Fire in autumn

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Fire in autumn , French “ Les feux de l'automne ”, is the last novel by Irène Némirovsky , completed in 1941/1942 and published posthumously in 1948 . It was reissued in 1957 and 2005 (paperback 2007). The German edition, translated by Eva Moldenhauer , was published in 2008. The novel covers the period between 1912 and 1941 with the First World War , the interwar period and the beginning of the Second World War as the background for the story of Thérèse and Bernard Jacquelain, who were both born in 1897 and after to become a couple after the war.

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The novel is written in Némirovsky's preferred speech , which has become a modern stylistic device , so that the author can suddenly design the web of action that develops around the protagonists Thérèse and Bernard from the perspective of the people who are the focus of attention without the involvement of a narrator . In contrast to the previous novel The Dogs and the Wolves , which covers roughly the same period of time, partly takes place in the same places and with its 33 chapters only indirectly reveals an uneven three-part division, fire in autumn is clearly divided into three parts of approximately the same length each divided into ten chapters.

First part: 1912 to 1918

During the course of a spring Sunday in Paris, all the people who will carry out the action meet. This happens in the east of Paris , in the 12th arrondissement in the apartment of the middle-class Brun family, not far from the Gare de Lyon , where they first eat. The Brun family with their widowed father Adolphe, their 15-year-old daughter Thérèse and their maternal grandmother, Madame Pain, from Nice , have been joined by a relative and acquaintance: Thérèse's 27-year-old cousin, Martial Brun (medical student), the Jacquelains with her 15-year-old son Bernard, who, following the ambition of his father, is to attend the École polytechnique and rise to the elite , and Martial's college friend, the law student Raymond Détang. In the afternoon, 15-year-old Renée Humbert with her widowed mother, who is a milliner by profession , joins them for a walk to the avenue des Champs-Élysées and into the elegant 16th arrondissement bordering the Bois de Boulogne . There they let themselves be entertained until the evening in the “peaceful crowd on Sundays”, above all by the spectacle of the celebrities passing by in equipages . It's the adults who set the tone and let everything run smoothly. Light dust spreads over everything, which can smell of flowers, perfume and sugar, but also smell of horse manure, grind between the teeth or eat away at the chestnut blossoms (pp. 10, 19, 20, 21).

Two years later, in 1914, Martial was preparing to set up his first practice as an ear, nose and throat doctor and was satisfied with the life he had mapped out in all phases. On the national holiday, July 14th, he made Thérèse a marriage proposal, which she accepted. Both of them, who like everyone else say "you" to each other, see themselves as fiancés from now on. The first disturbing news is circulating that a war is imminent, but which the older generation did not consider possible. Bernard is infected and feverish, can't wait to turn 18, to volunteer and go to war, which Martial is preparing for.
In early 1915 he took a twenty-four hour vacation from the first aid station at the front to get married. The sight of wounds, mutilations and deaths has already marked him: the first white threads are showing in his beard (p. 51). Raymond is also wounded and given convalescence leave. Bernard, not yet deployed, perceives how the soldiers' world has broken away from the civilian world and its paternalism and how its realities are drifting apart. While Madame Humbert is designing a patriotic hat model - “very brash, dashing, dead chic” (p. 50) - and the amusements of the capital are supposed to stir up “the flame of enthusiasm”, he sees his fate mapped out in the faces of Martial and Raymond he lets him picture his own death with a shuddering heroism, so that he seeks the proximity of Thérèse in a sentimental touch (p. 43). Renée feels drawn to Raymond, who, with his Mediterranean way of entertaining his fellow men, convinces her of his successful future as a politician.

