Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart

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Ferdinand, the man with a kind heart is the last novel by Irmgard Keun , which was published in Düsseldorf in 1950.

The young first-person narrator Ferdinand Timpe is a survivor of the Second World War . When he returned to Cologne from captivity , he kept silent about the war experience. Ferdinand remains divided. On the one hand, he would like to support disoriented contemporaries in his occasional job as a life coach. On the other hand, Ferdinand feels so disgusted by some people that he would like to run away in front of him.

time and place

Cologne 1945

The novel is set in the summer ruined city ​​of Cologne, most likely in 1949: the currency reform is already history, the denazification of the fellow travelers is still in progress in Germany and the Goethe year 1949 is not over yet. In the post-war novel, Ferdinand tells about the period from 1945 to 1949.

content

Ferdinand had studied German for a few semesters , but is not an academic . Rather, he has tried all sorts of professions. He had only undertaken his studies for the sake of his uncle Kuno. The uncle, a full professor of botany , married his mother a year after the death of Ferdinand's father and thus headed a household with many children. The mother Laura, a Brazilian who grew up in Holland , married the father Markus Timpe in Germany. Ferdinand's father came from Neuruppin , studied in France and was a painter . The father died when Ferdinand was ten years old. Before the war, Ferdinand inherited from his uncle Hollerbach a very small bookstore with an antiquarian postage shop in a little-frequented alley in Cologne's old town. The humble shop was bombed.

Ferdinand has countless relatives, acquaintances and friends. One of them hires Ferdinand as a “happy advisor”. The small expanding company offers life counseling and a. also astrology , clairvoyance , dream interpretation and foot care . During his exhausting desk work, Ferdinand has to practice the art of listening with the customers.

Ferdinand's devoted fiancée Luise has been waiting for the groom for years, because that's the way it should be. Throughout the entire novel, Ferdinand pulls a few levers in order to get rid of Luise, for whom he feels nothing further. In the end, he is all the more surprised by Luise's revelation: Actually, Ferdi, as she affectionately calls him, is “a man for abnormal times.” And now, after the currency reform, these are coming to an end.

philosophy

Ferdinand sees his existence as a provisional one. He lives from hand to mouth in Cologne. For his age, the first-person narrator has a considerable repertoire of wisdom: Only those who can talk to one another if necessary can remain silent. Ferdinand wants to experience that he doesn't want to experience anything more.

Why does the protagonist have a kind heart? There is a concise answer in Ferdinand's philosophy : As a life coach, he tries every day in dealing with customers to take away some of their fear. And yet it was once his only principle: never give advice to others!

Ferdinand wishes to be “nothing at all”. And he wants to savor that.

reception

  • While Uncle Hollerbach is permanently silent and drinks, Ferdinand writes against “the great silence” of the Germans after the war.
  • The structure of the novel is as bombed out as Cologne: "splintered" and "fragmented".
  • Ferdinand, who speaks a lot, falls silent like the author after her last novel.
  • The cold between the ruins is omnipresent in the novel, which can also be felt in the narrator's "unhoused self".
  • Ferdinand, the “ impotent hero” in Irmgard Keun's late work: After the war, doctors state that returnees were sexual disinterest as a result of lost self-esteem .
  • The author deserves Ferdinand as the “key word” for her own stories and lets him “chatter”.
  • Irmgard Keun has written a “ socially critical time novel ”.

expenditure

  • Irmgard Keun: Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1950.
  • Irmgard Keun: Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart. Paperback, 240 pages (1st edition 2019). Ullstein paperback, ISBN 978-3548291864 .

literature

  • Hiltrud Häntzschel : Irmgard Keun , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-499-50452-9
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . S. 331. Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8
  • Gesche Blume: Irmgard Keun. Writing in a game with modernity. Dissertation (vol. 23 of the series of works on modern German literature. Ed .: Dorothee Kimmich, Walter Schmitz, Detlev Schöttker, Marek Zybura). Dresden 2005. 223 pages, ISBN 3-937672-38-9

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Irmgard Keun: Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart. Novel. dtv Munich 1990. 175 pages, ISBN 3-423-11220-4 , p. 99, 5th Zvu
  2. ↑ Blume, p. 188, 14. Zvo
  3. ↑ Irmgard Keun: Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart. Novel. dtv Munich 1990. 175 pages, ISBN 3-423-11220-4 , p. 167
  4. ↑ Irmgard Keun: Ferdinand, the man with the kind heart. Novel. dtv Munich 1990. 175 pages, ISBN 3-423-11220-4 , p. 134, 11. Zvu
  5. ↑ Blume, p. 14 and
  6. ↑ Blume, p. 15 o.
  7. ↑ Blume, p. 15 and
  8. ↑ Blume, p. 41 o.
  9. ↑ Stephanie Hoffmann: You don't talk about that? Quoted in Blume, p. 147, footnote 20
  10. ↑ Häntzschel, p. 127. Quoted in Blume, p. 186, footnote 116
  11. ↑ Barbara Drescher, quoted in Blume, p. 189, 11. Zvo