Frankfurt am Main in literature
The city of Frankfurt am Main has been the place of action for many biographical testimonies and literary receptions in the form of poems, stories and novels , especially since the Weimar Republic . In them, at least for the local reader, the city plays a role as a backdrop. This means that the linguistic images are supplemented by the remembered visualizations of the streets and squares with their buildings and also evoke the atmosphere.
Founding legend and award song
The first Latin text about the name of the city, written in hexameters , was written in 1187 by the Cistercian monk Gunther von Pairis , also called Ligurinus, in his epic (section Primus ) about the northern Italian battles of Friedrich Barbarossa :
[…]
But the name is artless:
the German resident calls it
Franconeforte. I am allowed to call
them
“Francoforum vadum” with Latin sounds , because
Carol the Emperor
once
overcame
the wide pouring flood of the raging Mainstream while fighting with the unrestrained
people of the Saxons
There,
without knowing the ford,
and led
his troops right through the river bed , since there is no bridge
:
[...]
The oldest proverbial poem Eyn proverbial poem zu lob und eer der Statt Franckfortt by Johann Steinwert von Soest is documented from 1501. The poet, employed as a city doctor in 1500, praises a. a. the social bread legislation and the patrician Daniel Bromm, who is the arithmetician responsible for financial policy :
Franckfortt, you noble place gezyrt,
Myt virtue off das hogst probyrt,
Dyn merry, good and merciful kind
Forces me, that I have to save
Dyn praise many times,
[...]
And by the wysen ratt found,
the iglicher to all stonden
Gutt brott likes to eat mod syn gelt,
Baked wol dyr numer felt,
too swer enough weight to synem,
I hy Billich meld and dense,
Dan ny keyn for by disser zit
is found, so geschytt,
the the to brecht by bill represents
the brott common who offrecht;
Since wydder dan eyn erbar rott
Eyn ertzeny found hott,
Darzu Daniel Bromm myt flyß
Gehulffen hott in high price.
He is there hyn, god consolation dy sel
And gyb ym rest nimble and snel.
He has been from and knows,
He thinks that he uses gmeynen myt flyß.
As another also don in the red,
Dar off eyn gmeyner use dan stott.
Wol dem, the gmeynen
take advantage of Myt flyß vil me then all duty.
Got lybt eyn such ussermossen
And word yn publicly number loose.
[…]
So I live numer byn,
Say myner poor sel to comfort:
Nu comfort you god, Johan von Sost
Historical novels from the 15th and 16th centuries
The authors of historical novels are faced with the challenge of introducing their readers to a bygone era in an entertaining way. To do this, in their efforts to achieve authenticity, they research documents and scientific studies, but often unconsciously or consciously (e.g. Thorn) project topics of their own time such as social integration or emancipation problems into their reconstructions and put them into the mouths of their invented characters. This creates an over-the-top or modern image of thought in a historical setting.
The Jewish Diaspora in the 15th Century
Since the Enlightenment , after centuries of exclusion, Jews have increasingly been given the same civil rights and emancipated themselves into German society (see History of the Jews (Modern Times) ). This led authors of literary receptions on the one hand to a look back at the ghettoization (motto of the Spindler novel: "Ghosts of the past: Why do you call me up from my dark grave? Magician. [...] that you bear witness to a dark time.") and second, in connection with integration and assimilation to a reflections on Jewish identity. Heine and Spindler shape this topic on the basis of historical research (see History of Jews in Germany , Frankfurter Judengasse ) using the example of Frankfurt Jews of the 15th century.
Karl Spindler The Jew
Karl Spindler's three-volume novel Der Jude (1827) unfolds an opulent picture of the Frankfurt citizenship and their disputes with criminal feudal lords of the northern region against the backdrop of the Council of Constance . The relational events and the various locations outside the Mainstadt Worms, Costnitz (= Konstanz) and the knight castles in the Wetterau are linked by two family stories in the religious-social field of tension and the love of two of their members: Dagobert and Esther.
Most of the acts in Frankfurt take place at the seat of the Frosch patrician family on Liebfrauenberg. After the death of his wife, the old citizen and aldermen Diether married Margarethe, forty years his junior, from the impoverished Leuenberg family in Gelnhausen. This created tensions with his children from his first marriage. His daughter Wallrade received the Baldergrün estate from her uncle and had a relationship there with Rudolph Bilger von der Rhön (Book II, Kp. 11), which was not accepted by his father. After the lover left her and her boy Hans and married Katharina, she abandoned her child and, in revenge, gave it to strangers. Her brother Dagobert is supposed to become a monk according to his mother's vow and at the beginning of the novel he travels to his uncle, the prelate Hieronymus Frosch, in Constance, where he is during the council (I, Kp. 2, 5-8, 11-16) but more interested in worldly life than in its spiritual training. The father's second marriage is burdened by the great age difference. For Margarethe it is a money marriage and she falls in love with Dagobert, who, however, does not respond to her affection out of a sense of duty to his parents.
The complex and adventurous novel plot, which changes back and forth between the merchant town and the robber barons' castles of the Wetterau, is built on these relationship conflicts due to the many interlinkages. Johannes, the sickly and ailing son of Diether and Margarethes, is robbed by beggars as a pathetic child for her business during a stay in the country with the farmer's wife Willhild. For fear of punishment, the nurse lies to the mother that her son has died (I, Kp. 4). She fears for the continuation of her marriage and gives the Jew David the order to buy a similar looking five-year-old foundling on his trade trips, which succeeds in Worms (I, Kp. 1). It is, as it becomes increasingly clear in the course of the novel (e.g. II, Kp. 1), Wallrades son, for whom the commissioner Gerhard von Hülshofen is looking for foster parents. Now Hans becomes Diether and Margarethes and at the end of the novel, when the real heir is brought back, becomes Dagobert's and Regina's child. Even after the birth of the first John, the rumor arose that Dagobert was the father and that the unhappy woman in their marriage was looking for adventure. This is how the mayor (II, Kp. 2, 5) sees a chance for an affair, albeit unsuccessfully, and Margarethes brother Veit, who with other robber barons assaults merchants and is supported by his sister with what he thinks is too low payments, wants that Use the situation financially and threaten to reveal (I, Kp. 9).
Diether learns of people's mockery of him, confronts the mayor about a present for his wife (II, chapter 5) and becomes more and more suspicious. It finally comes to a falling out with Dagobert and Margarethe when Wallrade is kidnapped and he suspects that his wife, as his son's lover, wants to extort ransom from him together with her brother Veit (II, chapter 8). Another danger to the frog marriage is the rumor of a Jewish ritual murder of a Christian child, which is linked to David's purchase of a boy in Worms. Margarethe fears that the Frankfurt Jews put under pressure during interrogation could reveal the truth about the replaced son. She leaves Frankfurt (II, Kp. 12) for fear of the anger of her husband and ends up on the run through various stations in Neufalkenstein Castle, the seat of the knight Bechtram von Vilwyl near Vilbel, where Wallrade is held prisoner and she is also her brother Veit meets.
In the meantime, investigations into the alleged ritual murder case are ongoing. Margarethes confessor Reinhold and Dagobert influence the witness Gerhard von Hülshofen that he exonerated the innocent David in the hearing in the Schöffensaal of the town hall (II, Kp. 14) by saying that he discovered Diether's kidnapped child in Worms and handed it over to the mother, and Wallrade, wrongly, accused of having kidnapped this child from Willhild's out of rivalry. Diether then changes his attitude towards the daughter and is reconciled with his son. Dagobert is now looking for his sister, after a hint from Rudolph, disguised as a monk, captures her kidnapper Bechtram, brings the robber baron to the city to the cheers of the Frankfurt citizens and forces him to release Wallrades. During his second action, he also finds his stepmother (III, Kp. 3), who is being held prisoner, at the castle, whom he brings to her husband, while his sister is admitted to the White Women's Monastery for atonement. Wallrade now offers to fulfill the mother's vow instead of Dagobert, so that the brother can marry and look after the father (III, chapter 10). But she does not regret what she has done, is just looking for a place to rest and continues to intrigue against the family. She receives the punishment for her continuing need for revenge from her former lover Rudolph Bilger, who knocks her down in anger with the sword and seriously injured her because she gave him the wrong news of the death of his wife Katharina and daughter Agnes, whom he has now found again in Frankfurt has caused deep suffering (III; Chapter 7).
After the execution of Bechtram, who has been accused of many crimes, his cronies and the Jew Zodick want to take revenge on the Frosch family and the whole city and use the unrest caused by the camp of the brown people from Egypt in Sachsenhausen: They are on Scrooge's wedding day with Regina From Dürning fires, wealthy citizens murder and rob them. However, they are overheard while planning their attack in Brändling's pub (III, Kp. 12) and betrayed. In this way the murders and the destruction of the city can be prevented by the vigilante group, led by the mayor and the alder Frosch (III, Kp. 13-14). Some leaders like Veit von Homberg are killed, others flee with a ship on the Main. Zodick is hanged by the court of justice The secret eight (III, Kp. 13).
Interlocked with the first adventurous plot is the tragic story of the Jew David, who was excluded and despised by Christian society, and his family, whose members represent the various positions between consequent adherence to the religion of the fathers and assimilation to Christianity. The fifty-year-old merchant David lives when he is not traveling in the Judengasse between Main and Cathedral together with his law-abiding father Jochai (“Hold fast to the books of your fathers, to the law that came directly from him whom I did not speak out, and have you tasted the bitter fruit of the time, mix the wormwood of their memory now and then into the food of your children and grandchildren, so that they do not cease to plead to the Almighty, so that he finally fulfill his promise, and us the Messiah send the longed-for! "), his daughter Esther, who is dreaming in her golden prison of a life in Christian society together with Dagobert (" I am losing all pleasure in life, and the sinful thought has often occurred to me that it is at the end better to be a Christian on earth than… ”) and the Worms Zodick, who after seven years of loyal servants, as agreed between the families, is to become his son-in-law. In the Judengasse, for fear of robbery or looting, they hide their wealth, which they have acquired through trade and financial transactions, behind a poor house facade on the upper floors, while the ground floor, which is accessible to poor envious neighbors, is sparsely furnished (I, chapter 3). David is committed to the tradition of his fathers, but does not want to force his daughter to marry against her will and rejects the seedy Zodick because of his unsteady lifestyle. He now increasingly joins thieves and robbers who force him to be baptized and thwarts David's business, so that he moves with Esther to Konstanz for a while, where he lends money to Duke Friedrich (I, Chapter 10). Zodick is now spreading the rumor that David and Jochai ritually killed and buried a Christian child in their house. Therefore David is arrested in Constance and imprisoned with his father in Frankfurt. Dagobert accompanies Esther to Frankfurt, keeps her assets for her, a bond from Duke Friedrich, protects her from the mayor's access and hides her with his acquaintance Crescenz in Schellenhof outside the city (II, Kp. 4) and when she was there is tracked down by Zodick (II, Kp. 9, 13), in Regina von Dürningens Forsthütte near Friedberg (III; Kp. 4).
In the interrogation on Holy Saturday in the Römer before the chief judge, David and Jochai are heavily burdened by circumstantial evidence. The Christian maid Gretel truthfully reports on the short stay of a child in the house of her employer after David's return from Worms. Zodick builds his false statement on this (II, chapter 3) that the child's body was burned in the cellar. He quotes Jochai's question to him as to whether he had never heard of “that the heart of an underage boy from Mount Seir, torn by blessed hands on the night of the Amalekite Sabbath, was burned to dust, and on the evening of the festival of Haman in a holy place Did you enjoy wines, good luck, and bring you great wealth? ”As the villain out of disappointed love, Zodick is the parallel figure to Wallrade and purposefully pursues his diabolical plans. He poses as a friend to the Jews whom he has slandered, offers to buy them out if they reveal their gold hiding place to him, and tries to wear them down by telling them that Esther is Scrooge's lover. On the other hand, the prisoners are also put under pressure by the mayor (II, Kp. 7) with the accusation that witnesses “are also very well aware of having heard one of the main murderers use the name 'the Jew' and would Certainly recognize David face to face had he not always appeared to them then in an unrecognizable disguise ”. He cannot impress Jochai with this and the latter forces him to retreat by saying that he knows the defamations of the well poisoners and that his own family was the victim of a Jewish slaughter in Frankfurt with the grandfather of the chief judge as the perpetrator. Finally, in the court hearing, one of Margarethe's confessor's tactics brought about the solution: through the statement by Junker von Hülshofen that he had given a boy to David in Worms and that David, who recognized him as Dieter's son, had brought the child back to his parents both Jews acquitted of the charge of ritual murder (II, Kp. 14). Jochai dies in prison before his release, the court pardons David and banishes him from the city. By escaping, Zodick evades punishment for his false statements (III, Kp 2).
In the Dürninger forester's lodge, Dagobert, released from his vows, woos Esther. She should become a Christian, then they could get married. However, David exhorts them to carry out their duties to their father and religion. Esther is in a conflict. She loves Dagobert, has no more trust in her people and does not feel bound by the laws of her religion, but cannot see her father suffer, who has lost everything and has to travel around again. Therefore she renounces the beloved for earthly life, but not for paradise. David sees her grief and invents a story that she is the Christian child Marie, who his wife and his father have exchanged for the deceased child (III, Kp. 4). Shortly afterwards, however, after a long absence, her brother Ascher reveals David's information as a fairy tale. He also asks Esther why she actually wanted to switch to Christianity and why Dagobert, if he loved her, wouldn't become a Jew. That is the decisive factor and she disappears without a trace together with her brother (III, Kp. 5). Scrooge's hopes are thus destroyed. His cousin Fiorilla freed him from his bond with Esther during the Frankfurt Autumn Fair by false news that, at the will of the brother, she married the rich Jewish changer Joël von Lüttich, the bishop's right-hand man in money matters (III, chapter 11). But Esther has remained loyal to Dagobert, because Joël is Ascher. Like Esther, Dagobert also recognizes: “The gap was too great, even for the noblest and best, and to want to skip it was only the wish, the longing of a fiery, ruthless youth.” Soon afterwards he wed Regina, his second best and socially befitting love.
Compared to the historical situation, the novel ends quite conciliatory, but without idealization. In the last chapter (III, 14), David, whose spell has been lifted by the mayor, his daughter and son are welcome guests in the Frosch house, especially since the Jew in Hungary picked up the real Johannes Frosch who was kidnapped by beggars and is now the crowning glory of the festival presents. But the social division remains, as Esther explains at the end. "Two fathers, two mothers bless my decision, and the bad Jewess, who, she had gained her citizenship in this house through baptism, would still have remained in it, suddenly became a friend, a creature that one tolerates for the sake of her mind. I cannot praise the Lord gratefully enough, who has given me strength enough to roll a debt on myself in order to move you, dear Lord, to take the step which, suddenly separating us forever, had to lead your senses back into the circle of yours, your class, your duties. "But when she sees the happiness of the Frosch family, she can no longer bear the sight:" I can, I am not allowed to see this spectacle again! [...] I then feel that I am only a weak being of dust. "Turning to father and brother, she continues:" In your midst, let me be calm and happy in my duty, and let us escape from Frankfurt, where I can never breathe! "
Heinrich Heine The Rabbi of Bacharach
Heinrich Heine worked from 1824 to 1826 on the fragment of the historical novel Der Rabbi von Bacharach , which is partly set in Frankfurt's old town. The narrow streets and the parallel world of the Jewish quarter, alien to the author from his childhood in Düsseldorf, were the model for the novel setting for the second and third chapter. He had already been impressed by this district when he was a volunteer at the banker Rindskopff in 1815 and 1816, and he roamed it again in 1827 during his three-day visit to the city with his host Ludwig Börne . Heine moved the Jewish assimilation and identity debate in connection with anti-Semitism and the pogroms to the year 1486, when Maximilian was crowned king in Frankfurt.
In the first chapter, Rabbi Abraham discovers at the Passover festival in Bacharach am Rhein that a ritual murder of a Christian child is being blamed on him as a pretext for murdering the Jews and looting their property. That is why he and his wife Sara flee in a boat to the free imperial and trading city of Frankfurt. You walk through the main gate, past the shops with great offers to the market square. The day before, King Maximilian had watched a knight's tournament from the Roman's balcony. Then they enter the walled-off Jewish quarter on the Wollgraben through a gate. There Abraham takes part in a Sabbath service on the lower floor of the synagogue, while Sarah and the women watch the ceremony from the gallery (second chapter). Then they talk to the Spanish knight Don Isaak Abarbanel , whom Abraham knows from his studies in Toledo, in the third chapter, which Heine did not finish, in the cookshop of the Schnapper Elle . He is the counter figure to the protagonist and tells of the painful process of his turning away from Judaism, with which he still remembered childhood memories, the smells of the food and the longing for this phase of life ("and my soul melted like the tones of a nightingale in love") connect, as well as his ambivalent attitude towards Christianity and thus thematize reflections of the author: “Yes, I am a pagan, and just as disgusting as the arid, joyless Hebrews are the gloomy, torturous Nazarenes. Our Lady of Sidon, Saint Astarte , may forgive me for kneeling down before the painful mother of the crucified one and praying ... Only my knee and my tongue pays homage to death, my heart remained true to life! ... «. The rabbi criticizes this turning away from the faith of the fathers as the uprooting and loss of Jewish identity.
The time of the Reformation
Ines Thorn The Merchant's Daughter
Ines Thorn tells in the first volume of her family saga The Merchant's Daughter, the life story of the fictional Frankfurt merchant Bertram Geisenheimer during the Reformation, as the imperial city between the Catholic Emperor Charles V and the Archbishop of Mainz, on the one hand, and the Protestant camp around the Hessian Landgrave Philipp on the other hand, they had to pay large sums of money to the patrons who changed several times and had to change the dominant denomination. Corresponding to this political-religious dispute in Germany there were two rival factions in the city council occupied by the rich families, which intrigued against each other and used the conflict for their interests.
Bertram is at a disadvantage in this power struggle because he does not belong to the long-established patrician family of the Alten Limpurg Association . Because of his birth date on New Year's Eve 1499 to 1500 between the centuries, his superstitious father, the Taunus robber baron Wolf von Sauerthal, drives him out of the castle. Bertram (= shining raven) is trained by monks in the Marienthal monastery in the Rheingau and helps the merchant's son Ludovik Stetten, who was robbed by his father, to get his goods back (Kp. 1 and 2). For this, he takes the fifteen-year-old as an apprentice in his parents' trading house in Frankfurter Münzgasse (Kp. 4). He is now named after the monastery town of Geisenheimer and ambitiously pursues the goal of becoming a merchant to the upper class through diligence and cunning. He conscientiously carries out all orders, collecting information in the Roman halls about the range of goods and prices, trade routes from the producer to the sales market by land and water, expected grape harvests and timely storage or changes in purchasing behavior, e.g. B. by the velvet ban in the new dress code. The eighteen-year-old drills a hole in the floor of his room, listens to the conversations in the Stetten office and learns about their plans. For the banks of the Main Whore Irmelin he rents a room in a house Bornheimer to enable them to Pretty activist ascend and can attract affluent customers who aushorcht for Bertram. His news network is growing stronger and, after the stroke of old Stetten, he successfully runs the trading house for his son, who is less interested in business than in the good life, and who is popular with women. Ludovik sees himself as a humanistic esthete and woos Gutta Hellmund, who represents her brother Baptist, who is studying in Italy, in her father Walter's office. He speculates on her dowry, but she deliberately delays the decision in agreement with her father, who is skeptical of the business-unfit bon vivant. Bertram takes advantage of this situation. In contrast to the other higher daughters of the city, the self-confident girl who treated him kindly would be an adequate representative wife for him. He wants to qualify as a businessman on his own. As an authorized signatory at Stetten, he does business on his own account. When he found out about a death from the plague at the port (Kp. 11), he used this information advantage, borrowed money from the Jew Aaron in the Judengasse and used it to buy groceries in the Roman halls. After the disease became known, trade to the city was blocked, prices rose and Bertram sold at a profit. After the residents of the house next to Stetten fell ill and died and Gutta had indicated to him that she was not superstitious, he let Irmelin spread the rumor that the empty building was haunted. Bertram buys it cheaply and calls it Zum Raben . During a trip to Worms (Kp. 14) he was given suspicions that Landgrave Philipp von Hessen was planning a campaign against the Taunus knight Hartmut von Cronberg . He senses a war deal, borrows money from Aaron again and uses it to store wood. A year later (Kp. 18) he sells the wood to the landgrave in combination with craftsmen's services for building and repairing wagons, so that military equipment, food and other materials can be transported to the battlefield more quickly before the enemy can organize himself. After his victory, Bertram wins the prince's trust (Kp. 28), becomes his purveyor to the court and later campaigns in the city council to join the Protestant Schmalkaldic League . But he always only acts as a businessman, never as a politician, and always pays attention to the balance between performance and consideration. He also cleverly pursues his family planning. He confirms Ludovik in his conviction that a humanist has to be unbound and that marriage hinders his self-realization. Irmelin also spreads rumors that Gutta might have had an affair with the prince during Philip's stay in Frankfurt (Kp. 11) in order to devalue her as a wife for Ludovik. In 1522 Bertram achieved his goal. He married into a patrician family and was able to found his own dynasty, because his father-in-law gave him an expensive civil letter for the wedding as a prerequisite for a trading company. In Gutta, who is four years his junior, he loves the representative of a higher class, her noble appearance in public and the unusual interest in business for women of the time. For Gutta it is a calculated sympathetic marriage. She sees in the marriage with the enterprising upstart the chance to play a role not traditionally as a housewife, but as a clerk. Bertram later suffers from her cool arrogance and attempts to take the lead over her “dear boy”.
Bertram consistently combines political, social and business interests. Together with his father-in-law and his brother-in-law Baptist, he advocates the progressive strategy of trading companies that use the supra-regional gap between supply and demand without intermediaries. For example, he buys river fish in Worms, because the food order was changed there after the conversion to Protestantism and the prices fell, and transports them to Catholic regions with a large demand for fish. Confessionally, he remains ambivalent. When there was a Protestant guild riot in Sachsenhausen and the Neustadt on Easter Monday 1525 (Kp. 20), Bertram and his father-in-law paid two Lutheran pastors out of their own pocket. This avoids unrest in the conflict between the Archbishop of Mainz and the demands of the Frankfurt reformers. In return, Bertram becomes a Schöffe in the city council. There, however, he has a difficult position against the traditionally old-believing Limpurger. Ludovik uses this tension for his argument with his former apprentice and authorized signatory, who overtook him as a businessman. He is facing bankruptcy and blames Bertram for missing Gutta's dowry. He finds support from the patrician Hainbuch, who is married to the mayor's daughter. There is a lifelong exchange of blows between the rival groups, with losses on both sides. Some old citizens intrigue against the newcomer and unsettle his trading partners with false reports about his solvency. Bertram reacts to this and recruits Ludovik from the capable authorized officer Dietz, who is to run his branch in Leipzig. He wins back customers and takes over Ludovik's bankrupt business.
The situation changes due to the crisis in Geisenheimer's family life. After the birth of the three children Caritas, Falk, Konstanze and even worse due to the consumption disease Caritas and their death (cp. 21), Gutta withdraws from her husband. Bertram visits Irmelin again, who feels that he has taken advantage of him and accuses him of being pregnant by him. When the prostitute kills her newborn child, the affair becomes known and Bertram has to resign from the office of lay judge. In public, Gutta demonstratively sticks to him and accompanies him to the execution of Irmelin on the Gallusberg. Afterwards, on the advice of his father-in-law, Bertram disappears from view for some time and travels to his brother-in-law Baptist in Rome in order to organize business in Italy (cf. 23). There he witnessed the sacking of the city by imperial mercenaries. He fled Rome, founded a trading company with his brother-in-law in Florence, bought goods for Germany and ordered products at home that were needed in destroyed Rome. During his stay, he got to know the iron gall ink , had it made for office use in a monastery in the Wetterau region and developed a secret ink from it that could only be read by a chemical. In his absence, Ludovik takes revenge on his rival and uses Gutta's depression for a brief affair. After three months, the Irmelin affair has grown thick and Bertram is resuming business in Frankfurt. The relationship with Gutta is continued as a marriage of convenience. After Gero's birth, the two of them discuss their non-functioning family model (Chapter 26). Gutta confesses self-critically that she did not foresee her overload as a wife, mother, housewife and business woman and that she lacks the strength to be a lover. The two disagree on religious issues and the baptism of children, as they are on the upbringing of Constance. As a result of her own failed ideas of emancipation, Gutta wants to prepare the daughter for the traditional female role, while Bertram would like to let the four-year-old learn in the office, following the example of her mother.
The Geisenheimer-Stetten War continues. Ludovik, who is again insolvent, tries to disrupt Bertram's business. He gets his wife Angelika to steal Gutta Bertram's secret ink and his seal from her friend. With this he writes a letter to Emperor Charles V, in which Philip's bigamy plans are communicated. At the same time he gives the landgrave tips so that he can intercept the letter. Geisenheimer falls out of favor with Philipp and Stetten becomes purveyor to the court in his place. Bertram learns of his suspicions against him from his brother-in-law, is able to convince Philipp of his innocence through written samples and gets his position back. For reasons of family policy, in order not to have to disclose his wife's naivete and not to damage her or his reputation, he waives an indictment. But he has already prepared the counter-attack. After alluding to his wife's affair, he looks for a relationship with Stetten's maid Flora, who informs him about what is going on in the house. He buys Ludovik's promissory notes from Aaron. Since the latter cannot pay on the due date, he has to transfer the house and trading company to him (cf. 31). After Stetten hanged himself, Bertram took care of his destitute family in his commercial way. Ludovik's wife Angelika is married to his lover and fifteen-year-old daughter Margarethe for five years until he is reconciled with Gutta. He is married to his sixteen-year-old son Falk. You get the Stettenhaus, his mistress Angelika is allowed to live in the side wing for life. Forty-five year old Bertram is now at the height of his power (cp. 32). As one of the richest merchants in town, he owns more than ten houses. Falk has its own trading companies. Gero is studying law in Italy, doing money business and running an exchange office.
Geisenheimer's sudden decline begins a year later with the defeat of his patron Landgrave Philipp and the end of the Schmalkaldic League. In Frankfurt the mood is changing (cp. 33). The city is occupied by Dutch troops, and the emperor demands the submission and payment of more than a hundred thousand guilders for their withdrawal. Hainbuch and other Old Limpurgers blame Bertram for connecting the city to the federal government and want him to pay for it with his fortune. They seek an excuse for his arrest and accuse him of selling adulterated wine. The council has him jailed and his property confiscated. He is warned by his brother-in-law. He quickly married Konstanze to her lover, the Dutch silk weaver's son Jan van der Staade, who came to the city as an imperial mercenary. The two leave immediately and take the family's cash abroad. Nine years later they return as religious refugees and set up a silk weaving mill. Falk takes over the branch in Leipzig and later brings his wife and children to join him. Before his arrest, Bertram is reconciled with Gutta. Since her property is being confiscated, she now lives with Angelika and sells thread and embroidery in the market (Kp. 34). In four years she will have the twenty thousand guilders together to redeem her husband. He returned from captivity in the Netherlands at the age of fifty-two (cp. 35). At the end of the novel, the two get a second chance and are allowed to start all over again.
18th and 19th centuries
Goethe's youth in Frankfurt
Johann Wolfgang Goethe From my life. Poetry and truth
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived, interrupted by study or training stays in Leipzig, Strasbourg and Wetzlar or trips, from 1749 to 1775 in his native city. He tells his experiences and his development as a poet in his four-part autobiography From My Life. Poetry and truth .
In the first book of the first part he introduces his family and thus the upper-class socialization conditions. Some relatives play a role in the public life of the Free Imperial City : The maternal grandfather, Johann Wolfgang Textor , is a councilor , lay judge and, as a city schoolmaster, the highest-ranking judicial officer in Frankfurt, the father of the Imperial Council . The educated doctor of law has built a stately private library in his house on Hirschgraben with Latin and Italian, but also contemporary German writers. Since he can finance his family with the income from his wealth, he has time to teach Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia , or to organize private lessons with the children of the neighborhood. During the house renovation (1755), however, the son had to attend a public school.
On the first pages of his memoirs, Goethe vividly describes the historic cityscape, for example when walking across the Main Bridge to Sachsenhausen, from where he observes the unloading of the market ships with the help of the cranes. On market days he gets lost in the crowd between the stalls around the Bartholomäuskirche. During the tours on the city wall, he is impressed by the winding districts, the castle-like rooms from the earlier restless centuries that lie like small towns in the city: then again gates, towers, walls, bridges, ramparts, ditches that enclosed the new city is. In between, the "cleaning and show gardens of the rich" extend next to the "orchards of the citizen concerned for his benefit". Archduke Joseph's coronation as Roman King on April 3, 1764 is an outstanding experience for the fifteen-year-old. Wolfgang is impressed by the ceremonies: the arrival of the ambassadors, the entry of the princes of the empire and the pageant to the cathedral.
Another event is only touched upon by the author. Although Goethe saw the execution of the maid Susanna Margaretha Brandt after his return from Strasbourg in 1772 and at that time he dramatized the motifs of the abandoned lover and the murder of children in his Urfaust concept, in the fourth book he only deals with it in general in two sentences then to describe in detail a book burning: “Soon a great crime was discovered, its investigation and punishment put the city in turmoil for many weeks. We had to witness various executions, and it is well worth my being present when a book was burned. […] A French comic novel that […] did not spare religion and morals. "
Goethe's friends and acquaintances mainly belong to the upper class, but he also has contacts with young people of the middle and lower class who work as clerks or assistants for merchants. The fourteen-year-old joins a socially mixed society, which also includes a girl named Gretchen, with whom he falls in love. He recommends one of the young men to his grandfather Textor for employment, thereby unwittingly supporting a fraud, which gets him into trouble himself. Another love story takes the twenty-six year old to the palaces of the money aristocracy. However, the engagement to the banker's daughter Lili was dissolved again in 1775 for private reasons, the discrepancy between a life as a poet and a father, and family-political, the marriage strategies of the banking family.
Influenced by family and friends, Goethe took part in the various religious-philosophical and political discussions of his time. The earthquake in Lisbon on November 1, 1755 with the high number of deaths called into question the Christian image of God the Father. The friendship with Susanne von Klettenberg , on the other hand, gives rise to a pietistic image of the twenty-nine year old, who also reads mystical and alchemical writings during this time . The Seven Years' War divided Goethe's family into two camps: some, like his father, sympathized with the Prussians, others with the Habsburgs, e.g. B. the grandfather. The ten-year-old experienced the billeting of the French royal lieutenant, Count Thoranc, in his parents' house and the battle near Bergen on April 13, not far from the city , in which the French army repelled the attack by the North German regiments allied with Prussia.
Through the French officer's interest in art at home, Goethe also met painters from Frankfurt and the surrounding area: Friedrich Wilhelm Hirt, Christian Georg Schütz the Elder. Ä. , Johann Georg Trautmann , Johann Andreas Benjamin Nothnagel, Justus Juncker , Johann Conrad Seekatz , Philipp Hieronymus Brinckmann and later Georg Melchior Kraus and Philipp Hackert . He also encourages him to learn the French language and they attend theater performances. Mainly French comedies by Destouches , Marivaux , Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée , and Wolfgang reads, stimulated by this, in his father's library a. a. Corneille , Racine and Molière and studied Diderot's dramaturgy of naturalness. Through these experiences in and around Frankfurt, Goethe is well equipped for his political and literary career at the Fürstenhof in Weimar.
Karl Gutzkow The king's lieutenant
As a template for the comedy Der Königsleutnant , which was commissioned by the City Council of Frankfurt for the 100th birthday of Goethe. and was premiered on August 27, 1849 in the Frankfurt City Theater, Karl Gutzkow serves an episode about Count Thorane (= François de Thoranc) from the third book of Goethe's biography Poetry and Truth . The Lieutenant de Roi and head of the municipal civil administration was quartered in Goethe's house Grosser Hirschgraben during the occupation of the imperial city by French troops from 1759 to 1761. In the foreword, the author explains that Thorane and other people “if not completely, at least hinted at [are] given as they appear in [his] play. Alcidor is the Derones whose sister Wolfgang, who was so young and lovable, actually fell in love and in whom he really encountered that picture, as was a similar one with Thorane, a picture that he shared with him from the strange adventurers that were thrown romantic allusions was explained [...]. Thorane violates his own dueling laws. He could only allow himself to be carried away into a step that was doubly reckless for a general auditor of the army, probably only for reasons that were deeply connected with Goethe's description of his strange, tragicomic character. ”The framework of the comedy seems to correspond to Goethe's memories, including the different ones Upbringing methods and goals of the parents. Ms. Rat supports the son's contacts with the French theater troupe because he enjoys it and also learns French in the process, and, unlike her pragmatic husband, understands his fascination with literature. Even the officer Thorane, who is quartered in the house on Hirschgraben, notices his poetic talent and sees a kindred spirit in the boy. Together they recite Wolfgang's poem “With a painted volume”. As an art collector, Thorane gives commissions to Frankfurt painters and the Darmstadt Seekatz.
Gutzkow builds on this core with typical comedy characters and situations for his "joke", invents new people or changes the names to identify the fictional character, and incorporates a poem into the Belinde plot that was written later during the Sessenheim period constructs a background story for the king's lieutenant and the French actors: the curious and opportunistic professor Mittler tells Frau Rat the secrets of her son he has observed, in which the maid Grete is privy to as messenger. This in turn has a love affair with Thorane's loyal adjutant Mark and in the end follows him to France as his wife. The eloquent Wolfgang, around ten years old, argues like a student and skillfully plays the role of translator between the Germans and the French, who repeatedly misunderstand them because of language problems. The count is not only an irascible patriot, but also an educator of the Germans to a cultivated social behavior: He has the melancholy mood pictures commissioned by the rival artists work together to strengthen their sense of community: “In a time when the Nations are in bloody wars against each other, people should be good friends through the const. The kings should give them a beautiful, great example for kings all over the world, knowing that this earth is destined for the happiness and peace and love of all mankind. And that's why you should always paint all five together on one picture, so that you can give good examples, only nod for the people who only look at them, in order to improve their ore and their feelings. Eh bien! Commencez, messieurs! Soyez unis! (Put a few hands together.) “(3rd act, 5th appearance). After this collaboration has been successful in some works, the constraint is lifted again in the last scene. Now Edmund René de Thorane gives the painters artistic freedom with the further pictures: “The pictures are guaranteed, you can paint on them for as long as you want. But you, my advice, I was angry because we had two views in politics, but the peoples, who must be enemies in politics, should be reconciled through royalty and knowledge, and then I found one in your house Such a beautiful love of painting, such a patriotic enthusiasm for the German nation and such a talented genius from your son, also - a woman of such - grace and virtue - so ik will now take my farewell to you all forever - my farewell in the Love and friendship. My Erren, I will leave Frankfort. ”(4th act, 19th appearance).
There is some tension before the conciliatory final scene. For example, the enraged Thorane Rat wants to bring Goethe to court martial because of his sympathy for the Prussians, but ultimately does not. The central conflict plot, however, is the unhappy love affair with Belinde. Wolfgang is jealous of the Count from the start because his crush, who pretend to be Alcidor's sister, often mumbles the word "Thorane" to himself. His suspicions are confirmed when he discovers a portrait of the actress with the French and when he duels with Alcidor in the moat, where they wound each other. Their rivalry dates back to the past and is the cause of the misogynist officer's sadness. Alcidor and Belinde play theater under false names in Frankfurt. The girl's name is Heloise de Vautreuil and was taken into his castle by Thorane's father as an orphan. After his death Edmund wanted to marry his adoptive sister. But soon afterwards the bride fell in love with Jean Desiré Gaston Marquis Boissy d'Anglade et de Vasmenil and fled abroad with him.
Wolfgang wants this story to end like a moral and aesthetic work of art with love and reconciliation: “The source of true poetry is life! The spirit has no other school than the world! ”(Act 4, last appearance). Through his mediation, Thorane forgives the guilty Heloise, now takes on the role of father for her and Alcidor and moves with them, as he has to say goodbye as an officer because of the duel, to his castle in France, which is decorated with the pictures of the German painters.
Ruth Berger Gretchen
Ruth Berger's historical novel Gretchen uses the example of Susanna Margaretha Brandt's ordeal to understand how a pregnant, unmarried woman could become a child murderer through her tragic personal and social constellation. The author contrasts this portrait, based on the court records, with the situation of Wolfgang and Cornelia Goethe, who were around the same age, and their upper-class friends, thus drawing a picture of society in the Free Imperial City in the 18th century.
Using the biographies of her three sisters, who are more than ten years older, Susann can classify her perspectives. Before they married, they worked in merchant households, where they are very popular because of their reliability, married craftsmen or soldiers, look after their children and supplement their income with jobs as seamstresses, ironers and laundresses. Dorothea (Dorette) is the most successful. Her master carpenter Hechtel has a house in Predigergasse, while Ursula (Ursel) lives with Tambour König in a small apartment in Alte Gasse in the north of the city, where the unmarried Käthe also has a room. Susann's life, on the other hand, is quite changeable. As the youngest child, after the death of her parents, she had to leave the neighborhood school at the age of eight. Her sisters looked after her and, through recommendations from her masters, helped her to find jobs, e.g. B. in Mainz or with the de Barys in Frankfurt, which did not last long. She grabs diligently, but she is considered defiant and cheeky, does not tolerate any legitimate and certainly no unjustified criticism and reacts to it uncontrollably, choleric. So the unsteady Susann must be happy that Dorette is accommodating her in the hostel Zum Einhorn on the Staufenmauer at the Judenbrücklein at the gate to the Judengasse south of the Konstablerwache. There she works for the widow farmer as a cook and housemaid.
Susann is twenty-four years old at the beginning of the plot and is under marital pressure. Some of the girl's dreams of advancement have not come true and she experiences the social dividing lines every day: She fell in love with the twenty-one-year-old son of the merchant family Johannes (Jean) de Bary, but was hardly noticed by him. Then she dreams of marrying the widow Bauer's inn and hopes for the benevolence of the landlady, who values her hard-working cook. Their son Christoph tries to seduce Susann, but she knows that he visits Lieschen Körbelin at night and that a girl has to be careful with premarital contacts. She would like to marry a craftsman or merchant and have a family of her own like her sisters and is afraid of losing this chance of a civil life through having an illegitimate child and a bad reputation. In this context, Susann considers the conflict of possibly entering into a secret sexual relationship in order to bind the boyfriend with the expectation of a later marriage, as probably her sister during their long engagement and Lieschen, who was married as a pregnant bride in February 1771, or nothing risking and possibly missing an opportunity.
In this phase of disappointments and without any concrete relationship, their tragedy begins in November 1770 with the arrival of two guests at the hostel (first part Lapsa est Stumbled). The Jewish jewelry dealer Jontef and the Dutch journeyman goldsmith Jan van Gelder stop in Frankfurt on their trip to Poland and Petersburg, respectively. Susann serves them both in the dining room. Jan, a tall, handsome man her age dressed in an attractive blue skirt and burgundy vest, jokes with her, compliments her and asks her about the city. He wants to sell jewelry here and work for a goldsmith in Neue Kräme for some time to earn money for the onward journey. He also informs himself about the service in the Reformed Church in Bockenheim. Susann also belongs to this denomination and he asks her if he can accompany her, but she is on duty this Sunday, the first Advent. After his return he has the food brought to his room and tells Susann about his excursion over wine. He's met people she knows, of course. Mrs. de Bary and her sister-in-law Mrs. von Stockum and even her sister Ursel, laundry and sewing lady at Stockums, with her husband König. During the funny chat, Susann is completely dazed by the unfamiliar wine, sex ensues and Jan gives her strings of pearls afterwards. She hopes for a bond and asks him if she can come to Petersburg with me. But he takes it as a joke. She felt rejected and from then on avoided his presence until he left the Darmstädter Hof on the Zeil in December for Leipzig. Since she has a short menstrual period after the affair, she is reassured that her misstep has been without consequences. Jan leaves a message for her that she cannot read, and so she keeps dreaming of his return to one of the trade fairs.
Her suffering begins with the first signs of pregnancy (second part Impraegnata Pregnant). She tries to explain her missing menstrual period as a congestion of blood as a result of a shock through a violent argument with her colleague Christiane. When their body size increases and this is noticed in public, the landlady and sisters are concerned about their good reputation. In mid-April, Dorette asked Susann whether the rumors were true that she was pregnant. She could not come to her in an emergency, because Hechtel does not want an illegitimate child in his house, especially since she would lose her place in the unicorn because of her dishonor. She should name the lover, marry him or demand alimony from him. For moral, business and legal reasons, Mrs. Bauerin also fears the talk that Susann prostituted herself in her house with one of the Jewish guests. In addition, since a pregnant maid becomes increasingly less resilient, she requires an examination by the sisters. Ever since Susann felt the child's movements, she's been vacillating between repression and fear. She has no one to confide in. It is too late for a relatively safe abortion anyway, and she lacks the money to give birth in the country and hand the child over to a farming family. So she denies the affair with Jan until the end and insists on her increasingly unbelievable version of the blood clot. She knows that she cannot care for an infant on her own, is hoping for a premature stillbirth and is thinking of suicide by jumping out of the dormer hole three floors below. Everyone is interested in the cover-up and is shifting responsibility. The doctors notice that too. So Dr. Metz still in June out of an obligation to the landlady, although he has concerns and does not physically examine the patient, a means of promoting menstruation. The early July by Dr. Johann Philipp Burggrave , who actually worked as the primary general practitioner of the Goethe family , examined the urine sample in St. Gallusgasse without a clear result, is interpreted by Dorette Hechtelin to the landlady as proof of Susann's innocence, she even brings the journeyman from surgeon Taubert into the unicorn to drain her sister and, citing Burggrave, rejects all slander. Ms. Bauerin likes to believe that, but demands that Susann must disappear from her inn until her "recovery" and the onset of menstruation, then she can work for her again. She doesn't want a birth in her house, so she quits her cook on July 31 and hires Margret Seyfried as her successor. This puts Susann in a hopeless position, because nobody wants to burden themselves with her now.
On August 1st, she went into labor suddenly, dragged herself into the laundry room, strangled her child in panic and frenzy after a fall birth before it could scream, and hid the body in the stable under the straw. She tells her sisters that she's bleeding again, and Kathe lets her stay with her. The next day she confesses the truth to Dorette and Ursel and flees to Mainz, where she believes she is safe from persecution. From there she wants to go into hiding and look for work somewhere. But the next day she returns to Frankfurt without money with a remorse of conscience, is arrested at Bockenheimer Tor and first taken to the Hauptwache, then to the women's prison in the Katharinenturm on Heumarkt and finally, because of her condition, to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit . This quick arrest occurs because the sisters and the landlady, after Susann's disappearance, were afraid of being accused as accomplices of child murder. Frau Bauerin washes away the traces of blood and Ursula König reports the crime. All three claim to have known nothing about the pregnancy before the birth (third part Inculpata accused). The child's corpse is dissected in the hospital for the Holy Spirit , and severe head injuries and strangling marks are found. It was only during the second interrogation, when she was confronted in the hospital with the body exhumed in the Schandfriedhof of Gutleuthof , where Susann was buried after the beheading, that she confessed to the murder, described the process in all gruesome details and stated that the devil had it driven them to it. This confession is a prerequisite for the death sentence on January 10, 1772, to bring the child murderer "to the hideous example with the sword from life to death" (p. 399). Her defense attorney, the Adcocatus Ordinarius MC Schaaf, can argue that her boy died as a result of the fall birth, but she did not notice it in the dark and in a panic choked a corpse and hit its head against a barrel, the syndicists and Susanns could not convince Do not prevent execution. The Lutheran pastor Willemer works with her on the question of guilt and, after confession and repentance, promises her eternal life together with her child. As a result, she also has the hope of staying alive through the pardon, but the council rejects it because of the brutality of the act (Part Four Condemnata Condemned). In the novel, Susann's tragic fate is reinforced by the fact that three hours after the execution Jan comes to the inn and asks about Susann. The Jewish tenant Löb Bonum Zacharias, who represented Susann at the bar on the afternoon of love, guessed the connections after the pregnancy symptoms and, when he met him in the Judengasse in June, asked the jewelry dealer Jontef to inform Jan of this in Petersburg.
