Hot summer (novel)

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Hot Summer is a novel by Uwe Timm that first appeared in the Authors' Edition in 1974 . The novel is one of the few literary testimonies to the West German student movement of the 1960s .

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The novel describes a phase in the life of the student Ullrich Krause. It plays in the time of the 68 student revolt and initially in Munich . Ullrich's father is a furniture dealer and lives with his mother and Ullrich's brother Manfred in Braunschweig.

Ullrich lives in a shared apartment. Lothar, one of his roommates, is, in contrast to him, a very ambitious student. Ullrich has just broken up with his girlfriend Ingeborg, who was pregnant by him but had an abortion. After talking to Lothar about it, Ullrich convinces him to go to a beer garden. In return, Lothar accepts to leave the work on his presentation and Ullrich is enjoying himself instead of completing his difficult presentation about Hölderlin . Both sit down with two young women at the table and Ullrich immediately begins to flirt. Since he ignores Lothar at the beginning and then makes fun of him, Lothar urges them to leave. While Lothar then goes home, Ullrich continues walking alone through the city. Here he witnesses a verbal argument between a passerby and a street boy who is accused of just hanging around lazily and not wanting to work. The dispute is finally ended by another passer-by, Wolfgang.

Ullrich gets into conversation with Wolfgang and the two visit several pubs. Wolfgang tells the story of his friend Albert, who belonged to a resistance movement in the Third Reich and who kept leaflets for these. He almost got caught in the process. Albert was later admitted to the concentration camp, but Ullrich doesn't find out why. At the end of the encounter, Ullrich gets to know Gaby, with whom he flirts and makes an appointment. Now we are getting more details from Ullrich's everyday student life. The university is dominated by a strict and conservative atmosphere and Ullrich is constantly distracted from his presentation. He goes to a bathing lake and skips the seminar sessions, and in the evenings he prefers to meet with Gaby instead of continuing his presentation. Ullrich's father wrote a letter to inquire about the progress of his studies and when Ullrich was going to finish his studies, which were financially supported by his parents. He goes on to say that the furniture business is not going well.

Then Ullrich first came into contact with politics when he heard about the murder of Benno Ohnesorg on the radio . He then took part in a demonstration against Springer-Verlag , which was accused of complicity in the murder. In addition to anger and restlessness, he also feels joy.

Now Ullrich still has to work to raise the money borrowed from friends for Ingeborg's abortion. He works black for a successful building contractor. Ullrich was given notice of his room due to disturbance of the peace at night and unauthorized visits by women. He moves to Hamburg . But first Ullrich visits his parents with his girlfriend Christa (who is actually still with her boyfriend Bungert). Here it becomes clear that Ullrich does not have a very good relationship with his parents. Although his mother takes good care of him, he does not like his father and he is politically right-wing, which is not very useful for the relationship after Ullrich's incipient left-wing orientation.

When Ullrich and Christa are at a lecture, it is supposed to escalate under the leadership of some members of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). The SDS leader Conny gives a speech at the beginning in which he criticizes class society and calls for the professors' authority to be questioned. When the professor enters the crowded hall, he tries to hold the lecture as normal at first. But he is stopped by the rebellious behavior of the students and flees the building. When Ullrich learns that the SDS members are meeting in a pub, he also rushes to where there is already heated discussion. Ullrich would like to join the group and hears how the overturning of a monument is being discussed. He then also takes part in this action. When the revolutionaries were taken away by the police, he would have liked to accompany them out of solidarity. His left-wing political stance is slowly deepening and radicalizing: He wants to move from his apartment to a commune and tries to justify left-wing extremist acts of violence in front of Bungert, Christa's friend. He actively participates in demonstrations, rallies and protest actions and is now friends with the left-wing radicals Conny, Petersen and Renate. He tries to set fire to a police car with Conny and Bully, and he sleeps with Alice, whom he had only recently spoken to during a teach-in. A larger demonstration against Springer-Verlag after the attack on Rudi Dutschke is also described, in which demonstrators hide behind roadblocks and try to prevent the delivery of the Bild newspaper .

