One (Norbert Gstrein)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One (first edition)

One is a story published by Norbert Gstrein in 1988 . It tells the story of an outsider with a tourist village in Austria as the main scene.

action

The story takes place in a small but very touristy village in the Alps. The general plot of the story is a questioning: Jakob's family is supposed to report about his life and one “night of the crime”, although it remains open which crime Jakob committed. The story consists largely of looking back at Jacob's life, told from different perspectives. Jakob, a very clever child, is sent to boarding school. He doesn't feel comfortable there, he is an outsider and is abused. After returning to the village, however, he no longer feels at home there either. Above all, the villagers' dependence on tourists bothers him. He cannot identify with the role as a villager. Jakob withdraws more and more, neglects and falls into alcohol.

subjects

The topics in One are diverse: The main one is the failure of Jacob's identity . The reasons for this failure can be traced back to several disruptive factors in his childhood, e.g. B. that he is unable to cross the threshold between childhood and adulthood and between town and country. Further topics are alienation from home, family constellations, and the acceptance and refusal of a social role . Tourism and its influence on community life in the village also play a role.

Another central topic is the language problems of Jacob and the village: Within the village, language is only used for everyday use. Jacob cannot identify with this; he is desperately looking for a less superficial use of language, but fails. In the course of the story, the apparent love between Jakob and Hanna, with which he has been in love since childhood, is doomed to failure, as the indifference of village life suffocates all efforts towards a new life together like an avalanche.

Narrative technique

The narrative is characterized by many leaps in time and retrospectives. Above everything stands an omniscient narrator who takes different perspectives and gives the floor. This frequent change of perspective - often in the middle of a sentence - is characteristic of the style of the narrative. Jakob himself never has a say, only third parties report about him.

Genre of the anti-homeland novel

One is to be ascribed to the genre of the anti-homeland novel, which takes over the themes of the homeland novel , but caricatures them and evaluates z. B. of town and country almost completely reversed. The anti-homeland novel deals with disturbances in the process of identity formation and thematizes and criticizes processes of alienation from home, social determination, hopelessness and hopelessness as well as persistence between two states.

reception

Gstrein's narrative one was in 1988 much attention in the German literary criticism on their appearance. Gstrein's literary debut was valid back then and is still considered a “brilliant first success” today. Gstrein's story was seen as a milestone in a strategically cold regional story with a supraregional connotation. When it appeared, it was celebrated for its material, subject and narrative.

Thematically, Gstrein's story is closely linked to the remoteness of his own homeland, the Ötztal . “Now come and get Jacob” is the first sentence of the story, which already contains the exposition of the subject. Gstrein uses elements of the 19th century Heimatl literature, but turns them into the opposite of an anti-Heimat novel in the successor of Franz Innerhofer . The literary scholar Gerhard Fuchs wrote in his laudation on the awarding of the Franz Nabl Prize to Norbert Gstrein: “... the provincial social structure of the Tyrolean tourist community does not provide a home for the residents, but allows them to tread a passion path in internal and external isolation the end of which is the extinction of social identity and custody. Hanna and Jakob are conceived as outsider figures, whose failure also reveals the questionable nature of the assessment strategies of the narrating observers. "

On the occasion of the first publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled its review with the headline “Assumptions about Jakob”. This allusion to the novel of the same name by Uwe Johnson referred to the status and claim that this story has in today's German-language contemporary literature. Gerhard Melzer wrote in his review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung : “Since Peter Handke's Desireless Misfortune , such a dense, yet effortless interweaving of narrative and narrative reflection has not succeeded. Here writes someone who obviously has enough experiences to be able to tell about it and at the same time knows very well that such experiences often evaporate without a trace in the lack of presuppositions of pure narration. "

In 2001, the writer Jorge Semprún stated in his laudation on the awarding of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation literature prize to Norbert Gstrein in Weimar : “In his first stories, Norbert Gstrein explored the wonders and secrets of everyday life and described them in an outstanding manner. The wounds of everyday life too, of course. Are there miracles without wounds? It helped the silent outsiders of the Austrian village and mountain communities speak up, saved them from loss and disappearance. And they, despite the internal - sharp and tender - criticism, justified, which is probably even more important. "

Book editions

literature

  • Kurt Bartsch, Gerhard Fuchs (ed.): Norbert Gstrein . Droschl, Graz 2006, ISBN 3-85420-713-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert Gstrein in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
  2. ↑ Literature Prize of the City of Graz - Norbert Gstrein ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Announcement of the award ceremony Kulturserver Graz  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kultur.graz.at
  3. ↑ Norbert Gstrein or from someone who set out to learn the cold. Review by Cornelia Michelis, Internet magazine for cultural studies
  4. ↑ Portrait of Norbert Gstrein Poetenfest Erlangen 2003
  5. ↑ Between facts and fictions (PDF; 466 kB) Portrait of Norbert Gstrein by Anna Valerius
  6. ↑ On the craft of beginning (PDF; 119 kB) Laudation by Gerhard Fuchs on www.kulturserver-graz.at
  7. ↑ a b Norbert Gstrein: One on the Suhrkamp Verlag website
  8. ^ Norbert Gstrein - 2001 Literature Prize Winner Laudation by Jorge Semprum on the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung homepage