Fever (novel)

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Fever is a novel by the French writer Leslie Kaplan from 2005, which deals with the question of free will , guilt and responsibility and the generation problem. It was published in German in 2006.

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The book is an adolescent philosophical novel. Two classmates murder a young woman in Paris , found at random, apparently without any motive, an acte gratuit ? The act is increasingly burdening them. Triggered by the lessons, they want to unravel the secrets of their grandparents from the time of the German occupation (1940–1944) of the country, but Pierre's Jewish grandfather remains silent. Damien's grandpa, a young civil servant in the collaboration , evades specific questions. Rather, he tries to justify his behavior during the occupation with the circumstances at the time and refuses to accept that carrying out criminal orders from superiors is also a crime. The climax of the novel is the scene when Damien realizes that the crime he committed collectively is in line with what his grandfather did:

Damien looked at his grandfather for a long time, but he didn't really see him. He looked at him; and suddenly a dam broke. That sentence he had said to Damien: that was exactly what he had said himself. With one difference: instead of the “orders”, he himself chose chance. "If you give space to chance ..."

The boys are now concerned with the deportations of Jews to the extermination camps in the east and with the Papon trial at the end of the 1990s. You read testimonies about young Jewish victims of the collaboration and come across the Wannsee Conference , the pan-European murder plan of the Nazis and the Wehrmacht , and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann book. Plagued by fears and depression, unable to confide in someone, as if without their own identity, they walk around the Montparnasse district , fleeing from themselves and from their family past , while they successfully pass their Abitur.

The six deportations and the figure of Eichmann form topoi in order to underpin the main message of the book - the silence allows crimes to proliferate. As usual, Kaplan writes in a music-like language, with many repetitions, each word having its own nuance, and with unusual punctuation.

Fever is both fictional , beginning with its framework plot, the murder, as well as documentary, in the journalistic reports about the Papon trial and about Eichmann's murderous activities. The link between the two levels is the responsibility that Kaplan asks both the juvenile murderers and the Nazi perpetrators.

As a literary genre, Fever can be seen as a parable in the form of a novel, in that the book shows general human problems in the fate of the grandfather-grandchildren generations. "On the one hand I wanted to write something about young people today , on the other hand something about the weight of history, how things are transferred, how the past is passed on completely unconsciously ... The generation question, the question of what is passed on from generation to generation, affects each of us and also all human sciences. "(Kaplan on Deutschlandfunk)

German readers understand the novel better if they take into account that the collaboration between the French state was only widely discussed and regretted since the 1990s, about a generation later than in Germany. In 1995 Chirac recognized the active participation of the "État français" in the Shoah. The book was also an impetus for the French to come to an understanding on this.

In that the novel sees a motive of the murderers in asserting an intellectual superiority (e.g. over investigators), there is a real model in the Jewish US affair Leopold and Loeb of 1924, which Kaplan is certainly familiar with.

School, adolescence

When the boys planned the murder, it was supposed to be an experiment: let chance work for you, be free. She was very fascinated by the plan. After the murder, however, the two withdraw more and more from the class, their madness disrupts communication. They become outsiders. Your self-esteem drops; the murder does not prove their freedom, but on the contrary their involvement in the two family histories.

The Nazi and collaboration crimes occur in the school from Arendt's perspective. A classmate gives a presentation about the occupation. Pierre himself only suddenly speaks in the final week, when Hamlet becomes the subject, about his intensive reading of recent times. ... he began to speak hastily and incoherently about Vichy , about the traces of Vichy, about Eichmann, ... it just gushed out of him ...

The two main characters often behave immaturely, and even the murder looks like a stupid boy prank that has gone off the rails. Your behavior towards the teacher fluctuates between attraction and fear of her superiority. In the subconscious lurks a disdain for women, once they equate women with "Jews", another time Damien calls out with all his heart: "Down with women!"

Kaplan marks adolescence both philosophically, as with Dostoyevsky , as a run against norms, and psychologically: the two boys murder out of adolescent megalomania. The students had learned that humans only exist in a community: it is "humans" and not "humans" who inhabit the earth. Damien and Pierre want to prove the opposite: it depends on the individual in his nihilism and radical individualism, with his subjective aesthetics: this woman or another, they had no motive, no personal motivation, they let chance decide ... then they were the greatest . Light? Rather simple, like a mathematical proof that is characterized by simplicity, hence its beauty, its elegance.

