Empire

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Imperium is a 2012 novel by the Swiss writer Christian Kracht . He tells the story of the German dropout August Engelhardt , who set out for German New Guinea to run a coconut plantation there. As a fanatical vegetarian, Engelhardt worships the coconut as a divine fruit and strives to spread his ideology of cocovorism in a missionary manner.

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First part

At the beginning of the 20th century, August Engelhardt traveled to what was then the colony of German New Guinea to buy a coconut plantation. His goal: to be an avowed vegetarian exclusively from the coconut to eat.

In the Wilhelmine German Empire , outside of a narrow circle of admirers, his views and plans were only rejected. As a nudist , Engelhardt is arrested and laughed at several times. He then sets out for the South Seas with a sum of money and intends to found a community of sun disciples there. On the crossing, at a stop in Ceylon , he meets the Tamil Govindarajan, in whom he sees a spiritual ally. However, Govindarajan lures him on a joint excursion to a temple cave and robs him of a large part of his financial reserves.

Regardless of the loss, Engelhardt continues to travel and buys the island of Kabakon, which is worthless to her , from the landowner Emma Kolbe to manage it as a coconut plantation. Engelhardt hires natives as workers on the island and harvests coconuts with the intention of exporting them to the German Reich. Since Engelhardt has neither the money nor the means to pay the island, nor to pay the workers, he lends the profits of his trade for years, since money is of no importance to him.

August Engelhardt (standing) with Max Lützow

Aueckens, a disciple from Germany, soon announces himself who intends to join Engelhardt's cult. After initial euphoria and philosophical conversations, however, the two characters move away more and more. When Aueckens finally rapes Engelhardt's worker Makeli, Engelhardt grabs a coconut and kills Aueckens. The murder is disguised as an accident and is soon forgotten.

Second part

In search of like-minded people, Engelhardt travels to the Fiji Islands to visit Mittenzwey, who also emigrated. Mittenzwey, who pretends to be a light eater , is exposed as a liar by Engelhardt. He also meets Govindarajan in the community, but renounces retaliation for the robbery and public exposure of Mittenzwey and travels back to Kabakon.

When the hypochondriac piano and violin player Max Lützow joins the community, the two coconut disciples begin to live together. While Engelhardt rejects other disciples stranded in German Guinea because of him, he soon allows Lützow to live with him under one roof.

third part

After barely a year they fell apart and Lützow died in an accident in the port of Rabaul immediately after his marriage to Emma Forsayth . Since Engelhardt's eccentric way of life met with unease with the governor of the colony Albert Hahl after initial sympathy, he engaged Captain Slütter to murder the hermit. When Slütter meets Engelhardt, he refrains from shooting him and lets him go. Engelhardt's loyal worker Makeli also leaves the community.

With the beginning of the First World War , the brief history of Kabakon as a coconut plantation ends; the colony is occupied by Australian soldiers and Engelhardt is expropriated for a miserably low amount. He refuses the money and disappears.

Only after the end of World War II did Engelhardt appear on the remote island of Kolombangara, completely emaciated and confused, and was taken to one of their bases by American soldiers. A US military journalist records Engelhardt's story. The story ends with the Hollywood film adaptation of Engelhardt's life.

analysis

With Imperium , Kracht is based on the genre of the historical and adventure novel . However, both genres are constantly being shifted as frames of reference and ironically taken to the point of absurdity. In historical retrospect, figures such as August Engelhard, Max Lützow or the governor Albert Hahl existed and were in contact with each other. Only in the novel the details of their interaction are fictitious. Kracht says in an interview with ARD magazine hot off the press : “It's actually a big game with characters who appear and reappear.” The adventure of the novel, whose plot unfolds on an island like Robinson Crusoe , also takes him further and more absurd traits. With Defoe , the protagonist finds his Christian faith on the island and drives it to an economic boom. At Kracht he gets deeper and deeper into the absurd ideology of Kokovorism, increasingly falls into a rotten mismanagement and ends up as a neglected cannibal.

Kracht borrowed some of the characters from the novel, such as Captain Slütter and Pandora, from Hugo Pratt's "South Sea Ballad" around Corto Maltese .

reception

In 2012, on the occasion of the publication of the novel Imperium in the magazine Der Spiegel , Georg Diez wrote that Christian Kracht was the Celine of his generation. Empire is "permeated by a racist worldview". In Kracht's example, “you can see how anti-modern, anti-democratic, totalitarian thinking finds its way into the mainstream.” This assessment was immediately contradicted - for example by Jan Küveler in der Welt , who counters: “Now you have to find a pioneer in Diez recognize the freedom of irony. Most of the quotes that Diez maliciously pulls out of context for his denunciating pamphlet are at best evidence of Kracht's humor. ” Felicitas von Lovenberg speaks in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of the“ attempt to create a new literary publication through a completely unliterary reading destroy. ”The sociologist Manfred Clemenz also states a wrong understanding of literature in Diez's criticism.

