" in the catalog, would be offered for four marks sixty. Nobody is such a fool to believe that a shirt for four marks sixty can be washed more than three times. "

From the spirit of the times

In the figure of Koschatzki, journalistic reporting is caricatured and the question of authenticity is posed. After returning from his alleged trip to Pakistan, the young Drais is supposed to report to the Zeitgeist analyst Koschatzki about the production conditions. To do this, he has to go “into the realm of the imagination” in order to develop a picture of child labor, which he gathers with the help of various second-hand sources and imaginatively designed: with smoky, dry-hot factory buildings, “serious accidents” and Mr. Weczerek's economic analyzes from Fürth, "transmitted by Bella": "[A] about what should a country like Pakistan do in order to produce goods for the world market?" [...] An adult is too expensive and the work is so primitive that a child it can do. […] The person who has come home may seem a little cynical in the circle of those who stayed at home. But Ludwig [has] remained human. […] Yes, that [is] the pity of an eyewitness. ”[But]“ [without] contrasts there is no effect or clarity ”. Therefore, the description of “Mr. Khan's residence "with" pleasant coolness from rustling air-conditioning systems, spacious low rooms through which a servant in a white jacket leads []. "The comment of the time critic exposes himself:" That is typical for these countries, says [] Koschatzki, what one call the Third World, it is a culturally uprooted country […]. Ludwig is praised for his "authentic [] observation". "With most of the travel reports, he had the uncomfortable feeling that the people weren't there at all."

Analysis of personal relationships

Erna and Bella - The Daughters of Chaos

Erna Klobig - The bohemian life

“[Bella] began to describe this natural spectacle [at Kahler See] as if Ludwig had never seen a pond in summer. A tall bush with large leaves arched over the water. The sunspots that shone up from the small waves danced in the foliage and gave it an aquatic plant cradle, a dragonfly magic ”.

Erna Klobig represents the hippie generation, she left "the bourgeois half-timbered house" with weather vane and glass veranda "of the civil servant veterinarian" and district veterinary council from Hofgeismar and married the painter Schwatzke, who later worked as an art teacher, in Frankfurt. Her daughter's father is the student Reinhold, the son of a physics professor who " possessed the destructive energies of the self-hateful melancholic " and committed suicide out of desperation over his unmanageable dissertation . She got her current family name through her marriage to the screenwriter Klobig. When Ludwig visits his secretary's mother, who is currently working as a waitress, she presents him with her contradicting, chaotic way of life, for example her idea of ​​a spaghetti bar with a slaughterhouse atmosphere, “Sacco and Vanzetti” and, on the other hand, the diagnosis: “I work [...] I translate, I design, I do serve, I clean - I'm not too good for anything. And what does Bella do? ”, She is putting her future on the line with Lopez, the“ inventor of the sideline ”. She does not want to see her own restless relationship life with a daughter who, as a baby, slept under the tavern table at which she was having a beer with her friends. In urban society, Fidi put on his "fox burrows [...] in which he happily trots around, next to, under and above the bourgeois working world". Ludwig reflects: "An old hippie". “[Is] Bella's mother too close to this way of life to appreciate it? Her bohemian existence [is] built on wobbly stilts on a sloping slope. ”The close affiliation in the artist-pub milieu symbolizes the two-room dollhouse made for Bella, a“ result of clumsy eagerness in handling colored paper and scissors ”with Wallpaper by William Morris , pictures by Picasso and van Gogh , baroque chairs . On the one hand, she seems to have a "sense of the comic of her life", on the other hand, her broken partnerships and attempts to influence Bella's friendships expose her self-centered, possessive personality.

