We are fine
It's good for us is the title of anovel by the Austrian writer Arno Geiger, published in 2005 and awarded the German Book Prize.
Action overview
The main setting of the novel with the ironic title is the villa of the Sterk family in Vienna's 13th district, Hietzing , which grandson Philipp inherits and clears out. The story of the family between 1938 and 1938 is inserted into this framework, which takes place from April to June 2001 (Kp. 1, 3, 5 + 6, 8, 10 + 11, 13, 15 + 16, 18 + 19, 21) 1989 compiled from individual images (each from one perspective ):
- the grandparents Alma and Richard Sterk (Kp. 2 [A], 4 [R], 12 [R], 20 [A]),
- the parents Ingrid and Peter Erlach (Kp. 7 [P], 9 [I], 14 [I], 17 [P]),
- the children Sissi and Philipp.
The grandparents
The life of the grandparents reflects Austrian history from the pre-war to the post-war period (1938, 1955, 1962, 1982, 1989) and their bourgeois value system: Richard Sterk (born 1901) is the son of a wealthy, conservative family according to the patriarchal structures educated during the imperial era. The intelligent young man (called Der Römer ) is studying, doing his doctorate and pursuing a career as an administrative lawyer and director of Vienna's municipal electricity works.
His wife Alma Arthofer, who is six years younger than him, from the neighboring and much less elegant 12th district, Meidling , gives up studying medicine after getting married, runs the household and looks after the children Otto (born 1931) and Ingrid (born 1936) : In Richard's opinion, her pregnancy “turned her into happiness”. Since Alma also helps her mother run her parents' laundry business, she has Frieda as a housemaid after the second birth, and Richard cannot avoid her sexual attractiveness. However, because of this affair, which violates his principles, he suffers from remorse. On Saturday, August 6, 1938 (Kp. 4), he reorganizes his life with quick decisions and strengthens his central position in the family.
The trigger for this is the "connection" of Austria to the German Reich . As a former member of the Christian Social Party, he comes under pressure and, in order not to lose his position, has to sign that he will no longer be politically active. He evades the legal dispute with a security guard, who is a member of the NSDAP , about damage to his parents-in-law's shop through carelessness, by withdrawing his shares from the business without consulting Alma, whereupon it has to be given up.
His wife now has more time for the family and the nanny is dispensable. In doing so, he has also dispelled the fear that the Frieda relationship will be discovered. Alma, now reduced to house and garden, is rewarded with more free time for music and reading ( Schnitzler , Stifter , Gottfried Keller ) as well as with a new hobby: She gets a beehive, which he buys from her exiled neighbor Löwy. Richard can now enjoy the newly organized and dominated family idyll again.
On Tuesday, May 12, 1955, three days before the signing of the State Treaty (Kp. 9), the Hietzinger Villa functions as the setting for a new stage: Richard profited from the leading role of the conservatives in the Austrian government. He became a minister and played a key role in the negotiations with the Soviet Union on Austria's sovereignty.
However, his family threatened after the death of Otto, who as Hitler Youth in the defense of Vienna was killed to become increasingly disrupted by the dispute with Ingrid because of their unsound friend Peter: Richard tries his daughter over to keep control and Alma followed these clashes force - and helpless. Her criticism of his rigid intransigence and everything that she has so far withheld in her great courtesy and consideration was only formulated in 1989 at the bedside (“I would like to bring that up”) as her mentally confused husband, all in one for three years Housed in a nursing home, she can no longer understand: After the happy 20s and 30s, life has become a "great obstacle course [...] that makes you tired in the long run". And in the 50s, in the great time of the "old men" with their unnecessary severity, there was "no place" for the young.
In the 1950s and 60s Richard concentrated on his profession and, after he was no longer nominated by his party as a candidate for the National Council election , lost the focus of his life: “He lived for work [...] while he was with him Home the defeats added up ”. Despite occasional phone calls and visits, the estrangement from Ingrid is irreparable even after the birth of the grandchildren Sissi and Philipp. Alma leads her own quiet life, withdrawing to beekeeping, playing the flute and literature, and has broken away from her husband emotionally.
One weekend, on Saturday, September 19, 1962 (Kp. 12), Richard is once again looking for a conversation with his wife when she is reading a book by Stifter . He is skeptical about his attempt to refresh the "vague [n] idea that he has about private life" and ironically comments on his question about the requirements of a Stifter reader, alluding to his insensitivity, with "If you have a thing for soul and landscape images" . That means: "It moves in its own reality, which Richard does not understand, at its own speed."
