Maigret is wrong here

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Maigret is wrong here (French: Maigret se trompe ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 43rd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from August 24 to 31, 1953 in Lakeville , Connecticut , and was published in November of that year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . In 1955 the first German translation by Paul Celan was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1979 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Elfriede Riegler.

A young Parisian prostitute was murdered, and it soon turns out that there were two very different men in her life: a young, penniless musician who already had a criminal record for pimping , and a famous, wealthy surgeon who had numerous female admirers. In the course of the investigation, Commissioner Maigret realizes that he can be wrong despite his knowledge of human nature.

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View from the Arc de Triomphe onto Avenue de la Grande Armée and Avenue Carnot (right)

It is a rainy and cold November morning when Inspector Maigret is called to Avenue Carnot. The young prostitute Louise Filon alias "Lulu", who came from Butte-Montmartre , had lived here for two years , and it was here that she was found shot by her cleaning lady Désirée Brault that morning. Obviously, the young woman did not fit into the exclusive residential area, and her boyfriend, the saxophonist Pierre Eyraud, would never have been able to finance the expensive apartment.

Maigret quickly identifies the apartment owner, the famous brain surgeon Étienne Gouin, who lives in the same house and has had an affair with the young woman since he saved her life through an operation two years ago. The now 62-year-old Gouin is a recognized capacity in his field and, in addition to his grueling work, treats himself to only one form of relaxation: affairs with numerous admirers. His wife Germaine, a former nurse, pretends to be neither jealous of her husband's stories of women nor to object to the arrangement with the lodger Louise. Only her sister Antoinette hates her immoral brother-in-law with all her heart.

For the press, the guilty party is quickly determined: Louise's friend Pierrot has gone into hiding since the night of the crime, but Maigret believes the musician when he turns himself in and claims to have nothing to do with the crime. Instead, the inspector learns that Louise was pregnant without it being possible to determine whether the child was from Eyraud or Gouin. Maigret circled the surgeon more and more, whom he had not heard before, and he first asked his assistant Lucile Decaux. She is so devoted to her boss, for whom she sacrifices herself every day, that she gives him a false alibi.

Finally, the surgeon is interrogated, and Maigret and Gouin, two personalities of similar character, but with very different attitudes towards life, face each other. Gouin can show an alibi for the night of the crime, but covers neither his wife nor his assistant, although Maigret offers him the opportunity several times. On the contrary, he revealed Louise's pregnancy to the two women, fully aware of their jealousy, and waited cold-heartedly for the consequences. After all, it was his wife Germaine who drove her long-standing humiliation and the incentive of her sister Antoinette to murder. After her arrest, Lucile Decaux moves in with Gouin, but Maigret no longer wants to hear from the gifted surgeon.

interpretation

For Murielle Wenger, Here Maigret is a novel about women. A total of six female figures are portrayed, all of which have one thing in common: they are related to the surgeon Dr. Gouin, around whom they orbit like satellites around a planet. Love does not play a major role in any of the doctor's relationships. On the other hand, Louise and her penniless musician formed a real pair of lovers. Instinctively, they have the full sympathy of Commissioner Maigret, and his view of a petty bourgeois contrasts the social differences between the luxurious apartment building on Boulevard Carnot and the poor origins of the prostitutes from the La Chapelle district . The consumption of alcoholic beverages always plays a special role in Maigret's investigations. This time he remains loyal to a Marc through the entire investigation , but he explains that at other times there have also been “beer, red wine and even whiskey tests”.

In addition to Commissioner Maigret, Elke Hentschel has a “second hero” in the novel: the figure of the surgeon Gouin, whose personality is composed like a mosaic through the testimonies. Gouin is a typical male character in Simenon's work, especially in his non-Maigret novels such as The Cat or The Flight of Monsieur Monde . It is a civil "lonely wolf" (lone wolf). Murielle Wenger sees him as a double negative reflection of Maigret and Simenon, who boasted in an interview that he had slept with 10,000 women in his life. Inspector Maigret delays the encounter with the surgeon until it becomes inevitable because he is afraid of looking in a mirror that shows him a possible alternative to himself. But as is so often the case, in the end Maigret reveals the “naked person” behind all the deceptions, he discovers the weakness of the cold brain surgeon who treats other people like objects. It is Gouin's fear of dying alone that makes him a tragic hero in the end, while Maigret saves his empathy for fellow human beings from the surgeon's loneliness. According to George Grella, the brilliant doctor turns out to be innocent at the end of all crimes, with the exception of heartlessness, for which the inspector cannot arrest him.

For Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, there is more tension in Maigret's final encounter with his opponent Gouin than in the actual exposure of the murderer. Josef Quack sees the confrontation as one of the highlights of the series, reminiscent of comparable rivalries between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe . In contrast to its predecessors, who let two intellects wrestle with each other, Simenon is about the encounter between two people. Maigret does not face the suspect in his capacity as a police investigator, but “like a person who is interested in another person”. The encounter with the surgeon, who shares origin, career and many convictions with the inspector, turns into an hour of self-knowledge for Maigret. The lack of illusions with which Gouin philosophizes about human loneliness expresses some of Simenon's fundamental existentialist convictions. Maigret's eponymous error applies to the personality of the doctor. When the latter shows himself cold-heartedly, where Maigret wants to awaken in him that compassion that he himself feels for the murderess, the inspector turns away from the surgeon, disappointed. It is one of the few times that Maigret, whose intuition is otherwise almost infallible, has to admit to himself that he is wrong.

