Georg Letham. Doctor and murderer

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Georg Letham. Doctor and Murderer is a novel by Ernst Weiß that was published in 1931 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna.

The first-person narrator Dr. med. Georg Letham jun. writes himself free from his guilt. Letham, husband killers experimental pathologist and bacteriologist , tells how he in a penal colony in the tropics atones successful by the self-test against the yellow fever is fighting.

time and place

The novel is set in the 1920s in the tropical city of C. on a peninsula in South America , very far south of the Panama Canal . Escape to Brazil is being considered. Rio de Janeiro is seven day trips away.

The port city of C. and its “rock islands” in the Atlantic could mean Cayenne in French Guiana . The notorious Devil's Island is in front of the tropical city on the peninsula of the same name . Cayenne is just under 200 km from Brazil.

action

There is no love in Georg Letham's heart. He torments his "ugly, love-addicted" but wealthy wife. The aging woman, devoted to him as a dog, asks for an injection of morphine . Instead, he injects her with a lethal dose of "Toxin Y". After the death of his wife, the 40-year-old murderer comes into custody. In it he wants to "hold out without confession and without lying". The brother, not the rich, stingy father, takes care of the prisoner. Georg Letham is "sentenced to life imprisonment for forced labor for poisoning". The narrator still has "the death-lamentation" of his wife in his ear, but he confesses to the reader: "My deed was necessary, it came from my heart". Despite everything, the murderer still loves his life.

Georg Letham is tied to the young March during the transport to the ship that is to take the prisoners to the penal colony. This is a gay man who is sentenced to 20 years of forced labor for having shot his disobedient "love slave". Letham does not reciprocate March's homoerotic inclination, but tolerates the affection of the “pretty companion”. During the crossing, Letham gets to see his former colleague Carolus on the “crime ship Mimosa”; at the time statistician at the “ Pasteur Institute”, now a high-ranking military doctor. Landed in C., Letham got a job as a guard for fellow criminals suffering from typhoid in the hospital. The alternative would have been hard workers in the forest . Carolus, who succeeded Father Du Tertre with a “heated urge to research” on the trail of the yellow fever pathogen, accepted Letham and March as “corpse servants” in his modern “epidemic hospital”. In the hospital, Letham meets his old student friend Walter. His loving wife, Alix Rosamunde Gabriele Therese Walter, reluctantly followed the researcher and their five children into the tropics. When Alix is ​​pregnant again, Walter sends her to London with the children. Letham, in “convicts livery”, is allowed to research and researches the pathogen causing yellow fever. The subject defies exploration. Not even Pasteur had made it. Letham has to witness how the 14-year-old Portuguese Monika-Zerlina-Aglae dies miserably from the disease. The "lovely, blooming, innocent, childlike" Monika is for Letham, the "discarded man", love at first sight. “Against all calculating reason” he feels the “feeling of happiness”. When the “little Portuguese woman sobbed to death”, the 41-year-old Letham is at a turning point in his life. The “convicted criminal sent for life, the individual with no rights”, is appointed by Walter to lead a self-experiment that the entire group of scientists carries out of their own free will. The experiment is based on the so-called "Axiom I". Thereafter, a mosquito blood aspirated by a yellow fever, and transmits the disease when subsequently strikes a healthy person, in recent blood eyes on these. So the researchers keep mosquitoes, let the vermin bite sick people and present themselves as bite objects to the infected insects. Letham is the first to get yellow fever from the experiment described. He is lying down with all the life-threatening symptoms of the deadly disease and just registers the "strange, comfortable joy on the faces" of his "employees". March, who was also stung, also falls ill, but only slightly. Walter tries to pardon all deportees who survive the mosquito experiment. Alix appears on the "contaminated Satan's island" and wants to bring Walter to London. He's not coming. The rabid wife hits him in the face. The hitherto resilient Walter falls ill "post infection" immediately. Alix scolds the "experimenter" Letham as a murderer. Letham, however, thinks that Alix is ​​a murderer herself because she has arrived and thus made Walter unopposed against the mosquito poison. Letham goes even further. He carried out a "mosquito attack" on Alix by tolerating the bite of a most likely contaminated mosquito in Alix's neck. This “experiment” aims to answer the question: Is the unborn child infected in the womb? The hospital where the research team and Alix are staying is under quarantine . So the woman giving birth is not admitted to any hospital in the area. Alix gives birth to a boy after a problem birth. Letham, not a gynecologist at all , works as an obstetrician . From then on, Alix incomprehensibly hates her lifesaver Letham. The explanation: March reported the mosquito attack to Alix. But neither Alix nor the newborn are infected. Alix and March rush against the convict Letham. This wants to part with March. March wants to "own" Letham. Letham wants to get March off his neck by having him transferred. March survives an unsuccessful suicide. Letham and March are pardoned. Carolus gives March the money for the crossing to Europe. March stays and joins C. light-shy rabble.