Susann's tragic story is contrasted with the sheltered family situation of Wolfgang and Cornelia Goethe in inserted sections. The 20-year-old Cornelie, who was perfectly prepared for a bourgeois marriage by her father in the house at Zu den Drei Lier, is also of marriage age and, like her friends, is looking for a good match, but she suffers from the compulsion and expectation of her parents. The author lets the two young women meet each other. In mid-June 1771, the Goethe daughter with a complicated tower hairstyle made by Perruquier Lobenstein and her friends promenade in front of the All Saints' Gate and go through the still or unbound, good-looking and / or rich men of the city with them. The visibly pregnant Susann comes towards them and has to accept the mocking remarks of the higher daughters, etc. a. the beautiful Lisette von Stockum, who was engaged to Jean de Bary of all people. Cornelia is embarrassed. She thinks: "Someone is even more unhappy than me [...] at the same moment the maid looks up and as she passes her eyes for a second. Cornelia [...] feels somehow seen through and at the same time soiled by the look of the probably dissolute maid, as if it had been a moment of secret mutual recognition between her and the despised. "(P. 196)
Wolfgang Goethe's interest in the Brandin case has both a private and a literary component. He returned from Strasbourg on August 14, 1771 as a licentiate in law when Susann was still in the hospital after her confession. In Sesenheim he said goodbye to his lover Friederike Brion , whom he left behind in the belief that she was his fiancée and that he would bring her to Frankfurt. Apparently it was only after his suicide note and her reproachful reply in November that he only used her and never wanted to marry that he realized the suffering he plunged her into, and he felt guilty for her misfortune. Now he is projecting Susann's situation onto Friederike and thereby processing his love betrayal in literary terms in the Faust tragedy projected at the time . His and Cornelia's friend Georg Schlosser , who has access to the files at the jury's court, informs him about the course of the proceedings . The three also observe the beheading of the delinquent, who appears in a white dress with black ribbons, on January 10, 1772 on the square between the Hauptwache and Katharinenkirche. Wolfgang watches this play for “poetic reasons”. In the discussion of the friends about the verdict, he pleads against a pardon and speaks of the "inner logic": Atonement, complete settlement of guilt requires that an act be erased by the "identical process on the perpetrator" (p. 417).
Dialect poetry
Karl Ludwig Textor, Carl Balthasar Malß, Johann Wilhelm Sauerwein, Friedrich and Adolf Stoltze
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Frankfurt literature was influenced by dialect poetry. In their poems, the authors glossed over local events and personalities and, in their comedies, use characters typical of popular theater to create everyday conflict situations that take place in well-known locations in the city.
An example of this is the Schwank Alt-Frankfurt (1887) by Adolf Stoltze , which was played before 1866 . The focus of the piece is a love affair in the middle-class area of tension between the specialty shop owner and the green grocer or Ebbelwoi seller. Heinrich, the twenty-five-year-old son of the grocer Hieronymus Muffel and his wife Euphrosine, who was educated by their medical library, and Leonore (Lorchen) Funk, the daughter of a vegetable market woman and Sachsenhausen cider landlady, love each other. However, Heinrich's parents have other plans. They want to marry their son to the eighteen-year-old Compagnons daughter Agathe Schnippel, who has just returned from boarding school and performs French idioms and loves the theater. When the grouches find out about the love affair, they try to disrupt this connection (3rd picture). Lore, who helps her mother in the business, feels rejected as befitting her class and confidently renounces her lover (5th picture). Heinrich's parents believe they have achieved their goal with the engagement party (6th picture). But her son and Agathe only made an appearance. Because parallel to Muffel's plans, a counter-act has developed. Agathe does not want to become a merchant's wife, feels called to be an actress (2nd picture) and leaves the disturbed engagement guests to join a traveling stage. However, she is disillusioned with her soulmate friend, the hairdresser Theophil Haspel, and brought back from a smear theater in Langen to the middle-class camp. At the Wäldchestag at the Oberforsthaus (7th picture), which was ended by a thunderstorm, and the next day at the vegetable market on the Römerberg (8th picture), all those involved meet and dissolve the confusion. The pragmatic parents finally accept the feelings of the lovers, especially since they are now taken with the clever Lorchen. There is also a happy ending for Agathe: her future husband Theophil gets a job as an office servant and apprentice at Muffel & Comp. Finally, Lorchen's mother is taken over into the household of the son-in-law. Euphrosine is supposed to teach the woman from Sachsenhausen, as the punchline of the swank, the standard German.
Friedrich Karl Ludwig Textor , a cousin of Goethe, caricatured in the posse Der Prorector (1794) the Latin and Greek teacher Scherbius , who was different from the shrewd secondary school students at Frankfurt grammar school , v. a. Textor himself, repeatedly tempted to moralizing instructions and distracted from the class. This play is considered to be the earliest surviving dialect poetry.
Johann Wilhelm Sauerwein also wrote humorous plays, e.g. B. Frankfurt, how it lives and feels . The Lizius song sung to the melody “I am the Doctor Eisenbarth ” is of supraregional importance . Bernhard Lizius and other revolutionary students planned in 1833 to occupy the Bundestag in Frankfurt as the starting point for a revolution in Germany. In the so-called Frankfurter Wachensturm , they attacked the main guard and the constable guard on April 3. However, their onslaught was put down by the militia. The arrested Lizius managed to escape from the Konstabler Wache prison on the Zeil. Sauerwein's mocking poem about the guard Schnitzspahn, who represents the surprised police, is about this coup ("Break the bars, the box - and with a rope / lets himself down on the Zeil").
Carl Balthasar Malß ' comedy in Frankfurt dialect The Kidnapping or the Old Citizen Capitain is set in 1814 during the wars of liberation . The innkeeper Kimmelmeier mourns the past imperial city era, when there was a citizen company in every district, which was led by a captain and performed tasks of the military, the police and the fire department. He still bears the title, but is now only, with the support of Leibschütz Müller, as a well master responsible for fire protection and billeting the soldiers stationed in Frankfurt. His tavern is a meeting place for the "Frankforter Berjer". The author characterizes or caricatures individual originals who chat in "the poetic Frankfurt way" (p. 96) about daily events, exchange news about the neighbors as well as fluffy rumors from the city and the war against France.
The focus of the comedy plot are two love relationships that are typical of popular theater and rejected by the father. Kimmelmeier's pious and virtuous daughter Lieschen wants to marry poor August Weigenand. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis and does not yet have a job. Therefore he is not acceptable as a son-in-law. He first has to operate the pump vigorously in the event of a major fire “regardless of his studies”, improve the fire-fighting organization with his “clever head”, and, at risk of death, rescue councilor Hinkelbach from her house in order to gain the respect of the down-to-earth landlord. In addition, the garden shed in front of the Eschenheimer Tor presented to him by the Privy Council as a reward is a welcome bridal gift. In contrast to this happy relationship is an affair that takes up a topic of the bourgeois tragedy : the inappropriate and therefore usually not legalizable relationship between a nobleman and a girl from the bourgeoisie: Lieschen's fun-loving and frivolous cousin Gretel secretly leaves the house of her uncle and guardian and leaves with her lover, the Freikorps-Cornet from Daxowitz in the direction of Friedberg. He has to get out of town because his officer status is questioned in the district office and they suspect him to be a cheater. So he persuades the girl to come with him and pretends to take her with him to his property and to marry there against his father's will despite the difference in class. Despite Lieschen's warnings about the dishonorable intentions of the Cornet, she believes his promises, but already in Vilbel regrets her adventure and returns to the family with the riders sent on by the captain.
The most famous dialect poet is Friedrich Stoltze with the often quoted sentences from his self-confident, ironic poem Frankfurt (1880): "Un es will merr net in my head: / how can nor e man be from Frankfort!"
German Confederation
Wilhelm Raabe Owl Pentecost
Wilhelm Raabe's story Eulenpfingsten , published in Westermann's monthly magazine in 1875 , takes place in Frankfurt on May 22, 1858, a Saturday at Pentecost, and deals with a family conflict that is triggered by an actually insignificant honor controversy (3rd chapter). Legation councilor Alexius von Nebelung insulted the birthplace of his neighbor, the Grand Ducal Darmstadt Commerce Councilor Florens Nürrenberg, who was a tobacco manufacturer in Höchst until 1850 (Rottweil was a donkey stable) and his deceased princely employer (Alexius the thirteenth was a herring). The dispute radiates on their secretly engaged children Katharina (Kätchen) and Elard (professor of aesthetics in Heidelberg) (4th chapter). After the disputes, the main story begins: While Nürrenberg calmly waits for the development in his house and foresees the calming of the minds (8, 9. Kp.), The unfortunate Kätchen complains of his aunt Karoline's suffering and fog and Elard grazes from the bells Whitsun bells accompanied, churned through Frankfurt and think about the situation. (6, 7, 11. Kp.) Both exaggerate their situation literarily, the Legation Councilor in Sachsenhausen with Wandrer's Sturmlied (6. Kp), the well-read professor on his way, which, contrary to his usual habit, ends in an Oberrad cider tavern, with Goethe's contradicting feelings of love for Lili Schönemann and the philosophical question: “What is man? […] What a raw Doric paean of passion and soul! O Käthchen, Käthchen! ... "(7th cp.).
The neighbors' and lovesicknesses, which eventually dissolve again ("disdainful critics will probably call this the ordinary novel apparatus"), is connected to the revival of a relationship that failed for political reasons in the period of March thirty years ago. The review begins with the arrival of Nebelung's sister Karoline (Line) from New York. The fact that she is not picked up by her brother, but by his daughter at the Main-Weser train station (1. Kp.), Has to do with her repudiation by her noble family, which is presented in a parallel tour in the 6th Kp. From two perspectives . While Kätchen and Aunt Line drove through the Gallustor, along the Main, past the Allerheiligentor, Metzgertor, Obermaintor to the apartment in Hanauer Landstrasse, where they were telling their stories (2, 5. Kp), the Legation Councilor looked for one accompanied by spirits of revenge instead Hike through Sachsenhausen, on the Darmstädter Landstrasse, to gain time and to remember. He is amazed "how sharp and clear every detail of that memorable night emerged from the darkness." (6th chapter) In the restaurant at the Isenburger (Sachsenhausen) Warte, the second person involved in the events of the time appears to complete the picture of the past: Linas Friend Fritz Hessenberg. Nebelung has a guilty conscience towards both his sister and Fritz. "It's a phantasmagoria too," muttered the Legation Councilor. “I also lack all ground under my feet. Good God, and I was always an exact person who walked slowly but surely, and now everything is in disorder and confusion! ”: In his youth, in the royal seat of Prince Alexius von Anhalt-Bernburg, democratic ideas met aristocratic structures and shook them the Nebelung family. The law student and fraternity member Fritz Hessenberg, who had been expelled from various universities and was friends with the Börne reader Karoline, was the politically most disreputable resident of the city. The police arrested him one night for demagogic activities and confiscated his revolutionary anti-German papers. Line defended her friend defiantly in front of her parents and stood by her convictions of a parliamentary monarchy : “[I] ch and Fritz, we also founded the German republic and wanted to put His Highness [meaning Alexius the thirteenth] at the top as German emperor - We took our word for it, and Fritz has a ring with a lock of hair from me. ”The case of his fellow student was not unexpected for the system-loyal brother and he approved the exclusion of the nineteen-year-old from the aristocratic family. As a legal scholar respected in higher circles, he even recorded the trial of the treason and later went to Frankfurt as secretary of his envoy to the Bundestag of the German Confederation . Line's mother threw the rebellious daughter out of the house and sent her to Aunt Nebelbohrer in Bernburg. From there her independent path led via Petersburg to America. She worked as a governess and society lady and expanded her national horizons to include works of world literature ( Tristram Shandy ), while Kätchen continued the family tradition with entertainment novels from the lending library and singing German folk songs to the piano. (6th cp.). Fritz was sentenced to several years of imprisonment, then emigrated to the free Switzerland, learned the tannery trade and built a prosperous leather business in Romanshorn. The widowed father of three children, as he tells Alexius ironically, is happy that the judge pushed him from his law degree to the trade. But he criticizes the conservatism and the political immobility of Nebelung and predicts a social change in Germany. “For such a diplomatic skin, such a federal envoy skin, of course, a very special tan deserves. Well, there will probably come a tanner in Germany who knows how to deal with you; and, you know, I think it must be someone from your own nice company, someone who really understands the clique. ”(10th chapter).
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The humorous, ironic story with satirical features closes with a happy group picture. Nebelung and Hessenberg run at dusk from the inn at Lerchesberg (10th cp.) Together with Elard, who was met on the way ("The gods, who loosen and bind, separate and unite, led him back to the gate of Sachsenhausen at the right moment" 11. Kp) tipsy through Fahrgasse, Predigergasse, Allerheiligentor in Hanauer Landstrasse: “It was certain that this old Frankfurt am Main was enchanted; d. H. nothing seemed to stand firmly in its place in it, namely the three brave German men who sneaked into the sacred area of the towered city from the great outdoors, but each of them had his own worm in his heart. "(12th chapter) . There Elard makes up with Katchen. In the second, a little less exuberant happy ending, the emigrants Fritz and Karoline finally get together.
The authorial narrator seems to be looking back on the sins of the past with a transfigured look , but the title already indicates contradictions: between happiness and misfortune, nobility and bourgeoisie, the pragmatic tobacco manufacturer Nürrenberg ("It is we who the foolish rabble, society, We give the cigar the scent! The factory owner, the dear Lord, relies on us alone. "8th ct.) and his low-income son (" Yes, philosophy ?! At that moment, he completely abandoned his physiognomy To have studied medicine and to be the head of an asylum for nervous disorders was the only thing that could help at this moment. ”11th chapter), old and new, ideal and reality. On the other hand, Karoline Katchen speaks to her of the owl claws in the family coat of arms and of their change to the “most personal nobility”: Alexius “was born as a Nebelung and has always proven himself to me as such, and will - must have remained a Nebelung. Among other things, what I am now experiencing about him speaks in favor of the latter […] I have all the family features in the coat of arms - cat's claws, owl claws et une langue mechante [blasphemous tongue], everything in the yellow field; but behind it I sit, just me, and see out of my eyes. […] O dear me, your papa received the personal nobility with the Alexius Order; but I have possessed the most personal nobility for as long as I can remember ”(5th cp.).
Horst Wolfram Geißler The last Biedermeier
Geissler's historical novel The Last Biedermeier , published in 1916, tells of an ambivalent triangular relationship against the background of the political changes between 1836 and 1848 (see Frankfurt National Assembly ), which the author in connection with local events (e.g. Germanist conference in Römer) and Has incorporated personalities (including Schopenhauer) into the plot.
The young protagonists have been close friends from childhood, but they are separated by a one-sided, unrequited love chain: Wilhelm <Babette <Peter. The resulting tensions are overlaid by different ideas about life. Wilhelm is the son of the silk merchant König. The senator and supporter of the Greater German Party wants to preserve Frankfurt's freedom in the old small-state structures of the German Confederation and has therefore long resisted the city's connection to the Zollverein , in contrast to Babette's father, the merchant and city councilor van Hees. Nevertheless, both families are friends with each other in private and like to see their children's connection. They hike together to the Gerbermühle, meet on Whitsunday, the Wäldchestag, in the city forest and celebrate parties in the apartments on the Mainkai (König) or in the Zeil next to the Konstablerwache (van Hees). During the summer the patricians lead a Biedermeier life in the Königs am Röderberg's rose house, which is surrounded by vineyards, with a beautiful view over the city and the Maine plain (Van Hees: "A happy country! How it blooms and shimmers - a garden of paradise! And you [King ] Glückskind can see this every day ”, p. 17). Here Peter Kraft, the son of a seamstress, is involved in the friendship of the two merchant's children. Music is played and Wilhelms' private teacher, Jean Feldbecher, a master's and Schopenhauer devotee, writes a fairy tale for Christmas, for which Peter paints the scenery. Wilhelm plays Prince Robert of Arcadia, Babette, Princess Elise of Paphlagonia, symbolic of her roles in later life. Peter the brave knight Amadis and Feldbecher the old magician Merlin. It is a cultural, Arcadian parallel society, separated from the city in a time of serious political changes.
The contrasts become essential for Peter in particular. König finances the talented boy to train as a painter and helps him to get municipal commissions that make him famous. The employment as court painter for the Landgrave von Homburg brings the republican into a conflict of conscience. He only accepts the job in order to advance socially and to propose to Babette. At the end of the novel, after his patriotic-revolutionary speech on the Pentecostal pasture and the failed uprising of the September Revolution of 1848 , he has to flee abroad with the help of his friends. Wilhelm, dubbed the “Prince of Arcadia ” by the narrator after his theatrical role , followed the discussions with Peter in the republican “riot box”, but he himself remained skeptical, held back on political actions and preferred to study cultural history with his master's degree. Without feeling called to it, he learns the business deal with his father and eventually becomes his representative in negotiations in Paris and London. He cannot share Babette's love for him. He has traumatic memories of the scandal surrounding the death of the Jewish bookkeeper Ludwig Bruch, who fell in love with the capricious girl at a ball in the casino on Roßmarkt and threw himself under the train after she was rejected from the railroad to Mainz. Instead, Wilhelm has various love affairs in the rural surroundings of the city, e.g. B. in the Hessian town of Bockenheim. Only after he has come to terms with the past does he become engaged to Babette, shortly before his tragic death at the end of the novel. In the Schmidt nursery on Bornheimer Heide he happened to be the victim of a revolutionary shot at the fleeing Prussian MP Felix von Lichnowsky . The ball hits him right in the chest: "And sweet, wonderful roses, red roses of autumn spread soft and fragrant over the last prince of Arcadia" (p. 376).
The end of the Free City in 1866
Alexandre Dumas the Elder Ä. La Terreur Prussienne
Historical background of the anti-Prussian feature novel La terreur prussienne (The Prussian Terror) by Alexandre Dumas the Elder, which appeared in the Paris political magazine La Situation in 1867 and 1868 . Ä. is the German War of 1866. The occupation of the neutral city of Frankfurt and the tyranny of the victors is for the author an act of arbitrariness against freedom. Places of action are next to the Mainstadt v. a. Berlin (Kp. 1 - 4, 41), Hanover (Kp. 5 - 14), Paris (Kp. Èpilogue ) and the battlefields of Langensalza (Kp. 22-24) and Aschaffenburg (Kp. 27-28). In the historical framework with authentic events and names (see The End of the Free City ), an invented family history, formulated in the sentimental-pathetic style typical of the time, is incorporated.
The effects of the political conflict provoked by Count Bismarck (caricatured as Le comte Edmond de Bœsewerk ) between Prussia, Austria and the German Confederation are concentrated in the novel on a Frankfurt family of French origin. In the crisis situation, this comes into conflict with the opposing parties. The two beautiful daughters Emma and Helene von Chandroz love honorable officers from the two camps: Baron Friedrich von Below and Count Ludwig-Karl von Freyberg, who are friends with each other, but who are patriotically loyal to go to war as enemies. The Frankfurt plot reflects the various stages of private and military development. Friedrich, whose Prussian regiment was stationed in a garrison in Frankfurt before the war, met the twenty-year-old Emma in the house of Mayor Fellner and got married soon after (Kp. XV. Le baron Frédéric de Below ). In the 16th chapter ( Hélène ) he returns from a business trip to Berlin and a respectably lost sword duel in Hanover (Kp. XI. Le coup de manchette ) against the French painter and world traveler Bénédict Turpin, a radiant superhero in the tradition of other Dumas - Novels, with slashed arm back to his wife and little son in the stately Passavantsche house on the corner of Rossmarkt across from St. Katharinen Church. There, although he actually wanted to advertise Benedict, who had been friends with him since the duel, to his eighteen-year-old sister-in-law, he promoted the hitherto hidden and not yet declared love of Helene and the Styrian Count Karl (Kp. XVII. Le comte Karl de Freyberg ) Daylight. Their marriage is agreed in the presence of the grandmother Madame von Beling after the end of the war that was already looming (Kp. XVIII. La grand'maman ). Before the Prussian and Austrian troops withdrew from the neutral city on June 12th, Friedrich and Karl took their leave on the Zeil and vowed not to fight each other personally. Afterwards, Helene and her boyfriend promise each other in the Liebfrauenkirche not to want to live without the other. Then she observes from Mayor Fellner's apartment, where guests of the family speculate about the potential of the opponents and the victors of the war (Kp. XXI. Autrichiens et Prussiens ), the popular procession of Austrians from the Carmelite monastery to Hanau train station. The Prussians, on the other hand, leave the city with the Main-Weserbahn (Kp. XX. Le départ ) without expressing any sympathy .
After the Prussian army advanced on the unfortified Frankfurt after the capitulation of Hanover and the citizens who feared the course of the war (Kp. XXV. Ce qui se passait à Francfort dans l'intervalle de la bataille de Langensalza et de celle de Sadowa ), fear an occupation, an Austrian brigade and a federal corps with soldiers from Baden, Wuerttemberg and Hesse are supposed to stop the "cuckoo" before they nestle in foreign nests. The fighters are supported by the population, u. a. the mayor's family, too, were given a friendly welcome before they left (Kp. Le repas libre ). Count Karl also takes part in the campaign with a Styrian Free Corps, which Benedict Turpin has joined, and says goodbye to his fiancée in the Chandroz house. She sees her lover a month later after the lost battle at Aschaffenburg, severely injured unconscious among many dead, after Benedict brought her the “testament of his heart” (Kp. XXVIII. L'exécuteur testamentaire ) and brought her to the battlefield. During the night they transport the wounded man by boat to Frankfurt for medical treatment and care with the Chandroz.
In the following chapters the author interrupts the Helene Karl plot and tells the course of the occupation of Frankfurt in July 1866 (Kp. XXXI. Les Prussiens à Francfort to Kp. XXXIV. Les menaces du général Manteuffel ) and the Prussian reign of terror mentioned in the title : The billeting of the soldiers in private houses on July 16 and their supply of food and clothing. The requisition of horses and carriages. The death of the editor of the Post-Zeitung Fischer during an interrogation. The arrest of some council members. The demands of city commanders Falkenstein and Manteuffel to the mayor Fellner and the Senate. The threat to pillage and bombard the city if refused.
In the last third of the novel, the tragic development hits the Chandroz family and their friends. After he returned to his family unharmed and was shocked by the brutal demeanor of his colleagues, Friedrich von Below advocates a mitigation of the high demands of his general with the symbolic name "Achilles Sturm", but as a connoisseur of the Frankfurt scene receives the Order to make a list of millionaires. He refuses, submits his release from the Prussian army and is insulted by his superior. When the latter refuses his request for a duel, he shoots himself according to the Prussian code of honor (Kp. XXXVIII. Fatalité ). Like Baron von Below, Mayor Fellner refuses to denounce the rich citizens and hangs himself on July 22nd as a token of his resistance to the occupiers (Kp. XL. Le bourgmestre ). His brother-in-law Kugler brings the rope used for the killing to General Röder in the Römer and says that this is the city's ransom. Friedrich's widow Emma has meanwhile traveled to Berlin and has had Queen Augusta's claims for compensation canceled (Kp. XLI. La rein Augusta ), which calms the initially rebellious population and prevents a popular uprising. Below and Fellner are celebrated as folk heroes and on July 26th, after a memorial service in the cathedral, they are escorted to the cemetery in a long convoy of the Frankfurt associations (Kp. XLII. Les deux convois ). Two more deaths followed shortly thereafter. Helene cared for her fiancé, weakened by the great loss of blood and mostly unconscious, with devotion and after another collapse by donating blood for a transfusion (Kp. XLIII. La transfusion du sang ), so that her wish could be fulfilled before his death to be married (Kp. XLIV. Le mariage in extremis ) After a prayer in the Church of Our Lady, where she and Karl made their vows, she drowns herself in the Main and is buried together with her husband (Kp. XLV. Le vœu d 'Hélène ). At the end of the Frankfurt act, the civil commissioner, Herr von Madai, reads out the proclamation from a Roman window about the connection of the city to Prussia, to which the dogs brought by the citizens react with howling by kicking their tails (Kp. Conclusion ).
In the final part, Benedict Turpin comes to the fore again. He is now part of the Frankfurt family and, like a brother, has loyally supported his friends. Now he wants to fulfill Friedrich's wish to avenge him. Since General Sturm evades his demand and has him deported (Kp. XLVI. Qui vivra verra , i.e. the future will tell) one year later he uses his visit as a companion to King Wilhelm in Paris for a sword duel and stabs his aggressive opponent. With them France and Prussia are symbolically facing each other in a duel (Kp. Épilogue ).
Alberti The last mayor of the free city of Frankfurt a. M.
Inspired by the suicidal conflict situation of Frankfurt mayor Karl Konstanz Viktor Fellner , an author under the pseudonym Alberti wrote the play The Last Mayor of the Free City of Frankfurt aM . In doing so, he transformed the documented historical events into a model case for the resistance against violence. To this end, he invented further personal relationships and characterized this fiction by changing the historical names.
After the occupation of Frankfurt on July 16, 1866 the mayor and senate were ousted. Prussian city commanders took over government and commissioned the former city head Fellner with the administration. This gets into a tight spot - and this is where the action taking place on July 23rd and 24th begins - by General Manengel's demands for contributions (= Edwin von Manteuffel ) and his threat of coercive measures. In the magistrate, supporters and rejecters argue with each other about the city's reaction, with Mühler (= Senator Müller) and Heinrich Fellner (= Karl Konstanz Viktor Fellner), whose children Oswald and Ernestine have a love affair, taking opposing positions. Since Fellner's daughter has so far kept her romance from her father, Mühler can take advantage of this in the dispute and accuse his opponent of not overseeing either Frankfurt's situation or that in his own house.
In the first act, Heinrich Fellner and his brother-in-law Kügler (= Kugler) return to his apartment the evening after the meeting, his daughter confesses to him their relationship, which his wife Louise knows about, and he accepts Oswald's marriage proposal. His future son-in-law tells him about his ambitious father's negotiations with Manengel and the banker Rotschild, who paid six million guilders. Feller suffers from the depressing situation and confesses that "if [a] life itself were the price to buy back the peace and happiness of the city, he would be happy to sacrifice it."
Accompanied by predictions that promise misfortune (funeral procession, shattered glass), Fellner is first paid homage to Fellner as a philanthropist in the second act: Frankfurt citizens visit their former mayor, thank him for helping their families in emergency situations (Berger) and congratulate him on his birthday (Schneider ). In the subsequent meeting in the Kaisersaal, General Manengel, arrogantly victorious, demands a higher sum than that raised by Rotschild alone and instructs the mayor to give him a list of the money aristocracy. Fellner once again addresses the plight of the urban population burdened by the occupation and appeals to the gentleness of the Prussian king. But the general reacts relentlessly, takes personal responsibility for his orders and sets a deadline of three days. While Mühler pleads for avoiding a confrontation and giving in to the strongest, the others (Rotschild, Purneß, Kügler) reject the demand and Fellner refuses to “use tyranny as an instrument, and the citizens of this city […] theirs To have property robbed ”. He closes the scene pathetically: "Eh 'I prefer to die a free man Than to woo the favor of tyranny!"
In the third act, while tumults can be heard in the street, Kügler brings the general the rope on which his brother-in-law has hanged himself and blames him for his death. Fellner's emotionally troubled daughter Ernestine reinforced these accusations, which Manengel rejected, in her subsequent appearance. He gives the order to use weapons against the demonstrators if necessary. Their anger over the death of the mayor is also directed against Mühler, but they can be held back by Kügler and Oswald by remembering Fellner's peaceful attitude. Nevertheless, soldiers arrested the two in front of Louise Fellner and her daughter for inciting the people. In the final scene, the prospectus rises and you can see Fellner's grave, decorated with evergreens, accompanied by the song “Üb 'immer Treu und Righteousness”.
The merchant town
In the 18th and 19th centuries, for nationally known and foreign writers, Frankfurt represented the type of the affluent merchant town with shops for high demand and is portrayed under this aspect: z. B. in the novel Ein Sommer in Baden-Baden by the Russian writer Leonid Zypkin , who based on the notes of Anna Dostoyevskaya a . a. describes the shopping spree Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna Grigoryevna on Frankfurt's big shopping streets , admired by the guests, during their trip to Germany in 1867. For the fiction literature of the German bourgeoisie, which was prospering at this time, the Free City is increasingly interesting as a place of action, because here you can find many elements of tension for both contemporary and historical novels (Spindler: The Jew , Heine: The Rabbi von Bacharach ) Family situations, generation conflicts, friendships, love relationships with the social structure (patricians, craftsmen, artists, Jews), with discussions about the new Germany after the Congress of Vienna at the meeting place of the German Confederation and the Federal Assembly as well as with the revolutionary unrest, often with a moralizing tendency (Raabe: Eulenpfingsten , Geissler: The last Biedermeier ). Other literary works create a counterworld to the commercial city.
Wilhelm Riehl Pure Wine
In his novella Reiner Wein (1865), Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl tells the story of the wine merchant Franz Hertorf from the 17th century, who carelessly got into debt in order to win over the patrician daughter Susanne Silberborn and about her father, the lay judge and magistrate caretaker of the Holy -Geist-Spitals to be socially accepted: Since he was not born noble, he wants to live and act nobly. He beautifies the facade of his house on Roßmarkt, buys expensive wine, which he gives to the hospital “for refreshment for those who are convalescent” (2nd cp.), And is aiming for a seat on the council. He wants to establish himself as a wholesaler and serve rich society in order to be able to entertain his beloved appropriately with the money he has earned. However, he is betrayed by his manager (3rd cp.) And convicted of "bankruptcy". He leaves the choice between three punishments (pillory, yellow hat, dungeon) to Susanne. Out of disappointment with him and according to the principle of honor of her class, she chooses the “eternal prison” that he accepts (4th ct.) The maiden is deeply touched by this noble attitude and she changes her father's harsh judgment: a new one The principle of honor should replace the old, noble one. Lippold Silberborn vouches for Hertorf and frees him from the tower after a year in prison so that his future son-in-law can repay his debts by founding a new business instead of idly serving his long sentence. (5th cp.).
Ines Thorn The merchant
Thorn's third family saga volume Die Kaufherrin takes place in 1792. In July, the Frankfurters marvel at the festive and colorful procession of the German electors to the king's election of Franz II and the subsequent proclamation as emperor on the Römerberg and in the cathedral (Kp. 11). Three months later they suffer from the occupation by French troops during the First Coalition War (Kp. 15-20). Theda, the title character, as the forty-two-year-old widow of her husband Theodor Geisenheimer, has to manage the trading house together with the experienced authorized signatory Kalis and misses the support of her two sons. That is why she arranged a marriage for her eldest Jago with the capable merchant's daughter Barbara Allberger, who is increasingly taking over the management (Kp. 5). She herself was brought up in the pragmatic tradition of her noble Von Eisenberg family and could not marry her childhood sweetheart. Her spouse, like that of her friend Eckehard von Hohenstein, was determined by her parents.
Theda's sons, on the other hand, feel that they are representatives of the new era after the French Revolution. They do not want to become rich merchants and determine their own lives. The twenty-one year old Jago has broken off a three year bank apprenticeship in Italy. Now he writes poems and dresses like his role model Goethe in the Werther colors . After his Sturm und Drang performances, he spends most of his time in the coffeehouse, chooses Erato as his muse and lover, and neglects his forced wife. His brother Stefan, who is two years his junior, is enthusiastic about human rights and meets with the small circle of Frankfurt Jacobins in the Zur Eisernen Hand inn . However, in contrast to his friends, he takes a moderate, peaceful stance. They distrust the patrician son and urge him to take action during the occupation of Frankfurt, e. B. by persuading his uncle, Councilor Hans Heynold, who is responsible for the city guard, to leave the city gates of the neutral city open to the French (cp. 13). However, he escapes this conflict by the fact that the council allows the troops to move in and that he has previously been commissioned by Carl August von Bösdorff to act as tutor to his wife Lisette and the children Arno and Elisabeth on their flight from the French to an estate near Allendorf accompany. There he finds himself in a new predicament when the baron learns of his affair with Lisette, calls her back and challenges him to a duel on the Bornheimer Heide (cp. 19). However, the dispute can be resolved peacefully. Stefan feels overwhelmed by the whole situation, agrees not to see his lover anymore, and goes to Marburg as a law student. His fifteen-year-old sister Friederike also has problems. She becomes pregnant by the neighbor boy Christian Altvater and disappears from the public for delivery to relatives in Leipzig who adopt the child.
These personal difficulties are exacerbated by contributions to the occupying army. When the goods bought by Barbara in anticipation of the emergency situation and stored in the storerooms and cellars of the house in the Zeil are confiscated (Kp. 17) and Theda has to pay 50,000 gold thalers for the release of the poet's son, who was held hostage in the Red House (Kp. 16), the company is facing bankruptcy and can only be saved with Jago's deferred inheritance and his willingness to cooperate with the family in the future (cp. 21). After the occupiers were driven out of the city, the main characters also rearrange their relationships privately.
Johanna Spyri Heidi's apprenticeship and traveling years
In Johanna Spyri 's children 's book Heidi's Lehr- und Wanderjahre (1879), the unhealthy forces of civilization are reflected in the large city of Frankfurt. The eight-year-old orphan is accepted into the Sesemann family as a partner of the lonely, disabled twelve-year-old daughter Klara. The housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier, who strictly organizes the household of the widowed businessman, wants to civilize the natural child from Switzerland. Heidi therefore does not feel at home in the strange city environment, despite Clara's friendship and the affection of her grandmother, who teaches her to read on her flying visits, becomes mentally ill and the Sesemanns send her back to her grandfather in the mountains. There the healing powers of the simple, autonomous life in nature not only bring her quick recovery, but Klara also learns to walk again through self-confidence when visiting the alpine pasture.
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann Master Flea
As the setting for his fairy tale Meister Floh (1822), “the famous beautiful city of Frankfurt am Main”, ETA Hoffmann chose the prototype of the trading city that he knew through his publisher Friedrich Wilmans . The protagonist's father, the respected businessman Tyß, is a representative of the pragmatic, enterprising world, while his son Peregrinus (Latin: the stranger) chooses an alternative life, financed ironically by his parents' fortune, and at the end of the story goes to the country pulls. He is a representative of romanticism . During this time v. a. Intellectuals in the field of literature and art are critical of social development. The cities that expanded more and more beyond the old fortification rings, the increasing specialization of society forced by industrialization and the dominance of rational scientific analyzes aroused in them the longing for a simple, holistic life that one was looking for in nature or in a fantasy world.
Through clever speculations on the stock exchange, Father Tys got rich and was able to buy a nice house on the Roßmarkt. He “had the principle that the richest man must have a business and through it a certain point of view in life; businessless people were an abomination to him ”. He wanted to build his only son as his successor according to this principle. He had him trained first by a court master and then sent him to the University of Jena for three years. But he had to recognize: "Hans the dreamer went there, Hans the dreamer returns!" Because Mr. Tyß suspected early on that Peregrinus would strike out of the way and had no traits as a merchant. Even the little boy had no interest in external practical things and in systematic learning. He didn't like to talk to people, he didn't like ducats, big bags of money and ledgers, he couldn't hear the word “bills of exchange uttered […] without trembling convulsively, assuring him that it was like scratching at them the tip of the knife back and forth on a pane of glass ”. Rather, Peregrinus caught himself in his fantasy world, felt drawn to distant regions by a picture of the fairy-tale city of Beijing: “That which appealed to his mind was now everything wonderful, everything that aroused his fantasy, in which he then lived and weaved. “When the father tried again with an apprenticeship with a commercial friend in Hamburg, in order to“ bring him to his senses ”and“ force him into the business ”, his son went into hiding and only returned on foot after three years his hometown. This is where the main story begins.
Since his parents have since died and left him a great inheritance, the thirty-six year old nerd lives in seclusion with his old caretaker Aline in the big house. He reads a lot and celebrates Christmas like he did when he was a child. He buys gifts for himself, with which he then gives poor families. This year he makes the children of his bookbinder Lämmerhirt happy in Kalbächer Gasse. Here he meets Dörtje Elverdink, the beautiful niece and assistant of the flea tamer Leuwenhoeck. She calls herself Aline, knows everything about him, then sneaks into his apartment, searches in vain for an enigmatic prisoner, Master Flea, and disappears again (1st adventure). This is the beginning of Peregrinus' “most wonderful adventure”, in which he fears: “I'm going crazy - I'm going to be great!” It is a hike between the real surface world in Frankfurt and a realm of fantasy, inspired by master Floh (2nd adventure) through dreams in night scenes , which, however, unlike his children's toy world, is dominated by demonic, destructive and egocentric characters: everyone fights against everyone and wants to own the beautiful princess for themselves and the characters involved tell the plot in different versions that are advantageous for them: The one who emerged from the muddy water Leech prince kisses the blood of Princess Gamaheh of Famagusta, who is sleeping on a moss carpet in the cool cypress forest. While the thistle Zeherit tells that she resuscitated her beloved with the help of the mandragola root and killed the leech prince with her spines, in another version the genius Thetel succeeded in doing so with a toss of crystal salt, who dealt with the unconscious, accompanied by Master Flea, takes to the skies. The process is observed by two magicians from the gallery of a high tower and analyzed differently. They also argue about the methods of rescuing the girl, the microscopic projection from fantasy into the real world, the transformation in Dörtje (2nd adventure). Master Floh clarifies his view of things to Peregrinus: He is also a worshiper of the princess and has got her stagnant blood flowing again with an invigorating sting (3rd adventure).
After the fairy tale characters have arrived in the city, the dispute continues in transformations, because the characters have changing characters across time and space: Princess Gamaheh = Aline = Dörtje Elverdink. Thistle Zeherit = Peregrinus' friend George Pepusch. Leech Prince = Douanier leech. Genius Thetel = Legénie ballet master. 1. Magician = microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek = Dörtjes uncle, the flea tamer Leuwenhoek. 2. Magician = microscopist Jan Swammerdam = Dörtjes godfather Swammerdamm. The flea, on the other hand, also appears in reality in varying sizes under its name. He crashed during the flight of Genius with Gamaheh and got into the hands of the flea tamer, who thereby gains power over his people and lets them perform tricks. But the freedom-loving master fled the circus with his little acrobats. He hops over to the toy dealer's booth and jumps into an empty toy box that Peregrinus mistakenly buys instead of one with lead soldiers and hunting scenes. Now Leuwenhoek is looking for his main artist and his assistant, Dörtje, who has also disappeared. The girl follows the trail of the flea on her own initiative and stays with her godfather Swammerdamm in Peregrinus' house because, like a drug addict, she needs the master's impulse to live. In the meantime, he has seen through her selfish nature and does not want to be exploited any longer, but instead wants to live in freedom with his reckless, jumping people, as befits his republican nature. He warns Peregrinus, who is also fascinated by the girl, that she is only faking love for him in order to achieve his extradition and then leaves him. To demonstrate the mendacity of people, he inserts a lens into his pupil. This allows him to look into people's thought processes and learns the intentions that are hidden behind their friendly or insidious words (3rd and 4th adventure). For example, he simultaneously listens to Swammerdamm's and Leuwenhoek's flattery or to Dörtje's coquetry or ensnaring her motives for getting his talisman, the mighty flea, and to her surprise reacts differently to what she had hoped for (6th adventure). In the Knarrpanti episode (4th and 5th adventures) he thwarted the strategy of the court councilor, who wanted to prove that he had been kidnapped and murdered a princess with quotes from his letters and diaries taken out of context Profiling princes. He got this idea through gossip that Peregrinus had carried a girl into his house on Christmas Eve, it was Dörtje who was simulating unconsciousness.
Through the thought lens, Peregrinus can detach himself from his child's world, which he has unconsciously chosen as a protest against his father. With his naivete he also loses his carefree joy. With emancipation, he also becomes in principle suspicious of people. For him, this stage of reason is an important experience on the way from gullibility to a holistic life. He recognizes the limitation of situational, often only random insights as well as isolated facts ("You tried to explore nature without suspecting the meaning of its inner being.") When assessing multi-layered personalities and complex relationships, e.g. B. in the friendship with George Pepusch, which was at times disturbed by the rivalry for Gamaheh-Dörtje, for the sake of which he renounced the girl (6th adventure). In order to track down “the terrible secrets of those shallows”, a confident-emotional component is required, which Peregrinus finds both in the realm of fantasy and in reality in helpful and constructive forces, e.g. B. in King Sekakis, who appeared to him in a dream, with whom he identifies, and in Roses, his flower queen. She is the daughter of a bookbinder Lämmerhirt to him, in significant deep symbolism, the cut of his bound by her father in red morocco Ariosto gold -Prachtausgabe (s. Golden Ratio ) has (7 Adventure). "Peregrinus recognized himself, he felt that the carbuncle that ignited life was glowing in his chest." They are getting married in their new country house with a large garden near the city. Röschen strengthens his trust in the people and the demonic figures disappear. The second wedding couple Pepusch and Dörtje are reminded of the next morning after the party only two flowers that have withered "through the strange intertwining of a mysterious dichotomy between dark powers" and symbolize the destructive possessive love. Peregrinus returns the thought lens. The measure of his judgments is now the carbuncle of his heart, his soul source of strength, which is renewed again and again in the loving partnership. Master Floh only visits them at Christmas, where he presents their little son with artful flea circus toys.
Carl Rößler The five Frankfurters
In his comedy Die Fünf Frankfurter , published in 1911, Carl Rößler projects a discussion among Jews about demarcation and assimilation onto a historical situation. Early 19th century the Frankfurt banking house Mayer Amschel Rothschild has grown from small beginnings to a European size and has advanced into the field of public finance. Business and private friends include a. the French Prime Minister and the Hessian Landgrave, but also artists like Rossini. The oldest son of the company's founder, Consul Amsel, is told that he has to gain weight in order to place more medals on his chest. Now, in the first act of the comedy, his brothers Nathan, Salomon, Carl and Jakob came from their banks in London, Paris, Genoa and Vienna to their mother Gudula in her parents' house in Frankfurt in the Judengasse to discuss future business strategy . Salomon consistently pursued the rise in the ruling nobility. He has already bought the nobility letter in Vienna, which elevates the family to the baron class with various donations of money, and now wants to marry his twenty-year-old daughter, named Charlotte in Rößler's comedy because of the fictional character, to the Duke of Taunus in order to gain international renown or to be even more recognized and integrated in society. In return, Salomon offers the indebted regent a 12 million loan, which is financed through lottery bonds sold on the stock exchange.
In the second elevator a delegation of the Rothschilds goes to Schloss Neustadt to close the deal. The aristocratic family lost their fortune due to the French Revolution and the income of the small principality is nowhere near enough to finance the aristocratic, blasé lifestyle at a high level. The socially adept, witty ironically chattering Gustav would like to withdraw from state affairs like his friend Prince von Klausthal-Agordo and privatize in Paris. There he could only devote himself to his hobbies and the amusements of the city. But unlike the prince, he is bankrupt and faced with the choice of either selling his land to Prussia or accepting Solomon's suggestion. A family policy marriage is normal in his circles, but actually it has to be befitting. But he is ready to move with the times and to democratize the nobility, and he likes the beautiful, young, clever and rich Jewish woman. Therefore, he cannot refuse Solomon's proposal and astutely analyzes the situation: “It is [Rothschild's] ambition to dup us. And our ambition will be to trick them with grace. ”(P. 42) However, the negotiation will then be conducted openly by both sides. Salomon positions himself self-confidently: “Our legitimacy is the money that works and grows for our power in London, Paris, Naples, Frankfurt and Vienna.” (P. 62) Gustav, on the other hand, explains that Salomon, with his proposal to marry into a Ducal family in exchange for money, occurs “[like] a person who […] asks for a crown from below, […] like a pirate who grabs the flag of the admiral ship and grabs it with a firm grip. But the gesture with which it happens has something heroic about it ”(p. 63). It is agreed to link the family that spends with the family that accumulates.
In the third act, Gudula and her sons discuss the economic, social and religious aspects of this business in Judengasse. While Salomon sees a conversion of his daughter associated with marriage only as an outward adjustment that does not have to reflect the attitude of the person, for Amsel this would only be acceptable if he was convinced. The baron title means nothing to his mother and she finds a connection between her Jewish merchant family and the aristocracy inappropriate. The granddaughter would only feel like a stranger in their castles and would never be recognized by the nobility as equal, just as her sons would not be recognized by their upper-class clients. She fears a departure from traditions and religious roots. Twenty-eight-year-old introverted Jacob, who fell in love with Charlotte, focuses v. a. private happiness and advises his niece against a "speculative marriage", the Rothschilds should rather keep to themselves, as before. Lotte similarly analyzes her situation after a conversation with her grandmother and, although she finds the Duke likable, refuses to be offered as a commodity and to be sold. Salomon did not expect that. Patriarchally he demands: “My daughter has no will! In our family, children have to follow their parents. ”(P. 88) The author has Charlotte answer like an emancipated woman from the 20th century that her father had a wrong concept of her independence. She sticks to her opinion and chooses Jakob, who is shy and interested in music and a life in Paris. In doing so, it also strengthens family cohesion. Nathan settles the financial side of the non-feasible contract with Gustav, who has been spared problems in his stand by this solution. While reviewing the Duchy's debts, he still discovered resources that can be accepted as collateral for the loan. So instead of advancement through marriage comes the monopoly for salt and coal mining in the country.