As an adolescence novel, "Fever" is about the failure to create an identity , the refusal to mature into a man . Reading about the collaborators and about Eichmann replaces the answers they don't get from the older ones: ... he began to research and rattled off bookshops. He felt a great urgency, he was about to explode ... Damien read hastily, he devoured the texts, he absorbed them ... (It) hovered over all this precise, sound information, the facts ..., that he amassed, something else, an impression, a feeling, but which one? (141f.)

In a review in the FAZ, Ingeborg Harms links the male “adolescence” of the two of them, especially their misogyny, actually against the teacher, whom they cannot reach, or against the stranger, with the motive of revenge on their grandfathers. This unconscious revenge is different for both boys, depending on the family. After the murder, their self-knowledge begins, psychology triumphs over abstract philosophy. However, this “grief work”, the “school of life” disturbs the boys to the point of madness.

Judaism

Pierre's family is of Jewish origin. All of grandfather Elie's blood relatives were murdered by the Nazis in Galicia . His future wife was also deported, but she survived. Three generations live together in the apartment, it's restless.

The Judaism of this family means remembrance of suffering. The silent grandfather transfers a vague sadness to Pierre. Elie's trauma is very great, he feels like he is in exile , and sometimes the grandson also feels lonely and abandoned. Elie reminds the grandson of the eternal Jew who roams restlessly through the world. It's a little formal Judaism, free and humanistic.

However, Pierre also uses the Shoah as an opportunity to doubt God's justice in general ( theodicy ). God had turned his back on his chosen people, allowing them to be almost destroyed. In Pierre's words: God is a failure .

The collaboration and the sacrifices

Damien's grandfather refuses to give his grandson any information about what he thought as a young man and how specifically he was involved in deportation crimes. The question Were you in the Resistance ? he evades. In that he does not classify crimes that are committed without internal involvement, without a motive, as such, the conclusion that he himself was quite actively involved in them is reasonable. The two boys therefore suspect something bad, but cannot find out anything specific. Up to that day, both had a very warm relationship with their grandpas. However, their silence drives them crazy. How do you understand a world in which evil reigns every day and everywhere? Eventually they realize that their own act belongs in this series of evil.

In one of his many nightmares, Damien sees a crowd, prisoners, all with the faces of the murdered. The people depict the victims of National Socialism. The two boys are also associated with the Nazi and Vichy perpetrators. But the two themselves are unable to become aware of their role as perpetrators, an attitude that they share with the aging collaborators of that time.

Fever describes some cases from the trial against Papon, which show the irresponsibility of this bureaucrat, who with the stroke of a pen sent 1410 Jews from Bordeaux to their deaths. But also smaller collaborators, newspaper writers, police officers, administrators, are considered under occupation in their lousy job . With the so far little-known case histories, a memorial is set for the victims . Kaplan thinks that the individual French definitely had room for maneuver. Anyone could even show themselves to be human - or even murderous - in the face of the deportation. She documents examples of helping Jews, including unsuccessful attempts to do so.

The victims Kaplan mentions from the Papon Trial are:

  • Sylvain Mohlo, 15 years old, and his brother, 13 years old; saved by her father's commitment and luck
  • Irma Reinsberg, 20 years old, escaped the Nazis during the second attempt to escape
  • Robert Goldenberg, b. August 26, 1903 in Paris, married to a non-Jewish woman. Deported on June 26, 1942 from Bordeaux to Drancy , with Papon's signature. From there to Auschwitz deported with Transport No. 62; murdered in Auschwitz on November 25, 1943;
  • Marie Reille (there was a back and forth as to whether she was a Jew under the Nazi laws, she was already in Auschwitz, saw the smoking chimney, she was brought back, rescued through the efforts of her husband and friends)
  • Sabatino Schinazi (doctor, born June 28, 1893 in Mehalla-Kebir / Egypt, French nationality, father of 9 children, deported on November 25, 1943, died in Dachau concentration camp on February 23, 1945); (His son Daniel Schinazi, born January 26, 1922 in Bordeaux, was deported with him and later murdered. - A street in this city is named after Dr. Schinazi.)
  • Abraham Slitinsky, b. March 4, 1880 in Elisabethgrad , arrested on the night of 19/20. October 1942, deportation to Drancy on the 4th transport on October 26, 1942, from there to Auschwitz on November 6, 1942, murdered there on November 13, 1942; and his children Alice and Michel, both saved. Michel was shot by the French police while he was fleeing; At the age of 17 he went to the Maquis in the Auvergne and was active in the Resistance , he got the Papon process going through decades of persistence.