The next goal of the researchers, to stop the yellow fever with a serum, fails because of the administration. But the new governor of the colony finds the solution. He exterminates the mosquitoes in an extermination campaign. The yellow fever is going down. Letham turns down a doctor's position that is offered to him in C. and disappears "into the crowd".

Father complex

Letham's mother dies young. The father, Nansen's successor, manages and survives an "unfortunate North Pole trip ". In his opinion, Letham's inability to love is caused by the heartless father. This divides people into "sticky and slippery characters" like "rats and frogs" and wants to harden the son. For example, the father forces the boy to spend the night with rats. The narrator complains that his two siblings have become normal people, only he of all people was burdened with all of his father's reproach.

love

Even as a man, childless Letham is unlucky with any couple relationship. The marriage is unhappy. He rejects March's homoerotic approaches. When Letham turns to the attractive widow Alix with many children, March immediately drives a wedge into this relationship that is just emerging: March puts Alix in the picture of Letham's "mosquito attack" on her precious life and thus provokes the heavily pregnant woman's irreconcilable hatred of Letham. Finally, the burgeoning love of the 41-year-old Letham for the very young Portuguese Monika is destroyed by yellow fever.

Hamlet

Pazi sees Letham as an anagram : Hamlet . Indeed, the name of the Prince of Denmark appears several times in the novel. Parallels between Letham and Hamlet can not only be found just below the surface of the text. The narrator - he hides his name and has pushed Letham forward - plumbs his self and comes across "sin inherited from the father".

shape

The first-person narrator makes his “upbringing” by the father known to the reader through a retelling that is scattered throughout the text. The rat stories from the father's house and during the North Pole expedition leave a creepy impression and - in contrast to the later description of yellow fever - are applied rather thickly. In addition, some things seem inconclusive. After the condemnation of Letham, his brother suddenly no longer cares about those who have been expelled from civil society. And a second evidence: Walter's wife is first Laura and then Alix Rosamunde Gabriele Therese.

reception

  • Ernst Weiß succeeded in writing the "Epic of Evil Man" Letham, who becomes a murderer and only then comes true. His repentance is initiated by the dying young girl Monika.
  • According to Pazi, the structure of the novel is determined by Letham's “experiments on living souls”; even worse - in "loving hearts".
  • Ernst Weiß, the Dostoevsky admirer, lets Letham tell from an " urge to atonement ".
  • The fatherly upbringing makes Letham jun. ripe for a husband murderer.
  • "The two ... final chapters of the novel ... show the author at the height of his artistic abilities."
  • Only a doctor and artist could create this text.

words and phrases

Pleonasms

  • the "glass glasses"
  • the "basic basis"
  • "let go of something passively"

literature

source

  • Ernst Weiß: Georg Letham. Doctor and murderer. Novel . 521 pages. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1982 (License: Paul Zsolnay Verlag Vienna)

expenditure

  • Paul Zsolnay Verlag: 1931, 1932, 1950, 1961. Droemer , Munich 1964.
  • Ernst Weiß: Georg Letham. Doctor and murderer. Novel . 508 pages. Collected Works, Volume 10, Suhrkamp- Taschenbuch, 4th edition, July 19, 2000, ISBN 978-3-518-37293-7

Secondary literature

  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Ernst White . Issue 76 of the magazine Text + Criticism. Munich, October 1982. 88 pages, ISBN 3-88377-117-1
  • Margarita Pazi : Ernst Weiss. Fate and Work of a Jewish Central European Author in the First Half of the 20th Century . Vol. 14 of the series of Würzburger Hochschulschriften on modern German literary history, Ed. Anneliese Kuchinke-Bach. Frankfurt am Main 1993, 143 pages, ISBN 3-631-45475-9
  • German literary history. Volume 9. Ingo Leiß and Hermann Stadler: Weimar Republic 1918-1933 . Pp. 142-152. Munich, February 2003. 415 pages, ISBN 3-423-03349-5
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . S. 658. Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ White p. 349
  2. ^ White p. 246
  3. ^ White p. 264
  4. ^ White p. 249
  5. ^ White p. 344
  6. ↑ a b Pazi p. 83
  7. ↑ White pp. 41,157,185,203,335,338,349,384
  8. ↑ a b Pazi p. 85
  9. ^ Arnold p. 29
  10. ^ Pazi p. 84
  11. ^ Arnold p. 61
  12. ↑ Leiß and Stadler p. 149
  13. ↑ Leiß and Stadler, p. 151
  14. ^ White p. 347
  15. ^ White p. 336
  16. ^ White p. 383
  17. ^ Pazi p. 140