Martin Mosebach The Fog Prince
Martin Mosebach's novel Der Nebelfürst takes up a historical event in its parody of the colonial and industrial age with its economic prosperity and locates the second stage of the plot in the up-and-coming trading city of Frankfurt.
An imaginative lady, Helga Hanhaus, won the journalist Theodor Lerner for an expedition financed by the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, supposedly to save the balloonist André who disappeared in the Arctic Ocean, but actually to explore the coal deposits on the abandoned Bear Island for economic use. Ms. Hanhaus beautified his reports and passed them on to the press and after the return of the journalist, who became known as the Nebelfürst, she and her partner in Frankfurt organize the establishment of a bear island syndicate (chapter 15 in the morning in the "Monopoly" ).
After Lerner has left his fleeting quarters in Bornheim (Chapter 14), they both reside in the Hotel Monopol in the new and more spacious station district built than “the built-in half-timbered box in the city center”. Here one is spared from the “nests of ancient local demons, which poison and suffocate every unfamiliar thought, […] Here at the train station, wide rows of houses appear […] and the view of the gigantic glass vaults ver [means] traveling, new beginnings, mobility ”. In the nearby chess café Pique-Dame (Chapter 16), Ms. Hanhaus explains to her manager, “[t] he investor is sitting in his mahogany office surrounded by his real values and must be led to the step of adding these values acquired through pain or cunning or diligence for something that previously had no value at all, but suddenly takes on form and name and weight through this act of turning. The Bear Island exists in two ways: once as a pile of stones under the midnight sun [...] and at least as real, if not more real on paper, in the form of the 'German Bear Island Company', one shortly before the Registration standing company made up of potent investors. "
The two now undertake business trips from Frankfurt, negotiate with private and state investors in Wiesbaden, Cologne, Schwerin, Lübeck, etc. and seek military protection for the company from the government in Berlin. Ms. Hanhaus also demands private sacrifices from herself and Lerner. So he has to hand over the coal-black vaudeville beauty Louloubou, who got to know in the Schumann Theater (from chapter 18), for one night to the potential investor Sholto Douglas, who also takes the Hanhaus son Alexander into his service (chapter 21 morning of a tycoon, chapter 23 The lobby is applying pressure ). Later the protagonist visits the presentation of new works by the painter Hector Courbeaux in a pavilion on the exhibition grounds set up for exhibitions and circus events at the zoological garden on the Pfingstweide in the east of the city and recognizes Louloubou in a whole series of paintings, among others. a. again as Black Venus , for which she modeled as the artist's muse and lover (Chapter 39, The Queen of Sheba ).
In the end, the Bear Island concept fails due to inefficiency and the two impostors have to leave the hotel and move into a Westend apartment building (Chapter 37). As Olga Vladimirowna, Frau Hanhaus marries the Russian diplomat Vlasimir Gawrilvich (Chapter 41 The Petersburg Sleigh Ride ), Lerner the poor niece of the Lübeck bank director Kohrs Ilse (Chapter 42 A golden future ), who in Karl Riesel's travel agency, Berlin, Unter den Linden - Frankfurt am Main, Kaiserstrasse works. Her husband signs a three-year contract with this company “to arrange social trips and sports tourism to Norway, Bear Island and Svalbard” and presents Ilse his vision: “Today in 1900 we can say that the era of the European wars is finally over The end is. […] Watch, you see, this is the future. [...] Soon the machine will have completely taken over the work of humans. Then, for our entertainment and instruction, we will watch primitive peoples at work. […] The whole excitement about engineer André in his balloon was actually that the world wanted to watch him discover and then even crash and freeze to death. I can now see that I was on the right track very early on. "
The social question in the Wilhelmine era
Nikola Hahn The Detective and The Color of Crystal
In her detective novels Die Detektivin (1998) and Die Farbe von Kristall (2002), the author Nikola Hahn takes a look at the downside of the Wilhelmine era , which was revealed in the socio-political discussion as a social issue , behind scientific and technical progress and the expansion of the city the residential blocks in the north end and the mansions of the upper bourgeoisie in the west end as well as the solid bourgeois life became more and more evident: The business-minded, authoritarian fathers are demonstrated using the example of the merchant and banker families of Könitz and Hortacker, who were connected to one another through the marriage of their children. Above all, Rudolf Koenitz has his wives and maids at his disposal and tries to arrange marriages for his offspring based on their status, while the illegitimate cones have to disappear from view. During this process, unhappy relationships arise in the next generation in a new cycle, which are linked with the social tension in the city and the different living conditions of people as a breeding ground for criminal offenses, which has tragic consequences.
In the novel Die Detektivin , the situation of women and daughters not having equal rights in the class society of the 19th century is thematized primarily by the twenty-three-year-old Viktoria Koenitz. The plot begins with the 1882 Wäldchestag festival and takes place in locations spread across the city: in the Niederrader Stadtwald, on the Alte Brücke, in Sachsenhausen cider taverns, in houses that are about to be demolished in Judengasse, in Rapunzelgässchen 5 in the old town, where the Berliner Commissioner Biddling has rented a room near the police headquarters (Glesernhof) am Römer from the widow Müller, in the city palace of the wealthy brothers Rudolf and Dr. Konrad Könitz with her many servants on Untermainkai and in Neue Mainzer Straße as well as in the labyrinth of underground passages of the former ramparts, in the "Irrenschloß" Dr. Heinrich Hoffmanns on Affensteiner Feld, where Clara, Viktoria's sister three years older, has been staying for ten years after a traumatic experience. While the Frankfurters are celebrating on May 30th at the Oberforsthaus, the maid Emilie Hehl is murdered in the orangery (the glass house) belonging to the Könitz family of doctors, which is connected to the tunnel system. The merchant's daughter and niece of the doctor Viktoria (The Detective), the experienced and local police officer Heiner Braun and his young boss, the Prussian detective inspector Richard Biddling, investigate this case, more or less coordinated and cooperative. In doing so, they discover parallels to two similar acts committed by the “city forest shrike” ten years ago, who have not yet been identified.
The follow-up novel The Color of Crystal shows the protagonists twenty-two years later and usually takes place in the same main locations. Richard Biddling and his wife Viktoria moved with their daughters five years ago from their cramped apartment in the middle-class Fichardstrasse to the Könitz-Villa Untermainkai 18, which was adequate for the income of a civil servant. There is more space there for twenty-one-year-old Victoria from the inspector's first marriage and twelve-year-old Flora. Viktoria can also support family members in need of care and benefit from the upper class household with its service staff. Heiner Braun lives as a pensioner with his wife Helene, widowed Müller, in their house at Rapunzelgässchen 5 and has rented a room to the new police assistant Laura Rothe. Compared to 1882, the city has grown considerably and the wealth of the Könitz dynasty increased during this period of economic prosperity. In addition to the R. Koenitz department store in the Zeil run by son David and Andreas Hortacker, Viktoria's step-in-law, the family also has two dozen branches throughout Germany. Viktoria's sister Maria, married to Theodor Hortacker, and her sister-in-law Cornelia, widowed Countess von Tennitz, reside in villas in the Westend.
The criminal cases are partly based on authentic materials (Lichtenstein and Hopf). In a steam explosion in the Bockenheim machine factory Pokorny & Wittekind (Kreuznacher Straße), the machine attendant Fritz Wennecke probably died from a manipulated valve and a month later Hermann Lichtenstein, who supplied half of the citizens with pianos and granted loans, was slain in his piano shop Zeil 69, not far from Biddling's workplace in the new Zeil 60 presidium. On the one hand, the investigations repeatedly lead to large working-class families with violent, alcohol-dependent fathers in the narrow old town and uncover poverty prostitution and the trafficking of children born out of wedlock. The policeman Paul Heusohn, who lives with his syphilis-sick mother and little step-siblings at Grosse Kornmarkt, comes from such a milieu, whose father sold his wife and a son. On the other hand, there are indications of connections to the prostitute Cäcilia von Raverstedt (Zilly) or to her mysterious boss Signora Runa in the Laterna Magica clubhouse in Elbestrasse and to the dog dealer, chemist and photographer Karl Hopf in Niederhöchstadt. Biddling's research had a private component right from the start, as he received threatening letters that alluded to the events in a secluded place in the city forest with the hut by the pond with quotations from Goethe and Schiller as well as references to Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle novels where the twenty-two year old case is reopened.
The first female police assistant in Frankfurt, Laura Rothe, takes on the problem of poor families and tries to mobilize municipal and private welfare institutions and to sensitize the hierarchically organized authorities, which are slow to react and work according to strict regulations. To make matters worse, some of their colleagues are involved in prostitution, extortion and child trafficking businesses, use their inside information to cover up traces, and hinder the investigation or steer it in the wrong direction. In addition, the confidants and witnesses are put under pressure and often do not make any statements, which makes it difficult to provide evidence. But together with the amateur detective Viktoria, the detective Richard Biddling, his assistant Paul Heusohn and the pensioner Heiner Braun with his longstanding connections in the old town, Laura Rothe tries to penetrate the chaos and bring some order into this world.
Hilal Sezgin The death of the bespoke tailor
Hilal Sezgin's novel The Death of the Bespoke Tailor deals with socio-political processes in the founding years that are disclosed in connection with a criminal case. The investigation is being carried out by Commissioner Philipp Staben, who has just come to Frankfurt from Berlin to replace a predecessor who has been suspended from duty. At the funeral of the social democrat Hugo Hiller, he broke off a funeral address that cited the motto of the French Revolution, which led to a dispute between the police and the mourners. Staben takes on his new role in a politically tense situation. On the one hand, it is intended to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas, on the other hand, the moderate reformers must not be angry. In addition, he does not yet know his way around the city and the police apparatus and does not oversee the actions of his long-established colleague Rauch, the head of the political department and son-in-law of the police chief. That is why he uses information and suggestions from the Jewish lawyer and member of the Democratic Party who lives in Fischerfeldstrasse in the city council assembly Stern and his daughter Karoline as well as the banker Elbert and his wife, in whose villa in Guiolettstrasse in Westend he found a room with half board, happy to.
When, in July 1885, Karl Lübbe, the owner of the custom tailoring shop Lübbe & Sohn, was found dead in the Wallanlagen near his house on Hochstrasse, the case seemed easy to solve. Apparently on the way home from the shop in the Zeil via Hauptwache and Eschenheimer Turm he had been shot in revenge by the tailor Otto Rader, who had been dismissed the day before for criticizing the working conditions. Although there are no witnesses or evidence and Rader denies the act, but because he refuses to reveal his alleged alibi, he is arrested. Karoline got to know the desperate wife of the prisoner in the soup kitchen for the poor and, together with her father, supports the working class family who lives with three children at Kruggasse 9. Further research reveals doubts about the time and place of the crime and provides a broad picture of the economic and social situation and the interlinking of many factors. They also paint a more nuanced picture of the murdered person and thus expand the field of suspects: Lübbe is on the one hand a benefactor and do-gooder. He was a volunteer poor carer, looked after several families and, as a member of the Democratic Party, campaigned for social reforms. On the other hand, he apparently let those entrusted to him work for him for a low wage. In addition, the maid, the fifteen-year-old Luisa Döll, is released by the widow after his death and disappears without a trace. Rumor has it that she is pregnant by the employer. For her part, Ms. Lübbe has an affair with her husband's colleague and competitor Kobisch, the boss of an exclusive tailor-made shop for the rich and noble in the Zeil. In addition to these private constellations, there are economic conflicts. Lübbes bespoke tailoring is under pressure from the ready-made goods, v. a. of the clothing store Peschmann in der Zeil, which can produce clothes of the same quality at a lower price with cutting machines and sewing work done at home. Therefore, tailors had to be fired due to declining orders. On the other hand, the social reformers are calling for a reduction in daily working hours and health insurance for workers by the companies. Another competitor could be the large Metzler department store planned for women's and men's clothing, for which Elberts Bank wants to grant loans. Westphal's tobacco business has already been bought, and two neighboring properties are to follow. The city council argued about the change in the building regulations and the problem of speculative gains in the rebuilding of the Zeil. Lübbe was against it on the grounds that living space would be lost. On the evening of his murder he wanted to talk to Peschmann and Kobisch.
Karoline Stern's interest in the eponymous case is initially her social commitment to one of the suspects. Then she takes on more and more the role of a private detective, inspires the inspector with her observations and logical deductions of the chains of circumstantial evidence and becomes the main character of the novel. She would have liked to become a lawyer, which was not yet possible in Germany at the time. She also dreams of a self-determined life, unlike that of her older sister Friederike, who traditionally takes care of the household with two sons in Stiftstrasse as a housewife. But her mother Fanny, who withdrew into painting, was not a role model for her either. Karoline is still looking for her calling, reads a lot in her father's library, is interested in the social issue and helps every morning in the soup facility for the poor of the Israelite community on Röderbergweg. Martha Kellermann's lecture on the “Situation of the Women's Movement” on gender equality in the job, education of workers, sexual reform, maternity leave, and the exploitation of the maids in the Merian Hall will determine her future: “She finally wanted to get started [...] She didn't know where to go . But she had the feeling that she was ready for a really big step - one where you rush everything. "
First World War
Siegfried Kracauer Gorse
Siegfried Kracauer's novel Ginster , published in 1928, tells in personal form the story of Ginster , who managed to avoid military service during the First World War by playing hide and seek. Correspondingly, you don't find out your real name. The plot is thematically and locally divided into three sections: In Munich (Kp. I and II) and Frankfurt (Kp. III-VII, partly IX, X) the protagonist experiences the patriotic mood and willingness to make sacrifices in the country, in Cologne (Kp. VII – IX) the synchronization of young men in the military apparatus and in Osnabrück (Kp. X) the end of the war and the traces of the revolution. In the last chapter, five years later, in Marseille, he reflects on his existential situation (Chapter XI).
The novel begins with the outbreak of war in August 1914 and confronts the twenty-five-year-old protagonist with the patriotism of the population. For example, when the doctor of structural engineering in Munich was once "dragged along the stream of people [...]" and felt alien among the mass of war enthusiasts, which he thought of as a "secret society": "I have no feelings for anything that I don't know. "
In his Frankfurt family, after his father's death, he and his mother live with his uncle and aunt, he finds the spectrum of public opinion: While the aunt sees the war as a misfortune and warns of premature euphoria, the uncle, as a history teacher, analyzes and - research the national situation. He marks the battlefields on a map and, like the mother who was carried away by the pull of public opinion, but privately very peaceful, celebrates the territorial gains. He uses keywords similar to those used by the speakers at the public victory ceremony on Opernplatz . Even in the first year of the war, Gorse experienced the change in mood from euphoria to grief over sons who had died for the fatherland. Both in the circle of friends of the family as well as at his workplace in the small, winding private and office rooms ("A labyrinth like the old town") of the architect Richard Valentin and his ghostly Buddhist-esoteric oriented woman Berta in Ostend near the old town ( Kp. IV) victories and defeats are the main topic. The acquaintances gather for the aunt's Sunday afternoon teas and discuss the development of the war. The wife of teacher colleague Biehl mistakenly hopes that her missing son was not burned but was taken prisoner. Bank director Luckenbach criticizes the political leadership and its loyalty to allies, which the uncle defends as historically justified. The aunt complains about the army command, which uses the troops badly, the uncle contradicts her. The botanist and private researcher Dr. Hay wants secret information about the upcoming decisive battle in the west. The deeper causes of the World War are also philosophized in Frankfurt, for example by Professor Johann Caspari, whose lecture on The Reasons of the Great War Gorse and his aunt can be heard in the large hall of the Society House in the Zoological Garden . In the opinion of the speaker there are different beings of the peoples who could lead to the world catastrophe. The western peoples acted purposefully, the Germans are concerned with inner values. Gorse cannot understand these thoughts, because in this society he feels more like his own "lack of essence". According to his emotional state, he keeps a low profile and has few private contacts. Only with his schoolmate Hay and the chemical assistant Dr. Müller meets regularly in a music café. Both are released from military service due to illness or company complaints and exchange information about the course of the war and the methods of the "slackers". Social status and networking play a major role here.
Ginster is familiar with the social hierarchy in the old merchant town from his childhood. This is reflected in his assessment of the rich city, in which "places of worship and the stock exchange [...] are only spatially separated from each other": "The climate is mild, the non-Westend population, to which Gorse belonged, is hardly considered." . With his father, who traded in fine English fabrics as a traveler, he walked on the weekly family walks through this fine part of town, “where the villas and mansions retreat to the front gardens so that the asphalt does not touch them. Here the streets are deserted on Sunday afternoons and the houses hide their doors. […] The gentlemen sit behind the curtains or are in the country. ”As he passed by, his father estimated the high rental prices and imagined the rooms he had never seen before, because when he visited customers in such villas he was often in front of them Door set: "[T] he rooms are brighter than ours"
Gorse closely observes the conformist behaviors of the people, but also the schemes of its own civil and academic strata. He is an individualist who repeatedly has to deal with or come to terms with the conventions and thought patterns of mass society. Already during his school days in Frankfurt (Kp. II), where the eccentric was nicknamed Gorse , he had a distant relationship with his comrades and noted their unfriendly or indifferent behavior towards him in a book. Even then, he was not interested in real world events. “He was more interested in undated spiritual currents and popular life than in battles and peace agreements. In mathematics he was fascinated by the concept of infinity ”. In contrast to his classmates, he did not know for a long time which vocational training to choose. “He was lacking the ability to predict his place in society with such prudence.” But his parents urged him to earn a living. Perhaps that is why he no longer likes to read Goethe's Poetry and Truth , "because of the poet's brilliant youth, which he hated like the facade [of the Würzburg baroque palace]". He finally decided on architecture because he "[from] early on [... ] liked ornaments ”and then discovered“ that the floor plans in the art history books formed ornamental figures ”,“ whose beauty arose from their pointless existence. ”When he later planned houses, he lost interest in the projects at the latest when he was building them. Conversely, he looks for an idea or imaginative form in all useful objects. He does not believe “that it is important to ascertain the original reality” and, in addition to his profound reflections, maintains the naivety of a child. The fact that he detests the “need to become a man” also illustrates his role in the family. On the trip by tram past the main cemetery to the district command (Kp. VII), with which his military service begins, he takes the clothes box packed by his mother and he returns from the Cologne garrison (Kp. IX) or from the City building authority in Osnabrück (Kp. X) always back in the hometown. To the rhythm of the train noises he thinks: "I'm going home - home - home - always while the rustling and creaking."
In his loneliness, however, Ginster has an ambivalent longing for common ground with the masses, whose sense of togetherness he is touched: “Large crowds forced him to cry as much as films and novels, at the end of which two young people bonded. Even crowds of people seemed to him a guarantee of happiness. […] They were suddenly a people. Ginster thought of Wilhelm Tell [but] that we didn't want to get over his lips. ”He also loved the march music and on Sundays ran a little way alongside the parade of the watch,“ [d] he thought of marching in a uniform was alien to him . ”Therefore he is not unhappy that the Munich commandant's office rejected his report as a volunteer, which he feels obliged to do following the example of his friend Otto:“ More could not be done, Otto had not done more either. ”
Before moving to the western front, Otto explains to Ginster the motives of the young volunteers on a hike through the city forest (Kp. III): The students got caught up in mutual contagion, fled their “specialty” and “directionless freedom” and sought discipline and order. On the other hand, he acts out of “necessity”. In other words, he did not become a soldier out of patriotism, but because he does not want to abandon the young men of the same age, as he has no right to an exceptional position. In the background of this argument stands the assessment of his scientific possibilities as a Plato specialist and the lack of chances for an academic career. Apparently he already suspects, as indicated in his last letter to his friend, his death in the “terrible battle”: “If I am destined to stay, then consider that a rift would probably have cut through my life to the end. The contradiction between willing and able, striving and success, longing and reality, the whole tragedy of half-gifted natures has always worn me out. ”Ginster notices that the friend, for whom he feels a homoerotic tendency, is already moving automatically with the new role and has adopted language templates. "He drove a herd of expressions before him that had run to him with the uniform and created a cloud in which he did not notice Gorse's civilian clothes." As a result of the conversation, Gorse is looking for a way out and, with the consent of his family, answers Volunteer medical team . He transports the wounded from the hospital trains arriving at the Südbahnhof to the hospital (Kp. III). In his gray uniform with a white cap, however, he is seen by the military as part of the lower class: "In general, members of the column enjoyed the lower reputation of a maid than ordinary soldiers who copied his rule on the day of going out."
Ginster perceives Otto's death not only as a loss, but also as a release from the moral pressure of being in the “retired in peace” category due to his poor condition after being drunk with the sculptor Rüster the night before the draft. Otto has his fate in contrast and, against his will, joy creeps into him, “that he, Ginster, did not stand in Otto's place [], but is still alive []. He [wants] to live long. ”But“ the fear that he might still have to go to war [] immediately stifles the joy. ”The following actions are based on this wish:“ He didn't want to be hit by any bomb that happened to explode above him. He kept repeating that one had to investigate the reasons which had led to the war; right through the lies and right through the stupid feelings. Gorse hated the emotions, the patriotism, the glorious, the flags; they blocked the view and people fell for nothing. ”But he hides these thoughts and hides them behind his work at the drawing table or on the construction site in the city forest, because he is now“ surrounded by a population made up of nothing but heroes ]. ”When he received an examination order for a follow-up examination in the second year of the war, he obtained an expensive certificate from heart specialist Professor Oppelt as a precaution, which the doctor in the examination room near his place of work did not read. He is declared "fit for garrison service" and could be drafted any day. To avoid this, he uses the opportunity to file a complaint, because Valentin, who previously kept his office afloat with shop conversions, has now received two orders for the expansion of a leather and a machine factory for military purposes, namely the production of boots and grenades for army needs (Kp. V). For two years, his applications for exemption from military service are repeatedly extended, then the work is completed and Gorse is now patterned as fit for military service and assigned to the foot artillery of the Cologne garrison .
Three days before his draft, he reflected on his previous life (Chapter VI): “I am now twenty-eight years old and I hate architecture, my job. Otto is dead [...] the women close themselves to me. Everyone knows how to live, I see that they live beyond me and cannot find access. Walls are always pushing forward, you have to be polite and hidden. [...] People are interested in their life, they have goals for themselves, want to own and achieve something. Everyone is a fortress. I don't want anything myself. [...] I liked best of all to sprinkle. That keeps people away from me. ”He becomes aware of this strangeness in life again and again in the crowd. B. when calling the name in the district command Frankfurt. “The name seemed strange to Ginster, but it brought back a memory in him; as if he had come across the name several times before. [...] He stared helplessly at the name that took up the whole courtyard and made demands that he, Ginster, could not possibly fulfill, because it was actually nothing and therefore could hardly claim to be named with such power in the courtyard alone become. For a long time he hesitated whether he should deny himself instead of answering. At last it occurred to him that outwardly it belonged to the name ”. As always when he feels powerless in the face of the situation because he is “convinced of the futility of a fight with them”, he uses his “art method” of playing hide and seek and lets himself in “on an invisible board out of the environment slide down a cave in which he hopes nothing for himself [] [...] [if] a favorable event occurs unexpectedly, he [is] still free to decide whether he should climb back to the surface []. ”This flexibility , his distanced and critical view of society and the cautious restraint in connection with happy coincidences help him to survive. For example, revolutionary unrest in Osnabrück shortly before the end of the war prevented his convocation. He is often surprised by the fateful twists and turns that drive him in a new direction, but generally support his instinct for self-preservation: “Gorse was always unlucky at public events. Either he came too late or, to his surprise, he was given an excellent seat, which [...] was only left free because it was on the wrong side. [...] Without having suspected anything, Ginster was in the middle of a real revolution. "
The planning of a military cemetery (Kp. VI) for an architectural competition that Ginster wins for his office is of great symbolic value for the subject of the novel . His first draft with charcoal, which “cannot be tamed”, “[falls] in flakes”, “grows on the horizon as a thundercloud” and “[unrolls] like a curtain”, hides the graves in one "Maze". But then he decides on a facility "in which its horror is repeated []" and "a military organization table [resembles]": "Rectangular grave fields are aligned with a center on which a monument rose like a superior superior. It consisted of a raised cube crowned by several panels. Three sides of the cube were intended for the list of names of the fallen, the fourth was to carry a saying ”. In a speech to the architects' association, his boss Valentin interprets the sober, unadorned form, however, patriotically as "equality that can be described as patriotic in the highest sense". For Gorse, on the other hand, life is a vast labyrinth in which it is difficult for him to make decisions. When, after the lengthy procedure of repeated roll calls ("Here - Here - Here") and regroupings in the district command, he suddenly had the choice of returning home because his complaint was accepted at the last minute, he did not use this option because he was afraid before an early repetition with a possible briefing on the infantry, and marches as a future gorse gorse with the foot artillery through the city to the train station (Kp. VII). But that was just the foreplay. In Cologne he experiences the everyday life of the military apparatus that has been brought into line with the aim of uniforming through stereotypical drill, greeting and cleaning training (Kp. VIII and IX). From his bookshelf he has "a collection of lyrical poems that have gone unnoticed for years and that he felt sorry for like an overlooked person; completely dusty ”in his box. In Cologne he reads in the evenings a. a. Goethe's poem Poems are painted window panes , but can only interpret his message ("But only come in once. Greet the holy chapel") in the dormitory with the high windows as the irony of fate. He recognizes the absurdity of the system and adapts externally: he reduces his body weight and his performance through starvation. After the sub-doctor accused all the other patients as simulators during a medical examination and sent them back to work, Ginster suddenly pretended to feel healthy despite being exhausted and only to have come to the station on the orders of his deputy sergeant. The doctor then, out of sympathy with the academic, arranges a bribe for the medical officer and Ginster is classified as “home suitable for work” because of “general weakness” and is given a position at the municipal building authority in Q. (= Osnabrück )
In Osnabrück (Kp. X), Ginster first continues his previous successful tactics, but makes cautious attempts at liberation, even wants to get out of his cave at the end of the war after the protest meetings and get involved politically in a heroic romance and longing for community: "Sometimes he wished to be an adventurer with clenched fists and to be called Peter . […] Just as immature were the boy's dreams of his imminent fame, he had to duck. After all, something unforeseen could easily happen to him. ”He ponders his loneliness as a schoolboy as well as a soldier:“ If he had had comrades, he would never have wanted to part with them. ”In a change in social conventions and the consciousness of the People ("sometimes Gorse longed for an enemy plane".) He sees a meaningful task for himself for a short time, but the revolution in Osnabrück is over quickly and the editor, who promised to clean up a short time ago and whom he saw irregularities from Stadtbauamt wanted to communicate ("He has now come into being."), Explains to him that things should not be exaggerated. It is a period of disillusionment for gorse. On the one hand, the study of philosophical systems does not help him: “Either they demanded a perfect world or already presupposed perfection.” On the other hand, at the end of the war, he saw neither a private connection with the Biedermeier bookseller Elfriede nor professionally with Schmidt, the town planning officer.
Five years later, during a four-week summer holiday in Marseille, Ginster met Mrs. van C., whom he knew from a festival of the Munich Artists' Association and who had seen her again in Frankfurt as a companion to Casparis. The once dazzling socialite and diplomatic wife, who always fired his imagination, has become an author of revolutionary writings traveling through Europe, who wants to go to Russia in the autumn and calls on him to fight against capitalism. He would like to join the emancipated, active woman and go to Paris with her the next day, but he “thinks he hears clapping, hitting catchphrases [...] and involuntarily ducks.” So he separates from Julia van C. In a symbolic act running parallel to their conversation, he has just bought a toy bird with a quickly rotating ring from a street vendor, which can enclose the animal like a cage in an optical illusion, which raises the existential question for gorse determines whether the bird is actually free or trapped. He sees people wandering around in misery during the inflationary period and doesn't know a solution for himself either: “I don't want to remain an architect at any price […] I'd like to go under here… I don't know what to start…”. According to this situation, the novel closes with an open ending. "I'm going now," Gorse said to himself, tomorrow - he stumbled, felt a sting on his arm. The bird, the bird's perch. He turned the ring. "
Weimar Republic
Elias Canetti Inflation and impotence
In the second book, Die Fackel im Ohr (Part I, Inflation and Powerlessness. Frankfurt 1921–1924) of Canetti's three-volume literary life story , the author recalls his childhood in Frankfurt. It is the time of inflation with high unemployment. The author observes how, in this context, the Jewish population comes more and more into the focus of national groups and is therefore particularly sensitized to the formation of enemy images that are used for agitation for mass movements.
In 1921 Ms. Canetti moved with her three sons from Zurich to Frankfurt, where they lived in the Pension Charlotte on Bockenheimer Landstrasse and Elias attended the upper level of the Wöhlerschule . The other guests at the boarding house table represent the bourgeois fate of the post-war period and, with their conversations about politics, economics, painting and literature or the theater performances, form a small cosmos for the young people to observe. He suspects the effects of the First World War to be the cause of their positions. On the other hand, Elias discusses religious and social issues concerning him with his classmates, v. a. the role of Jews in society and anti-Semitic prejudices.
At the center of the memories are the portraits of some friends from mostly wealthy, educated Jewish families, theater performances, a Gilgamesh reading by the actor Carl Ebert and the tensions in his relationship with his mother, who ignores the young person's questions about people's behavior that he cannot understand. when he confronts her with his observations from everyday life, e.g. B. the starving on the streets in the time of inflation , which he personifies as a “demon with a giant whip”, and socio-political or sexual aspects. She finally flees from the riots and the first demonstrations, the “cauldron” of the “separation of 'opinions'” from the city to Vienna. Canetti remembers his perception of the coexistence of human behavior in reality and on stage, for which he finally sees a connection in the aristophanic comedies. “Here too [at the time of inflation] everything was derived from a single basic premise, the frenzied movement of money. It wasn't an idea, it was reality, so it wasn't funny but horrific, but as a structure, if you tried to see it as a whole, it was like a comedy. One could say that the cruelty of the aristophanic way of seeing was the only way to hold together what was splintered into a thousand pieces. "
Canetti sums up, “[…] that [his] memory of the last year in Frankfurt is filled to the point of bursting with the turbulence of public events and right next to it, as if it were about one and the same world, the aristophanic comedies appear like the first Reading attacked [him]. [...] the close proximity into which they moved for [his] memory must have the meaning that they were the most important things for [him] at that time and that one thing had a decisive influence on the other. "
Jakob Wassermann The Maurizius case
Jakob Wassermann's novel Der Fall Maurizius (1928) addresses two problem areas of the time, the father-son conflict, which is often shaped in the literature of Expressionism , and the question of justice and its representation in the judicial system. These focal points are dovetailed in the form of a detective story about the clarification of a miscarriage of justice with the Andergast family conflict in a plot set in Frankfurt around 1925.
Sixteen-year-old Etzel opposes his father, the Chief Public Prosecutor Wolf Freiherr von Andergast, who in 1905/06 in a circumstantial trial convinced the jury that the lecturer Otto Leonart Maurizius was responsible for the murder of his wife Elli. The prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment has been in Kressa prison for more than 18 years. His father, who lives in Hanau, now submits a petition for clemency and seeks out Andergast in his apartment on Kettenhofweg in Frankfurt's Westend in order to obtain his consent. This tells Etzel about the case. Over the years, a tension has built up between the authoritarian father and his closely controlled son. The law is the highest principle in the life of the lawyer and he sees himself as a strict representative of the regulatory apparatus, both in the public and in the private field. In his opinion, violations must be punished relentlessly: “The law is an idea, not a matter of the heart; the law is not an agreement between parties that can be modeled at will, but a sacred, eternal form. ”He feels himself to be an authority that is not to be questioned. His marriage broke up because of this attitude and his wife Sophia sought consolation in an affair and was dismissed by her husband after it was discovered: she had to contractually promise him that she would move abroad and renounce any connection with her son. Etzel is not talked about her, the housekeeper Rie and his mother also put Andergast under pressure and oblige them to maintain secrecy (1st part, 1st chapter, 1st section). As a child, Etzel imagined “that the father sat in the center of the universe” and therefore gave him the name Trismegistos . Now he doubts his omnipotence and sees through his strategies: The father instrumentalizes both the extramarital relationship of his wife and the Maurizius case as a crusade of order, duty and morality against indulgence and licentiousness of the younger generation (1, 4, 2). As he put it in his plea in August 1906, he wants to punish “the entire fate of a time, the sickness of a nation” in the person of the accused. Etzel breaks out of this order more and more, he skips school and instead walks in the Taunus (1, 2, 1), he seeks advice from his classmate Robert Thielemann (1, 3, 4) in Feyerleinstraße in the north end , speaks in the Miquelstrasse, on a square by the palm garden, with his teacher Dr. Camill Raff (1, 4, 5) on the problem of the truth or responsibility for the perhaps innocent Maurizius and asks grandmother Cilly, the general, in her country house in Eschersheim about his mother (1, 2, 5).
The trigger for his emancipation efforts are the information that Peter Paul Maurizius gives him about the trial against his son at a meeting at the portal of the Christ Church in Westend and in Hanau. While studying the old newspaper articles, he discovered something dubious in the chain of circumstantial evidence and in the prosecutor's strategy (1, 4, 1–4). He then traveled to Berlin and found the key witness Gregor Waremme, who now calls himself Georg Warschauer.
After his son's departure, Andergast feels that he is losing control of his painstakingly built system and that Etzel is beyond his control. He has the police searched for him (1, 5, 2), but without success, he reproaches the housekeeper and his mother, suspects a conspiracy against his instructions, but is opposed to it (1, 5, 3–4) and he instigates it the transfer of Dr. Raffs went to a provincial high school after he recognized it as a representative of free personality education and made him responsible for the development of his son (1, 5, 5–6). But parallel to these defensive measures, Andergast studies the trial files of the Maurizius case in his home office, at the same time he keeps reminding himself of Etzel's childhood (1, 5, 7 to 1, 6, 9). This leads to a slow softening of his position: He asks himself whether “there is another, more mysterious reality behind the known reality”. He is now sensitized to investigate the motives of Gregor Waremme and Anna Jahn, sister Ellis, and their relationships to Maurizius and Elli, and during a walk on Dammheide and on Rödelheimer Strasse in Bockenheim, he reflects on gaps in the chain of clues and contradictions in the Behavior of the witnesses whom he did not follow up during the trial (1, 7, 2). The other guest, who has become pensive as a result, feels this change in himself. Signs of this are the separation from his lover, the Californian Violet Winston, who studies at the Frankfurt Conservatory and for whom he finances an apartment in Bornheim on Pestalozziplatz (1, 7, 3–4), and the conversation with Peter Paul Maurizius (1, 7, 5) about their sons who were struck out of the way.
He now visits the imprisoned Maurizius in Kressa several times, gradually learns his story and listens to his criticism of the judiciary (1, 9, 2–9; 2, 12, 1–7): the alleged omniscience of the judges and prosecutors, which do not take into account the ambivalence of humans. To fall into the sphere of influence of the judiciary means to be at the mercy of it, to lose human dignity and "any right to respect". In his family history too, the public prosecutor is increasingly becoming a defendant. His mother, Cilly, notified his wife of her son's disappearance and took him into her home. During a visit to the Kettenhofweg, Sophia accused her husband of arranged perjury: he forced her lover Georg Hofer to make false statements that he had not had an affair with her, only to confront him with her admission of adultery, whereupon he committed suicide ( 2, 13, 1-5). Although Andergast's position has collapsed and he now knows that Maurizius is innocent, he tries to save face and prevents a revision of the judgment by pardoning Maurizius (2, 13, 6-10). When Etzel returned from Berlin after seven weeks of research, he could no longer use Waremme's admission that he had sworn perjury and thus wrongly accused Maurizius (3, 14, 1–5) for a rehabilitation and smashed glass panes and vessels senseless. While the father suffers a stroke because his son is turned away and is taken to a sanatorium, the son, who is injured with cuts, asks to bring his mother (3, last chapter, 1-3).
National Socialist dictatorship, emigration and the Holocaust
Irmgard Keun After midnight
Irmgard Keun's novel After Midnight (1937) takes place on two days in Frankfurt around 1936 and illustrates how the National Socialist dictatorship increasingly controlled people's lives and thoughts and discriminated against the Jewish population and pushed them to emigrate .
The narrator, nineteen-year-old Susanne Moder, called Sanna, moved from Cologne to her seventeen-year-old half-brother Alois in his expensive apartment on Bockenheimer Landstrasse a year ago. She helps his wife Liska with the household and with her handicrafts, which are sold in the business of her friend Gerti's parents in a prime area of the city. She accompanies the sister-in-law and Gerti z. For example, in the café on Roßmarkt, in front of which there is no sign saying "Jews undesirable", or while shopping in Goethestrasse and on the Zeil .
The two days in Frankfurt, which are at the center of the novel, outline the social situation. Sanna is essentially an observer and listener. Often she does not understand the content of the speech and its ideological background. But the author lets her observe people's behavior in everyday life with the childlike, uneducated gaze of a country girl and, supplemented by clever remarks by a woman with life experience, expose the phrases and grotesque contradictions of the partisans and the selfish attempts at reorientation of many citizens. Sanna constantly feels the fear of unconsciously saying something wrong and of being arrested by the Gestapo. Above all, she sees her careless and talkative friends who are drunk and in constant danger during the long evenings and nights in the Henninger Brewery near the Opernplatz or in a bar on Goethestrasse, in Bogener's wine taverns .
In Frankfurt, Sanna (Chapter 1) experiences the repression of the rulers and their organs: Gerti comes into conflict with the racial laws because of her love for the “ half-Jew ” Dieter Aaron, the son of an exporter who sympathized with National Socialism . Alois and Liska's circle of friends also includes Jewish business people and doctors. They are withdrawing more and more from the public and from the few cafés that are still accessible to them. While Aaron can continue to do his business and live as usual in a splendid villa, his son Dieter is no longer allowed to work in a chemical plant (Chapter 1). Doctor Breslauer is forbidden to operate in Germany. That is why he will emigrate to North America via Rotterdam over the next few days, where, with the prospect of American civil rights, he will be the chief physician of a clinic. He has already invested the majority of his wealth abroad (Chapter 5).
Sanna's brother Alois Moder, with the stage name Algin, was a successful socially critical journalist and writer during the Weimar Republic. After the change of government, his filmed novel "Shadows without Sun" was banned because of its corrosive tendency and he is faced with the decision between giving up his profession or adapting to the desired linear literature. He tends towards the second direction and "has recently been expressing himself as a poet about nature and his love of homeland, which is close to nature", because he was warned by the Reichsschrifttumskammer that a new "cleansing operation should take place among the writers, in which algin is likely to be sifted out." becomes."
In chapter 7, the heterogeneous circle of friends meets at Liska's party in her apartment. While the exuberant guests are celebrating and Algin no longer cares about his wife, his friend, the forty-year-old journalist Heini, philosophizes: “This society is a society of prisoners […] All are nice, good bourgeois people, according to the new German laws or the National Socialist laws However, it feels like they should all be locked up. They owe them to a coincidence that they roam free here. ”Shortly before midnight he shoots himself.
Heini is the central figure of the last two chapters of the novel (Chapters 6 and 7), in which he consistently represents the position of the resistance. Because of his critical attitude towards the system, he can hardly write any more articles. He came to the city six months ago and lives “in the most depressing neighborhood in Frankfurt. In a dull, musty gray street behind the train station. ”In contrast to the indecisive Algin, he says, z. B. when visiting restaurants, in long tirades his opinion. He accuses his friend (Chapter 6) of making “ridiculous concessions”. He had “written against [s] a feeling, against [s] a conscience” and was “in a poor man of letters”, because “[e] in a writer who is afraid [is] not a writer.” He gives the advice to him: "Where no criticism is possible, you have to be silent. [...] Kill yourself or learn to play the harp and make music of the spheres". His analysis of the situation is bleak. He sarcastically explains to Manderscheid, the former liberal people's party and head of the advertising department of a newspaper, who collected for winter aid that day: “We are living in the time of the great German denunciation movement. Everyone has to guard everyone, everyone has power over everyone [...] The noblest instincts of the German people are awakened and carefully cultivated. "
The highlight of the city's public image on the first day of the novel is the appearance of Adolf Hitler on Opernplatz, which Sanna and Gerti are watching from the balcony of Café Esplanade : Even before the motorcade pulled up, the convoy announced itself: “Calls swelled from afar: Heil Hitler, the crowds of shout came closer and closer - now he climbed up to our balcony - broad, hoarse and a little tired. And slowly a car drove by, in it the Führer stood like the Carnival prince in a carnival suit. But he wasn't as funny and happy as the Carnival prince and he didn't throw candies and bouquets either, he just raised his empty hand. ”This symbolic, foreboding scene is contrasted by the unsuccessful guide-with-child number. Five-year-old Bertchen Silias was chosen as the “row breaker” to present a huge bouquet of lilacs imported from Nice, but the rushing Hitler overlooked her. He now hurries between the rows of soldiers with flashing steel helmets carrying torches to the other rulers on the balcony of the opera house to show himself to the people. In the Henninger-Bräu (Chapter 2), Sanna then experiences how the child with a bad cold in front of his proud parents, in the midst of SA and SS people, as a substitute for the escaped appearance, the rehearsed poem I am a German girl / and future German mother / and bring you, O Führer my / from German districts Blümelein… again and again like a re-wound music box until it collapses dead on the table.
For Sanna and her politically engaged or endangered friends and acquaintances, these two Frankfurt days reflect the time of upheaval and the decisions for a life adapted to the regime or for fleeing Germany. The new day opens up for many changes in her life: Liska, whose unhappy love for Heini, who was preoccupied with himself and the political situation (Chapters 5 and 7) was not returned, separates from Algin and Algin marries her 30-year-old friend Betty Raff, who his new orientation as a poet admires the old one, just as his first wife did before. Sanna makes her life decision and thus draws the conclusion from the fate she has experienced. After her friend Franz took revenge on an informer in Cologne and fled to her, the two of them left Frankfurt by train after midnight, "[u] m one o'clock in the morning". In Rotterdam they are hoping for the help of the Breslauer who has also emigrated.
Anna Seghers The Seventh Cross
The storyline of the second part of Anna Seghers ' novel The Seventh Cross , published in 1942, criss-crosses various parts of Frankfurt with partly authentic, partly modified or fictitious street names. Here the protagonist hides from the National Socialist persecutors.
After the communist Georg Heisler fled the Westhofen concentration camp near Worms in autumn 1937 , he found refuge with socialist or communist-oriented friends and acquaintances in Frankfurt and thus escaped the Gestapo, which followed his trail from station to station and monitored his potential places of refuge . The figures represent the positions and behaviors of people under the control of the organs of the National Socialist dictatorship between loyal commitment to the regime and denunciation, adaptation and withdrawal from public life or help for the persecuted and cooperation in underground movements. A climate of distrust increases people's fear of expressing their true opinion. In the novel, this makes it difficult for Hermann to support the protagonist who has gone into hiding: Liesel Röder fears that the visitor is a secret agent and prevents Franz Marnet from contacting Georg. Conversely, Mr. Sauer suspects that a man he does not know, Paul Röder, is trying to set a trap for him (Chapter 5, Section 3). So the links close to a chain late and success is endangered by the temporary arrest of Paul and the danger that he will name Fiedler under pressure from the Gestapo.
On the morning of the third day of his escape (3/3), Heisler reached Frankfurt-Höchst , then took the electric to Niederrad and visited his girlfriend Leni in a residential area interlocked with houses, courtyards and gardens, with whom he was dating after separating from his wife Elli was. But she refuses to give him any help, since she is now living with a National Socialist. The next point of contact is an address in the city center given to him by his fellow inmate Belloni. He can change his clothes at the seamstress Mrs. Marelli (3/4). Equipped with eight marks, he leaves her apartment near Schillerstrasse. At the freight yard he meets a run-down prostitute who lets him spend the night in her room in Ostend. During the night he is woken up by noises and suspiciously escapes, as the whole city could be a safety net, through the window on the Main (3/5).
His suspicions are justified. In parallel acts, his friends are monitored, who in turn communicate through secret messages, seek contact with Georg in order to help him escape abroad. Franz Marnet, who works in the Höchst color works, meets Georg's wife Elli z. B. in the Olympia cinema (3/4), in the market hall and at her sister's (4/6), who is married to the SS man Otto Reiner, for advice. They know that Elli is alternately shadowed by several Gestapo people (4/3) and interrogated by the police superintendent Overkamp (6/3) as she walks through the city. Hermann, who works in the Griesheim ironworks, plays a central role in this underground network (5/3), links the messages from Franz, Sauer and Paul and finally organizes the rescue of his friend Georg.