The deportations from Bordeaux were journalistically accompanied by the newspaper "La Petite Gironde" with the classic phrase of the anti-Semites : From now on, we know that we have to look at all the miseries, bankruptcies, financial disasters, scandals and wars after the Jews behind it.

Eichmann after Arendt

Through the Papon trial and reading at school, the boys come across the figure of Adolf Eichmann. His statement in the Jerusalem trial ... and I saw Heydrich smoking and drinking , about his role at the Wannsee Conference, finally becomes the “password” in the boys' communication. Fever is essentially a palimpsest , a literary-fictional overwriting of Arendt's Eichmann book, supplemented with other thoughts about communication between people, about freedom and guilt.

Eichmann was a career-conscious, unscrupulous desk clerk who enthusiastically took on the task of using and organizing the Europe-wide railroad trains to the extermination camps . He claimed that he had not coped well with the sight of the murder, which his superior Heinrich Müller sometimes forced him to do in eastern Poland and Galicia . To ward off minimal doubts that he might have had, he created an illusory world separate from reality from clichés, language rules that the Nazis and the collaborators had invented, a fantasy that Eichmann maintained until his execution.

Kaplan concludes with Arendt: The world will be worth living as long as there are people who oppose the trend towards annihilation. Even in the deepest darkness, the German rule over Europe, humanity can be preserved and resistance can be offered, just as the governments of certain countries ( Denmark , Bulgaria ) have done against the Germans' demand for deportation.

"Eichmann" and "Fever"

Arendt's still controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem , (1963) and Kaplan's "Fever" make statements about a murder without motive, an "acte gratuit"; the intentions of the respective killers are similar. In the course of the increasing number of murders, Eichmann moved into a world that was ruled by "things"; the concrete victims disappeared from his mind. Once this thing had to be done ... then it was better if there was peace and order and everything went smoothly. (Eichmann; with "this thing" is meant the annihilation.) For him, killing gained its own laws, dictated by the will of the Führer. For the Nazi Germans an ideology of unlimited plannability was typical, an “everything is possible”. The administration and organization of the murder, an office activity, was the purpose of life for Eichmann. According to Arendt, the killing would not have come to an end with the intended disappearance of the last Jewish person from Europe. For Eichmann, the victims were only numbers in a statistic of transports and killings; they disappeared as some kind of person. Above all, he had to make sure that the trains to the extermination camps were always as full as possible in order to keep transport costs down.

The two boys behave in a similarly motivated manner in "Fever", even if there is only one victim. The act was planned long in advance, in a relaxed atmosphere (as Eichmann describes the Wannsee Conference). The victim was faceless, interchangeable (they chose another girl at the last minute), with one exception: it was supposed to be a woman (just like Eichmann's Jews should be, or what the Nazis thought according to Globke ). For the boys, the sacrifice disappeared as a person, it became a thing; what counted was her greatness as a perpetrator. This ideology of objectivity forms the intersection between Arendt's Eichmann portrayal and Kaplan's Paris murderers. When the boys first noticed the monstrosity of their deed, the turning point was marked by reflections on the world of offices and administrative acts. Later this becomes even clearer with the example of Papon, when he justified his activity as a Jewish porter in court with an "autonomous legality of the administration".

With Arendt, as with Kaplan, we see murderers who act “factually”, “objectively”. They are figures that stand in opposition to a positive image of man: responsibility towards other specific individuals. The derivation of the "acte gratuit", the motive-free murder from an alleged "objectivity", the organizational zeal of the perpetrators, connects the two very different books.