Martial, in constant action on the apocalyptic battlefields of French-speaking Flanders , sinking in the chaos of trench warfare , is torn to pieces by a bomb when he tries to carry a seriously wounded man into the dry. In the spring of 1918, Bernard is also drawn: “He had aged without having had time to mature; it resembled an early fruit where you only bite hard, bitter meat. Four years! He was tired ”(p. 65). The war hell that has become mechanized has "degraded him to a savage, an animal" (p. 67). The war of 1914 has turned into a “serial massacre, assembly line work” (p. 72). In the faces of the fighters there is "a kind of grin with fatigue that gave these young faces the appearance of death" (p. 67). The civilian world of relatives has long been affected and longs for the end of the war without much confidence. Thérèse and Renée, now married to Raymond, who has freed himself from the war, work as nurses in the hospital. Renée and Raymond lead a life that fits in with that of the slide, politician and war profiteer, so that "heroes, fame ... give his blood for the fatherland ..." have also become their formulas in the civil world. Bernard, however, was “inflicted a wound on the soul that would no longer be able to heal” (p. 66). He now despises Raymond as a "slacker". His parents are shocked when he shows up on a short convalescent leave. His father misses the respect he owes him, and his mother wishes he didn't come back from the war the next time; because in his "bitter, paralyzing skepticism" and the desire to give a damn about everything, but to do well while renouncing diplomas and the career path designed by her father before the war, she no longer recognizes her son (p. 92 f.). Thérèse, on the other hand, similarly shocked by the collapse of petty-bourgeois morality and the indulgence that is spreading among convalescents and nurses, is mocked by Renée. Because she trustingly dreams of love and the future as her truth and has decided not to be challenged by the catastrophic of the world (p. 102).

Second part: 1920 to 1936

Shortly disturbed by the founding of the League of Nations in Geneva in November 1920, Renée and Raymond wonder how they can prepare themselves for a successful life in Paris society, whether with the noble words of "right", "reason", "World peace", France as the "torch of humanity" or simply by making money quickly. They find that it is easiest to get involved in both without becoming cynical (p. 106). Because the post-war world has become a fair for them that anyone can enter, especially the unscrupulous nouveau riche. Raymond forges ties in the United States, plays on the stock exchange, maintains relationships with political figures, and plans his election as MP. In doing so, it becomes clear to him that as a politician he has to keep a low profile with his business relationships. Renée's mouth is already showing “bitter little wrinkles”, outwardly she has changed into the “post-war female type”: she has become thinner, with long, hard muscles she looks bigger than before. "Her skin, covered with smooth, gold-colored make-up, was dark and her light hair was styled like that of a boy." (P. 108).

Society is becoming Americanized. The small traders buy houses in the country where they spend their vikend (p. 108). Jazz, played by “negroes” in red jackets, is part of the ambience of the salons. But Bernard's mother becomes impoverished after the death of her husband, so that Bernard tries to get a pension for her. That leads him to the Détangs because he wants to use Raymond's relationships for his mother. Without first recognizing him, Renée would like to place him in the gigologic group she has put together for her receptions . “Four years of slaughter and finally, like at the end of a dark tunnel full of blood, this salon full of lights, full of women who were all available, this light, intoxicating atmosphere. Ah, goddamn it, he had already got it on his last vacation before the armistice, those who took something seriously were nothing more than ... bruised. Nothing you did, nothing you said, nothing you thought mattered. It was just a kind of vain chatter, like that of fools and children ”(p. 112). When Renée knows who Bernard is and what he wants with them, she uses herself for him with Raymond - “do as little as possible and earn as much as possible” (p. 115) - and at the same time becomes his lover. Raymond, as a politician through and through basically businessman , does not need him though as a gigolo, but as a "straw man" (p 132) to process its transactions with the admired America: "We do not produce enough. The Americans have understood that. What a people! "(P. 129)

After the death of her father, Thérèse continues to live with her grandmother in the old apartment without realizing much of the life of Bernard, who lives a few floors below them with his mother, who is now also widowed. She feels alone and is also impoverished because the Russian securities, which her father once promised for her trousseau , have lost all value because of the events in Russia . [For this, " ruined Russians " have been washed away to Paris and contribute to the commissions of the détangs with their various activities (p. 114).] Thérèse, who takes care of the small household and improves her widow's income with laborious sewing, sometimes learns something by Madame Jacquelain about the life of the rich when she talks about her son and what she learns from his lucrative business and starts to be proud. He'll soon have his own car.
Bernard increasingly despises the petty bourgeois world, in which he also perceives all the wrong things, but at a lower level: the false paneling in the living room, the artificial flowers, the photos of sons and husbands as soldiers in the first months of the war on the dressers (p. 119 ). But compared to Renée, who makes it so easy for him, he is impressed by Thérèse, who feels drawn to him but does not want him to make her mistress. Bernard confuses her, especially when he kisses her on the mouth once in the dark of a cinema. He thinks your reaction is old-fashioned “ from 'before the war', poor little one! “(P. 123) Thérèse 'grandmother would be happy if she became engaged to Bernard. In memory of her husband, she can imagine a looser life and wished it would for the lonely young widow who was never properly married. But Bernard travels to America for months to do business. Thérèse feels confirmed in her distance, because Bernard respects nothing, " neither women, nor love, nor the ideas for which one had fought " (p. 140).