Ultimately, Ullrich moves into a commune with Nottker, Ursula and Renate. Cannabis is used there and the facility is shabby. Ullrich has a relationship with Renate, whose father owns a successful furniture store, and together with Nottker he labels walls with revolutionary slogans. Although he has now moved to Hamburg to write another seminar paper, he keeps putting off writing the end. After all, an old friend, Petersen, whom he met at SDS headquarters, visits him often and urges him to finish writing. He asks why Ullrich is no longer coming to the SDS. Ullrich sees the discussion rounds only as improving the self-esteem of the speakers and finds that the rational, political content is neglected. Finally, he lets the deadline for his work pass during an excursion to the Baltic Sea.

In the following, Ullrich discovered more and more his sympathy for the workers. When Ullrich visited Petersen for the first time in his apartment, he was shocked by the simple conditions in which Petersen, who is now a worker, lives. Ullrich's parents are getting worse and worse financially and urge their son to finish his studies. When Ullrich is visited by his father, Ullrich breaks off the support.

Ullrich and a few friends then try to put on an anti-capitalist drama for workers, but this fails due to a lack of spectators and the lack of political will on the part of the workers. Ullrich then began to work in a steel processing factory in which, after having attended Petersen's base group, he founded his own. With Christian, a drama student, a new member joins Ullrichs commune. Christian has no money and lives from the pooled money of his roommates. He eats a vegetarian diet and does breathing exercises regularly and, in Ullrich's eyes, is just lying around lazily in the shared apartment. With some work colleagues, including the communist Roland, he succeeds in a leaflet campaign against a change in the standard time in final assembly.

When Ullrich fell out with Petersen on another visit to his base group and Renate confessed to him that she slept with Christian, his roommates also came up with the plan to live their green lifestyle on a farm. Ullrich then quits the company and now lives alone in the apartment. During a visit Christa talks about her work at Bayerischer Rundfunk and Conny, who also visits him, tells him that he now wants to use gun violence against "the system". He's got a pistol to prove it. However, Ullrich does not want to support him and goes back to Munich, where he wants to finish his studies and become a teacher. He also wants to meet Ingeborg again.

worldview

The novel paints an exemplary picture of student life during the German student movement of the 1960s. Some characters seem to be specific to certain groups. Ullrich's life in the community seems to the famous Commune I ajar. Political debates are described in detail or reproduced in direct speech. The characters explain in detail the motives for their political actions and also their politically motivated crimes. Linked to Ullrich's everyday life, the result is a picture of the student movement as Timm sees it.

shape

The narrative in Uwe Timm's Hot Summer is very extravagant. While little that is relevant to the course of the plot is described, smaller, almost incoherent, subplots are often inserted, which seldom fit into the chronological order. These help to capture the revolutionary atmosphere. The main plot with Ullrich, on the other hand, helps to integrate the events into the genesis and course of the 68 events. The narratives are often interrupted by poems, quotes and sayings. As a result, the reader sometimes finds himself in a storyline that has been nested several times.

The narrative technique can be compared to a camera technique: there are many “hard cuts”, the camera pans very quickly over the motifs and sometimes changes the scenery very quickly. Also, as in the film, the feelings are mostly not named directly, but rather described with their effects. Many characters are also drawn almost entirely by their actions (and looks). So the narrator is anything but omniscient. Nevertheless, the action is now and then not reported directly from Ullrich's perspective, but z. B. from that of the police inspector, the Lothars or in other inserts. Another noticeable feature is the frequent lack of time information. The time of day and date can only be determined, if at all, by carefully reading circumstantial evidence.

A formal conspicuousness is the lack of quotation marks in the entire text, which means that there is no clearly marked verbatim speech, even if verbatim speech occurs. But Ullrich's thinking and speaking go hand in hand.

Classification in the work of the author

Hot Summer is Uwe Timm's first novel. Together with Kerbels Flucht (1980) and Rot (2001), it can be seen as part of a “1968 trilogy ” that traces the changes of this generation over the course of German history. The novel also contains some autobiographical elements: Uwe Timm studied in Munich and was active in the SDS there. He also lived in Hamburg and Braunschweig. Like Ullrich, he wrote an unsuccessful play.

expenditure

  • Hot summer . Bertelsmann, Munich / Gütersloh / Vienna 1974
  • Hot summer . Structure, Berlin 1975 (licensed edition by Bertelsmann Verlag)
  • Hot summer . Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 1985
  • Hot summer . DTV, Munich 1998 ISBN 978-3-423-12547-5
  • Hot summer . RM Buch und Medien, Rheda 2008 (with additional booklet about author and book)

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