Bella - The Reshaping of Reality

Bella is like her mother and Fidi, but also Ludwig, a double being between dreamy overestimation of himself and realistic diagnosis, not so much of her own character, but all the more of related beings. For Ludwig it is "stray moths that beat the window with their soft wings". When Fidi and his wife go through the rainy night to the Erlkönig with his wife after Mr. Khan's intrusiveness, they appear to Ludwig, who looks after them, like “prince children [] who got lost in the big city instead of in the forest and now instead of in a cave in looking for a little sleep in the dark corners of a nightclub. "

Bella's paradise is, on the one hand, the childhood memory of vacations on Lake Kahler See southeast of Frankfurt and, on the other, the shared cave with Fidi. Dream and reality blur in their consciousness. “It is autonomous [...] it is above its surroundings. In the camping desert of the Kahler See she [finds] the beauty of the boat trips on the Marne and Seine , as painted by Renoir []. Does [] this power to transform the impressions come from the mother? ”Like Ludwig, Bella is a fantasy in addition to her business acumen. In her basement apartment she dreams of being in a lake landscape in the "play of sun and water in the bushes", forgetting about time. “She has no worried, far-reaching plan, no inclination to analyze dangers and anticipate them. [...] A nomad, always ready to pull up her tents. "

After his conversation with Hermann, Ludwig thinks again about Bella's attachment to the unsteady Fidi: “[E] s [is] possibly a little more complicated. Bella [] certainly believed that Fidi would transform this improvised existence she shares with him [] into something magical [...] that Fidi would improve, or more precisely that she would improve him. "

Fidi - The tragic soldier of fortune

In a dream, Ludwig continues a story from Bella's about a Sunday excursion with Fidi to the Main: “[He] r felt himself standing on the green railing with and instead of Fidi, just a breath away from the fainting and falling. [...] But Fidi rose higher and higher [...] The high altitude rush had befallen him. […] And he stood on the point and balanced on one foot, the other stretched out wide, his arms outstretched, as if he wanted to hug the sun, his head tucked back. It looked like he was about to fly - “.

After Fidi's death, his buddies paint a derogatory picture of him in their obituaries. Rudi Stüvels "assumes a suicide", others say, "Fidi may have been at the end" and "You couldn't eleven someone like that", but he was like a "cornered rat", who wouldn't kill themselves because of their survival instincts. Most of them agree with Erna Klobig's assessment, who compares him to a “big city fox”, who “[t] he industrial urban society […] a book with seven seals [stay]”.

"'Humanly alright', that [is] the formula that one [can] agree on." This is how Fidi always appears in a good mood when he spends his free time in a pub with Bella and Ludwig. As the boss's assistant, he always seems enthusiastic and childlike. But Bella also notices that he can't handle money and lives from hand to mouth. "A thieving joie de vivre [speaks] out of him, an oriental master thief who, juggling, rope-dancing, cunning, quick-fingered, does his job to amuse an anecdote-addicted city population [], could have laughed so much when he [gave back his money bag] to the stunned robber." "The game [is] for him like an earthly goddess". In the intoxication of the prospect of winning, he is even ready to pledge his wife as a stake. He also seems to extortionately exploit his boss's relationship with Bella, which he discovered but did not bring up, firstly with his request for an advance payment, secondly with his project presented in Hermione's restaurant in combination with the new complicity. He wants to move up and constantly has plans to work after a period of odd jobs as a night watchman, bicycle courier, warehouse worker, carpet seller, magazine subscriber e. B. to get into the machine business and get rich.

For Bella, Fidi is a carefree, playful narcissistic person, whom she forgives for his macho habits and, hinted at, pimp mentality as a Mediterranean charm, a dream dancer who presents himself to the Sunday audience as an artist balancing on the railing while strolling over the Eiserner Steg tragically fallen summiteer.

Ludwig - The cosmic world of the inability to understand

Just as Bella depicts the Kahler See as an impressionist picture, Ludwig aesthetizes the sober rows of houses on a street in the station district to create a painting, i.e. In other words, he tends to disguise himself and reality, even after moving into his new apartment: “On the horizon there is a high-rise building with a wide glass front [...] [a] projection surface for the setting sun. I'll have morning and evening sun in the same room, [thinks] he. In the course of the summer an artificial moon will be added. [...] What a fire would a high-rise city made of mirror facades ignite at sunset! Only the stars […] [don't want] to be exposed to any competition ”. Above all Orion , “the figure of the great hunter” appeals to him: “Orion [is] something far more binding than just a good star. He [is] Ludwig's very personal genius, his heavenly shadow ”. Elsewhere, when the protagonist ponders the enigmatic Bella on a park bench, the firmament is veiled: “The lights of the city lay a light dust over the pure black sky. No coherent constellation can be read. "