The secret police are getting more and more information about the contact people through the arrests of the other escaped prisoners, for example they can find Ms. Marellis Heisler's sweater (4/2) in the apartment and know that he has returned to his city. Now they are looking specifically for him, publish his profile in Frankfurt and offer a reward. As a result, he is recognized as he eats something in a buffet at the theater, but in this case not revealed. On the other hand, his fellow inmate Füllgrabe, who in exasperation broke off his escape and presented himself to the Gestapo on Mainzer Landstrasse, recorded that he had met Georg at the Eschenheimer Turm shortly before (4/3, 5/3). At this point he wants to leave the city to go underground in rural Botzenbach, and after meeting line 23, he goes in the direction of Eschersheim, but he changes his plan, jumps off, stays in the city because he only has friends here, and wondering which of them are not being monitored and who could hide them. So he goes to Bockenheim at Brunnengasse 12 to see Liesel and Paul Röder, who give him hospitality. His childhood friend was unemployed for a long time and is grateful to the National Socialists for his job at the Pokorny ammunition factory. The Nazi welfare organization also supports his large family. Despite the risk of discovery, he takes Georg in (4/5) and the next morning (Friday) he unsuccessfully explores hiding places in the station district for him: Paul Schenk in Moselgasse 12 has already been arrested and the architect Sauer, disguised as a party member, reacts in Taunusstrasse out of caution, not on the password because he thinks Paul is an informant, but later Hermann describes the visitor, whom he identifies as Paul (6/6).
Paul finds a way to new quarters. In the evening he takes Georg to his aunt Katharina Grabber in Metzgergasse and passes him off as his brother-in-law Otto from Offenbach, whom he found a job as a car mechanic in their haulage company (5/3). The next day he looks for a trustworthy colleague in the company and speaks to Fiedler (6/5). He instinctively chose the right one, because it now uses its connections and ensures that Georg is informed by the chemist Dr. Kreß in Schäfergasse will be picked up by the Olympia Kino in the city center (6/9). You drive with his blue Opel past the Ostbahnhof and Ostpark to his house Goetheblick 18 on the edge of the Riederwaldsiedlung. The next day, Fiedler goes to see Hermann's friend Reinhard. The latter gives him money and an ID in the name of the nephew of a Dutch tugboat captain with Georg's passport photo (7/2). Grete Fiedler brings the papers to Georg with the news that she will be at the landing stage at the Kastel Bridge in Mainz at five thirty the next morning (7/3), and the Kresses will drive him to Kostheim . The next day he goes on board the Wilhelmine (7/5).
Valentin Senger Kaiserhofstrasse 12
The Frankfurt writer and journalist Valentin Senger published his family history in 1978 in the book Kaiserhofstrasse 12 . In a back building at this address ⊙ he survived the time of National Socialism and the persecution of the Jews with his parents and siblings, camouflaged in the normal everyday life of the German neighbors.
The father Moissee Rabisanowitsch and the mother Olga Moissejewna Sudakowitsch have to leave tsarist Russia because of revolutionary activities. They flee to Germany, hide their biographies and, from 1911 onwards, live with forged ID cards under the new name Senger as stateless Jews in Frankfurt (chapter Mama, Der Revolutionär, Die Camouflage ). Until his unemployment in 1931, the father earned her living as a revolver turner in the Adler works and her mother as a seamstress. According to Jewish tradition, the son Valentin, born in 1918, and his brother Alex (chapter Circumcision ) are circumcised and the father visits the Reformed synagogue on Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße with them on the holidays. The two children and their sister Paula grow up on Kaiserhofstrasse in the city center between the opera house and the Hauptwache.
Senger describes (chapter Our Street ) the social structures of this petty-bourgeois and medium-sized area: During the Weimar Republic, employees, city officials, workers, craftsmen, business people and a few lived here, depending on their income, either in the front or rear buildings Birds of Paradise and originals: z. For example, the painter Lino Salini , opera singer, prostitute, the transvestite Didi, who was later murdered by the Nazis, the saddler Gustav Lapp who was friends with a Spanish violinist (chapter Life and Death of a Don Juan ) or the milliner Anna Leutze (chapter The Foolish Milliner ). She has to suffer from the gang of children, the Kaiserhof clique, who are fighting with the neighboring Hochstrasse and Meisengasse cliques. Valentin's family is one of the poor tenants in the rear building who pass the inner courtyard with vaulted cellars for wine barrels and cheese wheels as well as a metalworking workshop on the way from the street to their apartments: “When I looked out the window of our rear building apartment, I was about eight meters away , the gray, cracked facade of the front building in front of me, and although we lived on the second floor, I had to put my head back if I wanted to see a piece of sky. Linen was drawn in front of almost all the windows with the ugly stretch curtains, on which there were always lots of laundry ... From the barred laundry room window in the courtyard, plumes of steam pulled up the house wall, so that the plaster rotten and crumbled at this point. [...] It was like that in all the backyards, they looked dreary compared to the ostentatious sandstone-adorned street facades. " People came and went, handcarts twitching sparkled back and forth, or tinsmith rider rattled on his "Horex" -Seitenwagenmaschine in the court that the sparrows davonstieben. "When Valentin Bockenheimer at the nearby Great street known Freßgass where the food - and line up delicatessen shops, he is only allowed to ask about remaining stocks or in short supply, "for ten pfennig toasted fruit" or "for twenty pfennigs sausage pieces". Every evening before the shop closes, the father fetches perishable goods at a reduced price from the vegetable department of the Tietz department store on Hauptwache.
When the “backyard child [succeeded] in climbing out of the social basement into the somewhat loftier middle school rooms,” “means [] [that] a certain social equality with those from the front building and strengthens [] a little [s] a barely pronounced one Self-esteem ”, which is also related to the lower status of the Jewish child. His mother wanted to spare him and his siblings the daily humiliation and insults in a non-Jewish environment and forged the resident registration card and the alien's passport with the help of the police officer Kaspar (chapter Police Officer Kaspar ). The family of "Mosaic" beliefs become "non-religious", "dissident [s]" of Russian descent who are not on the state police's list of Jews. After the National Socialist seizure of power, Olga also invents a new family tree (chapter The Family Tree ), which suggests Volga German ancestors, and instructs her family to camouflage themselves and hide in everyday life. Kaspar later protects the Sengers from being discovered by not passing on information. Even the neighbors, even party members and SA people, hold back because of a certain human bond, do not report, even help with questions, such as the master plumber Otto Reiter and Frau Volk (chapter rivalries ), or pretend to be unsuspecting and remain silent: " We continued to live together on Kaiserhofstrasse, Hitler came, the boycott of the Jews, the Kristallnacht, the persecution of the Jews, the war, and I always saw the clique, often in their uniforms, and they saw me, even spoke to me. […] Every single one could have asked: 'Why don't you wear a Jewish star? [...] 'But nobody asked. "
The family faces a twofold danger from their activities in the Communist Party . During the National Socialist dictatorship this has to be stopped and also the nocturnal posting of posters calling for resistance against the Nazis and statements in school about those in power are forbidden to the son by the mother (chapter "Don't we already have enough zores" ) . On the other hand, they take over courier services, forward messages abroad (chapter The suitcase ), let persecuted communists stay overnight in their apartment for a short time (chapter Mama blames herself ) and thus expose themselves to the risk of exposure. Once, when the unemployed father was picking up lunch for the family of five from the Jewish Welfare Service in Koenigswarterstraße, his alien's passport was withheld during a check and handed over to the police station, where Mr. Kaspar prevented further checks.
Fifteen-year-old Valentin experiences the change in the political climate in the city and in the country (Chapter 30 January 1933, Der Deutschen Gruß, Kristallnacht ). The anti-Jewish songs of the SA people are shouted louder. The teachers at the Westend Middle School are adapting more and more to political developments and are sometimes reluctant to follow the instructions, only formally, but do not offer any resistance, while others propagate Nazi racial theory or cultivate “a more subtle anti-Semitism”. The fear of discovery and persecution overshadows everyday entanglements and worries, and the strong mother suffers from a heart condition. One camouflages oneself in everyday life, Valentin attends the public school, begins an apprenticeship as a technical draftsman in the air heating works in 1935 and after his early dismissal, thanks to the understanding of the industrialist Remy Eyssen, he can work in his iron and steel construction company Fries Sohn in Sachsenhausen, then in 1938 in Finishing the main work in, as he writes, Riederwald. (In fact, the factory at Friesstrasse 5-7 was already in the Seckbacher district.) On the way to his job in Sachsenhausen, Valentin found out about the synagogue fire on the Eiserner Steg (chapter Kristallnacht ). He rushes to Börneplatz and sees the dome building in flames: “A feeling overwhelmed me that I had never known before: I too was one of those who was tormented and abused. It was my brothers and sisters whose windows were smashed, their apartments demolished, the shops smashed, the houses of worship destroyed, the Torah scrolls desecrated and bad things done to life and limb. [...] I felt no hatred for the curiously gawking crowd around me, although I knew that the burning synagogue did not cause most of them any tremors. For her it was a show that gave you goose bumps for a short time. "
Valentine's women's affairs in particular are burdened by the game of hide-and-seek and cannot develop as in the normal life of a teenager. The mother fears that any friendship of the son could tear through the camouflage net she has knotted. So he secretly sneaks at night to the prostitute Rosa in Vogelsgesanggasse (chapter Die Whne Rosa ) or hides after a poster campaign at the Ostbahnhof at Mimi's, whom he met in a conspiratorial group in 1938, in Brüder-Grimm-Strasse ( Chapter Mimi - a temporary love ). Particularly risky in 1942 was her relationship with Bulgarian Ionka Michailowa Dragowa (Chapter Ionka ), who was employed in a household on Beethoven Street . Your approach begins in Königswarterstraße in Ostend , leads via Zeil, Hauptwache, Opernplatz, Bockenheimer Landstraße, Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße to the Liebesbank on Beethovenplatz. Other meeting points are the facilities on the Main, Paulsplatz or Ostpark. Valentin often only realizes how dangerous these conditions are after they have ended: after the arrest of Rosa and Ionka, the mysterious, surprising return trip to Sofia, apparently under pressure from the secret service. (The Koenigswarterstraße, named after a Jewish family, had to change its name under the Nazis; from 1935 to 1945 it was officially called Quinckestraße.)
The discovery lurks everywhere and the reactions of the Germans cannot be assessed: after ten years of unemployment, the seventy-year-old father found a job again in 1940 as a lathe operator in a gear factory in Sachsenhausen (chapter they called him Papitschka ), and because of his knowledge of Russian, he was used as an interpreter for the forced laborers and must accompany the column on their daily marches from the mass quarters in Uhlandstrasse in Ostend to the factory. Since he is committed to women, he is called "Papitschka" by them. In 1943, however, a Russian informant reported to the Gestapo that this relationship of trust went beyond his duty to serve. In the quarter on Lindenstrasse, the old man is interrogated and released after twelve hours with a warning (chapter Risen from the dead ).
After completing his apprenticeship, Valentin returned to the plant in Sachsenhausener Schulstrasse, where he was promoted to operations manager. Since one here war equipment, u. a. Torpedo carrier, manufactures, the factory is bombed in 1944 (chapter Bombs on Sachsenhausen ). Many Russian foreign workers also die in the process. During this time he and his family experienced the increasing air raids in the protective cellars from 1943 and the destruction of the city. Parts of the rear building are also burning out and the Sengers are staying with Mimi in Jügesheim. In the autumn of 1944, her mother, who had a heart condition, died there and Valentin took her on an adventurous, illegal journey with a horse-drawn hearse to the main cemetery in Frankfurt (chapter Mama's last trip ). So far, he and his brother have not been obliged to go to war as foreigners, but in the spring of 1944 they were called up for the last contingent in the district military replacement office in Wiesenhüttenstrasse. As with other examinations before (chapter visiting the doctor ), this means a danger, but the doctor ignores the circumcision and does not make a report. Valentin was trained as an artillery gunner in Fritzlar, but was not sent to the front because of a falsely diagnosed heart defect (chapter The Heart Defect ). So he survived the Hitler dictatorship in northern Hesse and after the end of the war he returned to the liberated but destroyed Kaiserhofstrasse (chapter Papa stood at the window ).
Silvia Tennenbaum Yesterday's streets
Silvia Tennenbaum's three-generation novel with autobiographical references Streets of Yesterday encompasses the development of the fictional Jewish families Wertheim and Süßkind from their ascent into the Frankfurt upper middle class at the turn of the century to emigration or deportation during the Second World War. In this context, the process of integration or assimilation and the tension between the values “jichus”, the “riches of the spirit [...]: knowledge and learning”, and the pursuit of prosperity are discussed. Representatives of the first view of life are z. B. Jakob Wertheim and Elias Süßkind, while v. a. Moritz and Eduard Wertheim think in economic categories and see the basis for maintaining the standard of living of the extended family in constant adaptation to the market. This discussion about the question of Jewish identity and their fatherland is intensified in times of increasing hostility and the beginning of exclusion from German society in the twenties and thirties.
The wool wholesaler Moritz Wertheim, whose ancestors had lived in the Judengasse in the old town, the former ghetto, since the early 17th century, tries to gain acceptance from the upper classes by expanding his company (Chapter 1, 1903 ). Above all, three of his sons should take on these tasks: Siegmund and Gottfried are already working in the Wertheim und Sons company . Eduard has returned from an apprenticeship in a befriended New York bank and would like to use this experience for a comprehensive reorganization and become managing director. For this he develops strategies for the continuation of the business and seeks the support of his brother Nathan. He is a lawyer and is supposed to help him with the downgrading of his father's unsuitable junior partner. Jakob, the second youngest, is not interested in business anyway. He studied history and philosophy in Göttingen and is currently writing his dissertation on Immanuel Kant. Using the Jakob - Esau example from the Old Testament , he explains his motto to his nephew : “Cleverness ultimately wins over animal strength. The Jews still draw important lessons from it. ”Edward's plan is favored by a crime committed by his unbridled brother Gottfried. He raped the opera choir singer Nellie, whom he was courting, when she defied his wishes. The family hushed up this case with financial compensation for the victim and exile of the son to America. There he tries a new start as Gerald F. Worth.
The family plays an intermediate role in society. Like Moritz's wife Hannchen, née Levi, they are proud to be a citizen of Frankfurt am Main and celebrate not only the Jewish festivals but also the Christian ones, especially Christmas. Great importance is attached to the European education of the children, who are first looked after by wet nurses, then by teachers, and employ, for example, Nathan and Caroline, English governesses. The connoisseur of life, Siegmund, who is more oriented towards a cultivated life than work, and his wealthy wife Pauline, who is inclined to luxury, visit exhibitions in the Städel and listen to concerts. The art historian Elias Süßkind tries to interest his friend Eduard in painting. This responds to it and enthusiastically collects v. a. Expressionist paintings, also with the ulterior motive of his social integration into the first circles as a patron of the Städel . After Elias became the museum's second director, he gave him the “blue Matisse ” in honor of the modern collection : flowers and ceramics .
However, one stays among oneself with close friendships and marries partners of the Jewish community. Aspects of social advancement also play a role here. The economic success is reflected in the number of, mostly Christian, service personnel (cooks, maids, coachmen, etc.) and the choice of apartment. Most of the family members live in representative houses outside the old town. Moritz and Hannchen, whose parents ran a small furniture factory in Bockenheim, invite the family to lunch on Sunday in their classicist building on Neue Mainzer Strasse. Nathan and his wife Caroline, who comes from a drugstore in the poor east, usually receive their relatives for tea on Guiollettstrasse on Saturdays. Only Jakob lives with his housekeeper and lover Gerda, who is ignored by the family, in an old town house on Fahrgasse.
The historical situation, and at the same time the increasing assimilation of the Wertheim family, is discussed with Nathan and Caroline on Christmas Eve (Chapter 2, 1913 ). The author lets individual people represent the different positions. While the Wertheims celebrate the festival with typical Christian symbolism, decorations, celebratory meals and gifts on a grand scale, Caroline's father Benedict Süßkind criticizes this adaptation, sees himself as a keeper of Jewish tradition and demonstratively brings a Hanukkah chandelier from Prague to the celebration . He is reserved about the Wertheims' striving for success, for whom the German-Jewish opposition no longer seems to exist, but only social class affiliation. The boys attend the Goethe-Gymnasium together with Catholic or Protestant children and then study, while the girls go to a private secondary school for girls, which also teaches social polish, and they also receive piano, dance and painting lessons. But also in the sweet child family, the dismantling of the demarcation with the Christians is clear from the example of single mixed marriages. Elias Süßkind, meanwhile employed by the Städel, marries Bettina, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer who holds a seat on the museum's supervisory board. And the blond, blue-eyed Thomas von Brenda-Badolet, the youngest offspring of one of the most respected Frankfurt families with Franco-Italian-Huguenot roots, befriends Nathan's daughter Lene, his future wife (Chapter 5, 1928 ). However, the marriage of these two aesthetically spoiled people and only interested in social and cultural life does not have a solid foundation in everyday life. Thomas cannot find a job to finance a befitting life and soon after the birth of his daughter Clara separates from his wife in order to live with his girlfriend Lulu in Weimar, while Lene has a brief affair with the married Jewish writer Paul Leopold.
The exponent of ascension consciousness is Eduard Wertheim ("We live in the twentieth century. The Jews are like everyone else, and if they are not, they should be."), Who goes into banking after the death of his father and acts as the head of the entire family and supported his brothers with monthly profit shares, bought a villa with a garden, Bockenheimer Landstrasse 32, near the Rothschild Palais, and Jakob tried to talk him out of his marriage plan with the unsuitable Gerda. Since he does not have a family of his own, he also feels responsible for the well-being of his nephews and nieces through the establishment of trust funds, represents their interests in marriage and divorce matters, gives them generous gifts and invites them to educational trips to Venice and Florence, where he shows them highlights of European culture. The economic situation of most of the family members deteriorates in the course of the novel, so that they can only maintain their standard of living through Edward's skillful increase in the company's assets. Only Jakob and Caroline's son Ernst forego financial support for reasons of principle.
The Süßkinds have a more keen eye for the conflicts between the upper class and the working class that came to a head before the First World War than the Wertheims. Especially Caroline's sister Eva, who works as a chemist in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory and joins a Spartakist group , points to this situation, which could accelerate a revolution after a lost war. After her “pilgrimage to the Soviet Union” she raves about a free society by changing the rulers and educating people to become socially conscious. She sees the solution to its problems in including the Jews in such an international. Her sister Caroline contradicts her fundamentally: one can "not change human nature" and one can only change culture gradually. In doing so, she apparently starts from her own socialization and her difficulties, as well as those of her daughter Lene, to limit herself in times of need and to run a household without servants.
In line with their efforts to integrate, the Wertheim sons volunteered for the military at the start of the war: Eduard was deployed as a dragoon officer in Galicia , Jakob wounded in France and treated in a hospital in Mainz. During this time, Siegmund was the sole head of the company that supplies woolen materials for the army (Chapter 3, 1918 ). This social opening also leads to tensions with the increasingly German-national mood in the population. Nathan's daughter Emma experiences exclusion in the Taunus holiday camp, even takes on the anti-Semitic prejudices, despite her sister Lene's contradiction ("We are like everyone else. At least here in Frankfurt.") And feels inferior: "The Jews make such a ridiculous one Figure in the world […] They should all disappear […] I want […] that we are not always different and fall out of the ordinary. ”Emma tragically fails when trying to escape from her milieu. During their rides together in the city forest, she falls in love with the East Prussian landowner and officer Otto von Benzow (Chapter 4, 1923 ), who is twenty-one years her senior, and marries him against the advice of her skeptical family, who suspect her admirer to be a hidden anti-Semite and dowry hunter. He is not, but at the wedding party there is a scandal when his demented mother accuses the Jews of ruining the whole country. After the additionally unsuccessful wedding night, Emma returns to her parents' house and breaks the connection again.
Political confrontations were still the exception in Frankfurt at this time, and when SA men disrupted a costume ball in which Lene and her artist clique took part because of the black jazz band, they were put in front of the door. But during the period of inflation and the emerging National Socialist orientation (Chapter 5, 1928 ), family members were increasingly concerned about their future in Germany, but assessed the events differently. The Wiesbaden doctor Jonas Süßkind has, perhaps, as Eva suspects, because he is married to a non-Jew, a certain understanding of the longing of many Germans for a strong authority, since in the republic the country drifted aimlessly without "law and order [...] “And Thomas von Brenda-Badolet hopes that the Nazis may fight the Communists, but that they can be kept under control. Jakob, on the other hand, fears that the Jews will be the losers of this reorganization and that they will be put back in the ghetto. His brother Nathan trusts fatefully in the experiences of history: “There have been pogroms before [...] but the Jews stayed. We are the conscience of the world, nobody will get rid of us. ”His sister-in-law Eva Süßkind continues to believe in her utopia and sees the solution in an international socialist society. Eduard Wertheim does not share their ideology, because he fears a Bolshevik and a fascist regime in the same way and, as a precaution, emigrates to Switzerland with his mother. He has merged his bank with a private Swiss bank and from Zurich he also runs the company, which, with prudent foresight, has been “sold” to an Aryan partner. Lene's lover Paul comes to the same decision. Before moving to Prague he analyzes the situation astutely: “The strength of the Nazis lies in the fact that they combine dreams of a pure and perfect past with the knowledge of the mass movement of the future, that they embrace the people's tendency to make sacrifices, as extremely suitable for the purposes of the state. ”Nathan's son Ernst and his wife Miriam, an Eastern Jew, do not stay in the country either. In any case, they planned to emigrate to Palestine as Zionists to live in a kibbutz , and in times of increasing threat they are implementing this plan.
In January 1933 a new stage was reached with the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor. It is symbolically the day of Nathan's funeral (Chapter 6, 1933 ), on which warning signs become a reality. During the funeral ceremonies in the Jewish cemetery, the Wertheims experience the march of SA units across the Eckenheimer Landstrasse to the victory celebration at the Römer. The restrictions for Jews that were quickly imposed in the near future will also force those who have been hesitant to make decisions. Siegmund and Pauline, as they pretend, only go to France for a few days and stay there, as does their daughter Julia, who, after the German occupation , marries Maurice, a member of a French Resistance group, and works as a farmer on his farm. Elias was dismissed from civil service in 1933 and five years later the new directors closed the gallery for contemporary art he had set up and sold many pictures abroad, including a. also "Edus blau [n] Matisse" (7th chapter 1938 ). Like Eduard, Elias was accepted into Switzerland with his wife Hildegard and son Benno and he was given the post of curator of the museum's graphic collection in Basel. Benno then emigrates to the USA, works at the Brooklin Museum , returns to Germany as an American soldier and writes an eyewitness report from the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp to his cousin Lene in America. His aunt Eva Süsskind survived persecution and war as a chemist in Paris. Lene's daughter Emma moves to Italy. While on vacation in Florence, she made friends with the guesthouse owner Mabel Hennessy Supino-Botti, who brokered the purchase of a country house, financed by Eduard, which she called La Favorita , with a view of the Arno Valley. Here she takes care of Clara and hopes that Lene will leave the child to her when she emigrates. During the German occupation of Italy, Eduard brought her to Zurich. Lene is in a relationship again and has been traveling through Europe from her base in Paris with the pianist Manfred (Mosche) Solomon, who was born in Poland and trained in Frankfurt, since the professional ban on Jewish artists on German stages. In 1935 she married and move in 1938 after a long wait for a visa and a painful confrontation with Emma together with Clara and Miss thoroughly, the old governesses of Boulogne from the Nieuw Amsterdam to New York. After a difficult first few years as a music teacher, Manfred Solomon is again successful as a pianist, albeit not with his demanding European repertoire, but adapted with light music (Chapter 8, 1939–1945 ). The child Clara is also burdened by the uncertainty of the circumstances and the change of place of residence in Europe and processes these experiences during the crossing. “Often she put herself in the spirit of an orphan outside society or a poor kitchen maid who secretly observes the lavish goings-on of the rich [in the midst of upper-class society with servants on the luxury liner]. Of course, the girl was better off than her domination, for she was free from all the pomp and formality. […] Since she got her ideas from the children's films she saw [on the ship], she imagined being an orphan or being poor very romantic. It never occurred to her that it was she, Clara, who always ate the delicacies. "
When individual family members meet in exile, for example in a restaurant in Paris, they look both into an uncertain future, especially since they fear a new world war, and wistfully into the past. Lene expresses this hope, which, however, will not come true: "May you one day return home to Frankfurt with all of us [...] and find the city that you have in your heart." When she met before her crossing to America Having said goodbye to her uncle, she thinks she is entering a museum room, because he has designed his Zurich property based on the pattern of his Frankfurt house: “His books, paintings and tapestries were arranged in a similar way, the same flowers bloomed in the garden, the family photos his desk stood exactly as it had always been […] Lene's memory featured images from her childhood; she saw herself ringing the doorbell at the gate on Bockenheimer Landstrasse, saw Emma look at her watch to see if they were on time. […] The room she was in had belonged to her grandmother; it was filled with small symbols of memory of Hannchen Wertheim. They made Lene think of Frankfurt, of home. If only she could come back just once! ”Eduard also expresses her sentiment:“ It is cruel to be exiled ”.
Others do not succeed in jumping off in time or they are captured after the German occupation and are killed in camps. Caroline doesn't want to leave Frankfurt. She escapes in her house on Guiollettstrasse "from the approaching demons in the madness" and has to be accommodated by her son Andreas, who also does not emigrate because of his boyfriend, and her brother Jonas in a private sanatorium in the Taunus. From there she was transported to a euthanasia clinic in 1940 as an “incurable person” and killed (Chapter 8, 1939–1945 ). Jonas is no longer allowed to practice as a doctor, so his Aryan wife Hildegard leaves him and goes with the four children to their parents in Altona to start a new, safe life. After the Kristallnacht, by suicide he escapes an attack by SA men who ravage the dead man's apartment out of anger. His nephew Andreas is arrested in his mother's house and transported with hundreds of other Frankfurt Jews to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Lodz). There he had to work hard with poor nutrition and died of exhaustion (Chapter 8, 1939–1945 ). All possibilities of escape and their tragic failure are concentrated in Jakob's fate. First he wants to stay in Germany, although he has to sell his bookstore to his employee Alois because Jews are no longer allowed to run businesses. He changes his mind when he hides a woman who was wanted by the police as a member of a resistance group, a friend of Eva's, in his apartment and falls in love with her. So he decides to follow Lore into emigration. After an apartment search by Nazi people, he flees to Strasbourg. He meets Lore at the Strasbourg Cathedral portal among the figures of Ecclesia and the synagogue, who are symbolic of the theme of the novel . You go straight to Amsterdam and live there with forged papers. After the occupation by German troops, Jakob hides in an attic, but is recognized as a Jew while walking through the city and deported via the Westerbork and Buchenwald camps to Auschwitz, where he, like many other prisoners, is gassed and burned. The truck that followed him is shot at the fence of the Buchenwald camp.
The author's motive to write this family chronicle and to research the political events is contained in the letter from the American soldier Benno Süßkind to his cousin Lene Solomon, which he sent her from the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. He interviewed inmates and quoted a survivor's message to him: “Tell the world what they did to us!” Benno adds: “Soon, before another generation has grown up and died, we will no longer remember , or hardly remember, or remember and twist it, each as it seems expedient to him. ”The author leaves Lenes’s Frankfurt-born daughter Clara, who“ hardly [thinks] about Frankfurt ”, now calls herself Claire and just graduated from High School of Music and Art , read this anti-forgetting appeal at the family's summer home on Long Island Beach. The life dates of Claire and Silvia Tennenbaum agree with each other.
Memories of the Nazi era, emigration and the Holocaust
Martin Mosebach The bed
Martin Mosebach's 1983 novel Das Bett deals with the fate of the fictional Jewish Korn family as emigrants . The flight of numerous German Jews is reflected in the biographies of the protagonists: Just in time for the start of the Second World War and the deportation, the Korns sell their factory and the Frankfurt villa and escape to New York .
Her son Stephan returns to post-war Frankfurt, visits the places of his childhood, v. a. the care of his nanny Agnes (title) in her “hewn together from the cheapest material only to solve the greatest housing shortage” settlement house in a remote suburban area, and falls in love with the narrator's aunt , whom he visits the earlier Get to know the neighboring family in a former villa area in Frankfurt's Westend and the excursions together. Stephan also strolls through the Bockenheim district adjoining Westend (Part Two, Chapters III and IV) with his girlfriend in search of childhood traces. He feels the atmosphere in an old, closed suburban cinema, the Titania Palace , experiences the “friable charms of the colors” of the streets and tells the companion about Parisian theater performances in a pastry shop. This journey into the past, the unhappily ending relationship and the return of the son to New York, after a chain of misunderstandings, by his suspicious and jealous mother Florence symbolizes Stephen's uprooting or his search for identity and reorientation. The two family stories and the fates of the protagonists during the Nazi dictatorship and the persecution of the Jews as well as the Second World War are unfolded in flashbacks.
The author brings together the life paths of the main characters in the largely destroyed city. Their fates contrast with the apparent post-war normality of the narrator in his parental home in Westend, which survived the war unscathed. From the child's perspective, a bizarre, fairytale-like picture of his environment emerges compared to what happened in the past. Political-historical discussions or processing that should actually result from Stephan Korn's visit are kept secret or are at least imperceptible to the narrator: His mother only goes to confession regularly out of habit, but has no sins to confess in private. A magic circle that deals with methods of conjuring up spirits and necromancers could allude to the passive resistance in Frankfurt, the inner emigration , during the Hitler era . In her mysterious Privatissima with Monsignore Eichhorn, Ines Wafelaert, a Belgian who moved to the country through a rich marriage to Henry and whose villa was later bombed, asks "less [...] out of hatred of Hitler, but mainly because she explores the spiritual forms of influence put the test [wants] ”the priest about whether incantations can change the political situation and whether an“ assassination of the will ”can kill a dictator. Eichhorn takes the view “that the willpower, if it is sufficiently developed, can appear almost physically condensed.” The seriousness of such considerations is relativized by the clergyman's declarations that they are “purely theoretical problems” “that arise for him the literature in its dazzling pros and cons are too well known to gain through practical testing, since the extraordinary dangers of such exercises basically already prohibit their use. ”This affinity for the irrational, combined with a loss of reality, can be found in the family the mother of the narrator in the repeated motif of madness : v. a. in the aunt's retreat into her dream world.
Dahn Ben-Amoz masks in Frankfurt
In his novel Masken in Frankfurt (1969), the Israeli writer Dahn Ben-Amoz tells of the stay of the Holocaust survivor Uri Lam from September 1959 to May of the following year in his native Frankfurt. The place of action, however, has few characteristic features, but rather represents the type of a German city with what was once a large Jewish population.
The reason for the trip burdened with the memories of the first-person narrator is to apply on site for compensation for the loss of his family, who was deported to the concentration camp in 1941 and murdered there, as well as "for loss of property, deprivation of liberty, orphanage [etc.]" (Chapter 12, Encounter in the dark ), as the deadline for payments was eleven years ago. With the lawyer Dr. Uri seriously discusses the legal situation and the corresponding procedure, e.g. B. Submit documents and reports about his state of health. He needs the money to pay a loan to buy a house, but he has a remorse for the suffering of his father, the Jewish veterinarian Dr. Erich Lampel, his mother and his sister Miri to receive a sum of money calculated according to tables (Chapter 11 Black Coffee ).
There is another reason why Uri does not enter Frankfurt with an open mind. The old pictures are always present as a background film and the faces of the present people overlap with the past ones. The encounter with the rebuilt city (Chapter 9, Bright Morning ) leads to mixed reactions. He understands rationally the complaints of the inhabitants about the horrors of the bombing ("Nothing is left of our Germany") and the pride of the tour guide during the city tour in the reconstruction efforts of the citizens (Chapter 10 in the evening ), but he remembers them suffered childhood discrimination. He then looks for a release ("Everyone knows the questions, but nobody knows the answer. You have to forget [...] There is no other solution."), Gets drunk in a bar and then uncontrollably insults other guests as Nazis. On his wanderings through the city and in the feverish dreams during his illness (chapters 28–30) the boundaries between past, present, fantasy and reality are blurred.
During a visit to his parents' house in Wagnergasse (Chapter 22 Ownerless Property ), which to him "seems like an empty and robbed box", the new owner tells him that he has been evicted from his own house in the eastern regions and that I bought and repaired the current one from the city in a shabby state. During this conversation, Uri thinks of a house on the Israeli border that is occupied by a painter, whose Arab owners fled to Nazareth during the wars of liberation and which the latter leased from the office for non-possession. Uri also lives in a legally bought Arab house, which his girlfriend Barbara reminds him of (Chapter 33 Armistice ). In his emotional ambivalence, he tries to put himself in the position of passive German citizens who ignore the deportations. B. when he watches a brawl without intervening (Chapter 21 Beatings ). Later he recognizes the feminine fashion designer and transvestite Martin Schiller, whom he met on the train from Milan to Frankfurt, in the victim. In his talks about another Germany, Barbara and Martin represent the extreme positions. Schiller demonstrates to him in his own treatment as a homosexual that, in principle, nothing has changed: the average citizen would still react their prejudices to outsider groups and construct enemy images, for example of the communists, who had stolen their eastern territory from them. But Martin also admits that there are thoughtful people who “persistently ask questions. They want to know why. ”With him,“ the feeling of guilt is so strong that [he] cannot free himself from the compulsion [to justify himself] to him. Always and everywhere. ”Uri reacts to this conversation, which activates his own distrust, confused:“ What I want to forget, he wants to anchor in memory. The only means to calm the hammering in my head, the forgetting, which alone could make this scream of madness, the endless fall, into the distance, that is what he calls poison. ”The original Hebrew title of the novel Liszkor W refers to this central idea 'Lischkoach (= To remember, to forget ). Barbara differentiates between the past and the present and encourages him in his thought, "[t] he children of Nazis [shouldn't] necessarily become Nazis again." She represents the young German generation and is certain: »[...] The dream is past and will not come back. Neither here nor anywhere else in the world. The world has learned from it. And we too. "The revanchists are only" a mentally ill minority [...] ". She sees no problems living with Uri in Germany, but when he refuses, she is immediately ready to go to Israel with him and their expected son Jonathan. She tries to dispel his scruples about accepting the compensation payments ("I will neither finance my house nor our future with this money.") By viewing them not as an impossible reparation , but as compensation, a jump-start for the survivors and their children to be able to build a new existence. Martin, on the other hand, represents the opposite position. He sees only polite, meaningless declarations in private and public statements. Uri also misses empathy with the victims when a distinction is made between a rejected “ collective guilt ” of the Germans and an accepted “collective responsibility”.
Uri then wonders how Jews with a fate similar to his can live in the city. For example, his friend Max Hermann and his wife Edna, who is fixated on Europe, avoid talking to their children Joab, Affe and Dudik about the Nazi era (Chapter 11, Black Coffee ). Max lost his parents too, was brought to Palestine like him at the age of thirteen and learned the Hebrew language there. Also a Jewish couple, the doctor Dr. Franz Meier and his wife Martha, old friends of his parents, survived the deportation to the Dachau concentration camp and returned from Haifa to their apartment in Frankfurt after the war. Here the woman spends the day, ghostly woven into her memory, in a museum room with closed curtains (Chapter 18, Doctor Meier ).
The idea of living in Germany and working in an architectural office brokered by his father-in-law also became relevant for the narrator after he met the student of German literature and history Barbara Stahl (Chapter 12, Encounter in a stuck elevator) on the way to the law office Dark ). They fall in love, attend theater, music and cinema events (from Chapter 13) and get married (Chapter 25 The Wedding ) when Barbara becomes pregnant (Chapter 20 Decision ). Uri's reflections are thereby expanded to include further aspects. He wonders now whether he can live with a German woman in Frankfurt or Düsseldorf as heir to a family tragedy. He constructs the allegations of the Jews: "Marry the daughter of the murderer of his family and build her a house with the reparation money." He doubts whether it is right to receive compensation for the death of people and later surrenders them on the return journey Israel part of the money, the sum for the imprisonment of his parents, the Italian foster parents Anna and Michele, who took him in at the age of nine in San Castello and hid him for three years. His aversion to the Jewish returnees to Frankfurt, who, in his opinion, stand out too little from the Germans and are too easily forgotten, is also shown in chapter 34 ( Masked Ball ), to which the title of the German translation refers. He appears at the masked ball in the costume of a dybbuk , i.e. H. a ghost of the dead, with a yellow Jewish star on the caftan , is expelled from the hall for lack of taste, but returns with Max, who is disguised as an SS man, and performs a persecution scene from the Nazi era.
Barbara realizes that Uri cannot live in a strange Germany with the shadows of the past and decides to share a future with him and her son Jonathan in Israel (chapter 35 epilogue and prologue ).
Bernhard Schlink The reader
Following on from the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, the city appears as the setting for the second part of Bernhard Schlink's novel Der Vorleser (written in 1995, published in 1997). In the first part of the novel, the high school student Michael had a relationship with Hanna, the tram conductor who was twice his age, which was broken off by the sudden disappearance of the lover, but which helped determine his further relationship life (third part). Seven years after the separation, he is attending a war crimes trial as a law student . From the information provided by the author, one can infer Frankfurt as the place of action and the third of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the late 1960s or one of the subsequent trials in the 1970s, in which guards were on trial, as in the novel: Guards of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp , one of them is Hanna Schmitz. They are accused of taking part in selections and, as escorts, when women and children were transferred towards the end of the Second World War, locking the prisoners in a church and failing to free them from the burning building after a bomb attack. Michael is shocked by the testimony of the lover's confession and her apparently emotionless execution of commands as well as the lack of a sense of personal responsibility, but he also remembers the woman's inexplicable behavior at the time and he notices similarities: Like him, Hanna had In the concentration camp, young girls as protégés who read to her at times. He discovers that his girlfriend cannot read, including the documents and protocols she has signed, which she does not admit in court, which is a burden on herself. Since she is the only one to confess the deeds, the other defendants place the main blame on her. In his emotional ambivalence, the narrator is unsure whether he should intervene in the process and communicate his observation to the court, which he fails to do after talking to his father about the responsibility of the accused. After Hanna's sentencing to life imprisonment, he contacts her, visits her and wants to help her reorientation after her release. But before that happens, the now sixty-one year old kills herself.
Hans Frick The blue hour
This novel by Hans Frick , which was published for the first time in 1977, is hardly available today even in antiquarian format. With his novel, this Frankfurt writer left an important document about the Nazi era in the Gallus district . Franz Dobler sees in the book The Blue Hour the autobiographical “report of the 1930 born about his youth in Frankfurt during the Nazi and post-war years and about the miserable life of his mother. They lived on Ginnheimer Strasse, then on Lahnstrasse, and everywhere the mother was insulted as a 'dirty Jew whore' because she had an illegitimate child from a Jewish art dealer. The half-Jew Hans Frick grew up with the fear that the Nazis could pick him up at any time (and he knew what they did with the Jews). "For Monika Sperr , Frick tells" of the difficult life and death of his mother, although he was concerned about the extreme scarcity and strive for truthfulness. In this strict restriction to the essentials, the renunciation of embellishment or intellectual expansion of facts, images and memories, there is a magic that turns this book, which actually only conjures up bitter experiences, into a moving document of the fate of a proletarian woman. "The book, for Sperr, a self-questioning of the author, ends in the post-war period with the death of his mother, and the last pages of the latter “are among the most beautiful and moving that I have ever read because of the restraint and caution with which a son tries to make death easier for his mother have".
Post War and Reconstruction
Marie Luise Kaschnitz returns to Frankfurt
In the fourteen-part cycle of poems, Return to Frankfurt, Marie Luise Kaschnitz describes her feelings when she encountered the changed city again (How did she look at you / Out of her extinguished eyes / The city? […] And how did you hear it / Under your feet / Out the sunken things?). The author mourns not only the historical buildings and the dead people, but also the spiritual world of humanity that was destroyed with them.
In the ninth section, this dismantling is demonstrated through a literary zoom in on the Opera Square. The narrator is happy to discover an apparently intact island in the rubble city (“How you bloom for me in the blind / dark chestnut branches”). But as she approaches, she has to admit: "All your beauty is shattered / aged and decayed / your body and face". The “pillars and sloping gables” of the temple of the Muses are “backdrops only for appearance.” Finally, the lost culture (“The tones all sung”) is symbolized by the example of Pegasus who fell from the gable and disappeared : “God knows where he sprang from / from the roof the wing horse. / [...] As if someone had ridden away / You don't know who anymore. ”In the tenth poem of the cycle, the sculpture sometimes appears to people as a ghost horse, which fascinates them, but shrinks from its“ primeval world ”.
Kaschnitz also takes up the theme of the lost culture when looking at the ruins of the Goethehaus, in that she imagines the representatives of the German Classical period against his parents' house in the rubble.
And the house was a hole, a cellar shaft,
a pile of filth and mockery,
and signs were posted there;
It read: Property of the Nation.
[...]
And suddenly on the roadside
he was in flesh and blood:
[...]
He didn't even have his own face,
I just knew: he was there.
And I was scared like last day
because he was looking at his house.
But “Because the completed maybe / only see the completion”, the poet Goethe lets look over the tomb. "He peered into rooms out of pure air, / As if candlelight shone there."
In section XIII the author describes the destruction metaphorically on the river of the city (“the river has become dangerous […] the river has become empty”), the water of which “comes from far away” and “the rest / from scorching and burning and murders, / war and corpse plague, / poisonous germs in plumes, / decoction of misery and misery [...] after the days of anger “with you. The poet hopes for a new beginning after a period of processing “everything that has happened”. But the river must “first experience everything / And let it sink to the bottom / Even the head with the snake hair / And the screaming mouth.” Because the waters “carry a long hard time / The bank's perishable fate / And then sing it in the sea wind / And lay it in your lap. "These thoughts are overlaid with images of memories of the old river:" It always seemed more cheerful to me / In the other time / When it wore the light of the room / Wore like a flickering dress / And shot under the bridges / And left them rustling, / While the lamps were still glowing / By the southern blossoms / On the wall that was called Nice . "
Max Frisch Diary 1946–1949
In four entries in the literary diary 1946–1949 , the impressions of the Swiss writer Max Frisch about the city destroyed in the war and the beginning of construction are noted. One year after the end of the war, in May 1946, the author experienced the image of destruction as an elementary turning point: “When you are in Frankfurt, especially in the old city center, and when you think back to Munich: you can imagine Munich, Frankfurt no longer. A plaque shows where the Goethehaus was. [...] the ruins do not stand, but sink into their own rubble. [...] the grass that grows in the houses [...] and suddenly you can imagine how it continues to grow, how a primeval forest stretches over our cities, slowly, unstoppably [...] breath of the years that nobody counts - [ …] At the train station: refugees are lying on the stairs […] their life is seeming, a waiting without expectation, they are no longer attached to it; only life still clings to them, ghostly, an invisible animal [...] it breathes from sleeping children lying on the rubble, their heads between their bony arms, bent over like the fruit in the womb, as if they wanted to go back there. "
A year and a half later, Max Frisch noted: “The need has lost adventure, everyday life, there is no telling what is to come. A certain hope that the collapse sparked becomes shabby, like the last clothes. I read billboards: Appeals for the Goethehaus [...]. "
In April 1948, while the bricklayers were restoring the Paulskirche on the hundredth anniversary of German democracy, Frisch felt the poetry of a tightrope walker performance on the square of the destroyed old town between the Römer and the cathedral: “In front of the old Römer: high rope over rubble […] but in the evening When the ruins are in the spotlight, everything is even more magical [...] And on top of that, the moon [...] the guarantee that the universe is not without poetry, the universe, the night, death [...] "Describes as a macabre climax he performed the “Camilla Mayer's Death Walk” to the top of the Nikolaikirche, which was spectacularly and successfully performed by a young artist.
Karl Zimmermann Frankfurt chants
The collection of poems by the journalist and writer Karl Zimmermann, called the Frankfurter Gesänge , addresses the existential situation of mankind in the post-war and reconstruction period: the tension between the legends of a past idyll (" Vineta's bells ring under the sea elsewhere" [...] It sinks, the city [ ...] / Strikes on corals, brick stones, on mainsand-red / mossy blocks of the monasteries ") and the race for gold" on the suddenly rediscovered mining site "next to the" [a] old towers [n]! dressed up ”in the“ decorated caravanserai ”that“ has become a princely house ”with its“ majesty of successful business ”. The stories of the good old days and the messages of salvation ("But above us the silver voices / leaves, flapping wings and hope.") Are no longer credible for those who follow "who do not share the will". They fluctuate between the dream-oasis-like moment ("We live happily today and here") and the memories of the catastrophes of the century ("Some would like to sneak to the dead / who are still alive.") And the destruction of the city: "This knows the city / she looks after him / from a thousand eyes / from windows, holes / from nowhere, where houses once stood, / from abandoned door frames, / from graves / and from individual old lanterns / which the wind has forgotten [ ...] The city is well-disposed towards him. / But it is silent. "
Associated with these images is the feeling of threat ("But the threat remains / And it remains new.") And loneliness: "We walk alone, shivering, / Across the sidewalk, cloudy". "Over, over on bridges / If the courage goes, / Even if the banks / do not welcome him / And the dark boats / Glide hastily, closed eyes." "Even when the sun is shining at noon / Crossing the city is arduous." But the instinct for life predominates: "But the scarred heart / goes unchallenged on the way."
