Icaria (novel)

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Ikarien is a historical novel by Uwe Timm that was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2017 . The audio book spoken by Ulrich Noethen was published by Random House Audio in the same year .

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Framework: Michael Hansen

Michael Hansen was born in Hamburg in 1920 and emigrated to the USA with his parents and older sister in 1932. After school, he studies German literature in St. Louis and then volunteers for the US Army . He returns to Germany as a lieutenant in the intelligence service and is involved in a minor battle in Franconia. After the end of the war, he received an order from the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC): He was supposed to interview Wagner, a former friend and companion of the eugenicist and founder of German racial hygiene , Alfred Ploetz . He is supposed to find out how the racial madness came about during the Nazi era and why so many doctors and scientists took part in the so-called euthanasia campaigns . Because of Hansen's sympathy for Wagner, but also because he expands the story more and more, digresses and lets his own life story flow in, the two meet a total of 14 times. Hansen's superiors give him time, but are dissatisfied with his reports afterwards: Ploetz was a socialist at a young age, Wagner still is, and the CIC hoped - in the climate of the Cold War that was just beginning - to gain knowledge of possible current contacts with communists.

Hansen confiscates an outbuilding of Ploetzen's villa, in which he now lives with his comrade George. George is given the task of interrogating doctors and nurses involved in the euthanasia campaign. Both have an idyllic, relatively undisturbed life there: Hansen confiscates a convertible and a motorboat for himself (the villa is right on the Ammersee ), and the hobby ornithologist George uses his free time to watch birds in the woods.

Another aspect of the plot are Hansen's relationships with women: a few weeks before he leaves for Germany, he meets Catherine in New York and later spends a night with her. However, she is already engaged. When Hansen's departure, she says goodbye to him rather dismissively at the port and asks him not to write her any letters. Months later he receives a letter in which Catherine informs him that she has broken off the engagement. In Germany, he meets every now and then with Sarah, who, like him, is an officer in the US Army, but sees the relationship only as an adventure. She openly admits that she also meets other men.

Despite the prohibition of fraternization , Hansen also developed a relationship with a German: Her name is Maria, but she would like to be called Molly, and is a young war widow who wants to set up her own business sewing clothes from parachute silk. Hansen isn't sure if he fell in love with Molly. Passionate, but then cool again, she takes advantage of a relationship with an American officer. In the end, she leaves him for a colonel .

Hansen is impressed by the beauty of the Bavarian landscape; some people arouse his pity, others his contempt. The prospect of a position as a lecturer in German literature and history awaits him in the USA. However, it remains unclear whether he even wants to return.

Internal story: Wagner and Alfred Ploetz

Wagner says he met Ploetz while studying in Breslau , where Ploetz founded a secret group with utopian-socialist ideas. Because of the persecution by the Socialist Law , both fled to Zurich. Ploetz was strongly influenced by Etienne Cabet and together with Wagner visited the Iicarian community founded by Cabet in the USA. However, both were disappointed that a better, more harmonious society was not developing there, but that there were arguments and resentment. Now Ploetz developed the idea that people must first be improved through eugenics before a better society can develop. This leads to differences of opinion with Wagner, who belongs to the left wing of the Social Democrats and advocates equal rights for all people.

Ploetz goes to the USA with his wife Pauline and works as a doctor for four years, then goes to Berlin, where Wagner now also lives. Both get to know the painter Anita (only called “the Greek” in the novel). Wagner falls in love with her, but she marries Ploetz, who divorced Pauline. With the fortune of his wife, Ploetz built a research institute in Herrsching am Ammersee , where he wanted to prove his racial biological theories. Among other things, he is conducting an experiment with thousands of rabbits to prove that alcohol changes the brains and germ cells of the animals and leads to "inferior" offspring. Ploetz therefore considers alcoholism to be hereditary and excludes social factors, but this turns out to be baseless. When the National Socialists take power and pass the law to prevent hereditary offspring , Ploetz is happy that his demands are finally being put into practice: Genetically inferior people can now be forcibly sterilized.

While Ploetz became wealthy through his wife's legacy and respected and known through his research, Wagner led a rather poor and difficult life as a speaker and journalist for various left-wing and union-related newspapers. In 1918 he fell ill with pneumonia and Anita brought him to Herrsching to nurse him back to health. In the meantime, Ploetz and Wagner have grown far apart in their thinking, but Anita prevents an open argument. Only halfway healthy, Wagner went to Munich to take part in the fighting for the Munich Soviet Republic . He continued his journalistic activities in the Weimar Republic and was imprisoned for several months in the Dachau concentration camp immediately after the seizure of power . Then he had to hide in the basement of an antiquarian bookshop, for which he worked until 1945.

Emergence

Timm dedicates the novel to his wife Dagmar Ploetz . In a short acknowledgment at the end of the book, Timm mentions that he began planning as early as 1978, after Morenga was published , but initially did not find a suitable form for the material.

Intertextual and (auto) biographical references

The way in which Ploetz pacts with a criminal system in the interests of his research is reminiscent of Henrik Höfgen in Klaus Mann's Mephisto and thus also of the devil's pact in Goethe's Faust . This is also due to the fact that Ploetzen's friend and “Famulus”, like Faust, carries the name Wagner.

Hansen receives assignments from his superiors, some of which he considers himself unsuitable for. A major reassured him by saying that the “Gesellschaft von Turm” was keeping an eye on him, which alludes to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister years of apprenticeship , the prototype of the German educational and development novel. This directs the reader's gaze to the maturation process that the young Hansen is going through.

The narrative structure of the novel is strongly reminiscent of Timm's novella The Discovery of Currywurst : As there is an old person who is happy to be able to tell a visitor his or her story. Like Lena Brücker in the novella, Wagner's narrative is long, disorganized and associative; like Lena, he has to be brought back to the actual story again and again by his listener. This orality-oriented narration, which also makes the memory and narrative process itself an issue, is typical of Timm's work.

Alfred Ploetz, the central character in the novel, is the grandfather of Timm's wife Dagmar Ploetz. Timm settles the novel for the most part in the German cities, which were or are the stations of his own life, and which he can therefore describe from his own perspective; these include Hamburg , Coburg , Munich , Berlin and Herrsching am Ammersee .

See also

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