At the beginning of the novel, on his first attempt to start a business, the protagonist is already characterized as a dreamer. In the search for a secretary whose offer to type up theses he found on the university bulletin board, the law student who failed in his final exam moves into the position of an "experienced businessman [s] in great style" who helps "Museums and large art collections" cooperates. “The European art world should [] be made familiar with the» Strand bei Zwingst «, certainly. Like a politician, he got drunk on this plan ”. Later, when he gave Bella and her husband a basement room as an apartment, he was pleased with his generosity. […] [Isn't he taking on some kind of responsibility for these two helpful and yet so strange people? ”Then he lets himself go Carrying away the imagination: "Dream and day [are] indistinguishable". “A basement window [draws] his gaze, moved surprisingly close so that he [recognizes] every detail in the room. Bella Lopez sits naked on the floor, her blond head bowed low. She [is] handcuffed to the heater. Your shoulders [move]. Is she crying? ”His vision shifts his sense of responsibility from the couple to Bella, preparing the justification for their love affair. In a similar way, his thoughts revolve around the personality of his employee and her private life. For example, once he sits on a park bench, feels the “currents of air flowing down the steep glass walls of the skyscrapers and hears the babbling of a fountain hidden behind the leaves of the large rustling trees between waking and dreams:“ He feels [] himself in no man's land. “:“ How easy I am to be impressed. With a bit of hidden theater, rustling, crackling, hissing and cracking, you could easily convince me that I am alive. ”He dreams of Bella walking away with him while Fidi balances on the top of the Iron Bridge . He thinks he hears a conversation between two passers-by about the girlfriend of one of them, who alternately loves two men, the girl resembles his employee.

After Fidi's death, his relationship with Bella is disenchanted and Ludwig feels guilty, but only later confesses this to his brother. "It [feels] to him [...] as if he had left his world a long time ago, as if everything that was taken for granted, from youth to familiar, had sunk behind him after a long journey that [...] went deeper and deeper into a dry, leafless and needle-free undergrowth that […] brought out a gray twilight. ”The disturbed and for him contradicting reactions of his lover to the car accident also unsettle him, he thinks about“ Bella's disloyalty ”:“ [Is] the same woman who makes him so felt infinitely strong []? ”He reflects on her relationship with Mr. Khan and wonders if he“ only dreamed the voices in the park at night ”[or if] the“ battered, unhappy doctor […] talked about Bella ” ". Above this, a “wutzwerg” develops in him and “[he] r [can] study himself for an eternal moment in a state of anger”. But “immediately before the tantrum, Ludwig experiences a moment of overwhelming crystal clarity. And now [...] an immeasurably shining miracle occurs. ”He sees his own situation in a panorama picture from a high mountain. “What he has seen [is] the invincibility of the enemy. He now [recognizes] the soul landscape of his counterpart. And if he put word on word and ground there with the patience of a saint, he would use it to build a miserable turret that would hardly be visible in the cosmic vastness of this lack of will and ability. He [is] lost. Every further word [is] pointless. "

In this relationship and personality crisis evoked by the disillusioning power of death, Ludwig confides in his brother. Hermann invites him to a mass , which he helps to shape as a sexton and acolyte, and at which Ludwig feels transported back to childhood: “[Are] you not in a big game in which every solved task leads to new tasks []? “While listening to the chants, which are reminiscent of oriental , Arabic or Indian music, Ludwig thinks of two sentences:“ I don't understand that, and that's really easy ”. During Hermann's procession with the priest, he thinks of the legend that when the Mohammedans conquered Constantinople , an angel opened a wall and thus enabled the Christian clergy to flee. One day the wall will open again for their return. For Ludwig, this picture is “an expression of hope against all reason and all appearance and against all laws of history”. But after returning to everyday life in the city, no wonder comes true for him. Although he resolves to sort out his relationship with Bella, he does not discover the legend's promise behind the wall.