Bernard made a small fortune in the "golden years from 1920 to 1921", bought a car and rents a garconière with "Negro masks", a green tiled bathroom, a Chinese boy and a Siamese cat in the elegant western quarter . Thérèse has to admit that she loves him beyond everything that divides, although she does not respect him as she respected Martial (p. 143). He invites his mother along with Thérèse, but forgets his guests and does not appear, so that the two women let themselves be impressed by his elegant apartment and drive home late in the day. Thérèse spends a sleepless night, senses how she takes a liking to words like "sensual pleasure" and "lust", sneaks out of the house and at dawn takes a taxi to Bernard's bachelor apartment, where after she found the key under the mat has nobody is. She waits in a café across the street until Bernard shows up at noon, tired and desperate. Renée is cheating on him with a rich old man. Bernard shows disgust for the world he has let himself into. With all her scruples, Thérèse, who is now openly professing her love, decides to live with Bernard as a faithful wife with her own home. They split up as fiancé.

But the marriage, the son and his new life as a bank clerk with manageable unspectacular promotion prospects put Bernard into boredom, so that he longed for his abandoned life in the company of the Détangs. Thérèse senses what is about to change, but thinks that her love will bridge everything, especially since Bernard can no longer imagine a life without his family. But when Thérèse reveals to him that she is expecting a second child after ten years of marriage, he gives her to understand that he does not want to let himself be tied up by the family any longer. Renée has already become his lover again. She expects Bernard to advise her on investing her money, which her husband knows nothing about and shouldn't know about, especially as a family friend, a Dutch financier named Mannheimer, does not seem very reliable. Bernard receives the key to Renée's house in Fontainebleau and speaks to Thérèse about his admiration for Raymond: “There are two or three hundred of them in Paris. They are our masters ”, Thérèse comments:“ It is evil people who will be our undoing ”(p. 179). She has two daughters a short distance apart, and her grandmother would like to help her when the couple separate, Bernard moves into a Paris hotel and only comes to visit or to meet his 15-year-old son. Madame Pain, her faithful grandmother, would like to tell her: “You see, these are the fires of autumn; they cleanse the earth; they prepare them for new seeds. You are still young. These great fires have not yet burned in your life. They will catch fire. You will devastate many things. You will see, you will see ... "(p. 176)

Third part: 1936 to 1941

In the third part, Némirovsky tries to further develop the character Thérèse to find an answer to the question of how a “real life” could look like in the increasingly collapsing French society and after the complete defeat of the war in June 1940 .
Bernard gives up his position in the bank and becomes head of a private agency founded by the Dutch financier Mannheimer and Raymond Détang for all possible commercial transactions, especially for a business with American parts for French state aviation aircraft, whose reliability is due to their metal alloy of Engineers is doubted. The technical questions are overlaid by ideological and political questions, and Bernard places the order in America, seeing himself as a mere broker. Mannheimer continuously entrusts him with business worth millions, which only exists as a symbol or as a sign on paper (p. 194). After Thérèse asked him not to visit her apartment any more and to leave it at meetings with the now 17-year-old Yves, he persuaded himself that Thérèse would remain loyal to him and he would someday when he was tired of the free life would be able to return to her. With a laborious smile, she admits that one day she will be able to forgive him and then take care of his rheumatism.