This development was intensified by Ingrid's death in 1974 and led to Richard's double life up to his onset of dementia in 1982 (Kp. 2): Alma only found out about this in 1989 through letters that were found, which testify that her husband and his secretary Christl Ziehrer, his sister, in 1970 Nessi and her husband Hermann spent vacation days in Gastein. At this point Alma is already woven into her museum-like house filled with memorabilia and pigeons and the rampant garden.
The parents
The introduction of the next age group is linked to historical events:
The defense of Vienna at the beginning of April 1945 against the attacking Red Army (Kp. 7) is presented from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Peter Erlach: in the initial successes in the style of the Hitler Youth, who tells of a war adventure (“While the T 34 burns out, wishes Peter, that his father could see him, he would love to like him. ")
Then, after a hand grenade tears off half the head of the Fähnleinführer, a fourteen-year-old volunteer of the Volkssturm dies (Otto?) And his right arm is shot through, the horror of death sets in and the description of the route out of the city follows increasingly sobering the Kahlenberg vineyards and the unsuccessful attempt to find accommodation with his uncle Johann, because the terminally ill mother and the National Socialist father have gone to Vorarlberg . Finally, they manage to escape together with Ukrainian Vlasov soldiers on a Danube ship. It becomes clear to him "that everything that is familiar and has been and what has been taught to him no longer counts from this moment on."
Ten years later (May 12, 1955) the Sterk subsidiary is actively involved in history. From the perspective of nineteen-year-old Ingrid, the reader follows the four phases of the exemplary confrontation with her father at the breakfast table because of her relationship with Peter, who is six years her senior:
- Richard's allegations against Peter with internal comments from Ingrid: “Nothing but reasons of reason. Terrible. Terrible."
- open exchange: “So you can put mom in your pocket. The trick doesn't work for me. "
- outward submission of the daughter: “Have we understood each other? - Yes, she says meekly, not because she is intimidated, but in the knowledge [...] that she cannot [...] manage to change his mind. So she doesn't see any possibility of being honest and happy at the same time. "
- conciliatory farewell: "It's only for your own good."
The discrepancy between external and internal action ( experienced speech , see below) demonstrates on the one hand the dependence on the father and on the other hand the determination of the daughter. In character, she resembles Richard and reacts unyieldingly in the escalation phase, although she actually shares his reasons, as the subsequent conversation with Peter about his "eternal bankruptcy" shows. She consistently cycles (“I drive as fast as it suits me”) after the conflict, not to the university, but to the friend's magazine, pays the landlady's debts and talks to him about his financial situation: “Because your eternal bankruptcy suits me Heavy as lead in the stomach, it's been like this since I've known you, and I sometimes wonder if there is any hope that things will get better one day. ”She gives him a six-page lecture with the father's arguments and his civic values regarding the distribution of man-woman roles in the family ("But is that a state of affairs that the girl gives the guy money so he can get through. I can't always sack the two grandmas for my atrocities.") He should be his "Who knows Austria? ”- give up board game sales and go back to college (“ Papa must never be right, I wouldn't allow him that ”.)
Ingrid moves out of her parents' house during a dispute, but prevails over her father, who continues to support her with studying and buying a house on Pötzleinsdorfer Straße even after her marriage (1958). However, the relationship has frozen from her side, as her sarcastic remarks during the few visits that were atmospherically tense despite Richard's efforts (chapter 12): "Since I received my notice of termination, my homesickness has been limited".
Peter gives up his indebted business, sells his licenses and in 1960 gets a job with the Kuratorium für Verkehrssicherheit . Ingrid completed her medical studies, which had been interrupted by the births of the children Sissi (1961) and Philipp (1966), and worked as a doctor in a hospital.
Her high expectations of the love relationship are not fulfilled in the “whirlpool of everyday worries”, especially since Peter, who is comfortable and focused on his job, gives her little support in the household and in raising children (cp. 14): “The great happiness - if she was honest - there never was […] and I: I live alongside ”. In chapter 14 she complains "of their two marriage messes [...] The only good thing that came out of it are the children". On the other hand, she doesn't want to give up her job. In retrospect, Ingrid speaks of the “fragmentation” of her life: “Her life seems to her like a pile of seemingly self-contained stages […], and all in all she did nothing that was special to her in the next stage would have helped. "
On December 31, 1970, since she feels guilty about the financial support, she resolves to be less indifferent and monosyllabic and more friendly when her father calls him for the New Year. Four years later, she drowns after diving into the Danube while on an excursion with children and friends.
