Cowards
Feiglinge is the first novel by Josef Škvorecký, written in 1948/49, but only published in 1958 under the title Zbabělci (German: Feiglinge) in Prague . At the end of the war, he plays from May 4 to 11, 1945 in the small Czech town of Kostelec, which is liberated from foreign rule after six years of protectorate and whose residents welcome the Red Army as victor over the Germans. Its appearance in 1958 led to a heated public debate, during which the President Antonín Novotný pronounced his condemnation at a party congress.
content
The action takes place in Kostelec, the same small town Náchod in Eastern Bohemia as in the novel Eine prima Saison , in which the 21-year-old first-person narrator Daniel Smiřický, the author's alter ego , lives. It is about the end of the war between May 4 and 11, 1945, which for the narrator also means farewell to his hometown Náchod. Each day is a closed chapter, at the end of which the narrator goes through the events in bed and interweaves the most suitable ones for falling asleep with his wishes. At the end of the novel, on May 11th, there is an appearance by the narrator with the jazz band, who is also a memorial in A great season .
Daniel, called "Danny", had to work for Messerschmitt AG for 1 ½ years after graduating from high school in Kostelec and, unlike others, no longer goes to the factory. At the beginning of the plot he practices as a tenor saxophonist with friends of the same age in a jazz band for upcoming performances in the open-air swimming pool, which will soon be open. During the breaks, they talk about whether there will be an uprising in Kostelec to expel the remaining Germans. With the jazz musicians, especially with the trumpeter Benno, who returned from the concentration camp and lost the Jewish half of his family, skepticism outweighs their own “guts” and that of their fellow citizens (p. 7f.). The upcoming swimming season seems to be more important for the young men.
Events occurring on Saturday 5th May push the music into the background. In the morning all houses are already flagged with patriotic flags, and people are gathering in the city. Danny’s friends paint over German-language signs. A bust of Hitler is thrown from the town hall tower to the cheers of the crowd . Occasionally, disarmament actions are requested. Because there is still a unit of the Vlasov Army , Wehrmacht soldiers and Hitler Youth in the city . After an agreement with those responsible in the city, you want to leave without being affected. The Germans fight back. There is shooting. The citizens are collecting all flags again. Danny clashes with a German officer and is arrested, but released again by the intervention of the Czech police officer.
On the following Sunday, Kostelec dignitaries put on their uniforms to ensure that there are transitional arrangements. They open an office in the brewery and call on fellow citizens to report to the “ČS Army” so that there is peace in the city.
On May 8, the day of unconditional surrender , Kostelec is overflowing with released prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners from many European countries. On his own initiative, Danny looks after 20 Englishmen who have been German prisoners since the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940 and accommodates them with families he knows until they leave. He attributes this to his anglophilia (p. 246), which also makes him adore Judy Garland , Clark Gable and jazz.
The situation in the small town becomes unmanageable the next day. A low-flying aircraft attacks the city, and SS units retreating in front of the Red Army appear. Danny was sent to the city with other provisional military trained to fight the approaching SS tanks, but went into business for himself and met a friend Přema, who had been imprisoned by those responsible in the city for rioting, who had freed himself and was taking partisan actions with Danny . Přema throws hand grenades, Danny shoots an SS soldier. Outside the city, they shoot down a tank with a heavy machine gun , which they transport on a motorcycle up a hill, before Russian soldiers appear to greet them.
On May 10, Danny and a friend observed how captured SS soldiers were being negotiated. It is men burdened by collaboration with the Germans who torture them before they are executed (pp. 427-430). With Irena, whom he visits and whom he has long hopelessly admired and desired and who constantly appears in his thoughts, especially before going to sleep, he gets other thoughts.
When the Red Army was officially welcomed at the town hall the next day by the new mayor, who also represented the community during the occupation and was mayor before, and in the afternoon when the jazz band performed, Irena comes to dance with her boyfriend, Danny knows that he will be dancing with his friends in Kostelec for the last time before he goes to Prague to study.
subjects
Cowardice and courage
Hrob, a red-haired young man from a modest background, who, like Danny, reports to the army and is shot by an SS man while attempting to shoot down an SS tank, is for Danny the only one who is his in the dispute with the retreating Germans Deserves respect and for whom he plays in his saxophone solo at the end. He knows him from his primary school days, has never had much to do with him, but values him for his unselfish honesty. In Danny's eyes he didn't deserve to be abused by the Kostelec patriots for their public commemoration after his death (p. 465). Danny disgusts their patriotism because behind it, as a masquerade, he sees various, unfair self-interest motives hidden, which the dignitaries allowed themselves to adapt even during the protectorate period (p. 44). Neither can Přema and himself be seen as courageous heroes. Because their partisanism was nothing but youthful daring, for which they do not want to receive any public commendation. When the Russian officer at her heavy machine gun asks her for her name so that she will be mentioned at the ceremony, they give false addresses with fancy addresses. Danny sees himself most likely in the assessment of his life possibilities like all other small townspeople as a "living corpse" (p. 480).
Remembrance and public commemoration
Danny's memory cannot be channeled through any public commemoration, at most negatively influenced (pp. 82, 95, 308 f.). Just as he does not allow himself to be captured by church rituals, he is just as little susceptible to patriotic excitement as: “I was incapable of long live Czechoslovakia! or shout something like that. I was not capable of that ”(p. 281). He despises the bliss of liberation displayed on display (p. 52). The mayor's speech in honor of the Russian liberators is an embarrassing event for him. Danny remembers his speeches in the Protectorate. For the dignitaries he was “always a reliable man in an important position. His whole life. They could rely on him. ”And so, to the applause of the crowd, he shouted:“ Long live President Edvard Beneš and Marshal Stalin ! ”(P. 477 f.).