Yves gets into increasing conflict with his father and thinks that he would have liked Martial, about whom he asked his mother about him, more than him. He let it come to a break when in the late winter of 1938/39 he went to Megève to do winter sports with Bernard and got to know Bernard there, who also seemed to be blind and at the same time treacherously intent on France's misfortune. He disappears into the snowy landscape, finds a hostel, writes his father a letter in which he asks his forgiveness for feeling disgusted by the people in his company with whom he makes common cause and therefore goes back to Paris alone return. But before the disaster hits France, everything collapses around Bernard that same summer in August: Mannheimer speculated, lost everything including Bernard's money and died. Raymond is ruined and is considering putting a bullet in the head. Bernard quickly realizes that there is no one left to trust him and that everyone he wants to turn to for help turns away from him. To stand by a former friend of Mannheimer's side is no longer an option. The relationships Raymond had been keen on are fading, and neither he nor Raymond can fall back on an influential group or wealthy family. The stock market crash leads to an immediate collapse for both. When he wants to visit the Détangs at home, he realizes that they can no longer speak for him and may have disappeared.
As if sleepwalking, he arrives at his wife's apartment and has the impression of having arrived home. But not for long, because with the declaration of war by England and France on Germany on September 3, 1939, Bernard and Yves set out together.

Bernard is going to Lorraine as an officer , Yves is a pilot in the Air Force. For the women, the situations of saying goodbye are repeated during the First World War and overlay the present as bad memories. Bernard, on the other hand, feels his departure as healing, because it stops all persecutions waiting for him because of the ruin. Especially in the face of his wife and children, remorse haunts him, and he wonders whether he still deserves them, when he must most likely describe his life as harmful (p. 219). As a father and husband, he must consider himself a failure, and when he receives news from his wife that Yves crashed and died on a training flight two months after being mobilized, he knows that he is also because of the bad aircraft parts he brokered is also a bad citizen. He sees his justification in the fact that, like everyone else around him, he was too carelessly convinced that everything would go well (p. 226).
In June 1940, the French army was quickly defeated by the advancing Germans and, in the general flight of the civilian population from the north and northeast, withdrew to an imaginary line of defense on the Loire .

Bernard escapes from Dunkirk with the remnants of his regiment and knows that the battle for France was lost 20 years ago, because of his shared way of life (p. 232 f.). With the remnants of his troops, he passes the Fontainebleau forest and leads them to Renée's abandoned house because he suspects that there is still something to eat and drink there. He must assume that the Détangs, after they had invested their assets abroad in good time, with all the valuables that had disappeared from the house and with the mess that was caused, also left abroad. When German soldiers appear, he is captured and brought to Germany, where he continues to think about his life. After all, he thinks he has found the key to his existence because he knows enough others who have lived differently from him. It is loyalty, although he is not sure whether he would perceive it as a fetter and "thirst for freedom" again (p. 250 f.). Thérèse, however, holds fast to him, keeps in touch and waits for him. With all sorts of sewing work and making milliner's articles from leftovers, she earns so much that she can get her daughters and Bernard's mother through the second winter of the war. With Madame Humbert, who has opened a business again, she cannot get rid of anything; but she learns that Renée and Raymond left her in the lurch after a car accident in the crowd of refugees on their flight to Rio de Janeiro . She recommends Thérèse to take more care of herself and not to neglect herself for the sake of the children, and offers herself as a matchmaker because she knows a man "of a certain age who is looking for a distinguished friend" (p. 260).
When her children get weaker and become ill, she relocates her fur coat, which brings in so much that she can rent a house in the country with Bernard's mother and daughters for the summer and autumn. They are doing comparatively well there. When the “purifying pyre of autumn” burn in the fields (p. 268) and she feels tired and weak, Bernard returns. She thinks she perceives that he "came back changed, matured, better, and that he was finally hers, her alone".

subjects

In contrast to The Dogs and the Wolves , Némirovsky has dispensed with literary motifs as structural elements in her contemporary painting, which is limited to France, and develops the family microcosm, which is multifaceted with social reality, only from the acting persons. However, she has linked the names of her main characters with literary works of French contemporaries. This is most strikingly the case with Thérèse and Bernard. François Mauriac has the main characters of the same name in his novel Thérèse Desqueyroux , published in 1927 , in which Thérèse is married to Bernard in an unhappy marriage in the province frozen in conservative Catholicism and only after an attempted murder of her husband, her breakup from the marriage and her voluntary exile in Paris can develop more freely. Raymond and Renée resemble the immoral pair of friends of first-person narrator and René (male form) in Raymond Radiguet's autobiographical novel Der Teufel im Leib (published in 1923, in the year of the author's death), which has a scandalous love story during the First World War and is part of its appearance was condemned as a stab in the back and betrayal of 'patriotic morality'.