Peter now has to look after the children and learn to deal with the mood swings of his daughter Sissi ("The right corner of her mouth withstands the smile of the left one."): In item 17, the reader can take the vacation trip in 1978 from Peter's point of view Follow the Yugoslav Adriatic, in which the sharp-tongued seventeen-year-old, the “future professional revolutionary” (“Because family life destroys personality”) clearly shows her displeasure with being forced to travel to the family (“It pisses me off, always messing with you”) and her father's attempts to explain ignored over the landscape. Peter reacts to these moods more calmly and skilfully than Richard in comparable situations. He knows that the children are thinking of their last vacation with Ingrid ("It's a beautiful summer [...] - but not like before.")
Sissi disappears from the story in a traffic jam ("I walk to the border [...] And she's gone.") Later, as Alma tells Richard in 1989, she lives as a sociologist and journalist with her daughter Parsley Sage Rosemary Thyme in New York and inherits two life insurance policies and a stake in a sugar factory from Alma.
Philipp, on the other hand, was ridiculed by his sister as a twelve-year-old because of his "snoring manner" and recognized by his grandmother on television as a demonstrator against speculators and for more living space, as the heir to the parent company, the protagonist of the framework story. He and his sister lived here for two months after their mother's death in the 1970s.
The grandson
From April to June 2001, 36-year-old Philipp will be cleaning and clearing out the grandparents' house with the Ukrainian illegal workers Steinwald and Atamanow from May. The two were hired by his girlfriend Johanna the day after the May Day parade, which he watched as a spectator, to support the dreamy, organizationally clumsy and technically clumsy young man. You take over the mucking out of the attic while the "die-hard [...] idler" with yellow rubber boots and protective goggles admires himself in the mirror.
Philipp's life is characterized by his mixture of egocentricity and a naive spontaneity without clear goals and contours: He not only has a sexual relationship with the meteorologist Johanna (“He desires her more than he understands her”), but also with her Postwoman having a casual affair between her job duties. Johanna, who is married to the artist Franz, who is in a creative crisis, has more and more doubts about the dreamer's ability to develop and make decisions ("... whether she is ready to accept any common logic and thus the ridiculousness that beset one, to deny and to say that I am and will remain who and where I am as long as it suits me ”) and is reluctant to finally part with her husband.
Philipp deals with this relationship problem in his notes, in which he also holds on to the criticism of his girlfriend and comments: “You prefer to get involved in things that are harmless and harmless - everything that is not worthwhile. On all that is outside of yourself. You are a coward. [...] Your passivity is a strategic passivity that should protect you from the danger of exposing yourself to things that are not pleasant. [...] Wouldn't say that this is something new. Nevertheless, thanks for the instruction. "
Finally he breaks all ties and wants to accompany the workers to Atamanov's wedding party in Ukraine. At the end of the novel, Philipp feels like a hero who rides on the roof ridge of the empty house into an adventurous fantasy world.
Classification and analysis
We're fine is a three-generation social novel with a focus on the bourgeois family ancestry. In contrast to the Buddenbrooks type , however, the storylines, taking into account the changes in structures in the 20th century, run separately after childhood and the contacts are limited to occasional visits, telephone calls and financial support from parents.
Historical background
The protagonists are anchored in Austrian history through dates and places, whereby the historical-geographical background is reinforced by incorporated headlines and radio reports. In addition, individual characters, in exceeding the limits of fiction, become participants in actual events: e.g. B. Ingrid, mediated by her friends Wesselys, plays an extra role in the film Der Hofrat Geiger , which she watches again and again on television, Peter invents the board game Who knows Austria? , Richard is a Minister in the 1955 independence treaty negotiations and the lengthy discussions about Article 35 are one reason for his bad mood and nervousness at the breakfast table.
However, additions create an ironic break in the game with reality and fantasy: The last rule of the game in Peter's first original version, alluding to the defeats of the empire in the 20th century, is "The loser must not laugh", and Richard's lack of it official photo is explained with an ulcerated tooth.
The motif of mucking out and clearing out the grandparents' villa reflects the separation of the cord from a burdened family history with its uncritical view of history ("Anschluss" or occupation): For example, when Peter fled the embattled city in 1945, he saw the relatives burning pictures and documents ("We are from now on neutral. "), while an SS commando, shouting folk songs, gets drunk in the wine cellar .
On the other hand, ambivalence is also evident in Richard Sterk's tactically far-sighted, apolitical stance during the National Socialist period (as it turns out ten years later with regard to his career): he himself is not committed, but as a compromise he does not think of his children away from the Hitler Youth - with the consequence of Otto's death.
