In the Congo

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In the Congo is a novel by the Swiss writer Urs Widmer , first published in 1996 by Diogenes Verlag .

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The novel In the Congo tells the story of the geriatric nurse Kuno, who learns about the secret service adventures of his father, who was previously considered boring. His father is moved to the old people's home where Kuno works as a carer because of an incident involving a gun. Together with Mr. Berger, whom he meets again after more than fifty years, the old man talks about his work in the Swiss secret service during the Second World War . Berger, who supplied lenses to the German Wehrmacht for an optics company , reports on his encounter with Adolf Hitler on Obersalzberg and how the dictator personally saved him from the violence of the Gestapo .

Kuno remembers his childhood and Willy, his best friend, who snatched his only love (Sophie) from him and traveled with her to the Congo to manage a brewery. Now he is asked by Anselm Schmirhahn, the owner of this brewery, to travel to the Congo to find Willy, who was believed to be missing, because Mr. Anselm has not received any money from the Congo for a long time.

Without further ado, Kuno accepts the order and sets off from Kinshasa , the capital of the former Zaire, on a boat trip to Kisangani , a town on the Boyoma Falls . There he visits the premises of the brewery and meets the tearful Saba, who pretends to be the daughter of Willy and Sophie. Kuno can't believe it because her skin is black as ebony. Saba leads the newcomer into the house. There he meets a dark-skinned woman who claims to be Sophie. The geriatric nurse is sleeping with her when a man dressed like a demon enters the room. It's Willy. Old photographs from her youth hang on the walls and Kuno recognizes himself in pictures. Willy and Sophie tell episodes from that time that only they can know in detail. They sing Swiss songs, speak perfect Swiss German and know everything about everything. Kuno fears he will fall victim to a murder plot. He claims that the doppelgangers murdered the real Willy and the real Sophie and then pretended to be them to wait for him and kill them too. The two report that they went black overnight after their arrival in the 1960s.

Willy invites Kuno to accompany him as grand vizier at a meeting of the tribal chiefs in the jungle. You travel down the Congo on canoes with brewery employees dressed up like them. The gathering includes ecstatic dances, folklore and sprawling revelers. Kuno carefully gazes at the great tribal chief who is most splendidly dressed. Meanwhile, Willy uses the meeting to talk about business relationships. When Kuno secretly frees a prisoner, he meets the great tribal chief who has mercy on him and gives him his number out of sympathy for emergencies. In the morning they return to Kisangani by cars and buses. Kuno is instructed by Willy to hand Anselm Schmirhahn a piece of paper and to trick him into signing it so that the old man cannot read it beforehand. Kuno then flies from Kisangani to Kinshasa and from there back to Zurich. During the flight he suddenly notices that he has also turned black. He is also in possession of a Zaire passport.

When he arrives in Zurich, Kuno meets with Anselm, who doesn't recognize him, and hands him over to Willy's letter. The brewery owner signs the document because he thinks he has Kuno's expense report in front of him. Only then does he read through the letter and fall dead to the floor. It was his own will, in which he bequeathed all of his property to Willy and the Kisangani brewery to Kuno. Kuno visits his father in the old people's home, who is dying and does not recognize his son at first. He sleeps with the station nurse Anne, who has a great passion for Africa, and buries his father behind his old house in Witikon . Then Anne and Kuno fly back to Kinshasa.

You are already expected by Willy and Sophie, who are preparing to escape. Willy tells Kuno that the great tribal chief is planning to take over the brewery on his tribal territory by force. The former geriatric nurse and Anne get drunk and the woman turns black. Suddenly enemy troops attack and Kuno calls the great chief on his secret number after a night of bitter fighting. This turns out to be Mobutu . He immediately stops all fighting because he found Kuno sympathetic at the meeting of the chiefs, unlike Willy. From then on there is peace and Kuno succeeds in expanding his beer empire and even exporting some varieties. Anne and Kuno now live in the jungle and enjoy their new happiness.

criticism

The Tages-Anzeiger rated: “A thicket of stories, magical episodes, unheard-of incidents, one more grotesque than the other, each almost worth its own little book, Congo - everyone will reach for the› Heart of Darkness ‹and once again Conrads Read the Congo diary comparatively. Perhaps Urs Widmer has never gone as far as here in all of his boundless love of tales. "

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Walter Hinck wrote: "The novel is teeming with surprise coups, and fairytale wonders are not missing either (in the Congo the skin of friends and their wives turns black overnight) - but idling also creeps in."

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Voices , website of Diogenes Verlag
  2. ↑ Walter Hinck: Beer for Kisangani review in the FAZ