The topics centrally negotiated by Némirovsky and the questions raised in them are as follows:

  • On what basis of trust can reliable human relationships be established in times of general moral crisis? Can loyalty be dismissed as a value that counts only for petty bourgeoisie? Is moderation, imposing a narrower life with “simple, hard laws” an outmoded imposition (cf. Bernard's reflections on p. 250 f.)? How can the family as a fundamental area of ​​reproduction be saved from the ravages of the fully developed free market economy and the highly speculative and risky flows of money? How are gender roles to be defined and established as socially mediated?
  • Bernard's reflections relate to the damage he and others have caused with their transactions, for which he explains: “He hadn't thought anything, just saw the money. It wasn't his business. In France there were engineers, technicians, people in charge. And everyone had probably thought like him, had thought that others, further up, would already be able to cope with it. And so on, bottom up ... All of them. Then the guilty were frightened and fled. What remained was a devastated country, a bared, crushed, defenseless people ”(p. 240 f.). This is an anticipation of what Ulrich Beck diagnosed and analyzed for the immediate present as “organized irresponsibility”: “Anyone who pays attention can hear the question of this age: How should we live? When looking for an answer, however, he gets lost in technical formulas and ecological cycles. Destruction of nature and major ecological-technological dangers - that is the argument of this book - can and must, however, be understood and deciphered as mystified, objectified, twisted forms of social self-encounter and self-determination. Society itself encounters the dangers that shake it, and only to the extent that the dangers are understood as guides to its own history and its changeability can - perhaps - the paralysis that rules be broken. "

reception

For Christoph Haas (in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 14, 2008), fire in autumn is one of those books “which immediately give the reader the certainty that he is in good hands. Already on the first pages everything fits and is just right in an almost dreamlike way; the language and storytelling is flawless. (…) We are no longer used to the fact that moral questions are discussed in a novel. But nothing is melodramatically exaggerated in 'Feuer im Herbst'; there is a pleasantly factual tone. The author also differs from the extensive epic exploration of her role models by the high degree of compression with which she works. For a plot that spans almost 30 years, since it dispenses with long descriptions and restricts itself to picking out exemplary scenes, it does not even need 300 pages. And despite the triumph of love, in the end the question remains open: What can a real life look like? (…) There is nothing to add to the superlative praise that the critics received for this work (i.e. Suite française ) and for all others that have been published by us since then. It is only to be confirmed without reservation. "

In the Frankfurter Rundschau on October 14, 2008, Thomas Laux is similarly convinced of the high value of the novel: “Némirovsky clearly focuses on the emotional weathering, it is - as always in her work - about money, greed and unrestrained egoism In any case, strong motifs that she spells out even more consistently than usual. More vividly than in the previous novels, she describes the predetermined breaking points of a society that has shelved its moral inhibitions after years of sacrificing. "

Mareike Ilsemann is less convinced in a detailed review in WDR 3 on October 8, 2008: “ Fire in autumn ends in sentimentality and kitsch. The novel is still interesting. The double, cross-eyed look of the exile persecuted in her adopted home shows up. On the one hand, she condemns her compatriots - on the other hand, she clings to her belief in them in her fiction. Probably a dream. The reality was more cruel. "

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The page numbers are based on the first German edition published by Knaus in Munich in 2008.
  2. ↑ Christoph Haas on fire in autumn in the Süddeutsche Zeitung v. October 14, 2008.
  3. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Beck: Antidotes. Organized irresponsibility. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1990, ISBN 3-518-11468-9 .
  4. ^ Mareike Ilsemann