Attempts at emancipation
Although expectations and ideas change from generation to generation and modernize in a liberalizing way to adapt to current trends, the distance between parents and children remains almost the same and the traditional, felt as a compulsion, but also supportive family structures with the ties to familiar, closely spaced urban districts are resolved up: In the course of time the emotional affinities weaken and the hopes and dreams give way to disillusioning alienation: the grandchildren leave Vienna and cut the connecting wires. The generations lead their own lives and are not very interested in an exchange.
Grandson Philipp tries to free himself from personal and historical inheritance by clearing the house. However, he has not yet found an alternative approach. In the last scene before his trip to the Ukraine, which changes into the surreal, he is sitting on the roof ridge and has an adventurous, Don Quixote- like vision of flying through the clouds and fighting with lions and dragons: “Philip will soon be his on the gable Grandparents' house out into the world on this surprisingly spacious course. All preparations have been made, the maps studied, everything broken off, tidied up, pulled apart, pushed, moved, armed ”.
The reorganization and orientation of his life after his return to reality remains open. Because so far "Philipp is a marginal figure on all the walls of his life, actually everything he does consists of footnotes, and the text is missing" [...] "the thought that he only looks for closeness where he is not in danger, To be captured seems to him for a moment like the proof of his sovereignty - even if he is also clear at the same time that he is kidding himself. "
The female line of development, on the other hand, is building emancipatory, but sapping: While Alma breaks off her studies as a wife and housewife, Ingrid is burdened with the double role without Peter's help, but does not want to give up her job. Sissi apparently continues this tendency as a journalist and mother in New York, at a great distance from her family, as Alma relates in her last ad from 1989.
Assemblies
Geiger uses the assembly technique to structure the novel : The plot is not narrated chronologically, but is made up of individual situations: typical moments with precise dates that bundle the stages of development. Since these chapters are reproduced from the perspective of a protagonist with his feelings and memories, the reader receives a fragmentary, mosaic-like picture.
In the chapters, partly in italics, documents have been inserted: Philip's notes and draft novels, newspaper headlines and radio reports on historical events, placeholders as a reference by the writer to possible additions to his rough version, which still has to be revised for completion ( war, a few numbers, Statistics, brand names, incidents (effects) and here and there an event that does not affect everyone ,) Quotes ( foaming , who knows Austria? ), Mnemonics ( even doing nothing can escalate things. ), Stage directions for Alma's dream memory Game ( [applause. End.] )
Narrative form
The personal narrative form with integrated dialogues in the speech style that characterizes the speakers is an expression of the different reception of the processes and the controversial assessments of the protagonists . The reader alternately accompanies the individual characters in their activities, follows the statements of those present in the scene, mostly verbatim, as well as their perceptible reactions and experiences the reflections of the main character. The author gives a multi-perspective insight into the processes as well as the inner world of Alma, Richards, Ingrids, Peters and Philipps and thus enables the descriptions and positions to be compared.
Hides are on inner monologues or forms of indirect discourse when such. B. Ingrid feels so dominated by Richard that she doesn't dare to contradict him in his presence: “Have we understood each other? No. "," Go ahead, let's see, [...] because he'll run into a wall because he doesn't expect this wonderful love. Then Ingrid also switches to stubborn. "
Alma first formulates her analysis of his complicated, lifelong game of hide-and-seek, the markings of which he can no longer control himself , only at the bedside of the demented man, and only then in the inner monologue ( for example, I would like to bring that up. ) so that much is revealed to her: “[I] think, Richard, the [creeks that should serve as memory aids] have dug a new bed. Rivers. They are swollen. Lakes. They have dried up [...] The events sink to the bottom like fish droppings. […] But let's leave that. ”This inner action intensifies towards the end of Alma's last fade-in: Your contemplation of a pen drawing by Philip ( MY SISTER'S FEET ) is linked with reflections on death and the further existence, scraps of memory and dreams in one Art stream of consciousness : “In the already cooled television, if it were running, if the right program were set (would be would be), a Russian director who died three years ago answers the question of what life is like: a catastrophe. Which one is always a little inclined to suppress. Yes? :? Yes. ” [Black-out] .