After his return from travels through Europe, Frankfurt is home to the narrator (“source is this city / and pledge, / wilderness and home corridor”) and location for vanitas thoughts, but also hopeful visions, e.g. B. at the Eiserner Steg:
Here, however, the guest at the Eiserner Steg ponders
and sees only the brown water, the backyard
gulls ,
A few of the lazy fish
Done before the cutting edge enters them.
Has pity on those who
sown the place of
The Franconian ford back then.
The description ends with a questionable outlook, in which "Dreams bring about the broad parade": "The large crowd will come / The Main will be amazed / Even snow-pale banks / Will be in the wake - -?!"
In another poem, the narrator, who has returned from Paris, feels that the setting on the Römerberg is "wrong":
Has Paris sent us home again […]
We stand on the Römerberg in amazement :
stone construction kit . Model of the old town friends.
Moonlight on church roof slate.
Nocturnal swan-white cumulus.
Justitia between the bodies,
also in geranium jewelry.
And the staring eye of the camera, thirsting for travel and collecting
- old city, new city, everything is wrong. […]
Coming home from the land of Helsinki
to Lisbon, from Edinburgh to Brindisi,
we stand in amazement in front of the red stone.
And see, it's still burning, the black star! "
Hans-Christian Kirsch With skin and hair
Frederik Hetmann's debut, the on-the-road novel Mit Haut und Haar (1961) , which was still published under his name Hans-Christian Kirsch, addresses the departure of many young people from the Beat Generation in the 1950s. The first-person narrator "Chase" Görmer, from whose perspective the story is presented, and his friends try to distance themselves from their parents and the bourgeois norms of the post-war period and meet like-minded people, first at a concert on the Loreley , then in Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, Spain and Great Britain, to have intoxicating experiences in the subculture pubs and in alternating love relationships. In this context they discuss the extreme positions of adaptation or self-discovery in their search for meaning.
After their first trips, the narrator, his friend from the Eastern Zone era, Harry Winter and their buddy Frank Lorre meet again as students in Frankfurt in 1955. Their arrival is told in the chapter Station in the Shadow , which is preceded by a quote from Brecht from To the Born Later : “I came to the cities at the time of disorder / when there was hunger. / I came among the people in the time of revolt, / and I revolted with them. / So passed my time / that was given to me on earth. ”Against his father's wishes, Chase quit his job at a bank and enrolled at the university. He earns his living as a translator for tenders and offers at an export company. Harry lives in a room in Sachsenhausen, Frank one in Holzhausen-Park. On long walks they roam the city, “watching the entrance to the Bettinaschule at the times when the girls are sent home from afternoon classes […] crossing the quiet, shady streets of the West End with their old trees and the Villas from the previous century [...] stroll [] in the palm garden on Sunday afternoons to the jetty with the boat rental and look for the boats on the large pond with hasty glances [...] [drift away] on Saturday afternoons in Nice [a Bank section on the Main]. ”In the evening you stroll over the“ brightly colored [e], like a deep sea flora ”, Kaiserstraße, the station forecourt with the“ modern stuffed ”bomb holes, past the Eschenheimer tower to the east port, back to the“ Äppelwoischenken ”in Sachsenhausen and the gloomy, venerable building of the Städelsche Kunstinstitut, in which pictures in fragrant colors are alone with themselves “, over the Untermainbrücke, through the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, to the Rothschildschen Park, to Café Kranzler at the Hauptwache. Traces of the air raids can still be found in the cityscape: B. in the "huge skull of the opera ruins", which "[spits] swarms of pigeons out of its eye sockets". On the night of the bombing, the hands on the clock plate of the Katharinenkirche stopped at half past two. Harry discovers the hall of the main station for himself: “It's so real, a huge filthy cave. The masts with the platform numbers and directional signs look like the death posts of a South Sea tribe, six large semi-arches span a pan in which people, breath, curses, soot, farewell kisses, smells, commands, machine screeches and loud loudspeakers boil together and drift over a stone ground in never-lasting restlessness. ”He loves the train station in the early morning hours of the“ workers' trains and the beer corpses from last night, and later there is a time for the little shorthand typists with quick, cute little steps, and then a time for the salespeople with sample cases and expense faces ”.
However, this Frankfurt phase will soon come to an end, and with it the non-conformist lifestyle that connects it. The spraying fountain on the roundabout in front of the “first hotel on the square” refers to Frank's future, whose dusty sheen “is reflected in the windows of the Mercedes salon over the hood of a black car”. He, who previously wrote poetry, is the first in the group to become an “opportunist”, he speculates on the stock exchange and after his exams will “plunge into 'big business' in Düsseldorf”: “This beautiful idealism that you all still have have preserved, has been lost to me. You know, Chase, I damn well like to live and I like to live well. "Harry and Chase, on the other hand, go on a long journey with their buddy Piero after the period of bumbling in Frankfurt (" 'O Lord I am on my way' "" ) to France and Spain. They earn the money as stevedores in the Osthafen or translators of the latest world news for press agencies.
In the fall, Chase and Harry return to Frankfurt (chapter The Frankfurt Depression ). At first they have no accommodation, try to spend the night in the train station, are thrown out and sleep in the Opera Square. Then their life normalizes: Harry works in the market hall and again as a translator, they can live with the artist Stirner and Chase continues his studies. But he sees no perspective in this, and the leisure activities no longer please him: “[W] or what am I waiting for?” They think of their travel friends Geney and Jeanette and no longer feel at home in the cold city. Chase later remembers: “[T] he view from the hallway windows into the black backyards, the dirty snow, the empty waterfront, the red bridges that swam against the current: it was sad. [...] I didn't have a penny of money [...] What did it matter whether I was cold on the way or in an empty room? The street had me again. ”He goes to Paris to look for Geney and performs as a street singer. Harry flies to America in the spring and wants to persuade Jeanette to return.
In September 1956 Chase returned to Frankfurt for a few days (chapter solo for Sindbad ). He roams the city alone, from Kaiserstraße to Hauptwache, from Steinweg via Opernplatz and Bockenheimer Landstraße to his pension in the Westend. Geney visits him for a week: “The question 'how will things go on?' was not asked. It was superfluous. It had to go on. We both knew that. ”She goes to Paris, he travels to Düsseldorf, where Frank found him a job with an export company and he appears as a clarinetist in a jazz band.
In the spring of 1957 a letter from Harry calls him to Frankfurt. After returning without Jeanette, he wrote a biographical novel (chapter The Sweet Scent of Success ), which was accepted by a publisher. In it he processes the trauma of fleeing with Chase from the eastern zone to the west, during which they left their friend Helmut behind, who was then shot while attempting to cross the border. The editor Stappenhorst is convinced of the debut and considers the young author to be a rough diamond. Chase is supposed to stay in Frankfurt for a few days to experience the photo session in the hotel and the book presentation in the hall. While taking a walk on the Eiserner Steg, his friend complains about the publicity events and its marketing: "I don't think I want any of that [...] and now the many people [...] I think it's all a mistake [...] dear" proud and lost 'as' discovered and humiliated.' "Harry succeeds in this story of guilt that, in Chase's opinion, is" also an angry proclamation for the hero's right to happiness nowhere else but in this world " expresses. The reviews are "either exuberant or devastating". He lets himself be celebrated and goes on reading trips e.g. B. to Düsseldorf. Harry also enjoys the new wealth, runs wildly through town with his friend, celebrates parties, "weekend orgies" and becomes addicted to alcohol. In order to finance his expansive lifestyle, he now writes magazine serial novels, “[g] ediegene Maßarbeit”, and becomes engaged to the 19-year-old banker's daughter Detta, although he still loves Jeanette. He no longer writes big books, but lets a ghostwriter produce dozens of items under his name. He breaks out one last time and drives his old friends to Italy in his car.
Then, in July 1958, Chase returns to Frankfurt with him (chapter The Ruin of a Young Dog ). Here is Harry's mood, v. a. when he found out about Jeanette's marriage and saw it as treason, he became more and more depressed and his health more unstable. Even the friendly assessment of his new play, for which Chase composed the music, about a love between partners from different social classes with the telling title “The success of a young dog” can no longer uplift him. Harry disappears after the publishing party, crashes into a bridge pillar on the highway near the airport and dies in the hospital.
In contrast to the unfortunate successful writer, the narrator takes the self-determined path (chapter Show us the way home ). He separates from the Düsseldorf band because the players keep the successful jazz repertoire for the concerts and no longer want to experiment. His message ("[...] as long as it is music and gives you the opportunity to express yourself [...] we play for ourselves. Haven't we always had the most fun with it?") No longer resonates with them. After Harry's funeral, Chase left Frankfurt in September 1958 and started traveling again (chapter retreats ). In Arles , he wandered over high heat a steppe landscape: "It was not just a piece of beautiful, wild nature that challenged to fight. It was also a state of mind. To have advanced five kilometers here was a victory over myself, gave confidence that I had not felt in such intensity for a long time ”.
Hermann Peter Piwitt Rotschilds
In Hermann Peter Piwitt's novel Rotschilds (1972), Robert (Rott) remembers his love affair with Rebecca in 1958 in Frankfurt. Both and his friend Baldus are looking for the meaning of life and their further paths. At the end of this development process, they split up and leave the city with different goals.
In the personal plot, excerpts from newspapers, books or advertising brochures as well as articles from Baldus' card box on historical, economic, political and social topics are mounted, which the German gold rush time, in which "the ascent to Croesus is open to everyone" Years of prosperity (“money is on the street”) and the “dawning nuclear age”, depict or critically illuminate. These materials also serve as a basis for discussion for the main characters.
The relationship with Rebecca is threaded through Robert Gustav Beenken's friend Baldus Korbes, whose educational path has stalled. He has broken off his pharmacy studies, works part-time in a Bornheim pharmacy and mixes drugs in his room on Berger Strasse, which he tries out with Rott. With his pills he fogged his everyday life: He swims in the cold Main from the Old Bridge to the Eiserner Steg and twilight at the pontoon in the afternoon. Sometimes he sits on the Opera House ruins, makes the pump room Trinklein on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, the "Parade of the shop assistants and secretaries from" or looking at Café Fiesta in Kalbächergasse (Fressgass) acquaintances with "bourgeois daughters" from the "first houses" of Class enemy. Behind these amusements, he broods over socio-political issues and collects in his slip box as evidence for his criticism of capitalism . a. Reports on the economic and political activities of wealthy families during the Nazi era and the post-war years. In order to distract attention from their wealth, they invented the “ Rothschild legend”, but they are the real Rotschilds (title). He also researched the life of his time to the struggle of the fascist Ustasha submerged in Germany Rasha father and his Identitätswechel to Momme Härmken Herms, the profiteer from the black economy and founder of the mail-order company Linde Broich. In contrast, he sees himself, Rott and Rebecca as the losers of the system. As an avenger, he shoots Rasha and moves to East Berlin.
Robert is also on hold during his time in Frankfurt. He still lives with his mother, who criticizes the relaxed lifestyle of her son, in Praunheim and, after a broken school career, clears up the Grappa & Sons furniture store at Allerheiligentor in order to collect money for an actor's training. However, this is hardly possible, because after work he spends his savings again, e.g. B. when he gets drunk with Baldus in the Knabe wine cellar on Affentorplatz in Sachsenhausen. Since his friend dosed his drugs too high one day in April, he is supposed to meet Rebecca at the main station in his place.
After jobs in a café and a chocolate factory, she works as a model for a department store catalog and is looking for contacts for further jobs in the advertising and textile industry. As a seventeen-year-old girl, she came to Frankfurt from the small town of Dülmen to start a new life and pursue a career after attending a convent school. For this purpose, it changed its visionary with the Dülmener Mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich common name in order Rebecca, signaled by an oriental-Jewish origin and amplifies this aura by a cryptic Eye - eyeshadow and their Shalimar -Parfümgeruch. In addition, she tinkers an eclectic philosophy together and appears as a shaman with the naive Rott in her carefree, unconventional charisma. For nights they talk about their mixture of Hindu and Chinese wisdom from the teachings of the Upanishads to those of Yin and Yang , conveyed through yoga exercises that put you into a trance and influence the body functions, occult ideas of a mysterious energy transfer via the earth's magnetic field or teleportation through magic, astral wanderings and Necromancy. Her worldview of eternal change is symbolized by the Russian nesting doll Matryoschko , which she carries around with her in a basket. Her turtle Lemmy is also mythologically significant. Rebeccae apparently also feels like an incarnation of a deity and carrier of humans. So she complains in her apartment in Oberrad with tears in her eyes: "Robert, what should I do: these people everywhere who cannot live without me." Her philosophy is change and swimming "in strong strokes with the current": “You don't need any tools, you are part of life and move on with it. [...] It is the only true way of life that harmonizes with the basic laws of a human kind - eternal maturing and growing. "
After the first meeting at the Hauptwache and the walk to Bibergasse, past the opera house ruins, across Bockenheimer Landstrasse to Bockenheimer Warte, Rebecca Rott invites you to Oberrad, where her asymmetrical relationship begins a few days later: While she is with Meeting photographers, designers, agents and yoga friends and being allowed to take part in Ernst Tivoli-Kunst's seminar on the history of mental pain, he transports furniture from household resolutions in Bornheim, Westend or Wetterau to Crappa's warehouse and sorts them according to their usability. Then he visits his friend. They discuss issues of life and society and get drunk in the process. Rott also drowns his manic jealousy of Rebecca in cider, for example because of the professor she admired and whom she met at an evening organized by the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. Drunk he imagines in his fantasy that his girlfriend is cheating on him with a bevy of lovers and sees her in a vision as a sexual object in the spotlight on the stage in the middle of a voyeuristic society. He associates these surreal images of Rebecca with her esoteric thoughts of the liberation of her astral body: "[S] he wants to come out of herself, she will shine [...] She will be the blue sky that lets in everything but is nothing." Rott searches in her apartment for traces of her infidelity when she stays away overnight and allegedly stays with friends, but finds nothing, which he interprets as evidence of her sophistication, but also of her self-esteem: “She doesn't want him to think badly of her, but she lies to him. She wants to be respected, even adored, by him, and she withholds everything from him that she fears that his admiration could suffer. ”She rejects his accusations and outbursts as unfounded. At one point, however, she responded by suggesting that it might be her fate that she must hurt all men. After her work in the cold advertising business and her consultations with her agent, Rott is a warm family support for Rebecca, a kind of brother-friend. In short periods of time, whenever she could be pregnant, their friendship has a future chance and then she knits another piece of his never-finished winter sweater: “[I] am actually having a child. So you did it. But it doesn't matter, I think it's wonderful. If it were up to me, I could be pregnant all my life. ”After her miscarriage, Rebecca ended the relationship she now sees as an episode in her maturation process. In retrospect, Rott assesses her time of esoteric romanticism critically: “For her, life was a clothes rack for world views, which she used depending on her appetite. And the imprecise, the dark ones [...] were her favorite. Whether dream interpretation or hypnosis, palm reading or telepathy [...] we rushed like birds of paradise through the jungle of the spheres and systems and took a beak full of every vertigo. Everything that could not be explained immediately plunged her into a delicate, erratic enthusiasm. ”But the juxtaposition of her philosophy and her superficial modeling activity also seems increasingly grotesque to Rebecca. She is unhappy about this contradiction and in the third phase of her life tries to escape it by converting to Judaism and moving to Jerusalem.
All three leave Frankfurt, the city of money, the Rotschilds . In keeping with the message at the end of the novel, they become socially active: Baldus lives as a teacher in Berlin. At the seaside, Rott puts together the characters of the story with the documentaries from the flotsam of his memory and thus becomes the author's mouthpiece. Rebecca has emigrated to Israel with her make-up and agricultural guide and sends Rott illustrated magazines in which she presents the new season's models, jeans and blouses, on a tractor: “Can you tell me how I’ve ever been anywhere but in the desert could live? "
The uncertainty about his girlfriend's whole life, the doubt about her sincerity, and his striving for the truth are reflected in the alternation between first- person and personal he-form . This uncertainty about Rebecca's assessment is intensified in the reconstruction of the Frankfurt time by the weaknesses of remembering: “[I] I just wanted to know what role she had intended me to play, maybe the cousin from the zone again? Or Rott as a terminally ill brother whom she does not want to leave aside. [...] The labyrinth is the labyrinth of memory in which the whole story is finally lost. "
Martin Mosebach Westend
Martin Mosebach's novel Westend (1992) tells the eighteen-year-old story of the neighbors Alfred Labonté and Lilly Has and their families and their houses on Schubertstrasse and Mendelssohnstrasse from the end of the post-war period, around 1950, until the beginning of the 1968 era. Based on this group of people, the author draws a portrait of the West End : the streets and houses are the scene of a heterogeneous society with its conflicts, fateful events and social dependencies. One example of this is the relationship problems of Etelka, who fled Sopot . As the wife of the scrap dealer Kalkofen and lover of Eduard Has' she becomes the negotiating object of the men and, at the end of the novel, leaves for Paris with her lover. Together with retrospectives, this creates a picture of the changes in this bourgeois urban area over the course of the 20th century (3rd part Das Haus ) as well as its residents and their values from the end of the post-war period through real estate speculation and large-scale, functional urban planning to the time of departure : the impending occupation and student unrest.
While the heirs of the delicatessen and luxury food store Wwe. Labonté , the unmarried daughters of the founder and great-aunt Alfred, Matilde (Tildchen), born in 1905, and Mi, live from their well-invested fortunes, the Has family's "house and property management" benefits from Reconstruction of the destroyed city (1st part of the Main ) and the son Eduard can have a valuable expressionism collection built up by the Swiss gallery owner Guggisheim, who had to give him his exotic, graceful wife Dorothée . Both the Labontés and the Has belong to the wealthy bourgeoisie, whose internal differentiation, however, is the difference between the Labonté family grave, in which Tildchen's urn (7th part Death ) is buried after the funeral in the hall of the New Portal, and the one not far away Olenschläger's mausoleum in the main cemetery is illustrated.
These differences are even more pronounced among the grandchildren: Alfred Labonté grew up in the post-war era in the milieu of ruined properties and incomplete family structures (his father Alfred disappears from the city after a simulated canoe accident in the Main), but was lovingly cared for by his aunts. Together with Lilly, who is chauffeured by her father in his sports car, he goes to the Westend elementary school and later to the grammar school. In the Rötzel household goods store and in the Tierfreunde café , he lets Has-lover Etelka complain of her suffering. At the age of eighteen he went to Ploog's beer parlors in the station district with his friend Toddi Osten . There he met Etelka for a while and a neighbor who comforted her about Edward's absence. Lilly, on the other hand, is invited to the parties of the rich, grows disinterested, seduced by the Viennese star architect Szépregyi, and grows up between Expressionism originals. She meets Alfred, who has been in love with her since childhood, and her classmates in Café Feuerbach on Feuerbachstrasse or in her parents' penthouse when he helps her with schoolwork.
The service staff is also characteristic of the social image of this quarter: next to Mrs. Emig in the Labonté house, represented by the caretaker Herr and the cleaning lady Scharnhorst, who came to Frankfurt from Silesia during the war, was instructed in the Has house and makes herself useful there . At times she lives with the scrap dealer Kalkofen, who used the post-war material needs. Since Eduard Has's mother gave her the right to live in the old villa, she was allowed to move into the low basement apartment as a replacement for her entitlement and consideration for her services after the new building was completed, on the top floor of which with a roof terrace and picture gallery Lilly's parents reside. So the social stratification remains in the next generation: Mrs. Scharnhorst's son Kurt, who hangs back in school and is hidden from his father, knocks the carpets in the neighborhood. But the change is heralded when the lime kiln, who has become wealthy, discovers the strong son and brings him into the business as his successor.
The Viennese architect Szépregyi commissioned by Has, who follows the storyline of the novel several times to Austria when the Has family visits him there, propagates his philosophy of "functional beauty." He plans the buildings "from the inside out", to "read off the inner functions on the facade". It is therefore a representative of the new, functional architectural style that has been gaining ground in the West End since the 1950s. Eduard's cousin Fred, the managing director of the real estate company, consistently represents the gigantic ideas that he got to know at the end of the First World War as “the utopias of the new urban planners”. He plans to “roll up Schubertstrasse” and buy old buildings with “backdrop architecture”. “The planner lives in it, the true remodel of entire regions. […] Especially the Schubertstrasse [appears] before his eyes: no longer the street, but an elongated courtyard between glass, concrete-supported ships, which are connected with numerous bridges, a city within the city, with its own connection to the public Traffic system, with escalators moving against each other, pneumatic tube systems, thousands of people who [bring] typewriters to a steady rattle there, a termite den in which it never has to be night. ”These perspectives lead to a feverish trade in old houses and properties Takes shape. The properties are either vacant or are rented cheaply during the transition period, e.g. B “as mass quarters for Greek and Croatian workers” or brothel operators. As a result, many long-established residents move away and offer their houses for sale: "The decay, its abandonment and neglect [combine] with the movement of sums, as if one suspects treasures buried in the bought-up front gardens." But "[i] n The authorities had gone too far in their licenses to the Frankfurt pimps and the rampant landlords of the mass quarters for the eagerness to clean the West End of its residents. A policy that was just sure of the approval of all progressive-minded people suddenly got a scandalous aftertaste. [...] From now on it was only necessary to protect the »poor« who were driven into misery by »unscrupulous speculators«. "
In the Villa Labonté, as a contrast to the new Has, the old days are in the furniture. Images and forms of life preserved. In this home Alfred is brought up by Mi and Tildchen and made aware of the upheavals in the environment and the style epochs. For him, "[every] house [...] is its own creation that quotes all elements [of the Gothic and Renaissance], but places them in new, previously unknown contexts". Inspired by his aunts, despite Lilly's opposition influenced by Szépregyi, he collects signatures against the plan to tear down the Christ Church, which was destroyed in the war, in order to build a “soup kitchen for students”. Such protests by the population against the unscrupulous speculation that escalated to the Frankfurt house-to-house war in the 1970s triggered pressure on the politicians, the quarter was placed under a preservation order and the real estate bubble burst.
Fred Ölenschläger's plans have therefore also failed. He can no longer market the land he bought and the listed buildings as expected, and the foundation for Eduard Has's generous, naive patronage and mistress financing is withdrawn (4th part Die Liebe , 6th part Das Geld ). The accounting of the bad planning is in progress, Has unsuspectingly signed the contracts with Szépregy's planning costs, which can no longer be realized. Now, parallel to Dorothée's return to Guggisheim in Switzerland, he is confronted with the demands of his partner, who wants to liquefy his painting collection, amounting to seven million marks. But the art dealer secured the pictures for Dorothée in a depot before she left. The new apartment has been cleared, and Lilly finds it abandoned on her return from Vienna. Even in the empty Labonté house, apart from his rooms, after Tildchen's death and Mis moving into a comfortable old people's home in Kronberg, Alfred remains alone as an heir. "The cosmos [is] shattered."
The dark side of prosperity in the 1960s
Ernst Herhaus The Homburg wedding
In Ernst Herhaus's satirical novel Die Homburgische Hochzeit (1967) , the social and economic situation of the 1960s is surrealistically parodied.
The first-person narrator Erich Hals, who was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Rödelheim, reports on his stay in this “Freihaus”, the conversations with other patients, e. B. Thilo von Sobeck, who was imprisoned for his “political and mystical diatribes” (“an overly sensible person who could only explain the chaos of his existence as a ghostly miniature of general chaos” and “decided in favor of the unattainable []”) Guard Paul Bosch (chapter madness, somewhat stretched ) and the senior physician Dr. Because (chapter The House of Freedom ). While the doctor, after reading the therapy notes about his wandering, Hals with the words "It is hopeless [...] I have tried everything to discover in you at least trace elements of insanity; I'm sorry, Hals, I looked into the abyss of health ”, the protagonist assesses his memoirs, in which the contours between reality and fantasy are blurred, as invented:“ Nothing there is, it never will give, never! ”Already during his writing process, around the nineteenth week of his cloister, he reflected skeptically:“ High up on the sick bridge of thinking, I lean far over the banister of word systems and theories that are more frail than ants' knuckles and look down to someone who is bent over his breakfast egg early in the morning as if it were a help against the fear of eating an egg so calmly and measuredly. "
In fact, as he demonstrates in his notes, he encounters both in the Homburg region of his childhood, to which he temporarily returns as a student "after years of confused wandering" to marry the 19-year-old Rosemund Erben in Bergfelden, as well as bizarre situations and strange characters in the big city. The time levels, personal assignments (mother and wife) and identities (father and son) mix. "The world of the understandable dissolves []". The narrator sees his “individual person long since shattered” by the fatefulness of his past and is in danger of being wiped out: “An outer world that has no prospect is not a real world for me, and an inner world that I hardly enter If I have insight, it becomes more and more an imposition for me ”.
After the traditional rural wedding celebration with a final coital-eruptive laughing fit, Erich travels back to Frankfurt (chapter The return to the interim realm ). The city turns again and again into an absurd panopticon and exerts a fascination on him, “because the fantastic is the real [...] the [...] that is only worth realizing. Frankfurt am Main with its sobriety, its stunning pragmatism, this city with its unconventional survival trend that wakes the dead, with its hectic criminal smell of money [...] and its distrust of all too beautiful and all too common thoughts, ideas and ideals, which is unique in West Germany " .
The narrator drifts through the streets and bars of the city with mostly fictional or slightly modified names from one encounter to another. While drunk, the figures who fell on the ladder of success (such as the former communist functionary Fred or the failed scaffolding builder Teddi Schnapp) try to drown their life and world pain. The actions proliferate through and on top of each other, for example in Erich's price song on the instinctual “Great Mandarin” and in the monologues (chapter madness somewhat stretched ) Hanne, who has descended from the heights of science to “Germany's worst bartender” their lust for love and the changing international homosexual and heterosexual relationships with Harry, Tristani, their Chinese, Fritjof or Plexi in the Koseclub (chapter The Tools of Life ). Her audience is the protagonist and the alcoholic Loulou Weiß, who has already been admitted to the Nordwestklinik because of polyneuritis. Hals takes the former colleague in, sees the “hallucinations of self-deception” on her face and hopes in vain to slow down her decay or to keep the “madness out of a person's life.” Again and again he encounters such cross-border commuters, including others have come to terms with everyday life, e.g. B. Manfred Mosch, the person responsible for leaving the church, letters H – L, at the district court and occasional visitor to the women's bar Kleines Paradies.
From the embryo perspective, the narrator (chapter A deep glowing beautiful eye ) observes the sophisticated, flirtatious and hardworking prostitute La Divine (“wheat blossoms only on a thousand seeds”). She is one of his three biological mothers. In the noble milieu at the bar of the Hotel Orlando , she explains to the eccentric Viennese painter Heinz Herschel, who is enthusiastic about the “Frankfurt style”: “Frankfurt is mysticism, mysticism with the naked knife”. After attempting to commit suicide on the gas tap, Herschel paints new works in the new studio in Westend or later in the Hotel Orlando under the "dull feeling of helplessness and weakness of consciousness". La Divine's new financier, the twenty-two-year-old melancholy art dealer and operator of the gallery in house No. 33 at the Iron Hand Jean Benjamin Thérèse de Maisch (chapter Heroic-gallant report ) interprets it as follows: “The strange paralysis that strikes you in front of these pictures, this astonishment charged with pain and wonder raises our feelings above freezing point because we recognize that in this art evil can never be fully realized. In these pictures our desire for purification and repentance is forever captured. ”After La Divine, contrary to her promise, met Herschel again in the hotel, de Maisch shoots her and with it also kills the embryo Erich. Doctor Weil analyzes the patient's surrealistic experience: "It all smells a little like colportage [...] Only that the world that you or I cannot interpret is therefore not a world, unfortunately I cannot confirm that."
In his Rödelheim cell, Hals also describes his work in the Frankfurt subsidiary of the Pilgrim Investment Group as a C2 employee (chapter madness, somewhat stretched ). It is a cosmos of madness: “Nobody sees through the hectic operation, everyone operates with numbers; nobody [knows] what it means [] n “The office director Dr. Philip, the so-called croak, "[brings] a stream of abstract threats and catastrophe terms into circulation every day, the whispering of deflationary rates, coupon tax commitments, restrictions and recessions, economic slowdowns, broken credit caps, bills of exchange and share inflation, bank embargoes and others lurking in ambush Death blows [tear off] never. "
An American visitor, Mister Friedman, is supposed to prepare the visit of the top boss, Herbie Pilgram (“Herbie is not blind, Herbie comes and takes.”) And in the Café Kranzler at the Hauptwache he outlines the main features of the program, “an international bluff in which the eventual tellers and the cleverest stock market psyches smile at each other and climb up to reveal their characteristics to everyone: blindness and mysterious strength. "Friedman calls on Hals to be missionary for salvation from the isolation and loneliness of people to advertise the fund: "We will of course not disdain a certain salvation pose [...] The pilgrim group" Investment for tomorrow "collects the money of the lonely and will make great promises to them [...] Our work is very suitable, optimism in the western world. ”Hals later met Herbie Pilgram as a charismatic speaker at the Hotel Orlando . He lures customers who are tired of the “years of lethargy on the German stock exchanges” with high returns and repeatedly emphasizes the “strict [] American [] Securities & Exchange Commission”, the “very well-known brokerage company Laugh & Co” with subsidiaries all over the world , also in Frankfurt am Main, and the American securities that are pushing "with giant strides [...] onto the European capital market". The Pilgrim Fund "based in Geneva" alone has a "$ 380 million capital accumulation". After a successful deal, Hals quit his job, then sold liquid soap as a peddler and wrote manifestos.
In the next stage in Frankfurt, the tendency towards a dystopia continues: Hals becomes President Bernhard Alma's secretary in the 36-story House of Freedom on Berliner Platz. There, the center for enlightenment collects every utterance from the past "which was made with the aim of changing the manifestations of earthly rule and order." Then the next center registers the data in connection with "the evaluation of the so-called" information explosion " and the “Free Grand Council” discusses with all those who “embody our freedom” the aspect of the future, the solidarity of all those who are thirsty for freedom ”. Participants of this permanent conference are: "Politicians, economic philosophers, dialecticians with braking devices, frustrated by strict observance, metaphysicians, drummers, negation experts, cryptosocialists, assassins, culture fighters turned upside down three times, language sorcerers, taboo teasers [...] There is no thesis, no provocation that should not be addressed before the Grand Council. […] Everyone should […] stand by their true convictions. [...] we demand it! "Alma and Hals, the two melancholics, say to each other when looking from the upper floor with" simplicity and severity "that" even if all processes are clarified in principle, there is still time for [their] inability to understand them ". President Alma therefore warns his co-worker: "The pull of idling, Mr. Secretary, the pull of protest, it will devour you."
In addition to this irritation, the philosopher Tadeus Hallenser, who was courted by Hals on behalf of Alma, cannot answer the existential questions: "Who we are and when we live, nobody knows to this day". He consoled: "Hope is part of training." After Alma's funeral, two passers-by, who publicly conceal their nocturnal experience in order not to be mistaken for the mentally disturbed, see how the House of Freedom crumbles and leaves an empty Berlin square.
The bizarre highlight is the pageant on Foundation Day (chapter A big day ) from the Nervenhaus in Rödelheim "over Alexanderstraße up [...] over Schlossstrasse to Platz der Republik." In the snow, the patients dressed in robes and hoods wander into the city center, are there Received by a delegation of the citizens with a "spirit schnapps", thousands of silent people pass by over the new opera to the Zeil. Sobeck philosophizes: “[W] he has arrived in this city, never finds out. Some succeed in this or that ridiculous attempt to break out, but they return, as if under pressure, whoever has once enjoyed the paradisiacal lusts of being isolated keeps coming back. ”In another surrealistic scene, only the patients see the Hauptwache and the Paulskirche removed and the stones handed over to the “oldest and most respected Frankfurt family” while the people drink coffee and do not notice anything in the “madness erupting in the street”.
At this moment Erich von Rosemund is born. A new cycle begins: “I already knew all the madnesses of my coming life by heart [...] This birth [was] a sign of my wondrous wandering and homecoming [...] All roads had started from this chamber, all of them led back here [...] I knew that in this Homburgian bedroom, pleasure, procreation, birth and death chamber everything had been seen, forgotten that had ever been devised and rejected again in the world, and felt a monstrous negation in the millions of brain cells all of this and at the same time, in my Bergfeld memories, an absolute, immovable and monstrous agreement. "
Head stories
Herhaus' Homburgische Hochzeit belongs to a special group of Frankfurt novels in which the framework is limited to an apartment or a clinic in the city. At this location, the narrator thinks up the mostly surrealistic plot that has a therapeutic function for him. The story of the author Karl Faller in Bodo Kirchhoff's Parlando (2001) could also be interpreted as a fantastic, inner plot or as a father-son struggle between dream and reality and a search for identity: the one after a traumatic experience on New Year's Eve of the public prosecutor Suse Stein According to this interpretation, recollections of childhood or adolescence and travel would take place in the head of the main character in a Frankfurt hospital room. Because the end of the novel follows on from the beginning: Faller's eye injury, which he suffered from a puzzling blow on the forehead at Opernplatz and with which he was brought to the clinic unconscious, is now being operated on. Another example of these “head stories” is Hettches Ludwig muss die (1989).
Gerhard Zwerenz The earth is as uninhabitable as the moon
Gerhard Zwerenz 'novel The earth is uninhabitable like the moon , published in 1973, addresses three areas of tension of the 1960s and 70s, which are personally linked and whose actions extend over the Frankfurt metropolitan area and its satellite towns: 1. the intellectual, revolutionary 1968 milieu with the The sympathetic scene that formed around the radical lawyer Joachim Schwelk, from whose perspective the actions are primarily assessed, 2. disadvantaged marginalized groups in urban society and 3. the urban redevelopment in Frankfurt associated with property speculation. The actions, which consist of many different episodes, are held together by the central figure, Abraham Mauerstamm, who - who returned to Germany from emigration after the Second World War - tries to understand himself and the unfamiliar urban society as a real estate agent in the tough competition social tensions and ideological debates.
What is particularly explosive in this conflict between capitalism and socialism is that the Jewish family Mauerstamm was persecuted during the time of National Socialism and thus the question of the new Jewish identity in a latently anti-Semitic or guilty and therefore endeavored philosemitic environment is repeatedly raised in the discussions represents. Abraham emigrated to Israel with his mother and sister Sarah (Trini) in 1937, just in time for the deportations to begin. They didn't feel at home there and returned to Berlin after the end of the war. Abraham's father escaped his arrest by suicide after the Reichstag fire in 1933, which is why the mother made the son promise: “You will earn money in this country, Abraham, it is the country of your father's murderers. You will not neglect anybody, have no pity on anyone, and take off everyone's marks. Is that what you promise, Abraham? ”In the 1950s they moved to Frankfurt, where their mother worked as a teacher. But here, too, she did not manage, was retired early and now lives outside of reality in a tenement apartment, in the basement of which she and her cancer-stricken daughter sleep acrobatically on two ironing boards lying on wooden chairs, symbolically grotesque.
Abraham, on the other hand, who, after jobs in the market hall and in a car cemetery, managed to start the real estate business with a small amount of borrowed capital ("From now on, only the pure business counted [...] the advantage that was sought and used.") and who now owns a dozen houses, lives in a furnished room on Schubertstrasse, later in an apartment in Wiesenau or in his office in Westend , Oberlindau 80. But he is dissatisfied: “[He] r clearly blushed with angry jealousy the undisturbed, quiet life that he had never been granted. His hatred of sedentariness [...] turned into a shrill extreme. He saw himself as a haunted Jew, always on the run, from whom the archaic aspect of a permanent home was taken away. You nomad, he said vehemently to himself, [...] build these strangers houses to live and work, change their cities, but they [...] bring you [...] off balance. You are enemies forever and more than just for life. ”He consistently carries out the assignment of his mentally confused mother, builds up a network of informants, such as the invalid Karl Schuwelbeck, who give him tips about potential home sellers, e. B. the old, greedy Cornelia Zweck with her plot of land suitable for a new building in the Nordend district (Chapter 1: Abraham, the house buyer ). He tries to acquire such objects cheaply in order to sell them for the construction of apartment houses at a profit. He is often forced to make quick decisions, because the competing buyers like the strip bar king Kreinberg monitor each other, shy away from thugs if they cannot agree on the delimitation of the territory and try to take away the bargains. In this way, Abraham asserts his interests in the Westend by devastating the dawn in the station district with a subsequent peace offer. Just as brutally, Mauerstamm quartered in the vacant rooms in order to drive away residents who are unwilling to move out of violent anti-social workers who were recruited by his vicarious agent, the gnome, to harass the tenants. But he works skillfully on different levels in his business: he negotiates with the mayor and the public prosecutor about the illegal squatting and organizes loans from the Bank für Allgemeine Geldwirtschaft (BfAG) for the necessary investments .
The gnome is also a figure deformed by fate and society, "set back all his life" and one with the secrets of the Jewish family, and v. a. Abrahams, trusted member: On the one hand, he plays when Sarah doesn't bring a lover home with her after her office work, her baby, on the other hand, he is the carer of the sick mother, whom he pushes through the park with the wheelchair (Chapter 2: The Gnome of Frankfurt ). Like the Tribe of the Wall, it has two sides, one compassionate soft and one assertive hard. He explains to his boss, disguised as a bum, when he visits the underworld: “Down here we have the power, and it's a different power than the power of the state or the power of property. You come to us because you feel such an edgy feeling in you. That is the power that you feel. "
Included in the Abraham story are the realistically portrayed family stories of two young people from Frankfurt's satellite towns and the thugs from the Gallusviertel , who, according to their social status, have their meeting point on the B-level under the "Hauptwache" upper world and are addressed or spoken to from two sides. to be recruited: on the one hand by the left revolutionaries and house occupiers and on the other hand by the land speculators, v. a. from the wall trunk's right hand, the gnome.
Once the social situation of the outsiders is demonstrated using Bennie's example (Chapter 3: Dressing up and recruiting the young Bennie ). When he was ten years old, his parents died. The physical confrontations with his father and the war reports from Vietnam (“Some were victorious and the others were defeated, not the blind chance of nature, the will of the people prevailed”) lead to the desire to “live differently” mixed up with aggression: “There was something that he would have liked to go through the wall with his head. At such moments he felt excruciating pleasure and the urge to take a pistol, shoot, or blow a bomb. ”After his parents' death, he lives on a mattress in the empty house of his parents, formally looked after by a guardian Kiessee: “For him, the world is divided into two halves. One is the bourgeois world [...] It includes the guardian and everything that scares you. The other half of the world consists of the deceased parents [...] and the newspapers and magazines that he gets. ”Then he moves to the city of Frankfurt. In his “collecting instinct” he often changes his overnight quarters, u. a. with a young teacher, a "typical left-wing emanze", who wants to fight the "mendacity of society" with free love for very young boys. Looking for odd jobs on the B-level he meets the gnome, who offers him a business: “Move in, don't pay rent, just make a noise day and night, break the house, beat yourself up with the others and behave properly Unbearable until the fine tenants leave the house because they are simply tired of being with guys like that. ”However, after a while Bennie loses the fun of this work, deals drugs, is caught by the secret police and recruited as an informant, but instead of revealing the plans of a student leader whom he is shadowing, he warns him, quits his job and is immediately arrested for drug trafficking (Chapter 18: How Bennie Becomes an Unfit Spy and the One-Eyed Revolutionary Leader ). After breaking out of the Staffelberg youth prison , he returned to Frankfurt, robbed passers-by between the Bahnhofsviertel, the banks of the Main, Nice and Sachsenhausen, fought against other criminals and was finally arrested again in Hochstraße (Chapter 21: Departure of the Gods in Different Directions. Because the times change ).
A second B-level youth is the fifteen-year-old Robbe at the beginning of the plot (Chapter 4: Beginning of a second recruitment or how Robbe becomes a killer ). After the death of his father, he lived with his mother with his sister's family and trained himself through fights for the final settlement with his violent brother-in-law, the former Foreign Legionnaire Sven. “There is an infinite joy in him, which makes it so wonderfully easy and pleasant for him to strike, he imagines that he might have been enlarged and walk through the city as he is now, no because of his size over the city […] Why shouldn't one crush cars, uproot trees, knock down trams and move entire streets aside so that they break up, why not? ”After being ostracized because of his father's theft, then breaking into one's own school and changing schools, stealing and denouncing Sven The reworking of stolen cars leads to the foreseen argument: Robbe is beaten up and kills his brother-in-law with a stone: “[T] he external wounds have long since slipped into his unconscious, he is someone who can no longer reach anything, even if it is his skin has broken through. "
Abraham did not choose his role in life either. He suffers “from innate fear [...] the trauma from the womb, later updated through experiences in the environment” as a Jew. During his sexual relationship with his secretary Anne (Mieze) Braunsiepe, whom he admires as a “type of a new, completely modern person” because of her “complete disrespect for all morals”, he reflects on the question of guilt of his fighting methods: “Guilt. How could he always live under their regime? Was it really the case that guilt and its bitterness had come into the world and it was ruling and that he, Abbi, always had to pump himself full of bitterness, had to burden himself with guilt just because he did not want to be inferior to his enemies? "
Like many characters in fiction, Abraham is a divided person. This dichotomy is made clear once when Anne takes him to an action by the squatters: "Abraham took part in a demonstration against himself." The role reversal with the gnome also fits in with this. During Abraham's temporary withdrawal from the business, when he became interested in the left-wing intellectual scene, his helper took over the urban warfare. In the meantime, Abraham, in search of his own identity and social integration, makes the acquaintance of enlightened people who seem to be free of prejudices and social conventions, such as the writer Pantara (Chapter 15: Abraham studies an intellectual and gets into better circles ) who have freed themselves from frozen family structures and seek to emancipate themselves in free relationships, e.g. B. Anne (chapter: Abraham discovers more and more new European territory ), or who are convinced of an idea and represent it, e.g. B. the lawyer Joachim Schwelk (Chapter 12: Abraham seeks to recruit a lawyer and discovers the beauty of the ugly ). But behind the public facades he only finds people “torn by contradictions and tormented by passions” or spun into a world of fantasy: “These intellectuals and writers had long since allowed themselves to be made into the apes of society. […] Everyone who took care of the affairs of others made a monkey out of themselves. "
Another left-wing extremist group around the lawyer Schwelk and his wife Marthe, who demonstrated against land speculation and thus Abraham, became increasingly radicalized (“You lived in a society that was coming to an end. Justice was lost, but there was no fanon for Europe , only gave shameful defeats. ") and is arrested because of the pistols hidden by Schwelk in his apartment on Fichardstrasse.
After his explorations, Abraham decides again for the strong side. His help, too, B. For the homeless Kastanien-Paul , to whom the gnome, his vicarious agent, but also his suppressed inner voice, persuaded him to be overlaid again and again by the will to assert himself: "[He] r preferred to remain the dreaded wolf [...] you should yourself fear him, do not praise his mercy and charity. "
He sees his skeptical view of man confirmed by his own endangered social position and the changing strategic coalitions. With his political enemy, the SPD mayor, he shares the vision of the modern high-rise city "with clear forms and simple, tangible dimensions". The chief prosecutor Parilla, who supported him in the trial against squatters, warns him, alluding to his methods, “[t] he power of evil is present everywhere [...] Man [is] never completely in control of his situation [...] whoever is then we never got into temptation and danger ”. At this time, a Zionist underground organization in the Haganah tradition expects his support in the fight against Arab-Palestinian assassins and their sympathizers in left student circles and controls him through the secretary Doris, who replaces "General" Britta, who for a severance payment of ten thousand marks Private life has been pushed aside (Chapter 20: How Abraham Is Involved in Fights He Was Desperate to Stay Away From ). For this secret service he is investing “black money [...] completely legally” in his construction projects and can now, no longer relying on credit, draw on unlimited resources.
For his new life he has to part with the seedy gnome and his B-level thugs. He pushes his former right hand into the red light district. There he succeeds Kreinberg as managing director of the Rote Droschke in the station district. But the dwarf is dissatisfied with his job and wants to extort money from Abraham's new financier. He is thrown off the train on the way to see them in Cologne. Abraham's role in this crime remains in the dark, in contrast to his murder of Robbe, which puts him under pressure with his knowledge of the gnome's actions and which he therefore throws from the boat into the stormy seas while on vacation on the Adriatic. In retrospect, he persuades himself that he not only punished him for betraying but also for killing his brother-in-law. With this he closed his past (Chapter 22: Catharsis or the act of liberation ), especially since his mother has since died in the cellar tomb. In front of the mirror he studies the "maximum immobility of his face [...] the calm of the mask, which one managed not to betray himself": "The gathering of all energies entirely within, without the slightest sign of it, that was what counted [ ...] because the people [...] are always in a gruesome, merciless war. ”He withdraws from the Frankfurt real estate business, whose gold rush days are already over due to the reforms of land law, and now concentrates on building settlements in the surrounding area, where he wants to implement his ideal: "The outside should show itself in enormous, exact geometry, the inside should remain open to the individual, adventure and discovery."
