Immanuel Kant (comedy)
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| Title: | Immanuel Kant |
| Genus: | comedy |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Thomas Bernhard |
| Publishing year: | 1978 |
| Premiere: | April 15, 1978 |
| Place of premiere: | State Theater Stuttgart |
| Place and time of the action: | On the high seas, front, middle and aft deck |
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Immanuel Kant is a play by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard from 1978. The world premiere took place on April 15, 1978 under the direction of Claus Peymann in the Stuttgart State Theater.
action
Thomas Bernhard's fictional Immanuel Kant travels across the Atlantic to New York with his wife, his servant Ernst Ludwig and his parrot Friedrich. At Columbia University he is to be awarded an honorary doctorate. The aging philosopher is sick with cataracts and almost completely blind. Since Columbia University has the best ophthalmologists in the world, the goal of the trip is not only to honor Kant, but also to regain his eyesight. In addition, Kant wants to bring the "light of reason" to the United States of America . With him on board are the art collector Sonnenschein, a cardinal, an old admiral and a millionaire who lifts the Titanic . The piece is divided into permanent locations. Front deck, middle deck and aft deck form the fixed framework for the plot. In the foredeck scene, Kant's wife (whom he never had in real life) and the servant Ernst Ludwig are constantly concerned about the philosopher's well-being. Kant's full attention is devoted to the parrot Friedrich. His ability to reproduce all of Kant's lectures makes him indispensable for the philosopher. The middle deck scene is determined by the appearance of the millionaire and the failed attempt by Kant to give a lecture on the high seas. The aft deck scene takes place during dinner, which is attended by all of the main characters in the play. In the last scene Immanuel Kant is in the port of New York not as expected by the committee of the university, but taken from misleading doctors and nurses in reception.
interpretation
Bernhard comments on the basic idea of the piece in an interview. In it he shows "a society on the high seas" that is constantly threatened by destruction because "everything [...] could always perish". "This society is just on the surface and then kills this grumbler Kant, who is a madman like all great philosophers [...]." He is taken up by this society, which is made up of types of the European upper class, those Types that the rational enlightenment produced.
The needs of the fictional Kant, the meticulous observance of order, the dwindling of his mental powers and the fear of going blind, all fit into Bernhard's model of the ridiculousness of all spiritual heights in the face of the fragility of the body.
"Particularly interesting is the spiritual trio that is formed by Kant, his servant Ernst Ludwig and his parrot Friedrich. Ernst Ludwig, whose right arm is thicker than the left from the dragging of the parrot cage, represented by the physical deformation as a result of the function he performs fills out, the same division of labor specialism as' Kant '. This one puts the' head ', the one the arms' "Kant's parrot does not inadvertently bear the name Friedrich, who was king and one of the most prominent rulers at the time of historical Kant. It was he who instrumentalized the ideas of the Enlightenment for purposes of power politics. Like the king, the parrot parrot parrots the principle of Enlightenment ethics "imperative". What remains is a phrase robbed of its content, now hammering in, a grammatical form of command.
stylistics
Repetitions
Repetitions of words and sentence structures ( anaphor , parallelism ) are particularly typical for Bernhard and also represented in Immanuel Kant . Every time the ship steward appears, he reports the wind direction ("West Northwest") and engine performance ("Full speed ahead"). "In contemporary literature, Thomas Bernhard is the first to rediscover the stylistic and compositional possibilities of repetition and use it intensively and extensively."
Puns
At the beginning of the piece, reference is made several times to an ideal line to be followed that Kant would like to establish. The steward advises that the racing line will be kept. But Kant's wife asks the servant Ernst Ludwig to place the parrot Friedrich near her husband so that he can keep his ideal line. First, one connects the expression with the direction of the wind, the orientation of Kant's folding chair or, in the case of the steward, with "order on the high seas". "The ideal line doesn't just seem to designate a certain position in space, but also a psychological-intellectual orientation that Kant can only achieve in close proximity to his parrot." In contrast to pure word repetition, a term appears here with different meanings and becomes a superordinate term.
literature
- Bernhard, Thomas: Immanuel Kant. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1978, ISBN 3-518-01556-7
- Klug, Christian: Thomas Bernhard's theater pieces, Metzler, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-476-00780-4
- Manfred Mittermayer: Thomas Bernhard. Stuttgart, Weimar 1995. ISBN 3-476-10291-2
- Gregor Bernhart-Königstein: Kant's hike across the sea of fog, The true history of the origins of the Critique of Reason in the mirror of the world of images Caspar D. Friedrichs, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3950398199