For Danny, only his own experiences count as material for his very personal memory, when it comes to a backdrop for a comfortable sleep or his search for meaning. In the last chapter he lets all his memories, about the meaning of which he had previously considered (p. 414), sink into playing the saxophone, so that he lets his instrument sob or sing, whether he is talking about the executed SS soldiers, about Hrob and them Irena thinks lost for him or the idea of a beautiful, if ultimately meaningless, future opens up before him.
Go away
In Kostelec, Danny can see himself not only as a "living corpse" but also as a "lost one" (p. 358). Contributing to this is his unfulfilled love, which also inspires his jazz playing. As a leitmotif, he evokes his longing for sensual fulfillment and security in a lover. Since May 5th and every day from then on he has been visualizing Prague, where he sees his longing fulfilled (pp. 96, 231, 237, 315, 320, 425, 437). In the last movement of the novel, he circles Prague and the unknown girl waiting for him on his saxophone.
reception
The novel was published in 1958 during a brief phase of liberalization of the political situation in Czechoslovakia, which was shaped by Stalinism . It immediately became an object of controversy in the dispute over the supremacy between liberals and Stalinists in the party presidium. The President and the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused him of “slandering the anti-fascist resistance and denigrating the Red Army”. Negative reviews appeared nationwide, the publishing director lost his post and Škvorecký was dismissed. The copies not yet sold were withdrawn from the bookstores and destroyed. Škvorecký describes the consequences: “(...) my mother-in-law (...) offered me to hide my valuables and savings accounts. My wife transported my manuscripts to my father in Náchod, who hid them with a friend in a mountain village 20 kilometers away. It looked like I was getting a belated opportunity to find work in uranium mining. But Stalin had been dead for six years, and so I missed the opportunity and instead rose to literary fame overnight. ”Despite the sharp criticism, the novel was published in 1964, 1966 and 1968 in Prague, and in 1972 by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto . There has been a critical edition published in Prague since 1998.
The German criticism only reacted to Škvorecký in more detail since the 1990s. Feiglinge was first published in German in 1969 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag . In 1986 Hans Magnus Enzensberger published the book as Volume 16 in the Other Library before it was last published by Deuticke in 2000. In 1999, Sigrid Löffler tried to help Škvorecký achieve a literary breakthrough in a review of two other novels by introducing him as a great Central European author.
Hermann Wallmann wrote in 2001 in The time in his review of " cowards " from "sobbing saxophone" as "Jazz of the 20th century". He describes what the novel means for him as follows: “The new edition of ' Feiglinge ' is therefore not only significant from the perspective of European literary history, it also deserves attention in comparison with the current literary situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. When Škvorecký wrote his first novel, he was even younger than many of today's juvenile debutants, and his 'jazz' was nowhere near as cheap and fair as the Love Parade is today . Even in the translation, it becomes 'audible' that Škvorecký is playing an instrument if he does not describe the eight days from Friday, May 4 to Friday, May 11, 1945, but rather brings it to mind, sometimes epic, sometimes pointillistically breathless , sometimes mad reporter, sometimes intoxicated Romeo. ”
Christian Schuldt reacted in a very similar way in Die Wochenzeitung :“ From the perspective of the pubescent, which has a remarkably authentic tone in the unchanged first translation from 1968, Škvorecký thus unfolds a historical panorama quasi en passant. Often funny, sometimes deadly sad, but always coherent, exciting and atmospherically dense, he brings war and picaresque novels to a common denominator. It's not just about the last days of the war, but also about the 'youth that was over'. "
Andreas Breitenstein wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on June 10, 2000 under the heading “Heroes like us”: “(...) the rigor of the political [appears] constantly broken by the subjectivism of the private. Danny is someone who has not yet forgotten how to be amazed. He is generous and carefree, daring and romantic, but the reality principle repeatedly drives him into melancholy. (...) His perception is free of prejudice, but by no means naive. His attention and empathy apply to all things indiscriminately. So it is no coincidence that Škvorecký lets him speak the language of ordinary people in the narrative passages (there is even slang in the dialogues), because the colloquial language eludes the ideological grids and refuses to systematically embellish the world. How the continuously relaxed conversational tone guarantees that people don't mince their words here. "
literature
- Jiří Holý: Jazz inspiration: stories and novellas by Josef Škvorecký . In: Josef Škvorecký. The bass saxophone. Jazz stories , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Munich 2005, pp. 339–360.
- Walter Klier: Reference to the narrator Josef Škvorecký - “It was very interesting to live”. In: Josef Škvorecký, Eine prima Saison , Deuticke: Wien-Munich 1997, pp. 273–284.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walter Klier: Reference to the narrator Josef Škvorecký - “It was very interesting to live” , p. 276. In: Josef Škvorecký, Eine prima Saison , Vienna-Munich 1997, pp. 273–284.
- ↑ [1]
- ^ It is quoted after the edition: Feiglinge , Deuticke: Wien-München 2000; ISBN 3-216-30449-3 .
- ↑ See Jana Halamíčková Von cowards, informers and soul engineers ( RTF ; 55 kB), p. 5.
- ↑ Quoted in Walter Klier (1997), p. 276 f.
- ↑ Cf. Bibliography ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Sigrid Löffler on two novels
- ↑ About Daniel Smiřický's sobbing saxophone
- ^ Christian Schuldt: Schweijk at the end of the war. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Press review, p. 2. ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2006 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. (PDF; 27 kB)