The 1970s
Eckhard Henscheid The complete idiots
Eckhard Henscheid portrays in his novel Die Vollidioten , with the subtitle A historical novel from 1972 , a group of journalists from the artistic-intellectual milieu, v. a. Editors and employees of a satirical magazine, as well as writers friends with them, and caricatured, oscillating between seriousness and irony, a way of life practiced in these circles in the 1970s, perceived as progressive-emancipatory.
The advertising of the twenty-five-year-old Swiss Peter Jackopp, who lives separately from his wife Doris, and the journalist and women's rights activist Evamaria Czernatzke, who is one year younger, forms the framework for the “extremely strange incidents” that take place “in one part of this city and within a very specific group of people People ”: This seven-day story that structures the novel begins on a Saturday evening (chapter first day ). Jackopp falls in love with Miss Czernatzke, drinks schnapps with her at the bar of the Krentz restaurant and urges "immediate sexual intercourse", which she refuses with the reference to her relationship with Ulf Johannsen. Jackopp cannot understand this argument and is appalled by the "cursed break in the logic" of the events, as he had already noticed her fascination with him, as the dancer Johanna Knott confirms with regard to his beauty and eroticism while he was interested in her colleague Mizzi Witlatschil at the time. On the next day (chapter second day ) he consults with the narrator Henscheid in an Italian pub, then at the soccer game that the group attended in the afternoon, in the cinema and in the Alt Heidelberg pub about a strategy to get to his, rush to eight Clock timed, aim to come. The narrator is indeed impressed by these "enormous erotic energies", but he tries to explain to the stupid Jackopp his egocentric, unworldly appearance and the lack of communication skills using the example of the childishly inexperienced Parzival and criticizes the macho-like expression of "flattening" or "pulling through" the Swiss. He prefers to orientate himself on the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide , because what is “love after all but one great lyricism ...?” And recommends Jackopp to try a bouquet of roses. However, he is curious about the reaction of the women's rights activist. Because, while Johanna Knott, who is also asked for advice , wants to penetrate Miss Czernatzke discreetly via the “ Women's Council ”, he is male-reserved towards this women's association: “I'm always for good and progress, but of course there must be a limit somewhere because in the end the only result is uncertainty and upheaval, and the stupid are the little savers. "
During a curious office visit on Monday (Chapter Third Day ), Henscheid is convinced of the unwelcome flower greeting and is not entirely unexpected by the editor ("And what's that snot?") As a donkey, rhinoceros, bastard, instigator, intriguer, etc. . insulted. He takes from their outbursts of anger, which also expand to those who happen to be present ("idiots", "moon calves"), that the employees of the publishing house Rösselmann and Miss Bitz ("These women! Want to introduce socialism and cannot even pass on information correctly!") were addicted to the information rumor chain. Then the narrator in Café Härtlein advises Jackopp to write a letter the next time his lover tries to approach him (Chapter Fourth Day ) and, together with friend Wilhelm Domingo, develops a plan for a networked action from real and fictitious letters that loosen up the group's partnership structure and fatefully close it new combinations. When his friend Peter Knott, the Ibiza traveler, arrives, however, he has concerns about "directing all erotic events according to [their] wishes" and criticizes the game as "infantile", "voyeurism" or "substitute satisfaction" . Henscheid, on the other hand, emphasizes the "enlightening and critical traits", since the manipulation of letters "opens the eyes of all those involved to the relativity of their erotic actions."
Jackopp does not write a letter, however, but seeks a discussion, which does not succeed: In their last meeting (Chapter Sixth Day ), Czernatzke takes part in a demonstration against Paragraph 218 and reacts to his request that the group speak to the group for a moment abandoned, with the slogan: "Come on, comrade, get in line, come into our line!" The disappointed lover sees another break in logic, breaks off his campaign of conquest, laments his fate by reading Camus , buys a dachshund in the city center (chapter Seventh Day ) and then disappears from the narrator's field of vision. Presumably he will be reconciled with his wife Doris, who is being watched by Mr. Rösselmann and Miss Bitz while walking this dog.
These main and the many inserted subplots are presented by a first-person narrator of the same name as the author, to whom one of the two preludes refers: “Indeed, I have to wonder what a gossip I have become am «. He appears on the café and pub tours and on the phone calls that enrich his everyday life ("And the phone rang again, how wonderful!") As an artist of life, for example in the chapter SIXTH DAY : After the night spent together with Miss Majewski, "wipes [] he takes the sleep out of sight [...] and hurries [] out of the house. [...] Oh what, grief and worries! "With the nearby publishing house employees with a fixed income, Mr. Rösselmann and Miss Bitz, he enjoys" at this early hour, half past nine "the" roundest and most perfect breakfast life with musical accompaniment ", Unfortunately, it was “crude percussion” and not the Gregorian chant favored by Bitz, which “transformed the tea masses into something extraterrestrial”. The breakfasters exchange their observations on the relationship network that may have changed due to the appearance of new guests yesterday evening at Krentz . Rösselmann's curiosity about the changing situations of his friends is underlaid by his "raw pleasure" in intriguing, which is not alien to the narrator either. For example, one pushes the imaginative Joachim Kloßen, who is constantly in financial distress, to one another and gives him the hope of the other's help with his phone calls with invented hints. After breakfast, Henscheid sums it up: “How beautiful was my existence! First an intoxicating evening, then even the greatest happiness, then a festive breakfast with a telephone insert [the entertaining calls from Kloßens with his desperately original, transparent suggestions], and now something was in the air again ... [...] a fresh wind swept over the city, down into the beautiful world, just like newborn I strolled along the street ”.
At home, he thinks about how he could "push Mr. Jackopp even more sharply" on Miss Czernatzke, and negotiates over the phone with Mr. Reinecke from the student journal in a "mutual duping" campaign about a "lively polemic" against the SPD education politician Lohmar, his Party comrades, and achieved that he did not have to return his advance payment because of alleged archival work when the glass cleaning association took back orders that he was supposed to write an article against a competitor's low offers. From such income he finances himself and partly also his friends by lending money. A week ago he wrote little poems in the coffee house about potato chips for the Maggi company and, to compensate for this, a comment against potato chips for a journal. The “empty spaces between these actions [fills] [his] beloved piano”: “Beethoven was too strenuous, and Mozart would certainly go completely wrong against the threatening background of the guild masters [the glass cleaners]. So something light, relaxed, that drives away fear! The Musette-Walser - that was it! "
But he is also self-deprecatingly flexible about his future work opportunities. In a conversation with the gullible Ms. Krause, he flirted with the wish to become “a simple clerk in an office [...], with a small file and a nice, clean desk, away from the grueling hustle and bustle of project group research and sales promotion '". At the end of the novel, apparently inspired by the Jackopp talks and the loyalty of the Swiss, he feels his talent as a pedagogue and social worker, "in the art of leading people and helping people."
The fictional characters, who live not far from each other near the bar, often change partners and so new constellations are formed again and again. At their daily and nightly meetings at card games in Krentz , in Café Härtlein , in Alt-Heidelberg , in Spätlokal Schildkröte , on Saturdays in the football stadium, in the publishing house or during private visits, they are usually put together in a drunk state and soon resolved if they are disillusioned. Ulf Johannsen is a magnet for women. He was engaged to Birgit Majewski for 15 years, they separated temporarily six months ago, she was replaced by her friend and flat neighbor Evamaria Czernatzke, but they have been a group of three for six weeks. In the meantime, the narrator made hope in his former apartment neighbor Birgit, but she became friends for six weeks with a Jürgen Steltzer, who then married another woman, divorced her and disappeared to Burma as a press attaché. The narrator describes this example to demonstrate the changes in position within the group: "This is how it goes with us often and often."
The narrator shares the relaxed, sexual lifestyle in the pub environment with this mixed, “really I am in love with” ideologically left-wing group, as presented, for example, at the company party (Chapter Fourth Day ) in the office building and describes Mr. Gernhardt's shielding of his cute smoker as “unsporting, but certainly wise of him ”, but for that he“ naturally has to atone with a lack of vitality and freedom. ”Henscheid, on the other hand, prefers to play along. He too has courted the protagonists on various occasions and always hopes for his chance if a gap arises. In these situations the narrator feels like a director and is curious about the outcome of his play. Like Jackopp, he observes the “break in logic” and tries, at least theoretically, to link threads with one another and thereby create free space for himself.
On the other hand, the protagonist smiles at the mostly female dogmatic zealots and generally takes a pathetic-ironic bourgeois standpoint: “For my part, I am definitely for the old and timeless, which reaches directly into the center of the world spirit and thus the lovable, albeit divided, fatherland ultimately also uses. ”He often recovers from the hustle and bustle of ventures and negotiations while playing the piano and shares this retreat on the evening after the company party with Miss Czernatzke, who is tired from fighting. After her argument with her rival friend Birgit Majewski, both of them listen to Franz Schubert's Idyll Hirt on the rock : "I consume myself in deep sorrow, my joy is gone, I lost hope on earth, I am so lonely here ..." He thinks with his real lover: the Turkish woman who left for her homeland years ago.
A special case, but not atypical because of the financial difficulties and planning instability of most freelancers, is Joachim Kloßen, the narrator's new apartment neighbor, who recently moved to town. He is not only a pumping genius and a stubborn scrounger when it comes to going to bars, a specialist in the "high policy of fundraising and redistribution", but also a great inventor of new projects ("a" crazy story "about a goat who once had to appear in court in the city of Velbert ”) with allegedly promising prizes, in which he wants the friends to participate in their pre-financing (including Chapter Sixth Day ): sale of tickets for football games at black market prices, entry into the lottery business, plan for a socially critical television game with one, according to information from a "Funkfritzen", paid 18,000 marks. At the end (Chapter Seventh Day ) he fled from the creditors and relocated to Garmisch, from where he continued to contact the friends and tried to sell them his ideas.
The busy people often hide melancholy seekers of happiness, like Jackopp, who is eloquent and relaxed only in Swiss German, who appears clumsy and clumsy during the Czernatzke conquest and helplessly seeks Henscheid's advice. Many people in the circle are daydreamers or failed visionaries: “This is how it happens to us intellectuals again and again.” At the end of his efforts, Jackopp Camus reads and confesses: “I am a poor person […] I am really only interested in three things. For professional boxes, fancy clothes and insulting waiters «.
The narrator Eckhard Henscheid shares many aspects of his image of man with his friend Wilhelm Domingo, with whom he exchanges information about the events and forms a confidential coalition. Combined with a self-reflexivity, her observer perspective, "curious [...] from a safe distance" from the opposite sidewalk, becomes particularly clear when describing the collapse of an old woman. You can see how other passers-by ("all in all it made a very determined impression."), But unsuccessfully, rush to the woman's aid. Mr. Domingo consoles himself with a bar of chocolate bought at a kiosk.
Because of their supposedly undecided position, they are also caught in the field of tension in political discussions. The two old people in Krenz are asked by the young, committed Barbara Müller about "what [they] actually have for a» status «in this society and its imminent change and whether [they] are» critical «about [themselves]» reflected "etc. etc.". Henscheid is proud of the “elegant rebuff that [he] [by falling asleep in the armchair] had given the young Ms. Müller. [...] I mean, of course it is the prerogative of young people to ask like this, to ask us older people, even to ask about our "status" if I think so, but somewhere it is over, and we old people just have to preserve our dignity and show the boys their limits. "
Walter Erich Richartz office novel
Richartz's Büroroman (1976) deals with a phase of economic development in the early 1970s: the shift in the relationship between goods production and administration and, as the next stage, rationalization by switching to IT and the associated loss of jobs in both areas. At the end, after the protagonists have left their offices, their offices are cleared out (Chapter 8.0 Go on, do not stand still) and their seats are replaced by office machines. H. by the “humanless TEXT PROCESSER” with previously unimaginable possibilities and the “WONDER-SHREDDER” document shredder: “Space for the new, for the young, for the new office [...] The process is unstoppable.” The anonymous narrator comments confidentially : "The work of our [...] long-term employees [...] has been completely worthless for our company for more than two years." The old jobs would only be kept because of the company and social legislation for humanitarian reasons until they left because of illness or retirement let those involved "believe for as long as possible [...] that their work is indispensable for the company". But he adds: “There is no need for great deception [...] Maybe he doesn't believe himself. Maybe he knows more than we suspect. "
This impending change will be demonstrated using the example of the DRAMAG company , abbreviation for German Regulator, Armaturen- und Messgeräte-AG, in Frankfurt's Ostend. Here, in front of the production and storage halls, there is the administration high-rise with the large glass panes that cannot be opened because of the air conditioning system (Chapter 1.0 The forehead on the glass ). As in an aquarium, these separate the day residents from the outside world before they march outside in a column at 5 p.m. (Chapter 2.6 Little Family ): to their friends, husbands, children, in the residential areas or to go shopping in the city: parking garage , Shop windows, escalators.
The accounting department is housed on the tenth floor and the three protagonists Wilhelm Kuhlwein have been working at their desk for twenty-three years, Elfriede Fuchs, later Klatt, for twenty years and, more recently, young Fraulein Mauler, in room 28 with standardized equipment (appendix: inventory) Over the course of time, different employees sat. The daily and annual operations are described from the perspective of this office. The department is a reflection of the world of employees with its figures, which can be categorized into Kuhlwein, who usually works quietly to himself, the slightly quick-tempered Klatt, the naive Mauler, the squealing Maier, the flower-pouring Klepzig, the office messenger Holzer with his from the Others no longer noticed Harelip, Martha singing to collect money for anniversary gifts. The table composition in the canteen is accordingly, with small confidential women's discussion groups and the noisy comedians. Little is learned about people's private lives, only the success stories that they themselves make known: their spectacular summer trips and the postcards with holiday greetings collected in the offices on the wall of cards (Chapter 4.1 The world in color). They only share family problems with their confidants, who then pass them on in a hint. This is how the rumor cycles arise. Only in the penultimate chapter (7.o Die Zeitraffer ) with the ironic headline Happy End (7.1) does the narrator, who guides the reader through this world of work, inform about the socialization conditions in difficult family relationships with dominant fathers or mothers and Klatt's life and professional dreams that are not being fulfilled or Kuhlwein in his parents' house in Sachsenhausen: behind the caricature of Klatt, who is unsatisfied and nagging in Frankfurt dialect , who is envious of his young colleagues, is addicted to chocolate breakfasts and lunches, a sick person appears, who at the end with COMA DIABETICUM is rolled by his colleagues to the ambulance on their office chair got to. Kuhlwein cannot help here. He has just died at his desk with a strange smile, which a Turkish cleaning woman only notices after work has ended.
The daily work routine (chapter 2.0 snail hours ), which the employees try to get through with more or less committed routine or tiredly bored, is structured by their subject areas, by cheering colleagues when passing on files, cross-departmental phone calls, calls to the office management, going to the toilet, coffee and cigarette breaks. In particular, lunch in the canteen (Chapter 2.2 The Verb , Chapter 2.3 The Canteen ) is a joyfully anticipated interruption for most people ("And? Wars good" "It worked"). You have to go through the minutes of the day, month ("there'll be money again in 8 days"), and year together, you gossip in groups about others who are having lunch, protect them if they are opposed to them, give the migraine sufferer a gift a tablet, brewed a cup of coffee for him, you hold together against those in the other departments, but are happy about their short visit, which interrupts the boredom, are annoyed about documents not delivered on the fixed date, warn the defaulters by phone ("Most of these people on the He's never seen the other end. "), celebrates birthdays, newcomer and farewell parties together, is curious about the love life of the colleague, etc. Then one suffers from the tightness again (" The nerves, you people, the nerves. The noise " ), cannot smell each other and cannot bear the looks of others ("s there n there a look?"). Every throat clearing, page turning, scribbling, every eraser noise ("Schabeschabeschab - fuit - Schabeschabeschab - fuit") is annoying, aggression and murder fantasies (Chapter 2.1 The daily murder ) arise.
"[T] he DRAMAG is a state" and "[t] he office guarantees stability" In the glass tower, the worldview, the pragmatic values and prejudices as well as the security needs and existential fears of the employees are preserved. The narrator remembers that at the time of the Baader-Meinhof attacks there was a wanted poster in almost every office. After each arrest, Ms. Klatt painted a cross on the picture of the wanted person: “It was a public festival […] and Ms. Klatt said with satisfaction […]: 'So. Now have a rest. '"
The company is a structured apparatus. In the courtyard, those employed in the skyscraper look down at the factory halls of workers dressed in overalls. Upwards they try to listen to the secrets of the company management. Little is known about their plans, even the chief secretaries Klepzig and Schadow of the department head Dr. Gropengießer belong to a different shift and only a few succeed in the small ascent to secretary, like the former employee Volz at the third desk in 1028. You are aware of the hierarchy and follow the inspection, which has been prepared for weeks like a state visit (Chapter 5.0 The high Visit ) of the main shareholder Tülle, a show event that actually belongs to the management on the twelfth floor and is only peripherally visible to the employees. Since one does not find out about the bulletin board, rumors, gossip and confidential messages create a constant battle scenario of the leadership (Chapter 3.0 The Whisper ): The managers compete for reasons of prestige over the size of their department, hire employees even if there is no work for them She gives. While friendship and harmony are played out for the public, factions struggle for power, draw up “kill lists”, saw on chairs, push competitors onto “ejection seats” or lure them onto a “smooth parquet”.
In terms of their socialization, the employees are also foreign to the intellectual area of the students, the objects of the private aspirations for advancement of young employees like Miss Mauler. The general social prestige includes the annual vacation trips documented by skin tanning (Chapter 4.2 Singing People ), the signs of their prosperity and the basis of their knowledge of the world, which after their return as ›Miss Carthago‹ or ›Signor Ajaccio‹ “with bright eyes, foam white Teeth, swollen and heightened from being at home everywhere ”in the department.
The tower residents are generally politically fixated on preservation and are not very committed to changes. They recognize the works meeting (Section 4.3 The meeting ) with an experienced look as a drama with a friendly introduction, a dramatic conflict and a conciliatory outlook, in which the unionist "Kaluza or Kionka", who is perceived as a foreign body by the employees, appears as a provocative class struggle attacker and curses that "Certain unteachable forces on the employers 'side still do not take notice of the hard-won workers' rights" On the other hand, the managing director, who is admired by the audience for his skill, analyzes Altenburg is concerned about the global economic situation in terms of production figures, which posed a serious challenge for everyone ("We should therefore all - it would not be an exception here - expect even harder efforts. More toughness. More dynamism. The cost ratio must be more favorable.") . At the end of their speeches, however, both agreed that a strong team could be formed and that the problems at hand could be solved together: “General relief. Strong, redeemed applause rises from all sides ”.
Eva Demski's apparent death
Eva Demski's novel Scheintod (1984) tells in personal form from the perspective of the 29-year-old writer D. (called “the woman”), who works for the theater and radio, the relationship with her husband, a lawyer one year older than him (“the man "), in light of the RAF - sympathizer scene in Frankfurt. The protagonist has been separated from her homosexual partner for three years and after his death, Easter 1974, has to answer questions from the investigating authorities, react to the demands of the revolutionary “ group ”, hold talks with his parents, friends and employees and close his office . In doing so, she found materials in his estate that prompt her to research his double life, to reflect on her marriage and her political position.
The novel is structured according to the twelve days from death to the funeral on April 24th: On Holy Saturday the woman is called into the lawyer's office apartment in Elbestraße in the Bahnhofsviertel ( DER FIRST DAY The Stage ), where she looks at the young current one Meet her husband's partner and the medical and police investigation team. Since the cause of death, presumably an asthma attack, cannot be clearly determined, the corpse must be autopsied and can only be buried after clearance. However, the investigation did not find any evidence of the use of force (Chapter 10).
From her apartment, she informs her friends over the phone and gets advice. Here she receives condolences from her friends from the left-wing scene, such as the former partner of the husband Paul, who helps her run the firm. She listens to the complaints of her in-laws arriving on Easter Sunday from the Nuremberg region about the estranged son ( THE SECOND DAY the festival ) and transfers the organization to the undertaker Marder ( THE THIRD DAY the visit ).
Although she lives apart from her husband, as a young widow she feels responsible for his legacy, she claims it for herself and yet is unsure whether her image of the great idealistic lawyer who defends the outcasts will capture his whole personality . Her grief is linked to a research into the unknown sides of men and her question about a transcendent dimension of death, which stands in contrast to the atheistic worldview of left intellectuals. In this context, she thinks about forms of mourning and a Catholic burial that could correspond to the man's view: in a department store on the Zeil she finds a cape as mourning clothing, then she looks for a suitable spiritual atmosphere in the cathedral, but does not find it . She walks along the Main to Nice Park , her and her husband's favorite place. On the way to Father Smile, a friend gave her the address of the progressive Catholic pastor, she remarks, “that many streets are no longer designed for people like you. Repellent, with heavy air, loud lanes, canals alike. [...] The passing cars [seem] to shave the narrow pedestrian path ever narrower. He [is] not needed after all. "
During the next few days, on her way through the city and in conversations with friends and companions of the husband, she remembers the years they spent together and their discussions about the fighting methods of the revolution. She remembers him as a contradicting personality, as a rhetorically brilliant advocate of the poor and outsiders whom she admires, theoretician of the revolution, but an anarchic and chaotic individualist on a personal level, a domineering patriarch and his prostitutes who changed egocentrics after a short period of sexual use (in the scene one calls him "Countess"). At first she tolerated this freedom, which was claimed by her husband, in accordance with the ideologically permissive view of man of her intellectual and creative friends, reacted to it with her own affairs, but finally separated from him and moved into her own apartment. But she still admires her husband for his flexible commitment and his local social work. As an “anarcho-jurist”, he mainly defended clients from the fringes of society: prostitutes, rascals, tattooed, leather-clad members of the motorcycle rocker club Bones named Blutwurst or Mike, war objectors, drug addicts, leftists from the RAF environment. He was brought up in a Catholic-conservative manner by his parents who fled from Silesia to Franconia on the Pegnitz ( THE ELFTE DAY childhood ), only dealt with Marxist ideas as a student in Frankfurt and joined the socialist student group SDS . During this time, when the left scene formed, the woman got to know him (3rd day). One committed u. a. For children in care who were denied the “normal socio-cultural forms of communication” as Andreas Baader, who came to fame among his followers because of his department store fire, put it to the man. Both insulted each other as “socio-fascists” and elitist lawyers. Such disputes were typical of the intellectual scene and its deliberations on a political struggle that went beyond demonstrations and squatting: on the one hand, people admired the class-struggle-revolutionary determination of the underground organization, on the other hand, they shied away from the dogmatic enemy and the consequences of the attacks, and so some got involved Courier services or as an overnight host. The writer, too, often discussed the question of empathy for the disadvantaged and the unreality of the actions with the lawyer. The woman initially accompanied her husband to the trials, was interested in the biographies of the accused, and sought conversations with them, e.g. B with the prostitute Hedwig S., and learned about her socialization conditions. Like her, he represented the ideas of the revolution, but he laughed at her boundless feelings of solidarity with released criminals, for whose crimes she blamed the inciting circumstances of society and thus also herself: "Her capacity to absorb misery was inexhaustible [...] left no suffering [] they are considered to be given by God ”. The punitive actions “against the meanness of the system” therefore gave the “group” “a romantic glow”. The woman wanted to get involved, at least on a human level. Her admiration for the innocent inmates in her opinion culminates in a short affair with the bulky, barefooted former bank robber Toni, which her husband jealously pursues (day 8). Because of his proletarian childhood and a home career at the parties, he was the draw of artists and intellectuals. Her husband took his outbreak of violence against her after she broke the spiritually unsatisfactory relationship, and his subsequent suicide attempt, as evidence of her illusion.
The lawyer represented a different utopia towards her. In his draft ( THE EIGHT DAY A Draft ) “many of the old things were meant to be games. […] His world was not allowed to serve any purpose […] where there was permission, the prohibitions were not far. Those, in turn, should of course be lifted, but not like in the children's shops and shared apartments, in which nothing has taken the place of the previous constraints [...] just boredom, which drove itself away with fluffed unimportant things. The world design provided for a strenuous imagination training. ”Parts of his analysis made sense to the woman:“ In seventy-one they had already discovered that the group had no world design. ”In their own design,“ laziness played a major role, including the addiction to pleasure. Power should take care of itself by hindering enjoyment ”. In his free spaces the man tried to live this idea for himself. He himself always kept a distance from his clients and, for example, did not allow himself to be instrumentalized by the radical “patient collective”, which only allowed him to passively but wanted to forbid a plea ( THE FIFTH DAY Captivity ), and he also developed into the many young men did not have a steady relationship, saw no danger to his marriage in his nightlife. Privately and politically, he separated the areas of the gay bars and the shared apartment. He remained an individualist, did not join the "group". "He was really the only one who understood that they were no longer Gudrun and Jan, Ulrike and Holger, Andreas and X, but a body that thought out things that the individual would not have thought of." He criticized them Strategy of the “group”: “How do you shoot a corporation? How do you hijack a cartel agreement? [...] of course there are representatives! But they are the character masks ”. Trainee lawyer Max Hardenberg (7th day), who works in the office and believes in the revolution and the survival of man in the earthly collective, confirms her impression that the lawyer was too much of a Catholic individualist for such a dogmatic view: “He has made his work available to them, but he didn't sacrifice his mind or his political ideas to them. [...] He couldn't do much with the armed struggle in the metropolises. ”As a hedonist, he would not have endured the puritanical ways of life of the underground fighters.
The writer not only has to differentiate her picture, she also inherits his contacts to the RAF group , which she does not see through. She considers the extent to which her husband is involved in the underground apparatus as a mastermind or follower: "For years there has been an increasingly fine-grained, increasingly obscure network of information, place names, procurements, materials, meeting points and aliases, a network full of knots and angles, in which every nodule was incredibly important. Somebody sat somewhere and maybe had the big picture. ”After his death, she receives messages from a“ Gloucester ”through calls and visits to meet with him and then with the“ boss ”in the zoo café , or she will go to the U. -Bahn addressed by a "Gadys". Since the handover of a bag is required, she wants to secure it from a police search and find out about its contents. The lawyer Hilde, the "Kyrgyz woman", accompanies her to the office ( THE FOURTH DAY: everyday life ) and they search the cupboards without any results. The next day ( THE SIXTH DAY The Friends ) she descends alone into the office's basement, which is filled with files, and there she finds the materials the “group” is looking for. Later she discovered ammunition and identification paper in the package. On the way across the Zeil to the zoo café, she realizes that her husband has left a gap in his function, and she considers the various options for dealing with the find and the respective consequences. At the meeting point she says "Gloucester", she has not found anything yet. She is now looking for helpers to remove the bag ( THE SEVENTH DAY The group ), because she feels just as little as her husband in the duty of an underage member of the group and complains that neither he nor her are given information about "goals and paths" have. They were only used as henchmen. She decides to “get rid of the bags. It [is] her first power, for the first time she [has] a corner of reality in her hand, of reality as they [have] made ”, and throws the cartridges from the Iron Bridge into the Main. At another meeting in the zoo café, this time with the “boss”, the successor of the imprisoned Ulrike , with whom she met once in 1972, she refuses to cooperate. She rejects her criticism of the instrumentalization: “We protect those on the edge by not informing them. If you feel abused, it is some other broken psychological story that is none of our business, that only concerns the system. ”The next day, the woman experiences that her solution from the networking of her husband had consequences: the one under the code name“ Gloucester "The underground fighter who appeared, Müllner was shot while looking for the bag in another cellar (8th day) and the Federal Prosecutor opened a case against them: there is a" suspicion of supporting a criminal organization ". Officials of the Federal Criminal Police Office search their apartment on Sunday ( THE NINTH DAY Danger ) and take them to the presidium near the office. Afterwards she called Christoph Koblenz from the station forecourt, who was defended by her husband because of his plant savior and plant avenger tick, and asks for his help in removing the hidden things that he sunk on his aquatic plant area at the Ried.
During the twelve days, the wife chats with various people about her husband and learns new aspects: with the bartender Ewald at the train station, with the homosexual host Geert in his local pub Zur Kaub and the transvestite Martina Abramiecz at his food truck on the edge of an allotment area ( DER TENTH DAY Other Lives ). She goes to the gay bars he visits in an alley near the court and looks at the young "rats". The barman Erika tells of the lawyer's joy in dressing up as a “queen” or “tough guy”. This is how her multi-faceted picture of the day and night life of her husband and his friends, which she tries to put together in a series of photos (Chapter 10). She puts this folder in the coffin and leaves the hall with the words “This stranger must disappear”. At the funeral ( THE TWELFTH DAY farewell ), the various social groups present themselves at the grave. “Where do I belong?” Asks the woman and her husband's partner Paul replies; "To nobody [...] you will be able to walk alone. It is not your business to be protected [...] He freed you from himself ”.
Around the turn of the millennium
Andreas Maier Kirillov
Frankfurt around the turn of the millennium is the backdrop for Andreas Maier's satirical novel Kirillow (2005), which is preceded by a quote from the civil engineer of the same name from Dostoyevsky's novel The Demons as a motto : »Halt! I want to paint a grimace over it with my tongue sticking out. " The main characters are students who are dissatisfied with themselves and their environment and their party friends who are addicted to entertainment. In labyrinthine discussions in the trendy pubs they discuss their views of the world and, in search of political actions, drive in a happening mood to the demonstration against a Castor transport to the Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility in the last chapter (Chapter 3). Here one of the two protagonists, Frank Kober, dies in a tragic-grotesque situation and is the first to be killed by Castor and made a martyr of the movement.
The order-resistant, disoriented Kober (“He can't find any true sentences” and complains about the “total [] indifference of all thoughts”) has only recently returned to his apartment in Ginnheim after a stay with his girlfriend Anja Nagel in Zurich and a trip to America Returned to Kellerstrasse 17. The portrait of the residents of the bourgeois apartment building, e.g. B. the pensioner Doris Badinski or the couple Koch, the couple who teaches, in the prologue ( for Kober: “Prologue in Hell” ) characterizes him as an outsider, “social parasite” and a bearer of their prejudices against left-wing students with suspected contacts in Moscow. This view is nourished by the fact that he and his friends look after Anton Kolakow and his group of Russian Germans from Khabarovsk. They take her to their meetings, for example with the old woman in need of care, Gerber in Westend, in Wiesenau, or in Julian Nagel's apartment in Humboldtstrasse in Nordend. They arrange an excursion with the coat of arms of Frankfurt from the Eiserner Steg to Mainz and invite the guests to attend the birthday party of the member of the state parliament Dr. To accompany Nagel in Eppstein. There a dispute broke out between his father's CDU party friend and the drunk, twenty-two-year-old Julian Nagel, disgusted by social conventions, which his friend Frank interrupted by a spectacular self-harm with a broken glass (Chapter 1).
Like the spontaneous conversations of the characters from one point to the next, their nocturnal parties with changing relationships, for example between Julian, his girlfriend Eva Bieroth and Michaela, who lives in Brückenstrasse, line up and flow from one to the other via the City distributed stations into each other. Into the economy to Stalburg in Glauburgstraße, the café way or Jobst apartment in the pond cup of the trip is planned to Wendland. University, West and Nordend, Bornheim, Sachsenhausen, Ginnheim etc. are meeting places for students. In one of the typical chaotic discussions about the most diverse socio-political aspects and protest actions, Julian and his friend Jobst introduced the friends to Kirillov's Law, named after Andrei Kirillow from Khabarovsk, in the Café Auseg near the new university, the Poelzigbau, which they called “Traktat about the state of the world ”on the Internet. According to this, man is in his pursuit of happiness and well-being in a huge collective system created by him alone according to his will, and not by dark forces, networked and entangled. After the drunk German-Russian group threw manhole covers on cars in Wielandstrasse on a November night , the damage to property is interpreted by Julian and Jobst as a model of “disruption of the process [...] without any intention, without political will, without a revolutionary approach” . “That is why no one as an individual is to blame in a particular way, because everyone contains the catastrophe in themselves, so everyone is to blame, not through conscious action, but solely through their form of survival. So through his life. ”During an excursion, the two of them looked out over the world from Feldberg:“ What happened didn't happen according to plan, there was no reason and there would never be one [...] The catastrophe was elementary ”. They see the "totalitarian [...] freedom of action and intercourse" as the "natural law of people". As the only solution to get out of the entanglements, Julian develops a suicide theory during a boat trip with his Russian friends to Mainz. (2nd chapter). At the end of the novel, he almost drowned them while driving a tractor rampage against a phalanx of policemen shielding the semitrailers with the castors. "I want to immortalize this night [...] then I want to stick my tongue out to the whole world [...] that means ... actually just me", he calls out to his new Wendland friend Rebekka, before he gets on the tractor and stopped being hit by pistol shots becomes. However, it was not he who died, but his friend Frank when he was taking care of the injured man and accidentally got under the tractor wheels while clearing the street (Chapter 3).
Martin Mosebach A long night
Martin Mosebach's novel A Long Night (2000) paints a picture of the city, which has been changing since the 1970s, and portrays the eroded educated bourgeoisie in the tension between lifelong dreams and pragmatism through the incorporated reviews of the post-war and '68 generation .
The main character is the twenty-seven year old Ludwig Drais. In personal form, the story is told from his perspective. He failed his law exam and, after unsuccessful attempts as an art dealer, finally took over the sale of cheap cotton clothes in Europe for the Pakistani textile manufacturer Mr. Khan. With his secretary and later lover (Kp. 4 In shops ) Bella Lopez and her husband Fidi, he set up an office and warehouse in the basement of a house on the sprawled outskirts of the city (Chap. 2 A day of thirty-six hours ). The triangular relationship is surrounded by various, sometimes caricatured, people who tell their life stories on Ludwig's business and private visits on his way through the city, creating a social mosaic: A lawyer wife who is dissatisfied in her villa in the Holzhausenviertel has her fulfillment as a train driver of a little train found in the palm garden (Kp. 1 Gründerzeit ). Ms. Rüsing, the love-experienced and not altruistic benefactress of young, poorly paid assistants in Ms. Müller-Servet's bookstore, (Kp. 2), who is passionate about changing partnerships, lives in a bare apartment building near Holzhausenpark . In the afternoon, the lawyer Bruno Hütte runs the business of his law firm from the Zum Purzelbaum restaurant . Erna Klobig is an old - 68er - Bohèmien living on Münchener Straße with changing, sometimes tragically ending relationships and her daughter Bella dominating mother (Kp.3). She has been banned from the Aldi supermarket branch at Eschersheimer Landstrasse 588 because of minor thefts. The "time critic" and "political analyzer" in "post-war Germany" Ernst Walter Koschatzki (Kp. 3), who wrote elaborate mostly ideologically vain mirroring, reflects on his fame and finally, accompanied by Ms. Rüsing, goes on a cruise with readings for senior citizens (Kp. 5 Rote Flmmchen ).
The children of this new era are looking for a new direction: Bella flees the mother-daughter household and the insecurities of an imaginative artist-behemic life into the equally unsound marriage with the casual worker and dreamer Fidi Lopez. Ludwig's parents, on the other hand, are admired by many as pillars of a stable, protective bourgeois family, but their sons do not continue this tradition: Hermann is an eccentric in his worldly strangeness and finds every job unbearable after a short time and ends after dropping out of studies, gardening and goldsmith apprenticeship and employment at the post office and in a retirement home, now also employed in the bookstore Ms. Müller-Sevets to support the care of the sick father. He finds support in a naive early Christian piety celebrated with animistic, magical rites and meditation in a hotel chapel in the Bahnhofsviertel, in a traditional attitude of acceptance as a counterbalance to modern, constantly changing society (Chapter 5). Ludwig, on the other hand, like Bella, is a double being between dreamy overestimation of himself and realistic diagnosis. As a soldier of fortune, the two have commercial successes (Kp. 3 "Zores" , Kp. 4 In shops ). But while Ludwig has a bad feeling at the thought that the cheap textiles in Hyderabad are produced by two hundred six-year-old children on sewing machines in piecework, Bella advocates a future-oriented American philosophy of life: "Make the most of it!" And advises him not to ask “whether you need what he offers”, “but he simply has to keep developing new sales ideas for marketing. Nobody is such a fool to believe that a shirt for four marks sixty can be washed more than three times. "
Using the example of the cheap clothing wholesaler Nephew & Nephew Europe , the narrator demonstrates the transformation of the old traditional merchant town after the war into an anonymous business world with constantly changing cast. After the first financial successes, the basement warehouse with office from Eschborn is relocated to the inner city “destroyed during and after the war” : “A bend in the street, a corner, a sandstone plinth preserves [] the memory of the evolved lines of the cleared Gothic City . The inner city [is] now wonderfully protected against destruction of any kind. [...] because there is nothing in it that can be irretrievably lost. […] And if the whole city center [disappears] in a crevice, that does not prevent it from [standing] there again two years later in this or somewhat differently shaken shape with new concrete stores for Mister Khan's cheap shirts and Monsieur Cartiers expensive watches. […] [N] after the fire in the synagogues in 1938 [is] now the whole city destroyed, its soil […] made sterile. "
The mood of the protagonist influences his assessment of the heterogeneous street scene when he walks through the city. Depending on his mood, he experiences it as a backdrop of impressionistic beauty, evening peace or a bleak path: he sees Münchener Strasse and the dome of the main train station in the midday light with the gaze of a Venetian painter and deliberately. “Perhaps the first step in breaking the spell of Frankfurt's ugliness was to paint it.” On a peaceful evening in the garden of his apartment building, he listens to the bell of the nearby deaconess house: “The objects emerged from the colorlessness. The many pedantic gardens with their paths and benches suddenly seemed to belong together in a complicated way ”. Ludwig's way home at night after the pub evening with Bella's husband, who was apparently informed about her affair ("Good night, brother-in-law") at Hermione's restaurant Minnies, from the quarter on the outskirts of the old city area back to the Holzhausenviertel via an arterial road lined with Art Nouveau factories Already atmospheric the accidental death of the drunk Fidi (Kp. 4, 5): “Bare backdrops that narrowed in perspective to the size of toys, paper mache houses in a gray powdered by whitish lamplight lined his path. [...] What surrounded him was ugly and light as a feather, only a row of large trees [...] in the mountains of leaves and caves kept impenetrable darkness. "
Martin Mosebach The Blood Beech Festival
In his novel Das Blutbuchenfest , set at the beginning of the Yugoslav civil war in 1991/92, Mosebach adds further aspects to the picture of a changing population from the long night , albeit with less of the local Frankfurt color. The action could take place in any major Western European city. In satirical form, the mosaic of an illustrious international fun society is built up with a constantly changing series of relationships that contrasts with the fate of the Mestrovic family and their simple and self-sufficient peasant culture in Bosnia until the 1960s. The Croatian cleaning lady Ivana Mestrovic and an art historian, the first-person narrator for most of the chapters, combine the two storylines.
The Frankfurt Roman staff is networked with each other in a complicated structure, both professionally and privately. Most of the protagonists meet again and again in the restaurant of Merzinger from Lower Austria, where the two projects are being forged, and then at the final big party. The links have v. a. two centers: Wereschnikow and Rotzoff.
Sascha Vereschnikow, the dreamy, impostor's cosmopolitan citizen of Russian descent, knows how to present himself in a media-effective manner as the spiritus rector of international congresses with time-related, interdisciplinary topics, which he tries to finance through his supposedly close global connections to influential sponsors. It is from this aura that he draws his effect on women: at the end of the novel, after the party, he reconciles with his former girlfriend Inge Markies, the active boss of an agency for business-private contacts, after Maruscha, the beautiful and sensitive Polish companion successful men, disavowed by two parallel relationships: first to the financier of her and Wereschnikows, apartment, to the real estate broker Breegen, who got back on his feet after bankruptcy, and second to the young Balkan poet Tomislaw, whom she marveled at as a high-rise window cleaner with a head for heights. After discovering her triple game at the party, Maruscha loses all lovers, but ends up with the shy and helpful landlord, the banker Dr. Happiness and can look to the future with confidence.
In luck, the advertising man Rotzoff had already flattered himself beforehand and persuaded him to leave him his spacious apartment in an older villa with a large tree-lined garden in the city center to repay his debts as a “super location” for the “Blood Beech Festival”. He is indirectly connected to the art historian through two girlish women. When he, like most of the guests, drowns in the bacchanical dance of fools, he falls in love with Rotzoff's big, beautiful friend Reni: a girl who drifts through life: “Everyone takes what he gets; everyone gets what he gives; you have to learn to come to terms with the second best - did the sight of Rotzoff thrust me into this depth of thought? ”The original of this second cast is Winnie, who is also alternately intimate with both men. The naive girl with heart disease (»dying fears blown away«) is one of the tragic figures of the grotesque social interplay and dies macabre at one of the festivals. Winnie experienced every day and every relationship as originally as with the first human couple ("Madam I'm Adam"). It appears to the narrator in his memory of their brief love affair, transfigured as "naturalness, unencumberedness, unquestioning, thoughtlessness in the most wonderful sense". At the same time, her vulnerability and the depths of her death are a metaphor for the divided world and human life (Chapter 31. The world sways like a hammock , Chapter 16. The forgiveness of the turtle ).
The position loosely art historian on the subject of Tintoretto in the Dogentestamenten the Cinquecento with cum laude with a doctorate, enters through Wereschnikows new project in the novel's plot. This is broadly based and should address "the dignity in the various Balkan cultures, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Muslim, the atheist-philosophical, the democratic-libertarian, the reform-socialist concept of dignity with the participation of the authoritative authorities of all affected groups" extend. In preparation for an exhibition, the historian was given the task of preparing an exposé on the sculptor Ivan Meštrović , a distant relative of the cleaning lady, and while looking for sponsors from Ms. Markies, met her office girl Winnie. His research on the Yugoslav artist leads him to Bosnia to meet Ivana's family and he learns the prehistory of the impending ethnic conflict.
At this time the people of Frankfurt also felt the signs of the beginning of the war: "The hostile parties were gathering all over the city", the Serbian shoemaker tells of the "mass killings", and Ivana and her husband Stipo meet the Croatians. It comes to a "real war weekend tourism" to the "locations and the bases". This development culminates, through Ivana's telephone calls, in the contrasting plot of the Yugoslav civil war that takes place at the same time as the festival. While the party is losing its contours and the cleaning lady and stipo begin cleaning the dirty rooms and the trampled garden, the Mestrovic peasant family is fighting with their Muslim neighbors and has to flee the Prozor Valley. Symbolically fitting, Vereschnikow, as he explains Inge Markies, can hardly hold his congress of "all the well-meaning" on "dignity in the Balkans", because "financial resources are limited".
Anne Chaplet Clean finish
A group of old friends is at the center of Anne Chaplet's 2006 crime novel Sauberer Abgang . Most of them have established themselves as bankers, restaurateurs, real estate agents, public prosecutors and journalists in the wealthy bourgeoisie. But not all have made a career and there are rumors of indebtedness, irregularities and unsuccessful speculations that could be exploited by those who know it, and those affected try to preserve the facade. In addition, shadows of the past from around 1981 appear. At that time, the current pillars of society took part in demonstrations as progressive students with changing love relationships and hidden rivalries. B. against the runway west airport expansion and the further construction of the Brokdorf nuclear power plant . Above all, they would prefer to keep their support for the squatters in Myliusstrasse or Schumannstrasse in Westend a secret. In connection with the subplots, this results in an explosive mixture for a crime story. The actions extend over the inner city of Frankfurt and enable the reader with his combinations of perpetrators and their motives, movement profiles of the protagonists, from whose perspectives the story is told in personal form; put together. The starting point of the investigation are the central locations of the novel:
In Bankhaus Leo responsible for the company locates Pollux Facility Management working cleaning lady Dalia sunshine the body of entangled in speculations on the edge of legality manager Marcus Saitz. Since the autopsy shows that the dead person was strangled, prosecutor Dr. Karen Stark to handle this case. Her office is in courthouse C on Porzellanhofstrasse. Her colleague Thomas Czernowitz is also found strangled here a week after Saitz's murder. a. again from Dalia, whose boss Johanna Maurer transferred her to this new job, apparently to spare her the daily shocking encounter with the crime scene in the bank.
Dalia lives near this second cleaning point in a cross street in the Zeil near the Konstablerwache. From here she wanders through the city in her free time with her white English Bulldog Wotan and thinks about her walks through the Grüneburgpark, the parks opposite the Alte Oper, the Freßgaß and on her way back via Goethestrasse, Hauptwache, Zeil to the apartment or in the Café Mozart in Töngesgasse about her life trauma. Her mother killed her abusive father in Dietzenbach in 1981 to protect her daughter. The consequences of this family tragedy and the washing off of the traces of blood are an automatic cleaning obligation in extreme situations and the frequent change of location, which, however, also results from their main source of income. Because the 32-year-old uses her six years of study in business administration to sniff for irregularities in the offices of the executive floors and to secure documents. If successful, she blackmailed her “clients”. She also found what she was looking for at Saitz.