Diez's assessment of the novel is offset by a majority of positive reviews of the novel, including by Felicitas von Lovenberg and Julia Encke in the FAZ, Richard Kämmerlings in the world or Erhard Schütz in Freitag . Lothar Schröder becomes clearest for the Rheinische Post : “This accusation is intellectually shameful. It is insane and, on top of that, unfair to a book that has been one of the best, most witty and eloquent German novels since Kehlmann's measurement of the world . "

Helge Malchow , Kiepenheuer & Witsch , publisher of Christian's Krachts Imperium , has the opportunity to reply to Diez's review in the Spiegel magazine: “This is how literary criticism becomes an attempt to marginalize one of the most talented German-speaking writers, and a book review becomes one Denunciation against which the victim now has to justify himself. McCarthy reloaded. "

Antonia Baum sees Christian Kracht trapped in the “hell of irony” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , and not only with Imperium , but since the late “eighties” with the Tempo magazine in “whose offices the then trainee Kracht wrote his first novel. For Baum, Kracht's “merriment” is “desperate”, “just as desperate as those who have to read and understand all of this and then, out of awe of the great writer Kracht, maybe just laugh and bow instead of saying, that they did not understand something. "

Sabine Vogel defends the novel in the Frankfurter Rundschau against accusations of "Nazi sentiments". However, she judges that “Kracht's splayed mannerism”, which apparently imitates Thomas Mann, soon gets on the nerves: “The disdainful stoker is a 'demiurge against the impertinence of world disorder' and the 'ectoplasm is directed into orderly barriers'. The fact that Krachts Engelhardt is also delirious by 'Northmen' and children 'whose blond hair was entwined in wreaths on their heads' "is" dreadful role prose kitsch ". Her conclusion is: "[...] to speak with the stiltedness of Kracht's diction: one cannot avoid saying that the novel is a very outrageous rubbish."

Awards

Adaptations

literature

expenditure

  • Christian Kracht: Empire . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2012, ISBN 9783462041316 (first edition).

Imperium has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Danish, Russian, Romanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Hebrew, English, Macedonian, Estonian, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian and Czech.

Secondary literature

  • Hannah Gerlach: Theories of Relativity: On the status of 'knowledge' in Christian Kracht's empire . In: Acta Germanica / German Studies in Africa: Yearbook of the Association of Germanists in Southern Africa / Yearbook of the Association for German Studies in Southern Africa 41, 2013, pp. 195–210.
  • Robin Hauenstein: 'A step back into the most exquisite barbarism' - With Germany in the South Seas: Christian Kracht's metahistoriographic adventure novel Imperium . In: Germanica 55, 2014, pp. 29–45.
  • Matthias M. Lorenz: Coppola and Conrad: Intertextuality as a criticism of racism in Imperium and I'll be here in the sunshine and in the shade . In: Acta Germanica / German Studies in Africa: Yearbook of the Association of Germanists in Southern Africa / Yearbook of the Association for German Studies in Southern Africa 42, 2014, pp. 66–77.
  • Rebecca McMullan: Island in the Sun: Pre-modern Nostalgia and Hyperreality in Christian Kracht's Imperium . In: Germanistik in Ireland: Yearbook of the German Studies Association of Ireland 9, 2014, pp. 75–87.
  • Catherine Repussard: A little bit of the South Seas and a good amount of life reform: the recipe for the beginning of the 21st century? Marc Buhl's Paradise of August Engelhardt (2011) and Christian Kracht's Imperium (2012) . In: Recherches Germaniques 42, 2012, pp. 77–98.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Denis Scheck talks to Christian Kracht about his book Imperium . In: Hot off the press from March 25, 2012. Link on YouTube .
  2. ^ Georg Diez: The Kracht method in: Der SPIEGEL 7/2012 (February 13, 2012), accessed on April 1, 2013
  3. ↑ Jan Küveler: Critic cries Nazi murder against Christian Kracht. https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article13866600/Kritiker-schreit-Nazi-Mordio-gegen-Christian-Kracht.html
  4. ↑ Felicitas von Lovenberg: No scandal about Christian Kracht , article, February 15, 2012, FAZ, accessed on February 15, 2012
  5. ↑ Manfred Clemenz: Literature and "democratic discourse" in LISA
  6. ↑ Georg Diez: My years with power. In: Der Spiegel 09/2012 .
  7. ↑ Felicitas von Lovernberg: A cult admirer of coconut and sunshine.
  8. ↑ Richard Kämmerlings: The only true God is the coconut.
  9. ↑ Erhard Schütz: Art, no Nazi stuff.
  10. ^ Lothar Schröder, Rheinische Post, "Imperium" - the great novel by Christian Kracht. http://nachrichten.rp-online.de/kultur/imperium-der-grosse-roman-von-christian-kracht-1.2714877
  11. ↑ Helge Malchow : Blue Flower of Romanticism . In: Der Spiegel from February 18, 2012
  12. ↑ Antonia Baum: Hell of Irony . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on February 19, 2012
  13. ↑ Sabine Vogel: Hitler was not a hippie . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 16, 2012
  14. ↑ accessed on June 11, 2012
  15. ^ Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize 2012 for Christian Kracht ( Memento from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Bücher.at, accessed on October 4, 2012
  16. ↑ accessed on June 5, 2016
  17. ^ Thalia Theater: Imperium based on the novel by Christian Kracht , accessed on February 28, 2016
  18. ↑ ORF.at: The Dream of the Coconut Society , accessed on February 28, 2016
  19. ↑ [1] , accessed on September 16, 2019
  20. ↑ https://www.raamatukoi.ee/cgi-bin/raamat?215837
  21. ↑ http ://www. Ersatz.se/bok_kracht2.htm
  22. ↑ http://www.pelikanen.no/bok/imperium
  23. ↑ http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/892781018