Often these narrative forms and perspectives are used in a flowing transition and the spoken word goes, e.g. E.g. when explaining a fictional class photo, in an internal monologue of Philip or in an address to the reader about: “That's me. I am one of them too. But what can I say about myself after thinking about all the others and not getting any happier ”. The descriptions also diffuse with authorial approaches: “Sissi looks out of the window, but as if she were out there searching for the meaning of life, which the air, who knows, contains as tiny matter. One would like to wish her good luck. "
Reality and fantasy
The realistic narratives in Hietzing's bourgeois milieu with the idiosyncratic language of the characters contrast with the partly surreal, partly grotesque-burlesque framework story, whose representative Philipp, as a funny-childlike figure, seeks contact with the neighbors over the high garden walls. He dreams of adventures with Atamanov's bride Asja, an operator of the mechanical milking in the collective farm Sieg des Communism , who quickly transforms into a determined class fighter with a worn leather jacket, “so that he feels like becoming a communist [...] and thus a way out find for his misery. ", or he philosophizes about his situation:" The possible in the past tense is the futile. "
Philipp wants to write a novel about his family, but because of his emotional involvement and his rage to free himself from the family baggage, he throws all the documents in the container and lets Steinwald sell them, so that “everything personal and all the books that he threw away are available to interested parties [have] found who he was not himself ”. So he would have to rely on his imagination and memory in carrying out his plan, as in his design of the story of the cannonball, which would also correspond more to his inclination.
After reading Philip's drafts, Johanna thematizes his writer's problem, which is at the same time that of his isolation and reduction to his own person, in a language that parodies both the stilted feuilleton style and the stereotypes of sociological-psychological analysis: “You write hard, and it Seems easy to get out of hand, but in truth every word stands in your way because nothing is really about to be created. Pure wasting time ”[…]“ I could perhaps accept that due to unfortunate circumstances you were cut off from an early age on the genealogical information transfers that are common or at least not uncommon between relatives. But I have to remind you that at least your father is still alive. [Instead of talking to the father] you'd rather twist your own stories together, okay? But even for that I could admire you [...] if you [...] really worked on it, if you - if so - at least invented your family history without vanity [...] ”.
The artist's parody of the storyline indirectly refers to the fictional character of the storyline with precise dates and the involvement of the staff in historical processes. A reference to this could also be Philip's uncertainty: “Now it seems to him as if he is just a big show-off who invents everything: The weather, love, the pigeons on the roof, his grandparents, parents and his childhood - that has he also (only) invented it. "
expenditure
-
We are fine . Novel. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-446-20650-2 .
- We are fine . Novel. dtv, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-13562-7 (paperback).
- also audio, spoken by the author.
literature
- Wynfrid Kriegleder : Austrian history as a family history. Eva Menasse's “Vienna” and Arno Geiger's “We are fine” , in: Gunda Mairbäurl u. a. (Ed.): Childhood, childhood literature, children's literature: studies on the history of Austrian literature; Festschrift for Ernst Seibert . Vienna: Praesens, 2010 ISBN 978-3-7069-0644-9 , pp. 225-238
Web links
- Review notes for We are fine at perlentaucher.de
- Review (text) (audio) of Es geht uns gut by Michaela Schmitz in the show Büchermarkt of Deutschlandfunk on August 28, 2005.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Arno Geiger: We are fine . Carl Hanser, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-446-20650-7 , p. 71. This edition is cited.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 355
- ↑ Geiger, p. 349
- ↑ Geiger, p. 201
- ↑ Geiger, p. 194
- ↑ Geiger, p. 195
- ↑ Geiger, p. 195
- ↑ Geiger, p. 11.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 121.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 147.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 149.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 150.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 151.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 165.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 152
- ↑ Geiger, p. 165
- ↑ Geiger, p. 168
- ↑ Geiger, p. 167
- ↑ Geiger, p. 261.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 213.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 260.
- ↑ Geiger, pp. 261, 264
- ↑ Geiger, p. 258 ff.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 250.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 288
- ↑ Geiger, p. 286
- ↑ Geiger, p. 288.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 289
- ↑ Geiger, p. 299.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 323.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 353.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 9.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 354.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 277.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 123.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 328.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 187.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 142.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 349.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 380.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 23.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 121.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 119 ff.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 389.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 285.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 186 ff.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 52 ff.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 313.
- ↑ Geiger, pp. 114, 123.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 319.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 325.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 370.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 145.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 146.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 355.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 356
- ↑ Geiger, p. 371.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 16.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 293.
- ↑ Geiger, pp. 273, 274.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 285.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 274.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 98.
- ↑ Geiger, p. 374 ff.
- ↑ Interview ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Text) zu Es geht uns gut by Pamela Krumphuber with Arno Geiger, 2 days after receiving the German Book Prize 2005 for this work.
