Way home (novel)

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Heimweg is a novel by the journalist and author Harald Martenstein and was published in February 2007 . He represents the current trend in fiction books that thematize the post-war period .

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In the center stands Josef, who is referred to as grandfather by the narrator . He returns home from a Soviet prisoner of war and finds his wife Katharina in an adulterous situation. As the story progresses, he tries to win her back. He succeeds in this insofar as she goes mad and in this context only turns to him. The family history is rolled up over several generations, revealing a variety of torn characters and multiple murders, including sonicide and suicide. A key scene tells how Josef carried out the execution of a Soviet commissioner in World War II. This was defenseless and executed without a judgment by commissioner order. Shortly afterwards, without necessity, Joseph kills another boy crouching near another corpse.

Towards the end of the story, Katharina's mental confusion is explained: The “visitors” she believes she receives in her apartment are those murdered by family members: They reappear as ghosts on a fictional level of the book, who are the heroes at the same time appear real. The reader experiences this as the real family members gradually begin to die 'finally'. The first-person narrator turns out to be the ghost of the murdered boy.

classification

The book stands in the context of a tendency in the publication landscape of books that thematize the post-war period after 2000: not only the factual processing, but also the emotional moments of the war time slipping into the distant past are addressed. In 2007, for example, the nonfiction book Schweigen tut weh by Alexandra Senfft , the granddaughter of Hanns Ludin , describes the emotional impact on her family up to the present day, and the novel Es geht uns gut by Arno Geiger , published in large print in the same year as a paperback . In the context of these books, Martenstein works out the mood moments in conjunction with the actual events. He describes the reference back to the German history of a war with a guilty experience and the outward reassurance after 1945. He approaches these moments with great accuracy, partly supplemented by an ironization that is only possible from a temporal distance. So the past becomes understandable as an influencing background of the present. Martenstein explained this way of depicting the past both now and then:

“The ghosts of the past: this metaphor, this leading article - I took this phrase literally. Just let the ghosts of the past crawl out of their cracks! And not the political, but normal ghosts from real life: the people you have killed, the people you love or would like to love. "

The distance to the past is narrated through the contrasts with current forms of representation: The author often compares with sentences such as “Today one would say ...” The special importance of the books by Martenstein and Geiger lies in the fact that fiction captures the mood of the post-war period so precisely to have as no scientific book could achieve in its analytical methodology. The past is linked to the present through the visualization of the distance. This manifests itself particularly in the person of the first-person narrator. She was the guilty of the family's greatest guilt, and she embodies that guilt in the narrative. At the same time, however, she brings the greatest purity and love with her "reappearance". The critic Julia Encke called this a "conflict ... between guilt and love". In addition, the first-person narrator gives up his identity by declaring at the request of the grandfather that he should be considered his grandson. A melancholy hope of forgiveness in the present responds to the paralyzing inability of the post-war period to be able to neither grieve nor forget. At the same time, the repression lives on. Because in the fictional logic of the book, nobody is aware of the identity of the boy who appears again only because the grandfather did not tell the scene of the shooting. The presence of the past and the fading of its influence are visualized in the narrative medium of the "living dead" which determines the plot.

Awards

Heimweg was awarded the Corine Prize in 2007, which the publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit is involved in. Martenstein is the editor there.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Let the ghosts out! . In: FAZ , March 31, 2007, p. Z4
  2. ↑ Julia Encke: The perfect novel . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , February 25, 2007, p. 28
  3. ↑ Richard Kämmerlings: Poor devils in top shape .. In: FAZ , February 24, 2007, p Z5