With the former local reporter who specializes in music and architecture and now freelance journalist Willi (Will) Bastian, the reader can also wander through the city and find his murdered secret allies. He initially appears as the loser of the friend group. After his girlfriend Vera broke up with him because she thought he was unreliable in the family and hostile to babies, he had to move out of her Bockenheimer apartment and switch to his eighty-two-year-old father via Reuterweg, Grüneburgweg, Körnerwiese in Hansaallee. He does this with mixed feelings, because in the 1980s their generational conflict escalated with mutual accusations: the executive of a construction company was made jointly responsible for the demolition and reconstruction of Frankfurt in concrete blocks by his son. He reciprocated with the criticism of the unsound life of the son and with his saying for all situations: "It depends on what you make of it". The two are the prototypes of the confrontations at that time and at the same time represent the twenty-five years of adaptation to social developments and have more understanding for each other after Will's return.
At that time, Will broke family ties and in 1981 joined an alternative quarry-pond clique, from which the rebellious secret society Pentakel developed, which supported actions in the anti-nuclear demonstration and squatter scene at the time. The initiator and head of the group was Leo Curtius. The end came when there was a falling out because of the universally popular and courted Jenny Willard and her main friend Leo was arrested while trying to put a banner on one of the Deutsche Bank towers to set an example: “Stop the world ". In order to support the comrade who emigrated to the Canary Island of Gomera after his early release, where he was u. a. Financed a house out of a guilty conscience under pressure from Jennys, some members have been meeting for the weekly regulars' table at Dionysus for twenty-five years , next to Will Bastian, Michel Debus, Max Winter (restaurateur), Thomas Czernowitz (public prosecutor) and Julius Wechsler (real estate agent) also the murdered one Saitz. The situation threatens to develop into the series when Czernowitz asks Will for a chat at the Carpe Diem on Klingerstraße and, after his friend does not appear, finds him murdered in his office in the courthouse opposite, where he meets Dalia. Soon after, Will is called again, this time with the hint that Jenny has appeared. Willi makes his way via Reuterstraße, Grüneburgweg to Liebigstraße 17, where the dead Max Winter lies in the office of his restaurant Gattopardo . Old rumors are surfacing again that someone from the group betrayed Leo to the police in order not to endanger his career or out of jealousy. The rest of the group fears for their lives and suspects an act of revenge. One mistrusts one another. Even the public prosecutor and the police are long unsuccessful in this criminal case until individual protagonists involved in the case discover the right lead and break their silence.
Literature workshop Frankfurt
In the Frankfurt novels Genazinos , Kurzcks , Henscheids , Demskis , Piwitts and Pamuks , the city is an experience space and workplace for writers and journalists who talk about their lives and that of other people. In the following works, writing processes (Hettche) and the cultural business with reception (readers' opinions, newspaper reviews) and marketing strategies (Kirchhoff, Fauser) are discussed in connection with the actions.
Jörg Fauser raw material
The main character in Jörg Fauser's novel Rohstoff (1984) is the writer Harry Gelb, who returned to Germany in 1968 from his drug trip from Istanbul (Kp. 1-5, 20) and, after stops in Berlin (Kp 6-10) and Göttingen ( Kp. 11-14, 16-17), lived mainly in Frankfurt in the early 1970s. An apomorphine cure cures him of drug addiction, but then he becomes an alcoholic.
Harry had already written poetry as a high school student and at eighteen he knew "that the writing profession was the only one in which [he] could live out his apathy and perhaps still make something of [his] life." Description of his life in the alternative scenes of the Istanbul district of Tophane, Berlin and Frankfurt his personal style. He tries to differentiate himself from traditional literature, but also from the authors of Group 47 , e.g. For example, through a stream of consciousness “à la Joyce ” or through poems in prose form: “You could only write honestly about what you had learned or experienced yourself.” He is particularly impressed by American on the road authors such as Kerouac or Burroughs ("The Soft Machine"). This passion for experimental underground literature suffers from the limited publication possibilities. Harry's search for a publisher is an odyssey with rejections. Only small publishers, “little mags”, “away from the hustle and bustle of large companies” (Kp. 35) are interested in his work. He found initial support from Gutowsky in der Hochstraße (Kp. 18), who printed a small edition of his novel, consisting of page-long sentences without periods and commas, about a ghost town with bums, morphinists and old SS men with the title Schmargendorf City Blues want. While this project failed due to the lack of funding, he was finally able to admire two works as a book: His cut-up montage in the magazine format Eisbox, edited by the Göttingen publisher Clint Kluge (Kp. 22), about mankind frozen by civilization, albeit sluggish Finding sales, and his Stamboul Blues , who tells his junkie time with the painter Ede in Istanbul in a flood of images with a broken sentence structure.
In the subculture outside of the mass media, every author, despite similarities with other writers, is a loner and has to find his way: Harry Gelb also wants to set himself apart from the great writers of the post-war period such as Böll, Lenz and Grass in terms of content and style and is oriented towards the North American underground . His friend Anatol Stern, who is financially secure as a pilot and can afford an apartment in the Westend for his family, recommends the cut-up style of the beat generation based on Burroughs' model (Kp. 19), which he does not copy want. In any case, his writings are criticized for their difficult readability and the focus on the narrator, e. B. from the French Bernadette, his Trotskyist friend from the squatters' time in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, who is studying German in Frankfurt and organizing a revolutionary women's group. She misses the political awareness of his book and generally his lack of efforts to get involved and work. She accuses him of just drifting through the pubs instead of writing seriously, and separates from him (cp. 33).
Harry's lack of money and his search for a place where he feels at home are the reasons for the frequent moves: from his parents' apartment to Wolfsgangstraße in Nordend , to Wiesenstraße in Bornheim and then to Wittelsbacher Allee. In between he slips into the flat-sharing communities of left-wing protesters. He moved into an occupied house on Bockenheimer Landstrasse, an empty speculative property, a room on the anarchist floor, experienced the tensions between the flatmates and finally the neglect of the old town house and the return of many activists, among others. a. Bernadettes, into the pleasant bourgeois life (Kp. 43). As an individualist, he registers the contradictions of the various revolutionary groups and observes how hierarchies are formed in long plenary sessions: the Communist Student Union and the Red Cell Jura set the tone, followed by the Italian troop Lotta Continua and the anarchists. At the end of the row there is a rocker gang quartered in the basement, who are pampered by the students as rag proletarians and are instrumentalized in the demonstrations. (Kp. 29) Harry, on the other hand, is of no use to the doctrinaires and therefore they treat him suspiciously. Harry discovers the same mixture between the theorizing elite and the left-wing crowd on the one hand and violent chaos on the other at a party in the dormitory on Beethovenplatz and in the Club Voltaire in Kleine Hochstrasse, the center of the left-wing intellectual scene. (Kp. 32, 34) Harry feels the pressure to adapt to the political and cultural establishment here too. Just as little as with the communist groups, he feels that he belongs here: "Whether publishers or editors, whether bigwigs or fellow travelers, it was all the same society, the functioning cultural class, whether you came to them as an eager writing slave or as a cut-up junkie, as a comrade or as a journeyman, for them I was nothing more than an agent provocateur, an agent of the dark forces from whom they had to save their building society contracts, their posts, their wives. ”He sees himself as being of them as of“ the highly powerful cultural critics ” "Banished to the literary bulky waste".
As an experimental underground author, Gelb finds little response when looking for a job and has to keep looking for new sources of money. Although he routinely writes half-hour essays for women's radio on “the life and work of well-known women”, he is unsuccessful in the city's cultural scene. The managing directors of the rock music pub Zero in Stiftsstraße want to set up a communication center with childcare, painting and meditation groups and an alternative newspaper and offer him the position of editor-in-chief. Since he already has media experience as co-editor of the house organ of the cut-up conspiracy UFO (Kp. 25), he agrees. However, the second edition of Zero is already too revolutionary and rebellious for the editors and they stamp it in because they do not want to jeopardize the municipal financial support of their company (Kp. 23-25). Other projects are just as disappointing: the screenplay he edited for his Greek friend Dimitri is not accepted by ZDF (politically too explosive and progressive) or by the third program of Hessian TV (too apolitical and irrelevant, reactionary) (Kp. 27). A film scene about the drug scene on the hash meadow at the opera house ruins ends in an argument between an actor and the director Nico (Kp. 36). Through such frustrations, Harry suddenly feels a dull hatred, “which could actually only be appeased and cooled with the clatter of the typewriter and the Stones [...] Perhaps it was because of this hot, narrow city, which let off steam in the sky, every stock market recovery celebrated a new skyscraper, was filled with incessant roar, jackhammers, wrecking balls, subway rams, in the evenings the poisonous air was pushed out of damaged lungs, a deadly dose compared to which the pale opium dealers on the hash meadow sold the purest nectar for sale. "
Since yellow can not feed through his literary work, looking for must he other pursuits, which he, however, soon announces again or stops when he has collected some money for the next few weeks to be back "freelance writer": In the Bundesbank works he works in the office, for the Germania Wach- und Schutzgesellschaft he secures a factory site at the east port or university building in the west end at night, for the airport he distributes the luggage to the machines starting all over the world. Inspired by this, he dreams of a middle-class life with his girlfriend Anita, an apprentice at the Kaufhof , in a bungalow on the edge of the Asian jungle: In the evening after a hard day at work in the airport office, he would "sit on the veranda and hammer another page into the old Olympia Splendid, those raw, unhewned, gloomy sentences that would cause a sensation in the German feature section long after [his] early death from an insidious malaria. ”But Harry is not looking for“ domesticity ”, but a“ new milieu ”:“ Because where the milieu was, was Home, which I found when I discovered Schmale Handtuch , a small pub on the corner of Wittelsbacher Allee and Saalburgallee for poor drinkers: pensioners, sales representatives, roofers, a Greek hairdresser, the Rundschau writer Horch, students, bums, little prostitutes etc. On Sundays they meet again on the FSV square on Bornheimer Hang ”(Kp. 39).
After returning from a Stamboul Blues reading in Montabaur (Kp. 43), when he arrives in Frankfurt, looking out of the train window, he is happy about “how the city grew together again. Half a day in the country and you were longing for [...] the noise, the seagulls, the howling, the face of the crowd in which you could disappear in order to save face. ”The now twenty-eight year old comes at the end the plot coped with his life. He knows: “You cannot give up [writing] like alcohol or the injection. Writing can at most give up on you. And it hasn't really started for me yet. ”Now Harry is also gaining a pleasant side from his job and he particularly likes his rounds as a night watchman in the university district: from Jügelstraße, via Senckenberganlage, Kettenhofweg, Beethovenplatz, Siesmayerstraße to Myliusstraße : “The night kept what the evening promised. The air was soft and tasted good. Satellites shimmered in the sky and a few stars were out too. ”From the roof of the law school he overlooks the city:“ At dusk, with the slim silhouettes of the skyscrapers against the reddish horizon and the smoking factory chimneys on the Main, the city was a sight, which made up for some bitter hour. Pigeons cooed trustingly. And under every roof there lived stories waiting to be written. "
Bodo Kirchhoff trash novel
Bodo Kirchhoff satirizes in his trashy novel (2002) titled thriller with the schemes of Trivialliteratur the German literary scene at the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The two authors appearing there with their debut, the "shooting stars" Vanilla Campus (Sexfibel Bodymotion ) and Zidona, who is highly praised as the "representative of the new man's miracle" (The Sad Skin) and publishes under the pseudonym Ollenbeck, are both private and business in one network closely linked from white-collar crime, contract killings and prostitution: The former TV spokeswoman Campus, who was born in Hanau, is married to the “leasing croesus” Johann Manfred Busche known as “Big Manni”. Together with his partner and her lover Dr. Cornelius Zidona the murder of her husband, to whose u. a. To inherit millions accumulated by selling nonexistent super drills. In this context, the lawyer Zidona cleverly combines three projects: He travels with the prostitute Lou Schultz, whom he shares with Busche, to the Philippines , where he allegedly sells her Picasso , which he has inherited from another customer . With their help, he died during sex. Second, in Manila, through the detective Homobono Narciso , he hired Willem Hold, who was wanted in Frankfurt for robbery and murder of a jeweler and was therefore traveling under the name of Hagen Pallas, for fifty thousand euros. He has 20 years of youthful enmity with him, which he now wants to bring to an end with a double stroke: He also orders Willems to be shot after the crime has been committed and, in order to control his activities, puts Lou on him by calling for books the flight to Frankfurt for the two neighboring seats. However, the fine-grained game gets mixed up at the scene: two secret police officers, Helene Stirius and Carl Feuerbach, investigate the prostitute on behalf of the heirs claiming the Picasso drawing and she falls in love with Willem.
The various overlapping actions run from two beach resorts across the city: Willem, at times with Lou as an overnight guest, is staying at the Hotel Burger on the corner of Zobelstrasse, near the zoo in Ostend (from Chapter 8), later he has to leave modest because of the extension of the stay in Frankfurt with the Pension Apollo , an hourly hotel in Elbestrasse near the train station (chapter 35). As a child, until his parents died in a traffic accident, he lived at Ostbahnhofstrasse 9, where their small watch and jewelry shop was also located. From this time comes the protagonist's tick for expensive watches that he takes from his victims. Not far from this district he later shot his father's Lebanese business rival at the end of the Zeil in a robbery in a kind of revenge, and from here he sets off on his long march west: via Allerheiligenstraße, Zeil, "Hauptwache," Rossmarkt, Kaiserplatz and into the banking district ”to liquidate Busch in the small, expensive restaurant Charlot on Opernplatz, with a view of the fountain. However, he does not shoot Busche, but when he realizes that he has been set up, he shoots the killer who was set on himself (Chapters 11-13). After the fact Hold cycles back to the hotel via Neue Mainzer, Willy-Brandt-Platz am Theater, Braubach, Hanauer. One day later he strolls across the evening Hauptwache, along Fressgass to Oederweg (chapter 26) and meets with Lou in the therapy group of the Ursula Schmid Institute on the corner of Glauburgstrasse. The evening after next, when he wants to visit Lou in her apartment on Gartenstrasse near the banks of the Main (chap. 38, 41), he finds the corpse of the lover who had been murdered by Zidona and then fulfills his order by threatening the newly arriving bush who makes public the recordings of his sex practices recorded by Lou with a video camera hidden in the keyhole of the closet door, forcing them to jump out the window.
The two private detectives live on Morgensternstrasse in Sachsenhausen (from Chapter 5). After her divorce from her husband, Helene, known as Helen, recently sublet a room to the unemployed art director Richard Huemmerich to her four years younger employee Carl Feuerbach, with whom she will also be working privately after the end of the novel. From here they start their research, follow Lou's and Willem's leads at the airport, in the bookstore, the therapy group, at the crime scenes, discuss their work results and strategies while walking along the Eiserner Steg, through Schweizer Straße or in the Orion bar in the Oppenheimer Landstrasse (chapter 30). Feuerbach walks over the old bridge along the museum bank to Holbeinsteg, then through the station district to the Westend and asks the Manila-Frankfurt flight attendant from Groß-Gerau, the Lufthansa stewardess Heike Puschmann, in her apartment on Bettinastraße (chapter 34 , and 46) about their observations.
The investigations of the detectives and holds overlap with the literary activity of the Frankfurt Book Fair: "Feuerbach stood in front of the hall of the Frankfurter Hof, which in the late afternoon resembled an army camp, namely at the hour between the hard business at the fair and the receptions in the evening, where it was enough to distinguish friend and foe. [...] It seemed as if a war was raging in Frankfurt, and basically it was one too, the five-day war for the most diminishing of all earthly goods, the meaning. ”Here faces familiar and unfamiliar to the media crowd in front of microphones and TV cameras seek the public eye. In the novel, the boundaries between the biographies and areas of activity of the protagonists are fluid: the author Campus is a criminal and Lou a prevented poet. For example, she buys the Banziger novella Saló (chap. 15) in her favorite shop, the antiquarian bookshop Rüger in Dreieichstrasse, in memory of her only vacation with her mother on Lake Garda. It was there that the then fifteen-year-old fell in love with the fifty-year-old writer and then wrote some rhyming poems. Three of them were selected by Louis Freytag to be included in the supplement to the Frankfurter Allgemeine . Irony of the fate of the novel: Willem accidentally kills this well-known critic after his arrival at Fraport , thereby fueling rumors of a revenge murder by negatively reviewed and thus offended authors. In his attempt to distract Carl Feuerbach from the trace of Lou, he hits the features journalist with an elbow after the latter has looked at his picture in a newspaper as the last deliberate act (Chapters 6, 7).
While reading the Banziger novella, Lou discovers that Zidona's book is plagiarism, uses her knowledge to blackmail him and is murdered by him. The very well-read theology student Nola, a subtenant of Helene, has also found out Zidona's source and tells Feuerbach. During their joint visit to Ollenbeck's reading in the Rothe gallery in Danneckerstraße in Sachsenhausen (Chapter 40), the detective confronts the author with the suspicion of plagiarism, to which he reacts evasively: "Everything comes from somewhere, my friend, even the Shakespeare plays."
In search of his unscrupulous clients, Hold follows Vanilla Campus at their appearances. He hears her answer to the ZDF reporter Jan C. Bartels' interview about the attack when asked about her belief in the hereafter: “At the moment I believe in my book.” But that's just a masquerade, because she cannot do hers in her private life To follow the message "Surrender!" Hold now wants to put the successful author under pressure in her presentations of her sex primer during the book fair. In exhibition hall six, he asks her as Dr. Kussler from the Süddeutsche and records her confession with his tape recorder (Chapter 36). A few hours later he shares the campus at the Bertelsmann reception in the Interconti (Chapters 42, 43), after talking to journalists, colleagues ("You know my name [...] Great literature is not worth it") and a ZDF culture editor from the aspekte team, with the death of her husband and demands his payment and your help with his settlement with Zidona / Ollenbeck.
The two detectives also cooperate with Hold: at the end, after the showdown on Lake Garda , they receive the Picasso picture and thus the amount agreed with the heirs. Willem Hold is allowed to take revenge on Narciso and Zidona and go underground in the Philippines with the two dream watches stolen in the decisive battle as well as his client and helper on the last stage, the rich widow campus (chapter 64).
Location Sachsenhausen The rough outline of love - Desire and melancholy - Marthaler crime novels
As in the trash novels, the Frankfurt protagonists of other Kirchhoff novels, some of which have a parodic reference to the cultural media sector, live south of the Main in the Sachsenhausen district . This is how the long-time married couple in the four-person relationship story Die Liebe, in broad outline, Verena (Vila) Wieland and Bernhard Renz, when they are not in Italy, lives in Schadowstrasse “in the most homely corner of Frankfurt, quiet streets, named after painters, beautiful old buildings , tall trees, the nearby Main riverbank and its museums, the lively Schweizer Strasse, their bars, their shops nearby. ”(Chapter 1) Both worked for television and snappy commentary on the previous evening series templates, which, however, gave them a holiday home helped finance on Lake Garda. Near her, on Schweizer Strasse, lives Vilas' lover Kristian Bühl, who is about ten years her junior and who was a former teacher at the Hölderlin , whom she discovered in the nearby museum park for her midnight cultural program when he preached like Francis of Assisi. He rates "the city with the reckless skyscrapers, [as] not high enough to hold your breath, but already too high to just shrug your shoulders [...] Frankfurt is full of scars, the skyscrapers hide that." . 2). The personal structure, the Vilas and Bühls affairs as well as the Bernhard's with the twenty-year-old producer of his film, the terminally ill Marlies Mattrainer, are held together by the project about Francis and Clare of Assisi.
The former culture editor in the regional section of a Frankfurter newspaper Hinrich in the novel Desire and Melancholie also lives near Schweizer Strasse on the tenth floor of a high-rise with a view of the city and the museum park with the old villa of the Frankfurt Museum for Ancient Cultures on the banks of the Main, in which his from Carsten, an “electronics man” (chapter 4.), divorced daughter Naomi works as a curator and is preparing an exhibition “Eros in Pompeii ”. As a 66-year-old pensioner, he has time to support her in this project and also to help his grandson Malte with the ethics and literature preparation for his oral Abitur examination. In his lonely hours he looks back on his life, scoffs at the prominent columnists "with their eternal excitement and breathlessness" and looks at his past in self-tormenting circles of reflection and tries to unravel the connections: his marriage to Irene, his relationship with the doctor Marianne, while he did not notice his wife's depression and her need for protection (“I never wanted to be free, I wanted to be held”), and the opaque relationship with Zuzan. Above all, in the “Spaceship of Mourning” he ponders the suicide of his wife, the meticulous translator of Italian literature, new years ago, remembers their travels together to the land of longing for Rome and Pompeii and their beginning alienation. Hinrich remembers the day he last saw his wife: “A summer day in the city, she had lunch with a small backpack and the declaration to join a rally against the airport expansion in order to become a new person , leaving the apartment, and the dash of irony about the seriousness of something was not uncommon for her. Now Irene didn't even go to the airport […] And the next day she was found at the foot of the Goethe Tower, shattered after falling from a height of forty-three meters ”(Chapter 2). Later, near his favorite café on Schweizer Straße, he met the Polish supermarket cashier, Zuzan, who seemed to have “done all the little services [in his apartment] with a big heart”. Much of the action takes place abroad: from Frankfurt he travels to Switzerland, Poland and Italy to come to terms with the past. Above all, his search for clues leads him to Warsaw, where he looks for Zuzan, learns about Irenes' relationship with his Polish colleague Jerzy Tannenbaum and becomes increasingly aware of his egocentricity, which blinded him to the personalities of his partners and their secrets.
Two main characters and many acts of the Marthaler crime novels Jan Seghers are located in Sachsenhausen. The protagonist lives at the end of the rabbit trail on the Lerchesberg. In the reading café on Diesterwegstrasse he met the Czech art student Tereza Prohaska, who waited there, moved in with him for a short time until she left for Spain, and took him on a tour of the Städel's painting collection for the old masters (Cranach, Vermeer, Bartolomeo da Venezia) tries to inspire ( an overly beautiful girl ). After her return from Madrid, where she financed her training as a city guide at the Prado ( The Bride in the Snow ), she organized exhibitions as a freelancer for the Städel. Tereza feels neglected because of Marthaler's professional commitment. The resulting tension is heightened by a tragic attack: In The Rose Heart Files , Tereza accompanies a famous medieval painting ( Garden of Paradise ) for an exhibition in Budapest at the airport. Two motorcyclists stop the transporter in Schwanheimer Wald, shoot a security guard and injure the pregnant Tereza so badly that she loses her child. That is also a reason for her return to Prague and the discussion about a separation ( The Sterntaler Conspiracy ).
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From the private center in Sachsenhausen, Inspector Marthaler drives his Mercedes or bicycle to work, first in the police headquarters at Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage, then on Adickesallee and later in an old building in Günthersburgallee (White House), or all over the place the crime scenes or apartments of witnesses or suspects scattered across the city and the surrounding area.
The first three cases each begin in the Frankfurt area south of the Main. An all too beautiful girl : In the south of the city forest near the Kesselbruchschneise, the night steward Werner Hegemann comes across a male corpse with a cut throat on his way home from the Hotel Lindenhof to his apartment in Oberrad. The bride in the snow : On a November morning on the way to the clinic from the S-Bahn, the nurse Nikolas Schäfer sees the corpse of the dentist Gabriele Hasler, presented in the style of an installation in the courtyard next to her house in Oberrad . Score of death : Five guests are killed in a shooting on the restaurant boat Sultan's Imbiss on Schaumainkai. Rowers rescue the injured owner Erkan Önal on the beautiful view promenade . Marthaler and his team found out that the crime was related to the Jewish Hofmann family who had been deported to Auschwitz from their house in Liebigstrasse in Frankfurt's Westend in 1941. Father Arthur left encrypted information about a concentration camp doctor in a score of the operetta The Secret of a Summer Night by Jacques Offenbach , which survivors brought to his son Georg, who was rescued in France.
In the fourth and fifth Marthaler cases, the crime scenes that trigger the first investigations are in the western and eastern parts of the city. The Rosenherz files : In the search for the art thieves of the Paradiesgärtlein and their clients, the team discovers connections to a painting theft in the Schirn with a nebulous buyback and a prostitute murder forty years ago. At that time, Karin Rosenherz was stabbed to death in Kirchnerstraße and two colored pencil drawings by Paul Klee, a generous gift from a customer, disappeared from her apartment. The research leads u. a. to Sachsenhausen to the villa Mumm of the gallery owner Lichtenberg. Anna Buchwald and Marthaler, known from this novel as the prostitute's granddaughter, find the corpse of the journalist Herlinde Scherer in the Hotel Zooblick am Zoo, who has tracked down a political intrigue ( The Sterntaler Conspiracy ) about the expansion of the airport and the election of the Prime Minister of Hesse .
Thomas Hettche Ludwig must die
Thomas Hettche's first-person narrator in Ludwig must die , the "crazy [] brother", the title character, is treated in a psychiatric clinic , just like Herhaus' Erich. He was in the shadow of his successful brother (journalist, wife, city apartment with library, etc.) until his successful brother (journalist, wife, city apartment with library, etc.) had a heart attack. He has been ignored by him since childhood and has problems leading an independent life because of his "disorder" (Chap. 5 The journey along a line ). While Ludwig travels to Imperia on the Ligurian Sea to regenerate , the narrator is allowed to leave the hospital for a few days and look after his apartment in Frankfurt near the banking district. Here he begins with his literary processing of their relationship: "I told it, made it, Ludwig figured out [...] entirely on my responsibility [...] and played with the means that I had at my disposal due to my disturbance that Dr. Minks had always attested and Ludwig had been right as an occasion to differentiate himself from me, ”and so he changes his brother in his imagination, projects his own wishes in his relationship with the Italian student Lene and his own fears in their mutual escape before the anticipated disaster to Venice (Chapter 12 Dream ). He is advised on this construction by two plastinates- like people who hatched from a hundred-year-old anatomy atlas : the first introduces himself as the 15th-century Viennese medic and humanist Johannes Tichtel . He has a prophetic eye for doomed patients and recognizes from the position of death, either at the foot or head of the patient, how the patient's chances of recovery are (Chapter 3. Biographical. Once upon a time. Once upon a time ). The second guest is death, who signals this information to the doctor. He appears here in the form of a young woman with organs that can be opened, wrapped in the white terrycloth robe of Ludwig's late wife. She is at the same time the cold muse and lover of the narrator, because the plot at the same time reflects the writing process of the novel: the limitation of thoughts and inner individual language, especially of puzzling emotional impulses, when translated into conventional words (Chapter 22, Dialogue ) and the feedback between the characters' independent lives or their fateful control and the writer who bears responsibility for his creature (chapter 30. Eighty-four twenty-seven ). In other words, the characters are not independent characters in a novel, but rather projections by the author in his subconscious stream (“As if someone else spoke from me”). He wants to keep his brother and himself alive, to bring everything to a happy end, to have Ludwig return from the short vacation tanned and regenerated by a love experience, but it fails: Tichtel dampens his hope and the shivering nocturnal embrace of the narrator and his female Guest in the brother's bed is a prediction ("like a little death"). Because the next day, the foreign lover has disappeared from the framework and reappears in Italy. The story thus develops in a reciprocal process, a kind of feedback: the narrator's own fantasies permeate Ludwig's thoughts and his brother's fears and pains are transferred to him. The two actions are also linked personally: The death woman now appears at Lenes and Ludwig's bed at the holiday resort as a nocturnal, shadowy observer (Chapter 29.Ludwig dances ) and finally smiles at the doomed one day later in the hall of the hostel in Duino (Chapter 29 ) . 35. Time has slender fingers, a wonderful scalpel, and it is in a hurry ). The narrator becomes more and more like a vortex in the story he has invented, which he has meanwhile hoped that his therapist Dr. Minks will dissolve it as a phantasmagoria, drawn into it: He follows Ludwig's death, “listening next to it” drives himself towards death and wishes to understand him and himself better (“who am I and who when I am in your dream ".,), The pleasurable penetration into the deeper brain regions of the anatomy atlas woman," the beloved, narrator of all stories, that is, literal death. "Who" pulls him over to her ":. "I was so close to death already". By merging with Ludwig, he hopes, he would be "included [...] in history, not forgotten". In the end, the narrator believes he is a book figure: prepared by Tichtel, with stripped skin, "which separated [him] from Ludwig's story, [...] a leap in time, turned over like a page, landed in the words with a leap" He concludes to the reader, whom he reminds of his mortality and from whom he wishes devoted submission, in similar sexual imagery as before to death: “I am, page after page, which you turn around with your hand and with the movement animate the sound there, I am not an invention. [...] I feel, believe me, how you speak my words for yourself, how you put them in your mouth. Ever closer […] lie beneath them and the whole story lies on your skin, I can feel you. ”In the symbolism matching this, he finally holds the photo“ attempted resuscitation ”in his hand as the only evidence of his story, which Dr. Minks presented to him in the last therapy session (Chapter 1. I said ) before his stay in Ludwig's apartment as a stimulant to talk about the tension between the brothers and which inspired him to tell his story: “[M] an tells again and again only yourself ”.
City walks
Wilhelm Genazino An umbrella for this day
In his novel Ein Regenschirm, published in 2001, Wilhelm Genazino had a 46-year-old city hiker talk about “the peculiarities of life” in Frankfurt. His observations during the "wandering [s]", similar to the novels Die Liebe zur Einfalt , Abaffel , When it rains in the hall , are snapshots and could have been taken in every city, whereupon the partly fictitious or general location information (city fountain, department store , Quick buffet, flea market, market square, bridge, embankment).
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The narrator's encounters repeatedly reflect the darker side of his inner world and lead him to existential questions about "the futility or [...] the futility" of existence. Depending on the environment, life in a park appears to him as “undergrowth”, on an embankment at the flea market as “rubble”, among passers-by on the street as “rustling”, when looking at the flood as “sloping”. The narrator then questions his interpretations again: "My God, how the compulsion to see meaningfully gets on my nerves. [...] In truth, I only experience my participation in the general trivial fate: At the end of my life there is death, further is." Nothing". He sees the breadth of everyday human life, cautious, caring, careless, regulatory actions. For example, at the Nikolai Church, an artist from a small circus gently grooms her horse. On the other hand, the jackets and bags of the guests, crumpled up on the chairs in Café Rosalia and piled on top of each other, appear to him like “small, veiled creatures”. “People who are completely untalented for conquest [fall] into the tram” to win a seat.
As a nonconformist, he has difficulties with enduring permanent positions with their structures. He fears “the usual guilt of the systems that slowly immigrate into us, in that we believe we are guiltlessly living in this order.” In contrast to friends from the student days such as the former KPD activist Messerschmidt, who, as editor of the Generalanzeiger, “succeeded in being saved is ”, he avoids such an adjustment to the operating routine (“ I need rest, and I found this calm here ”). That's why he gave up his journalistic work years ago and has been working ever since: He interviews customers about their shopping habits and has been roaming the city for seven years as a tester for expensive shoes. When Mr. Habedank, the dispatcher of the Weisshuhn company, told him when delivering his reports (Chapter 6) that his fee would be reduced by a quarter due to the changed market situation, he sold his test shoes at the flea market. His dream job would be "background man of television", e.g. B. silent background man of an interviewed politician. But he also sees the fate in contrast to Messerschmidt: In Chamisso-Strasse in Ginnheim, the artist Himmelsbach throws brochures into the mailbox slots. (Chapter 10) The protagonist sums up: “Himmelbach fails in my place. [...] It was always my greatest fear that one day I would have to show my immense flexibility in public. "When he experiences the human grotesque how the failed photographer combs his hair in front of the side mirror of a car, he grumbles:" [...] Himmelsbach [...] ] you want to make a good impression in front of your misery. "
He shares the tendency towards melancholy unsuccessfulness and the aversion to the “proletariat experience” with his friend Susanne's circle of acquaintances. A joke made to his wife Balkhausen that he runs an institute for the arts of memory and experience for patients "who have the feeling that their life has become nothing but a long rainy day and their body is nothing but an umbrella for that day", applies to almost all protagonists and his therapy, "helping these people to have experiences that have something to do with them again", at least Ms. Balkhausen appears successful after her first television interview at the ship landing stage (chapter 10). “I like floods because I like to see the world go down,” she confesses to the reporter, “she likes the appearance and the as if! One thinks, at last all the junk will swim away, but then it will stay or it will return! It [was] all just a small flood, nothing more! "
The fluctuation of his occupations and ambivalent thoughts about it correspond to his partly virtual partner interplay, for example with the unsuccessfully courted Anuschka (Chapter 8), the hairdresser and occasional prostitute Margot (Chapter 4), whom he apparently shares with Himmelsbach, or the Job colleague Regine, who he meets on Gutleutstrasse and is now completing a course as a dying companion. With her he interviewed passers-by in front of department stores (Chapter 6) and afterwards they “died together once”. After the early retired teacher Lisa (her “professional life had been little more than a slow familiarization with her collapse”), from whose pension he mainly lived, left him eight weeks ago (Chap. 3), his “poor financial roots in the world ”has become even bigger. On his wanderings, by distracting himself from private problems, he tries to dissolve his cycles of reflection on the life given to him “without an inner permission”: “Today I hardly think anything, I look around. As you can see, I've fallen into lies. Because it is not possible to walk around the streets without thinking. ”The city is filled with association impulses, e. B, the still warm white bread bought in a bakery in Dominikanerstraße in the old town reminds him of the smell of Lisa's and Susan's bodies (chap. 11).
Above all, he suppresses thoughts of his childhood ("PLEASE AVOID THE SUBJECT OF CHILDHOOD"), which he nevertheless cannot escape: When the "disappearance" strikes him in Herderstrasse in the north end, Gunhild avoids him because it causes him reminds of his childhood sweetheart Dagmar and speaks to him about his madness (chapter 1). He usually takes on the perspective of the children he is watching: while the laser show is building on the market square, unimpressed by it and perhaps as protection from it, a roughly twelve-year-old on a balcony made of woolen blankets is building a cave that will remain after the summer festival installations have been dismantled at the end of the novel (Chapter 11). A family is amused by their child in the car: “[Y] every time the child cannot do something [...] the man, woman or grandma screeches happily. They do not notice that their crude delight for the child is mocking ”. When he sees a roughly seven-year-old girl standing around in the showroom of the Schmoller car dealership, according to his interpretation lonely, while her parents are busy cleaning, he wonders whether the parents might give him the child (Chapter 2). Later he becomes aware: “The child is just a pupated memory of myself”, of his early fears, although he no longer knows exactly what actually happened, since various experiences overlap in his imagination: “I have an interest in different versions of the truth because I appreciate appearing a little confused to myself. ”But he does not want to reflect on the“ collision of amnesia with confusion ”:“ The truth behind the truth is however, that I can't stand the assumption of my own confusion and then take it to be true and real. "His method of wandering thinking is a kind of" lying hospital "and in the afternoon in his apartment, which is empty without Lisa," finds a kind of crumbling [s] a person instead of [...] a fraying or fraying ”or a“ fluffing ”with dying fantasies. His situation is made more difficult by the fact that his conflicts occur mainly while he is working and that he therefore “has to avoid work”.
He also wants to hide from Susanne Bleuler, the unsuccessful actress and playmate from earlier times. In contrast to him, they are interested in all “details of [their] unique childhood”. Perhaps that is precisely why he begins with her, who also feels “threatened by the mediocrity of life” and philosophizes about the “misery of the masses”, a relationship that could end his crisis, especially since she also has a steady income as an employee of a law firm . Their paths cross again and again in the city: at the opening of a new household goods store in Dürerstraße in Sachsenhausen, in the inexpensive eatery Nudelholz (Chapter 5), at dinner with friends in their apartment (Chapter 7) or for two in the VERDI and then in her bedroom (chap. 9), at the summer party (chap. 11) with the hardly bearable LIGHT SPECTACLE in the PARTY MILE and FUN ZONE on the market square, about which he is supposed to write an “airy” article. He is “involved in the disgusting work or in the work on the disgust or in the disgust of the real. [He] cannot clearly distinguish between these moments at the moment ", since" most visitors want to take artificial life for real "and do not like it" when [their] life is transformed into an examination of [their] life. " However, so that he appears important to his girlfriend, he accepts the offer of the editor Messerschmidt (chapter 8) to write for the Generalanzeiger again, because “[w] really important are [in his opinion] only people who have their individual knowledge and their position in life could merge. "He explains to the new partner:" You love when you no longer want to flee from the other, although you suspect that they will make impossible demands. "
In the last chapter, in a fictional conversation with Lisa, the narrator says goodbye, at least in his mind, to his previous wanderings of forgetting and memory: “I no longer feel like watching my life. I no longer wait for the outer world to finally match my inner texts! I stop being the stowaway of my own life! "
Peter Kurzck - walks through the city
Peter Kurzck's novels tell of walks through Frankfurt. Sometimes the city is viewed with the autobiographical background of the fifteen-year-old from the 1950s, as in Mein Bahnhofsviertel (1991), sometimes with a strange view of the guest or with the familiar, but also distant, new citizen, who is always aware of his roots as a newcomer is ( Übers Eis , 1997; As Guest , 2003; Again October , 2006). The way through the streets is accompanied by impressions of the times of day and seasons, the blossoming or bare trees or icy streets in winter, the freezing passengers waiting in vain for the tram at the Bockenheimer Warte. These images are associated with the narrator's memories of his small family, unemployment, poverty and his overcoming alcohol addiction.
For his writing work, he roams the city and collects impressions. “You take all of that with you in your head. Cigarettes, notes, ballpoint pens. Start writing while walking. Lots of voices in my head. […] Have to […] get out of the house in the morning. Must feel the weather and taste the air. I have to see what will become of the city and me and the beggars, drunkards and bums. […] And see what new stories are added and where they lead us. ”For example, the narrator of the novel goes as a guest every day at the beginning of March, alone from Grüneburgweg to Eschersheimer Landstrasse“ to buy, at least buy milk in the HL , or at least just counting my money again? ”“ The evening rush hour traffic on Reuterweg is getting denser and the evening air and the exhaust fumes blue. Downtown a distant conflagration […] I walked as if I were someone else. With myself. In the third person. And anyway, everything is only on loan. Borrowing is easy to learn! and again the Grüneburgweg? And on to the Hauptwache and the Zeil. Hauptwache, Zeil, Konstablerwache, Hauptbahnhof, Güterbahnhof, Gallusviertel, and Mainzer Landstrasse. From then on as a ghost. Cannot turn back and continue as a ghost. Foreign plaster […] Tired home in the evening. And as often as I come home, every time I continue with the manuscript. [...] at least read the last three lines again and continue. "
On another day, his route leads through the Westend , across the campus, Graefstrasse, Leipziger Strasse, Ludolfusstrasse, Weingarten, Falkstrasse to Hessenplatz. He remembers that he and Sibylle lived in a room here for six weeks when they came to Frankfurt. He registers the familiar and the changes: “Around the square the lanterns and the silence of the old houses. A Persian auto repair shop, an Indian fruit shop, a beverage distributor, a wool shop, sweaters and wool, a clothes shop with incense sticks and next to it four tailors in a row. Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians and all of them still light. And at least every second house has a pub. Under the chestnuts at Hessenplatz and make sure that you go here again when the chestnuts are in bloom and then a long summer. A summer that will last. Chestnuts as high as a house. "
In front of the Römer, the narrator describes the atmosphere of the square: “There are crowds of people, Frankfurt residents, who know everything better. Sachsenhausen residents of Frankfurt who do not know exactly how they came to this page and since when and why. Taxi drivers, tourists, residents of the suburbs [...] work in the city, come to the city to do some shopping and live in a nice, quiet area in the country. [...] a street musician with a hat, dog, guitar and harmonica. Past the edge. Hurried. The dog like a wolf's shadow. Where do you go? [...]. The last of the evening newspaper sellers. And now they are slowly ending. Anyway, everything has long been on TV. And pack up the headlines, the past day and their stuff. A Turkish pretzel seller. A Pakistani rose seller, the one up from the Main, up from the Sachsenhausen bank and with the roses through all the bars. Night after night. ”What remains is“ a lot of the Frankfurt people. Inhabitants from the Nordend and Bornheim, who always go downhill at the end of the day, but where do they go? Variety, catch your breath, evening stroll. Fresh air, exercise, just a few steps on foot. […] [Every evening the people.! Stand and cannot go home […]. All not dressed warmly enough and impatiently standing in the dark. Nightly. Have to wait for summer. First spring and then summer. And stand and walk three steps back and forth. And stand and stand. And the pigeons are still awake here at the Römer. A March night, soon a full moon. Like a cathedral the night before the Romans. "
During the Christmas season, the narrator strolls from the Theaterplatz through the shopping streets with their luxury shops and customers. It is a journey through a dream landscape: “Step by step. An explorer. Expeditions. Kaiserstrasse, Roßmarkt, Hauptwache, Steinweg, Goethestrasse, Opernplatz, Freßgass. Christmas tree dealer. The Christmas lights. Jewelers, lingerie, men's outfitters and how the day is reflected in the shop windows. Cerutti, Brioni, Armani. Model suits for three thousand eight hundred marks. Made to measure, prices on request. Silk, cashmere, mohair. Finest Egyptian cotton. Made to measure silk shirts. The shoes are hand-sewn from the finest goatskin and tirelessly. ”The passers-by present themselves accordingly exquisite and self-indulgent. “The most beautiful women at every turn. And see yourself walking in the shop windows. And are reflected in every man's eye. [...] Preferably not to lose sight of them! But move away! In all directions! [...] And how moving it is. [...] And now, at the right moment, she has her head a little to the left, so that you can see her profile too, absolutely! And take it with you into infinity. ”For the narrator, this is an unreal world. “Never, not once been with Sibylle in the expensive fashion shops here on Goethestrasse! But now it was almost as if we still had that ahead of us and time for everything. Next time. Many lives. [...] Finding the way back with all the treasures in mind. Already filthy rich on the way back. [...] The Frankfurter Hof has never greeted me so politely. Even flags. Even flower pots by the arcades. The fountain made a gentle splash. Providing a whole harem with precious underwear, a ballet and a secretariat. Quickly two or three Mercedes models. A Rolls Royce stops in front of the traffic light and all clocks show nine o'clock. Light your heart. Even in its gloom, the day was cozy and full of hope. And has its own inner luster, a restrained, quiet glow. "
He experiences his own world more on the remembered path with daughter Carina von der Homburger Strasse “along Bockenheimer Landstrasse or past the Christ Church made of black stones and through the morning peace of Schwindstrasse, as if we had a rightful part in it. As if we were entitled to this share every day ”, to the children's shop in the Westend. On the way there are “book stands at the university. A flower woman from the Wetterau. An Indian sets up a jewelry stand. He has been greeting us for a year and a half [...] ready to show us his jewelry. At any time. Of course without obligation. The entire collection. Even if it is clear from the start that we will not buy anything for the time being. […] An Indian with a turban and calculator. During the demonstration he becomes a magician [...] And then on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse [...] A working day, cloudy and gray. Autumn leaves, chestnuts. Cars from all sides […] More and more beggars too, beggars, drunkards and bums. At the control room, on campus, on Leipziger Strasse. In front of the department stores. At Plus, at Penny, at Aldi at the entrance. At all beer and schnapps booths. More every day, or does it just feel like this because you started paying attention to it once? Because you lost your job yourself? Because you go several times a day, because you keep going back here? […] And now, even if you haven't been drinking for a long time, a drunkard who stopped, now you still see yourself in each of them. See you standing with them and drinking and stumbling (the earth is turning) and arguing in drunkenness because in drunkenness you are right all your life. [...] Quit drinking four and a half years ago, and that didn't seem that long ago. "
Matthias Altenburg Landscape with Wolves
In his 1997 novel Landscape with Wolves, Matthias Altenburg had the first-person narrator Neuhaus report in the manner of a diary, interspersed with minute times, about a week of his wandering life through Frankfurt, where he felt like a foreign body in the middle of the bustling city. During this time, from July 1 to 7, 1996, the main character loses control of himself more and more: His anger at people who seem hostile to him fluctuates between the melancholy of the outsider with sympathy for kindred souls and aggressive punishment fantasies and actions. In his current situation, he no longer sees an alternative (“I was not always without friends.”) That once existed in his memory ( Seventh Day ). "It is too late."