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(Do not confuse the work with the German book of the same name for children by Susanne Fülscher, 1999, which plays under 12-year-olds.)

Similar topics in media

  • Edgar Allan Poe: The Treacherous Heart and The Black Cat : Murders without Motive
  • Truman Capote in Cold Blood An assassinated murder by a murderous couple
  • Alfred Hitchcock (director) Rope (1948) German cocktail for a corpse based on the play The Rope (murder as "intellectual pleasure" and out of the imagination of being a superman ) by Patrick Hamilton ; the real criminal case "Leopold and Loeb" behind it also inspired the films Compulsion (= The compulsion to evil ) by Richard Fleischer and Swoon by Tom Kalin and Murder according to plan by Barbet Schroeder .
  • Günter Grass , autobiography (2006): Damien's grandpa gives in "Fever" the reason for his work in the collaboration with the Vichy authorities that he wanted to escape the tight family environment in the province in Clermont-Ferrand . Grass says of his complicity in the Waffen-SS : At first my main concern was to get out. From tight quarters, from the family. I wanted to end that, so I volunteered. The similarity makes it worth thinking more about the connection between male youth and totalitarianism.
  • Ödön von Horváth: Youth without God Edition Suhrkamp-Basisbibliothek, p. 139; the motive of adolescent megalomania through murder: ... that the T wanted to watch a person come and go. ... He wanted to find out all the secrets, but only to be able to stand above them - with his scorn. He didn't know any shivers because his fear was just cowardice. And his love for reality was only hatred for truth ...

literature

  • Niklas Bender: Guilt and atonement in Paris (subtitles: A school presentation in the novel ) In: Literatures (magazine) . Friedrich, Berlin, issue 07-08 / 2006, p. 110f (not readable online; consistently factual errors)
  • Thomas Laux: Inherited Guilt? NZZ , 23 August 2006 (see the exact quote from the author in an interview with Deutschland-Funk 2006)
  • Julia Schulze Wessel: Ideology of Objectivity. Hannah Arendt's political theory of anti-Semitism (= TB Wissenschaft. 1796). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-518-29396-6 (to the above section "Eichmann" and "Fever" )
  • Pierre Nora : Downfall of a state lie . Die Zeit , 12, 2002. (On France's difficulties in dealing with the past, especially Vichy and the Algerian War)
  • Reviews of this book:
  • Wolfgang Heuer et al. (Ed.): Arendt-Handbuch. Life, work, effect. Cape. 5: History of reception, including Section 3: Poetry / Narrativity, subsection Echo in Novels. Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 355 right.

filming

  • The novel was filmed in French by Raphaël Neal in 2014 under the same title (80 min). The film received the 2014 Oldenburg Film Festival award for "best film". Arte broadcast the film in 2018 with German subtitles. Alice Zeniter wrote the script .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on puberty of boys: But why did their puberty turn towards a "bad fever"? in an interview with Claire Devarrieux in Liberation Kaplan, sans mobile apparent . No. 7358, Jan. 6, 2005, pp. 1-3.
  2. ↑ French Version p. 123. Here own translation with a slight paraphrase to reinforce the statement
  3. ^ French barrel, p. 164.
  4. ↑ subscription.sudouest.com ( memento of the original from November 17, 2006 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / subscriptions.sudouest.com
  5. ↑ subscription.sudouest.com ( Memento of the original from November 16, 2006 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / subscriptions.sudouest.com
  6. ↑ subscription.sudouest.com ( memento of the original from November 17, 2006 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / subscriptions.sudouest.com
  7. ↑ Michel Slitinsky in the French language Wikipedia
  8. ↑ the speaker of the section, Barbara Hahn, confuses the cause and consequences of the murder and thus misses Kaplan's intention. Hahn: ... after reading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem', two young people come up with the idea of ​​committing a murder without a motive ... Kaplan wants to point out, however, that the boys only come across "Eichmann" AFTER the murder by reading Arendt at school and that it becomes clear to them in the long run that they are following in different ways in the footsteps of their burdened grandfathers (one of them presumptive perpetrator, the other a victim unable to cope with the past)