German translation

Paul Celan in a passport photo from 1938

In March 1954 the Cologne publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch commissioned Paul Celan , one of the most important German-speaking post-war poets and author of the death fugue , to translate two Maigret novels. The lyric poet, who was dependent on additional income, received a fee of DM 1200, including an advance payment of DM 200 for a rather simple job, measured against Simenon's simple style and the limited vocabulary of his books. A few traces of the translation work are still preserved, which show that Celan marked newspaper phrases and brought them into the translation (such as “come into the kitchen” or “spoon out a soup”, where neutral verbs can be found in the original).

The publisher was satisfied with the work and only intervened in a few areas. Celan allowed himself some translational freedoms and got mixed up with the dates, but Stefan Zweifel saw the translation as the "far more reliable, sometimes refreshingly awkward" text compared to the second work Maigret und die terrible children , which led to severe criticism from the publisher and was only published heavily revised. Tom Appleton described the German versions as "unadorned and plastered crime translations", in which Celan resisted the temptation to prove his lyrical skills.

When the rights to Simenon's work were transferred to Diogenes Verlag , the latter commissioned Elfriede Riegler in 1979 with a new translation of Hier errt Maigret . However, the syntax, choice of words and, in some cases, identical deletions reveal traces of the first translation, so that Stefan Zweifel judged: "The fingerprints are from Celan". According to Andreas Lohr, "Celan's version may have served as a basis for work" in Riegler's transmission. The German title Hier errt Maigret , which goes back to Celan, remains close to the French original Maigret se trompe , but also evokes the catchphrase “ Hier errt Goethe ”.

reception

For Frank Böhmert , Here Maigret was one of the most literary novels in the series, the content of which repels the reader more than usual. With the figure of Dr. Gouin had Simenon created a painful “caricature of himself”. Some colleagues could learn a slice of his descriptions: “Haunting, atmospheric, captivating without any ugly - so good, as practically always.” Tilman Spreckelsen, on the other hand, did not buy the ingenious doctor and the numerous women who succumbed to him from the author “with the best will in the world. And while one is still annoyed, fine cracks appear in this picture. Lucky. "

The British magazine Encounter found “a remarkable portrait of a thoroughly amoral person” in the novel, although some of the secondary characters were also drawn with the same “clarity and deep understanding”. The South Atlantic Quarterly spoke of a commendable confrontation between Commissioner Maigret and “a cold and brilliant surgeon, a perfect man of understanding”. Time and Tide described an investigation in “November fog and drizzle”, conducted under the influence of Marc, which was all in all “not very good”. Anthony Boucher rated Maigret wrong in the New York Times as a "good middle-class Maigret".

The novel was filmed five times as part of television series: The main roles were played by Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1960), Kees Brusse (Netherlands, 1964), Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978), Jean Richard (France, 1981) and Bruno Cremer (France, 1994). In 2003 SFB - ORB , MDR and SWR produced a radio play adapted by Susanne Feldmann and Judith Kuckart . The speakers included Christian Berkel and Friedhelm Ptok .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret se trompe . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1953 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is wrong here . Translation: Paul Celan . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1955.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is wrong here . Translation: Paul Celan. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is wrong here . Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-20690-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is wrong here . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 43. Translation: Elfriede Riegler. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23843-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret se trompe in the Maigret bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 60.
  4. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret se trompe (Maigret's Mistake) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ^ Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories . McFarland, Jefferson 2013, ISBN 978-0-7864-7054-9 , pp. 160, 162.
  6. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret is wrong here . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23843-3 , p. 166.
  7. ↑ Elke Hentschel: The positivistic ancestors of William von Barkerville or: Is "The Name of the Rose" a detective novel? In: Hans-Jürgen Bachorski (Ed.): Lektüren. Essays on Umberto Eco's “The Name of the Rose” . Kümmerle, Göppinge 1985, ISBN 3-87452-663-1 , p. 114.
  8. ↑ George Grella: Simenon and Maigret. In: Adam, International Review. Simenon Issue, Nos. 328-330, 1969, p. 56 ( online ).
  9. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre . Athenaion, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-7997-0603-8 , p. 225.
  10. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , pp. 46–47, 66.
  11. ↑ Maigret Forum Archives 1999 on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  12. ↑ Sylvie Lausberg: The author of the naked man always wrote unadorned . In Le Soir Illustré No. 2986, September 14, 1989.
  13. ↑ a b Stefan Zweifel : This time murdered: The text . In: du. Die Zeitschrift der Kultur No. 734, March 2003, p. 72.
  14. ↑ Tom Appleton: Hear voices . In: Telepolis of September 25, 2005.
  15. ↑ Andreas Lohr: The "Simenon Case" . In: Axel Gellhaus (Ed.): “Foreign proximity”. Celan as a translator . Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, Marbach am Neckar 1997, p. 248.
  16. ↑ Maigret Entitled on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  17. ↑ Read: Georges Simenon, Hier errt Maigret (F 1953)  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / frankboehmert.blogspot.de   in Frank Böhmert's blog .
  18. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 43: Maigret is wrong here . On FAZ.net from February 12, 2009.
  19. ↑ "A remarkable portrait of a genuinely amoral man [...] the same clarity and depth of understanding". Quoted from: Encounter Volume 4, 1955, p. 83.
  20. ^ "A cold and brilliant surgeon, a man of pure reason". Quoted from: The South Atlantic Quarterly Volume 66, 1967, p. 537.
  21. ↑ "November fog and drizzle [...] Not very good." Quoted from: Time and Tide Volume 39, 1958, p. 199.
  22. ↑ "good middle-grade Maigret". Quoted from: Anthony Boucher: Criminals at Large . In: The New York Times , September 1964.
  23. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  24. ↑ Maigret is wrong in the HörDat audio game database .