Neuhaus sees his surroundings symbolically through a pane of glass: From his window on the third floor of an apartment building in Nordend near the Alleenring , he observes neighbors on their balconies, three Asian prostitutes or “a brunette” watering flowers. Even when he leaves his apartment, he looks at passers-by e.g. B. interested in Berger Straße, but does not seek closer contact with them. He is skeptical of everything human and finds confirmation for his pessimistic image of a wolf society everywhere. In the city center, for example, he follows the rituals of the consumer world he has criticized, such as the advertising and buying game of the fashionably designed cosmetic consultants and their customers ( fourth day ). In this context, he registers the dense coexistence of poverty and prosperity in the city: beggars and homeless people in the middle of multicultural business life, junkies at the train station or dealers at the Konstabler Wache. But he has just as little pity for them as for the blasé beautiful and wealthy and for himself. “The fabric of their jackets is a little more expensive. [...] You try to keep your composure. It's no use. […] For free. It all dissolves. I see myself in the window, I puke myself. "At the center of his Weltschmerz and his doom and gloom is himself." At some point I want to be forgotten by everyone. "With the" old singer ", his" crazy " “, A demented neighbor on the second floor, to whom he takes care of something, albeit mixed with disgust at its deterioration, this situation has already arisen: Nobody visits her except him. She thinks he's her Arthur or some young man and he plays with ( first day ).
Despite numerous contacts, Neuhaus feels isolated and sees no prospects for himself. Although he is well-read and could easily keep up with the literature students at the university, he rejects the cultural business with the intellectual fuss. In addition, he does not feel up to a standardized work and family life. “I want to know how you can take it out at four o'clock every morning. And that day after day, for a lifetime. And then in the evening a dull woman, screaming children, and sitting in front of the television. ”Because he hates any convention and uniformity:“ In general, they all look as if they want to copy the television families. Ninety percent of people are decals, eaters of mud, jumping jacks [...] And that's what you should love. "
When he feels harassed, he often mixes an aggressive, misanthropic or misogynous tone into his descriptions of people , which extends in defensive reactions to all social groups: the party societies with their self-satisfied conversation, the intellectual discussion clubs, the multicultural population and the marginalized groups and especially the girls and women whose sexual attraction he cannot cope with and whom he repulses when they approach them tenderly or whom he can become violent towards when he is drunk. Pregnant women on Berger Strasse depress him. He cannot understand her mother's pride and her feeling of happiness in his doomsday mood: “You believe that it will always go on like this. Live, die, live. [...] The hope of humanity croaks again in the maternity wards. […] At some point the delivery rooms will be bombed. ”In line with his mood, his behavior towards women is ambivalent. Neuhaus is constantly on the lookout for new sexual relationships ("All stale fantasies [...] they plague me day and night, but there is nothing you can do about it."). B. with Tanita, but he can't stand it and he throws the uncomplicated, talkative law student Milla out of his apartment the morning after the first night and hits her in the face after her reconciliation at Henning's party.
Neuhaus is a loner and is afraid of too close emotional contacts. Both serious conversations and friendly, non-binding small talk ("How are you? Have to stop, and yourself? Always so on."), As well as conversations with self-portrayals and status role-playing games with hidden malice, he avoids or breaks them off aggressively. So he soon flees again from the party parties to which he was invited by old friends or into which he happened to get into, e.g. For example, the birthday party of Krüger's daughter Rebecca on the Lerchesberg in Sachsenhausen, the meeting of the “green bourgeois” with Dany in an old apartment in Nordend ( second day ), the poetry reading in the KOZ (communication center) in Bockenheim, to which he joins Milla has made an appointment ( third day ), or Henning's intellectual and artist party in the bungalow on the eastern edge of Seckbach ( fifth day ). “I like it best when nothing happens. When I can just walk around or sit in front of a café, when people leave me alone, when I can just look without anyone asking me what I see, what I mean, what I say about it, what I do about it legend. It's difficult. ”“ I don't want to belong. They always pour their stupidities into my ears. I don't want to hear anything, but it doesn't work. ”He feels most comfortable when he is hanging through the window“ [e] in a few red clouds in the sky ”and sees the swallows“ screeching away from underneath ”. “When you think about it, life isn't all that uncomfortable. The less you worry, the more pleasant it is. "
The hype on the fairground on Bornheimer Hang ( fourth day ), where he delivers an envelope to a stranger on a secret mission for Krüger at the ferris wheel, is for him the greatest concentration of a superficial fun society whose greed for sensation through cynical catastrophe reports ( fifth day ) with their typical Speech templates would be fed that block their individual view. "You have no idea what a grace it is not to know something yet, to cast your first glance at a tree, a house, a landscape."
He does not want to submit to this routine and keeps himself alive by "[d] ies and that", e.g. B. as a test person for sun protection creams or through city tours that Krüger arranged for him from the city administration. On the very first day of the novel, he profits from the criminal gift from his old friend Brinkmann, who steals an old woman's wallet in the southern cemetery and puts half of it, one thousand two hundred marks, in his breast pocket. With that "he can get by for a while". Even he himself has no qualms about incorrectly accounting for the old singer when he goes shopping for her.
In accordance with his mood of life, he feels the doom and gloom of the Osthafen. The night watchman Lukas, a friend of his father's, lives here in a hut with his fourteen-year-old daughter Asma, who is sensitive to poetry. “Eyed by blue sheriffs from the east, I dive into the brackish air of the harbor, where the cranes stretch as if they knew what was going on and the evening sun was turning brightly in the waste oil. Over the iron hills of the scrapyards, seagulls tumble in the wind that blows over from the river. ”Matching this, he thinks“ it makes sense to familiarize oneself with death early on. ”He likes to mingle with any mourners at the city cemetery (“ Third day ") And can then be invited to coffee and cake. “Not that I'm necrophilic or tired of life, but I think it's just part of it.” At the end of the fourth day, Neuhaus confesses in the “Dampfkessel” in the Bahnhofsviertel after his disappointment with Krüger: “To be honest, I'm happy when I do that have everything behind me. I don't want to go on living like this. "
At this point, at the latest, his ambivalent emotional state between attraction and repulsion heralds his retreat into a hateful fantasy world. The increase in aggression hits Milla on the sixth day. After his two breakups in their relationship, he followed her from the Zeil, where he happened to see her with a young man, across the Freßgass , past the fountain in front of the Alte Oper, and watched her caresses. In Myliusstrasse he sneaks into her companion's apartment and threatens her with a pistol that he took from Henning's bungalow, but loses interest in her after Milla had to undress and flees to Grüneburgweg to the subway station. On his birthday ( seventh day ), this attack turns into a virtual revenge action. Krüger did not pay him the promised money for the delivery of the letters on the fairground and is now flying to Florence. When Neuhaus arrives too late at the airport with his request, he gets confused into a violent intoxication, which reflects his state of mind: “[I] imagine I would break up, now, here, just break up with these unfortunate people, with this unhappy life and all the unhappy rest. ”In a daydream, which is formulated in an indicative description enclosed by subjunctive clauses, he experiences his rampage through the supermarket. He shoots seven tourists and then flees past the parking garage in panic fear of the “pack” chasing him: “They thirst for my blood. This is what is left of all that culture, democracy, humanism that they want to slaughter me. They would tear me to pieces alive. You would feel right: "After he was arrested by the police (" Everything is in order. "), He imagines the court process:" I will not plead my innocence. Maybe I'll be lucky and my defense attorney can convince the judge that I was out of my mind. [...] It would be like that. "
Jamal Tuschick Breaking up couples
Jamal Tuschick tells four complex relationship stories in his prose volume Aufbruchende Paar . The professionally and privately connected couples referred to in the title stand in the field of tension between dominance and subordination. In constant movement and in a repetition of the situations, couples form, basically remain strangers to each other despite constant conversations and reflections, expand with parallel relationships and dissolve again. The demarcation is symbolized by the final scene, when the narrator of the third and fourth parts, as Kurt is standing in front of Kat's house at the end of the first story, looks up at her closed windows and then makes his way to a drinking hall.
The third part is about the one-sided love of the first-person narrator Zierenberg for Jana and portrays the young woman who emigrated from Leipzig to Frankfurt in the post-reunification period. The narrator gets to know her in a phase of perplexity. With an “oppressive tendency to resentment” she mourned nostalgically for the GDR era. In changing circumstances Jana vacillates between her husband Pavel, a sports commentator on television, her "boys", a hippie musician, a hope for a writer, the publisher's editor Mischa Ode, his reduced edition Olaf and Zierenberg. He suffers from his descent from lover to jealous observer and occasional interlocutor. He sees her roaming around with Mischa on Liebfrauenberg, in Münchener-, Elbe- or Spohrstraße and at the farmers' market at the Konstabler Wache or how she disappears with Olaf in the artificial fog of the disco U60311 under the Rossmarkt. At the same time he meets up with Jana in the palm garden, at the cemetery, when ideas of alternative theater and music scene in the club, the restaurant Wanners on Oederweg, in Bornheimer Hasenbein or Bockenheimer to Tannenbaum . There they talk about their different roles in the network of relationships with open partnerships, triangular constellations with changing main and secondary characters. Private matters are mixed with professional networks and rivalries in the art scene or in the media business.
In the fourth part, the narrator lives at the upper gate of Günthersburgpark. “I enjoy the view of the skyscrapers on the Main and consider the changing impressions in the lower elevations of Güntherburg Park. The night closes him off from his surroundings. ”From here he roams the city. "... how beautiful Martin-Luther-Strasse is, where it is divided by Rohrbachstrasse like the plus sign from the horizontal." On his hikes he comes through outlying districts with signs of neglect. "The eternal noises of the Ostend [...] This is an orphan area: an industrial quarter after the end of the industrial age." He knows the station district at every hour of the day and night. The protagonists have gotten older. "Fatigue is a sail on the Main [...] We meet in such a way that it is noticeable how little is attached to us. There are no children and no frail parents whose care gets on our nerves. We only have our passions and our prejudices. ”Names known from the other stories appear. On Ostendstrasse, the narrator meets Ariane, who wants to separate from her husband Kai-Arnold, and her son Marcus, a musician product of a drunken night in the Batschkapp, a "being disturbed from birth." Then he approaches the center and he still has the contrasting images of the gray urban areas in his head (“Some moods in the city are as disturbing as wild animals”). Seen from the streets to the Main, the cathedral protrudes from the area "which has not completely lost its valley and swamp character from the time of settlement [...]." During crawl training at the Hilton, he meets Kat and makes an appointment with her a vernissage. Jana, her changeable predecessor, is also present. You meet again “on a gallery [...] that towers over the exhibition space like a command bridge.” In the selected artist-friend milieu of the third story. "What is it about, if not about staying on the platform?"
The second part of the volume stands out from the others because of the local burlesque setting. The story of the landlord's son Kurt from Bornheim is told. During his evening tour of his drinking stations, the forty-year-old “virtuoso [] of loneliness” remarks: “The city is ruled by moods that alternate at the transitions between the districts like relay runners. In Bornheim the light falls differently on the streets than in the Nordend. ”But the district is changing. “The local has withdrawn from the appearance of its area of distribution. He drowns in the crowd on Berger Strasse. ”In the Ostpark,“ runners from all over the world ”overtake him. He “has been on the road for hours, more likely for years. Basically always [...] He walks around as his own ghost ”through Eulengasse, the examinee, Turmstrasse, Grüne Strasse, past the clock tower on Sandweg to Merianplatz. He wanders through the zones of poverty prostitution and nightly fights. In the Galgenstübchen and in the Palazzo in Sandweg everything has stayed the same. The regular customers are full of mistrust of the immigrants with an Arab look and the garbage collector Gero would like to clean up the Holzhausenpark. As a “somnambulistic bystander”, Kurt regards the meatball “the panopticon made of pressed-in food [...] a lemur cabinet.” As the host's son, he knows his way around the milieu and runs his own pub. "On some days Kurt just waves the present through." Then it is enough for him and after his tour of Bornheim he sends his last guests home at half past one. “His choleric way is part of the local color.” In a sudden mood he throws out his two employees, the simple-minded Vera and the Slovak Hasi, closes his bar and goes to his father, the innkeeper of the Bornheim cider house Zur Burg .
Kurt's return is at the center of the story. His father Otto Wundersamen needs him as a junior boss. The old man with the whiskers is the patriarch of an economy in which private and business are mixed. Chef, cook, kitchen, serving and cleaning maids as well as the core group of regulars form a kind of community, in which the jointly managed late-evening restaurant operation continues in nightly booze of the group. Otto is at the top of the hierarchy. As a master of maintaining power and exploiting it ("Life is not a request concert."), He plays the dependent against each other. He gives orders, jumps into gaps, punishes with slaps, rewards with alcohol, lures the girls with ascent to the landlady, dismisses them and takes them back ungraciously. This was the case with Kurt's mother, one of Otto's exotic women with whom he fathered the mongrel, while the long-established Bornheim men "made connections with blacks and Asians", but founded their families "with daughters from the neighborhood". When she can no longer stand his humiliating rule, she leaves the company with her son, but returns after a further descent and has to stand behind a Peru Indian woman, the new "Queen of Sheba", with the role of second wife until her death , Kitchen help and maid. “She broke up under a regime that made heartlessness a virtue.” Her little Kurt, who was described by her grandmother as a banker, “is ghastly inconspicuous in his father's disregard, [burns] her fingers on everything that is hot in a kitchen can. ”Only when the father recognizes the talented cook in the son does his esteem rise, because he can use him. On the other hand, the Queen of Sheba sinks one day into a pensioner “bottling station” in Rohrbachstrasse. Demonstrations of power are part of the fighting game (“must be fun”) in the milieu.
Kurt takes over the father's strategy. When the waitress Sina brought her boyfriend with her, he harassed her and threw the student defending her out of the bar. She fears for her job, gives in (“That's life”) and is rewarded for her submission with house fire and sweet gifts (“I eat bread, I sing it”). He even promises her "marriage, a large apartment in the castle , a lot of money and considerable prestige." Sina accepts the contract in the "horse trade". “The impartial observer could call the arrangement medieval. We know that Kurt is empathizing with his father, with the aim of overcoming him. ”Then the former nurse student Denisa, who“ runs for Kai-Arnold in the restaurant [ Hasenbein ] ”, is brought into the castle and moves into it two chambers that were previously rented to guest workers and have been empty since then. "You have to take the fat with the thin," says Kurt to Denisa, who has a better figure than Sina. Later that night the old Hessian Otto whispered in the ear of the young Saxon Sina: “Everything is mine [...] If the boy doesn't feel, I'll put him on his compulsory portion. Then you just have to become my wife to inherit me. "
Immigration and intercultural relations
Jakob Arjouni Kayankaya - Novels
Jakob Arjouni's crime novels, which are told in first person form from the perspective of private detective Kemal Kayankaya of Turkish origin, show the migrant scene of the 1980s and 90s and the situation of non-integrated immigrants in the Frankfurt train station district with protection money extortion, drug trafficking and prostitution . The protagonist lives on the edge of this parallel society ("Rush hour traffic, winter sales, noisy neighbors, and also the construction workers for the expansion of the Frankfurt subway directly under my window for over a year") and has to repeatedly oppose racist ones because of his appearance and name Fight off hostility from the radical right-wing greengrocer and caretaker on the ground floor as well as regular guests in Henninger beer pubs or individual employees of the immigration office. On the other hand, since he was adopted as a child by the teachers' family Holzheim and speaks just as elaborate German as Frankfurt dialect, but not Turkish, he does not belong to the foreigners. He ironically describes his ambivalent position when looking at the office towers: “When Frankfurt's skyscrapers appeared in front of us, I slid deeper into my seat and was delighted by the lights of the executive floor next to the moon. Whatever the situation, every time I drive into Frankfurt my heart opens for a moment when I see the skyline. "Then he reflects on this feeling:" Usually it's probably just the image of a concentrated, powerful place , which the closely spaced high-rise buildings give off from a distance and which gives someone who has his little room somewhere in between the illusion of being concentrated and powerful for a moment. " Kayankaya has no illusions about the lives of people, neither Germans nor immigrants. He pragmatically registers their everyday life with the regulars' prejudices against foreigners, the tragedies in the immigrant families and the gang wars in the red-light district. Real friendships are rare, most try to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them and have some fun. He himself is a lonely wolf with no family or steadfast partnership and numbs his melancholy with alcohol and chain smoking.
Thirteen years later, in the last Arjouni novel, Brother Kemal , the now 53-year-old has stabilized. He lives as a middle-class non-smoker and controlled drinker with the former table dancer and prostitute Deborah in her apartment in Westend. She came as a nineteen-year old Helga from northern Germany to Frankfurt in order to earn money for its own restaurant, most recently worked for three years after Kemal has freed them from their protector, on their own in the pimp free Mr. Happy on German Mr. bank and now manages a decade Deborah Natural wine bar in Bornheim. Kayankaya, previously her customer friend, has been in a relationship with her since then. He also rose as a detective. He could actually give up his office at the beginning of Gutleutstrasse near the train station, since he was working on his orders. a. over the Internet, but he needs a distance to privacy in everyday life.
Through his personal experiences he sympathizes with the disadvantaged and takes on the role of judge and avenger of the excluded in a marginal society that is outside the civil code, in which the law of the strong applies and the state organs often no longer function. In doing so, he repeatedly gets caught between the lines of rival mafia gangs and corrupt police officers. The caricaturing descriptions of his gangster opponents, by whom he is brutally beaten again and again, for example in Doctor Klinsmann Privatklinik ( More Beer ), but which he beats with their own unscrupulous means, and his excessive Rambo-style fighting methods, for example when he Chasing two Croatian-German thugs in the asylum seekers' home through the hallway with their Mercedes and squeezing them against a wall ( Kismet ) can be seen as individual perceptions of the first-person narrator or as "irony and reduced emphasis". the author also compared with that used in the novels Robin Hood - Genre ( ". 'ne mixture of Robin Hood and Bulle This can not go well after all.") to be interpreted. Kayankaya ensures, for example in the investigations against human traffickers, justice in his sense, i. H. he interprets the illegal actions of the weak and abused as self-defense and protects them from persecution by the authorities. If he lacks the evidence for a judicial charge and conviction, as in the case of the three drug trafficking police officers in Happy Birthday, Turk , he plays off the perpetrators against each other and lets the one with the slightest guilt run as a reward for his testimony. Individual corrupt officials z. B. the head of the immigration police Höttges ( Kismet ), he puts pressure through his knowledge of their vulnerability, such as the use of underage prostitutes, and thus forces them to look into the files. He also covers up traces that incriminate him and his clients ( Brother Kemal ) and bury the corpses of the criminals killed in battle ( Kismet ). He lets the perpetrators, who are more or less forced to take part, run if they tell him who is behind them. As far as he can grasp them, he delivers the masterminds to the police or exposes them through newspaper articles from journalists who are friends ( one man, one murder ). His helpers are the former drug dealer, brothel thief and then successful ice cream truck boss Slibulsky, who lives in Sachsenhausen with the archaeologist Gina and, in the last novel, with Lara, who is 20 years younger, the retired detective Theobald Löff from Nieder-Eschbach ( happy birthday, Turk ) and some Lower ranks officials who seek revenge on their superiors. He explains his disaffected idealism to the skeptical Slibulsky: “I had believed that a private investigator was a kind of family doctor. He doesn't change the big slaughterhouses and the general filth, but for one or the other it may be important that he is there. […] In the meantime I also know that it doesn't matter whether I'm there or not, I do my job as best I can, that's all. "
Happy birthday, Turk
In his debut Happy birthday, Turk , the first day of the action takes place on the protagonist's birthday, the author creates the profile for the following novels, which are determined by the character of the private detective and the atmosphere of the Frankfurt train station area. Kemal Kayankaya is supposed to investigate the deaths of Mustaffa Vasif Ergün, who was killed in a car accident near Kronberg in 1980, and his son-in-law Achmed Hamul, who was found stabbed to death three years later in the backyard of a brothel near the train station. Both Turks, who lived with their wives Melike and Ilter as well as three children each in the Gallusviertel, had simple jobs in the garbage collection or the post office parcel service and were forced to sell drugs. When Ayse is supplied with heroin by her brother-in-law Achmed and becomes dependent, tensions arise and two factions form: Melike and her children Ayse and Yilmaz, who works as an assistant cook in the canteen of the Hessian broadcasting company, on the one hand, Mustaffa and Achmed on the other Page.
The author combines the search for Achmed's murderer, with which the detective is commissioned by the widow Ilter, with descriptions of the milieu of the red light district. Since Detective Inspector Paul Futt (Hausen, Große Nelkenstraße 37) and his assistant Harry Eiler and Georg Hosch from the narcotics department do not give him any insight into the files, Kayankaya works his way through streets and bars step by step and with the help of a few banknotes he finds the first leads: A colleague of the murdered man in the train station tells of a prostitute who was looking for Achmed, as it later turns out, it was his girlfriend and customer Hanna. A young drug addict heard that the man stabbed was a heroin dealer. After unsuccessful attempts in Milly's sex bar with insults as Kanake and the following brawl with the bouncers, he receives the tip from a street prostitute to look in Heini's chicken pan and there he meets Hanna Hecht. Her announcement that Achmed has got out of the heroin business and wants to move away with his family and pay a place in a clinic for his drug-addicted sister-in-law Ayse is the key for Kayankaya for his further investigations. His suspicion that he is on the trail of the backers of the heroin trade is confirmed by written and tangible threats and he discovers a whole series of manipulated protocols about the Mustaffa Ergüns accident near Kronberg as well as the murder disguised as an accident, such as the eviction of the car a witness.
One man, one murder
In the third book, A Man, a Murder, Kayankaya investigates a gang of pimps who, in cooperation with corrupt police officers, earn a lot of money through illegal immigration, prostitution and the threat of deportation. He is commissioned by the sculptor, painter, film and radio writer Manuel Weidenbusch to track down his kidnapped girlfriend, the Thai prostitute Sri Dao Rakdee. His research uncovered a network of human trafficking: The owners of various establishments, e. B. Eros-Center and Lady Bump in Elbestraße in the Bahnhofsviertel, Georg and Eberhard Schmitz, whose "business [...] primarily [consisted] of making it clear to someone else how well they understood it", employ foreign girls, who entered on a tourist visa and have to work off their travel money in sex bars, such as Sri Dao Rakdee. She had to marry her pimp Manfred Greiner in order to receive a temporary residence permit. After Weidenbusch fell in love with her and bought her free from managing director Charly Köberle for 5,000 DM, she fell into the clutches of the gang shortly before the deadline. She was promised new papers for 3,000 DM, she was picked up when she was supposed to be handed over and she was locked up in an old, vacant villa of Eberhard Schmitz 'together with other illegals. After paying the amount, however, the prisoners should be arrested by Commissioner Höttges of the Aliens Police and his colleagues and deported from Frankfurt airport, which Kayankaya is able to prevent. In Sri Dao's case, however, complications arise and the detective only discovers her whereabouts at the end.
Kismet
The fourth novel Kismet deals with a protection racketeering war between German, Turkish, Albanian and Croatian gangs . A new German-Croatian gang, called the Army of Reason , tries to gain a foothold in the station district with surprise actions and cruel methods and to force the established competitors out of their districts by bombing their headquarters. It is one of those struggles in which Kemal Kayankaya has only a choice between the greater and the lesser evil; H. he has to work with the Albanians. He gets involved in the dispute when the gangsters cut a thumb off his friend Romario, who has lived in Germany for twenty years and worked his way up to the host of the Brazilian restaurant Saudade on the edge of the Bahnhofviertel via a snack bar in Sachsenhausen , in order to earn 6,000 DM a month blackmail. With his friend Slibulsky, known from Mehr Bier , who now runs the Gelati Slibulsky ice cream truck chain with nine employees , the detective lies in wait for the two mafiosi who drive up in a BMW to hand over the money in the restaurant and kills them during an exchange of fire. While they are burying the bodies in the Taunus, Romario sets the restaurant on fire to cover up the traces and goes into hiding. Kayankaya's investigations into the perpetrators are extremely dangerous, as they suspect him to be an opponent's snoop. He escapes the bomb attack on his office in Ostend because he is on his way. But both in the bag soup and pudding powder factory of Dr. Michael Ahrens, the owner of the allegedly stolen BMW, as well as in the Adria grill in Offenbach, on whose trail one of the blackmailers' cell phone leads him, he is brutally beaten. However, he learns from the kitchen assistant, Zvonko, that he has found the meeting place for Croatian nationalists, mercenaries from the Bosnian war, neo-Nazis and Ustaša supporters in the restaurant and that the heads of the Army of Reason are refugees from Bosnia through the threat of taking their relatives hostage to force them to collect protection money to finance their war. The German organizer of the gang is Ahrens, who makes sweets from waste products in his factory and exports them to Eastern Europe with labels suggesting German branded goods. The BMW teams of two also deliver their booty to him. A victim of these crimes is fourteen-year-old Leila Markovic, whom Kemal finds during his research in a youth hostel that has been converted into an asylum seeker's home. She is looking for her missing mother Stascha, who was employed by Ahrens, and tells about the fate of her family. Kayankaya brings them to safety with Slibulsky and his wife Gina in Sachsenhausen.
Brother Kemal
In Arjouni's last novel, Brother Kemal , the detective worked his way out of the station district both privately and professionally and found clients in bourgeois society, in which the various ethnic groups are more or less accepted in everyday life. At least the prejudices are handled more subtly. Kayankaya no longer has to deal with mafia gangs in red light bars, but visits his customers in Westendvillen or publishing houses. However, the problems are similarly ambivalent. It's about drug addiction, prostitution, blackmail and threats, and the detective often gets into difficult-to-understand situations, receives only detailed information, and then becomes aware of manipulations. In doing so, he loses the overview and entangles two separate cases.
He received his first assignment in the diplomatic quarter. Marieke, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the dark-skinned Dutch painter Edgar Hasselbaink and his wife Valerie de Chavannes, a French banker's daughter, has disappeared from the villa of her parents, actually her grandparents, in the upper Zeppelinallee in Bockenheim for some time. The attractive, snake-tattooed mother wants the matter to be treated confidentially and hesitantly admits that Marieke has moved to her Turkish friend Erden Abakay's apartment above Café Klaudia on the corner of Brücken-Schifferstrasse. Kayankaya is supposed to bring her back, whereby the mother's fears and her relationship with Abakay initially appear puzzling, because Erden was first interested in Valerie and then took care of the daughter. Kemal's trained eye assigns the woman with the ostentatiously emphasized unconventional lifestyle and the non-jealous, “surprises”-seeking husband to the type of heroin-addicted prostitute (“hooker”) of the special class. She also left her parents' house at the age of sixteen and financed her own life in Frankfurt. Apparently she wants to save her daughter from repeating her own fate and is looking for a private detective who is willing to carry out a contract murder on a troublemaker. Kayankaya finds the girl at the specified location, convicts Erden Abakay of the heroin and girl trafficking and delivers him to Octavian Tatarescu, a police officer and undercover of Romanian origin in the moral department. The thirty-year-old pimp's trick is to befriend young girls and then offer them online for sex as minors. For example, Marieke, who is socially romantic and adventurous and interested in Islamism, poses as a bohemian and photographer who wants to artistically depict the misery in the city of Frankfurt from a new perspective. He also inspires her for his alleged project in favor of a Roma family in Praunheim, so that she is ready to prostitute herself, first of all with his friend Volker. The detective finds the girl put on heroin before or after her first action together with the suitor's corpse and expertly beats up the pimp. For him, however, the case becomes more complicated when Abakay's uncle, Sheikh Hakim from Praunheim, who preaches fundamentalist preaching in mosques and calls the detective “my brother”, demands that he withdraw his statement that his nephew had killed Marieke's potential rapist, and him under pressure by taking his wards hostage in front of Deborah's natural wine bar in Bornheim. This connects the first with the second order, in which Kayankaya protects the Moroccan writer Malik Rashid in the Hotel Harmonia in Niederrad during the Frankfurt Book Fair , during appointments at the Maier publishing booth in the exhibition hall and during meetings with colleagues in the Frankfurter Hof as a bodyguard from Islamists should. In his novel Die Reise zum Ende der Tage , which was rejected by religious critics , the author tells of a commissioner who discovered his homosexual inclination towards a prostitute “from a mixture of sexual frustration, longing for freedom and lust for the forbidden”. Kemal suspects the publisher's advertising strategy is behind the alleged death threats from Islamist organizations and the staged personal protection. Ironically, the five-day hostage-taking directed not against the writer but against the detective helps in the marketing of the novel.
Martin Mosebach The Turkish woman
In the novel Die Türkin (1999), Martin Mosebach designs the topic of intercultural relationships from the perspective of a 35-year-old art historian who, after completing his doctorate in Frankfurt, decides not to continue working scientifically, but instead to take an assistant position at the New- Yorker Antiquariat und Kunsthandel Hirsch (Chapters 2 and 6) to be accepted. A plane tree leaf that wilted prematurely in July and fell on his table in a Frankfurt apple vineyard (chapter 1), which he sees as a message of departure, already indicates the narrator's departure from his career path and his trip to Turkey. "Incidentally, plane trees do not belong in Frankfurt [...] I only understood the plane trees in Lycia".
In this situation of reorientation, the search for a different life is triggered by a chance encounter: “The protagonist, who has little experience in dealing with reality, falls in love with the Turkish woman Pupuseh Calik, who runs the laundry in the three houses from his apartment in the Holzhausenviertel” Hüsseins served customers during their visit to Germany (Chapters 3, 5, 6). While walking through the city, which is becoming increasingly insubstantial from the center to the “no man's land” of the periphery (Chapter 7), he accidentally discovers the beautiful girl at sunset among Turkish women: “The city surprisingly reveals an aspect that attracted me. I overlooked a wide panorama from the balustrade of the terrace. The light, this devilish mood maker ”. The described scenery around the “ Chiricoesque basilica” resembles the Holy Cross Church of the Center for Christian Meditation and Spirituality of the Diocese of Limburg on the Bornheimer Hang . The protagonist interprets the group picture in the plane grove as "integration into an environment" and is impressed by it as an isolated modern city dweller. He fantasizes about a life together with the girls in New York (chap. 8) and sees them following their enigmatic gesture message, which leads him to her cousin, the Kurdin Zeynab, who is employed in an Italian hairdressing salon (chapters 9 and 10 ), a fateful confirmation of his wishful thoughts. Pupuseh is suddenly called back to Girmeler by her guardian, as the divorced laundry owner and cousin is wooing her, but the head of the family wants to marry her off to the German-trained engineer Ünal. He plans to use her dowry to set up a trout farm in a mountain stream (Kp. 9, 10). With Zeynep's help, the art historian decides to pursue and rescue his beloved. Without “explaining the inexplicable with something inexplicable”, he decides not to travel to New York, but to Antalya . This is the beginning of the main part of the novel: the exploration of Pupuseh's homeland and its traditions. Disguised as an archaeologist, he spends a few weeks in the province of Isparta in the western Taurus Mountains and reflects on his potential intercultural relationship in connection with the experience of a foreign country. In his indecision, he misses the moment to flee with Pupuseh, sees it as a predestination and after their wedding with Ünal he returns to Frankfurt alone. He is picked up at the airport by Zeynab, who advised him over the phone during his adventure (Chapter 30).
Orhan Pamuk snow
In his novel Schnee (2002), the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk deals with the tension between Western and Eastern culture using the example of the fictional Turkish poet Kerim Alakuşoğlu, known as Ka.
On the occasion of the death of his mother, Ka returns to Istanbul from Frankfurt and takes on the assignment to travel to Kars in eastern Turkey for the Istanbul magazine Cumhuriyet (The Republic) and watch the wave of suicides among young girls and women. a. some headscarf girls to research. He meets friends there, v. a. İpek, the woman of his dreams from his student days in Istanbul, from whom he was separated when he had to go into exile in Germany for twelve years because of his socialist views , where he lived his life with government support in an apartment on Gutleutstrasse in Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel , Funded odd jobs and readings. Now he hopes to marry İpek and live with her in Germany.
But after his tragically ending adventure in Turkey, Ka returns to Frankfurt alone. There is only one miserable substitute for the great love of his life: the consumption of American porn films with the star Melinda, who looks vaguely like İpek. Four years later, in his isolation, the political events in Kars, in which he was involved and which led to his separation from his beloved, finally catch up with him. After returning from a poetry reading, he was murdered on Münchener Strasse near Frankfurt Central Station.
His friend Orhan, the author of the novel, travels to Frankfurt about a month after his death (Chapter 29 What I lack in FRANKFURT ) to look for the poems mentioned in his letters. Arriving in sleet on a windy February day, the city “looked even more repulsive than it looked on the postcards Ka [him] had sent for sixteen years. The streets [are] empty except for cars in dark colors passing quickly, trams that appear and disappear like a ghost, and housewives in a hurry with umbrellas in hand. "But he is pleased," anyway on the sidewalks in the vicinity of the nearby main train station, where kebab stands, travel agencies, ice cream parlors and sex shops are located, you can find traces of the immortal energy that keeps big cities on their feet. ”An acquaintance of the murdered, Tarkut Olçün , shows the visitor the daily route of the poet on Kaiserstrasse, past the main guard house to the city library and the place between a Turkish hairdressing salon, the Kurdish vegetable shop Güzel Antalya and the kebab restaurant Bayram, where Ka was shot from behind. While Orhans city guide proudly talks about the university studies of his two children born in Germany, the visitor reads "in his face [...] that very peculiar loneliness and resignation that is visible in the first generation of Turks in Germany [...]." Kas feelings as an emigrant: Orhan discovers forty unsent letters to İpek in his apartment, in which he complains about his "unbearable feeling of loss and abandonment". Ka's lover, Nalan, from his first time in Frankfurt, on the other hand, has apparently settled in in the city (Chapter 41, Everyone Has a Snowflake THE LOST GREEN BOOKLET ). She is now married to a kebab and travel agency businessman and cries during the conversation with the writer "a little [...] less for Ka than for her youth, which she sacrificed to leftist ideals."
Ka longs for a kind of synthesis of western and eastern cultures. His assessment of Europe is ambivalent in a mixture of admiration and rejection. In their discussions with Ka, for example, the Islamist leader Lapislazuli and his friend Kadife (chap. 26 Our poverty is not the reason why we are so attached to God ) reveal a template of Western life. This is expanded to include the figure of the German democratic, educated, blond journalist Hans Hansen from the Frankfurter Rundschau , invented by Ka in a mixture of pipe dream and parody . He lives happily with his equally beautiful two-child family in a bright house with a garden and probably looks at the Turks with friendly pity, which, in Lapislazuli's opinion, should actually offend their pride. But Ka replies, continuing his ideal: “You were very serious. Maybe that's why they were happy. For them, life is serious and requires a sense of responsibility. Not like ours, where it is either a blind effort or a bitter trial. But this seriousness was something alive, something positive. "
Martin Mosebach The moon and the girl
The setting of Mosebach's novel The Moon and the Girl, published in 2007, is not far from Ka's apartment in the station district: On the busy Baseler Platz and the adjacent streets with an Ethiopian fast food shop, Pakistani vegetable shop, Filipino laundry, Bengali newspaper kiosk, tattoo studio, Islamic travel agency and Lebanese restaurant is an ethnically mixed population. After his wedding to Ina, Hans accidentally rented an attic apartment here.
The novel tells of the unsuccessful marriage of the protagonists and a related tragicomic , chaotic story of involvement with the roommates, the actress Britta Lilien and her husband Dr. Elmar Wittekind, and the homeowner Sieger and his wife Despina Mahmouni, who is currently at odds with him. While Ina, who is oriented towards the values of her mother, Mrs. von Klein, is increasingly withdrawing to the lovelessly furnished apartment after her diploma, her husband, who is employed in a bank, comes to terms with the situation: he befriends Lilien / Wittekind and in the evening in a court bar belonging to the Ethiopian Tesfagiorgis, he listens to the other guests, mostly emigrants, about their fates, business projects and wisdom . On the summer nights in the midst of the exotic surroundings, Hans increasingly falls into a demonic spell that carries him away from Ina. "But the moonlit night spoke to him more clearly since he had some alcohol in his blood and moved into the shadows from the light of the arc lamp." "That made the rooms both smaller and larger at the same time. After all, he felt as if he had entered a space in his own body that was large, the limits of which could not be assessed ”. He is sensitized to borderline experiences when the Moroccan property manager Abdallah Souad takes him to a derdeba ritual at night in an industrial area on the outskirts of the city. In this cult of obsession by the Moroccan Gnawa , the spirits of the patients who dance ecstatically to the music until they collapse are to be evoked and appeased. Souad explains to Hans, "[m] an [will] never get rid of the evil that is in you - you [have] to come to terms with it". As the last chapter of the novel shows, Hans orientates himself on this African wisdom after Ina bought a house in the Taunus for her family according to the ideas of her mother Irma from her inheritance . One of her daughters is called Ida, so that the monogram engraved in the silver items, an I with a noble crown above it, also fits the next generation.
The narrator describes Baseler Platz: “The city literally crumbled apart here. It was as if a geological fault had occurred in the middle of the open area that was taken up by the motorway, which caused the rows of houses to tip over to the left and right of the road. ”It is an example of the death of the old city by the Bombing: "Desolation of lifelines, a paper cardboard smell [...] the complete loss of reverb and timbre [...] The city was cleared, as it is called in the German of gynecologists during certain radical operations [...] On the Baseler Platz this occurred When it is cleared, it is especially exposed to light. ”This place exerts a cruel magic on Ina. In the inhospitable part of Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel, reinforced by its bourgeois socialization conditions, her attempt at transplantation and reorientation, and thus her relationship with Hans, must fail. Ina's disorientation (Chapter XIV) becomes clear in her escape from her apartment and her wrong ways through different parts of the city (Chapter XV). Here she discovers a middle-class residential area in the Westend or Holzhausenviertel, which with its family atmosphere would have made a better marriage possible. After her return to the house at Baseler Platz, the situation escalates and she forces her husband to decide to change the apartment and come to terms with her wishes.
Frankfurt in a detective novel
Let the Frankfurt background determine:
- Frank Demant met the life artist and former tram driver Simon Schweitzer , especially in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen. So far (2018) twelve novels have been published in this series (see: here ).
- Udo Scheu met the public prosecutor Schultz , the detective inspector Schreiner and the journalist Dennis Hauschild . So far (2018) six novels have appeared in this series.
- Jan Seghers the Commissioner Robert Marthaler . So far (2018) six novels have been published (see: here ).
literature
- Askenasy, Alexander: The Frankfurt dialect and its literature . Frankfurt a. M. 1904.
- Boehncke, Heiner and Hans Sarkowicz: What nobody has, I find with you: A Frankfurt literary history . Darmstadt and Mainz 2012.
- Brandt, Robert and Renate Chotjewitz-Häfner: Literary Frankfurt . Writers, scholars and publishers - places of residence, work and works. Jena and Berlin 1999.
- Gazzetti, Maria (ed.): Frankfurt. Literary walks . With (...) a literary search for traces by Renate Chotjewitz Häfner. Frankfurt a. M. 2005.
- Hahn, Peter (ed.): Literature in Frankfurt. A lexicon to read . With photos by Andreas Pohlmann. Frankfurt a. M. 1987.
- Heckmann, Herbert (ed.): Frankfurter Reading Book . Literary forays through Frankfurt from the time it was founded until 1933. Frankfurt a. M. 1985.
- Klein, Diethard H. and Heike Rosbach: Frankfurt. A reader . The city then and now in sagas and stories, memories and reports, letters and poems. Husum 1987.
- Kramer, Waldemar (ed.): Selected Frankfurt dialect poetry . Frankfurt a. M. 1966.
- Oberhauser, Fred and Axel Kahrs: Literary Guide Germany . Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-458-17415-8 , p. 417.
- Schäfer, Theo (ed.): Frankfurter Dichterbuch . Frankfurt a. M. 1905.
- Wurzel, Thomas (responsible editor) u. a .: Cultural discoveries, literary land Hessen . Frankfurt a. M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-7954-2190-8 , pp. 79-103.
Remarks
- ↑ This aspect is, in addition to the localization of the respective socio-political background, the main criterion of the present selection. The demarcation between autobiographical novels ( poetry and truth ) and autobiographies or memoirs in report form is fluid. The focus is on literary works by the authors who at least temporarily lived in the city.
- ↑ His son got to know works by Friedrich Rudolf Ludwig von Canitz , Hagedorn , Karl Friedrich Drollinger , Gellert , Creuz, Haller , Benjamin Neukirch and Koppen (Johann Friedrich Kopp).
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↑ The Frankfurt landscape painter Carl Theodor Reiffenstein has many of the scenes described by Goethe in his drawings and watercolors (Commons : Carl Theodor Reiffenstein - Album with pictures, videos and audio filesWorks by Frankfurt am Main in literature at Zeno.org .)
based on, u. a. the Goethe and Schönemannhaus, the Christmas market, the view over the gardens to the city wall ( "View from the rear windows of the Goethehaus", 1858. Historical views of the town, plans and floor plans. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).)
- ↑ In the 11th chapter the narrator explains the title: “It is an innate right of human beings, after every present anger and annoyance, to lie as quickly as possible into all possible and impossible bliss of the future. If not always, it works quite often. Sometimes the regained good mood lasts, but sometimes it also passes like a glimpse of the sun on an April day. In the latter case, the world speaks in all tongues of Owl Pentecost - St. Never Little Days - postpones comfort in earthly life at latter Lammas [Day of the Last Judgment], ad graecas Calendas [St. Never Little Day], aux calendes grecques [for an indefinite period] Pentecost, when the goose walks on the ice; but the Jewish wisdom remains right for all time: Rejoice, young man, in your youth, before the evil days come, of which you will say I do not like them at all. "
- ↑ The author knows the city from two stays in 1838 and 1867 and has anecdotes e.g. B. taken over into the novel via the Sachsenhäuser.
- ↑ Dumas has some documented actions such as the suicide of Mayor Fellner and the letter appeal from the banker's wife Emma von Metzler nee. Lutteroth used her friend Bismarck as a template for his figures. Another parallel: Emma's mother owned the Stadtpalais Rossmarkt 12 ( Wolfgang Klötzer: Die Metzlers and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt (pdf) ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2015 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 note. ); With Metzler through time .
- ↑ This brings the author closer to history, because Solomon's daughter Betty married her uncle Jakob .
- ↑ The title refers to the poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Entoptische Farben im Projekt Gutenberg-DE
- ↑ also reference to biographical references to the author who published newspaper articles under the pseudonym Ginster .
- ↑ The description of the town hall and the cathedral square indicate the city in which the author worked in the same function in 1918.
- ^ Restaurant on the Römerberg , burned down in 1944 on a night of bombing.
- ↑ In Asian mythologies, turtles are carriers of the earth floating in the sea. The Indian god Vishnu is transformed in his second incarnation from the world serpent Ananta-Shesha to the turtle Kurma
- ↑ presumably allusion to Theodor W. Adorno
- ↑ The questioning of his perception and his identity correspond to discussions about radical constructivism and the postmodern novel
- ↑ This speech recalls the Molly Blooms in Joyce's Ulysses (Chapter 18 Penelope )
- ↑ 1967, in the year the novel was published, the Hauptwache was indeed dismantled and rebuilt a year later above the underground station.
- ↑ Hallenser bears traits of Ernst Bloch, quoted several times in the novel : "Tadeus-Von-der-erlernbaren-Hoffnung", Herhaus, p. 170.
- ↑ In 1975 Rainer Werner Fassbinder took over motifs from the novel in his play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod / Just a slice of bread. Two pieces. Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt a. M . 1998, ISBN 3-88661-206-6 .) And in his film Schatten der Engel (book, together with Fassbinder, and directed by Daniel Schmid ). Fassbinder, on the other hand, did not realize the film adaptation of the novel, for which he wrote a screenplay in 1975. It was published together with the novel in: Gerhard Zwerenz: The earth is uninhabitable like the moon and an appendix: The earth is uninhabitable like the moon . Screenplay based on the novel by Gerhard Zwerenz by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. April Fools! Published by Jörg Schröder 1986.
- ↑ The description is reminiscent of Ernst Herhaus.
- ↑ Henscheid's narrative style corresponds in many aspects with Robert Gernhardt's theory of high comedy
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- ↑ This topic of the dumb gate alludes to the social behavior of the epileptic Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot .
- ↑ easily recognizable as Wilhelm Genazino, z. B. through references to his novel An umbrella for a day , pp. 46 and 141.
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- ↑ This is where the suicide motif , later continued by Julian, appears in allusion to Dostoyevsky's novel (p. 248).
- ↑ Maier's novel is clothed in two quotations from the student Kirillow: Maier, p. 5. Also on p. 294 and p. 345 reference is made to the demons and Kirillow's suicide
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- ↑ apparently refers to the Frankfurt deaconess house in the Cronstettenstrasse, north of the Holzhausenpark.
- ^ Fauser published the magazine UFO together with Jürgen Ploog, Udo Breger and Carl Weissner in 1970/71
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- ↑ see also: The bride in the snow
- ↑ see also: Marthaler - Score of death
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- ↑ Compare literature by and about Karl Udo Scheu in the catalog of the German National Library .