Hermann's life patience - acceptance and meditation

Hermann reveals himself more and more as the hero of the novel, also for Ludwig. In its simplicity of mind, it is the calming pole and the traditional counterbalance to modern, constantly changing society. He tries to replace Ludwig's lost naivety with a magical- pragmatic mixed way of life and the replacement of the dream of an earthly paradise with a belief in a transcendent one.

Initially, Ludwig's relationship with his parents and older brother was still strained. He is an eccentric in his unworldlyness and after a short time finds every job unbearable and after dropping out of studies, gardening and goldsmithing apprenticeship and employment at the post office and in a retirement home, now also ends the job in the bookstore Ms. Müller-Sevets To support caring for the father. Ludwig often reacts to the mother's understanding of the cheerful and humble child brother with "fits of jealousy" and thus excludes himself from the family.

Because of the father's last phase of illness, the brothers get more into conversation. In Hermann, Ludwig discovers a simple, helpful person with firm Christian principles who has found a way to a satisfied life for himself and who does not allow himself to be irritated by social opinions and fashions, but also not by reform theologians. His wisdom lies in the fact that he does not constantly look for scientific-rational explanations, but abandons himself to the ritual of the mass, to the misunderstood texts, which, like music, have a magical meditative effect for him through sound and rhythm. In life he is not looking for the realization of dreams and ideal constellations, but trusting collective actions. Ludwig, on the other hand, in his dream narcissistically produced a companion who had emerged from himself, the first human being, a cloned being, so to speak, fixated on him, and transferred this claim to life with his beloved. In contrast to this, in Hermann's picture of paradise, Adam and Eve run a vegetable shop outside the palm garden, on the edge of it. That is, they have established themselves in the world with their shortcomings together. The view that the relationship with Bella is adultery, he takes after Ludwig's argumentation of the changed moral concepts of society and the unhappy attachment of his girlfriend to "an irresponsible, dangerous rascal". It is true that "[offers Hermann] the image of a person who is defeated in a speech battle, but who holds fast to his convictions without having weapons to defend them."

Using the example of the cochineal lice , a reminder of the family vacation in Provence , he explains his worldview to his brother: “Your world in the pod [is] your one and only. Outside of that [is] nothing imaginable ”. They do not know that "this only imaginable world [is] nothing but the disease of a leaf [...] that the entire fate of such a cochineal culture [consists] in the fact that a certain dye [is] obtained from the bodies of the people" [ …] A clear, fiery red. ”Hermann chooses this example as a symbol of a mysterious, transcendent world, for Ludwig, on the other hand, it represents a biological process.

reception

In a newspaper interview with Martin Mosebach from 2007, the early history of reception is presented. Like other works published before the Büchner Prize was awarded , literary criticism hardly noticed a long night or criticized the author's attitude to tradition as "backward looking". Similar evaluations can also be found in the later publications in the feature section that is split on this question.

Mosebach opposes this determination of the location, it is based on “misunderstandings”, he is not reactionary politically, but, in the sense of the Colombian philosopher and aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila , in a “belief in original sin, the imperfection of man, the impossibility To create paradise on earth ”, by the way,“ [re] actionary and revolutionary standpoints […] could touch ”, as with Büchner .

With increasing popularity, reviews increasingly appreciate the Frankfurt novels as their main work, recognize the linguistic virtuosity of the "poeta doctus, [...] writing thinkers, [...] art critics [s] of high standing", recommend "Eine long night "as a" formally refined Bildungsroman "and praise Mosebach as perhaps the most important representative of the social novel at the moment , which takes up topics such as tradition and progress or people's search for cultural orientation in the context of our time and represents its position in the spectrum of German literature inappropriately .

literature

  • Fliedl, Konstanze, Marina Rauchbacher, Joanna Wolf (eds.): Handbook of Art Quotes: Painting, Sculpture, Photography in German-Language Modernist Literature . Walter de Gruyter Berlin / Boston 2011, Mosebach: p. 569.

Individual evidence

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