In the open
Into the open is a 1998 published novel by Karl-Heinz Ott .
In the autobiographical work, the 30-year-old first-person narrator tells how he makes his way to his dying mother, reflecting on his own childhood and the relationship to his home country and his mother.
content
An assistant doctor informed the narrator that the mother, who was in hospital, only had a few weeks to live. She is around seventy years old and has pancreatic cancer, but does not know her diagnosis herself. The narrator makes his way to his Upper Swabian hometown on the Danube to be close to her in her last days.
While driving through the villages and later at his mother's bedside, he remembers his childhood, which was characterized by narrow villages, strict Catholicism and rural work and barreness and which evokes mostly negative associations in him. But positive moods of rural life are also traced in vivid and atmospheric memory images and the concept of home is questioned. Quote: “Nevertheless there are fleeting images of home: the night-blue starry sky, the lazy winter days in the back room (...), the apple crates in the upper hall, the bottles with the homemade currant juice on the wobbly cellar shelves, the ice flowers on the morning toilet window, the Crocuses and daffodils in the spring garden (...). "
The relationship with the mother was always tense for the narrator, wavering between love and the feeling of dependence and the resulting hatred. After he was born out of wedlock, he and his mother had a difficult time in the village community for a long time. Often his mother made him feel that he was to blame for her suffering and made him feel guilty. As a child he suffered from asthma. He sees his mother's death coming with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he hopes that this will free himself from the relationship, which is perceived as cramping, on the other hand, he is afraid of the feeling of being finally abandoned and alone in the world.
After the mother dies, he sits by her deathbed and thinks about death and life, expressing a more pessimistic view of life. Quote: “A corpse reveals the pathetic helplessness of the human body (...). (...) In retrospect, the dead body symbolizes life that cannot be glossed over by anything and shows the horror of loneliness from which it no longer suffers. "
Awards
For Ins Offene , Ott received the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Prize of the City of Bad Homburg and the Thaddäus-Troll-Prize .
expenditure
- First publication: Residenz Verlag , Salzburg and Vienna, 1998.
- Hoffmann and Campe Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, 2006.
- Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH (DTV), Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-13868-0 .
- French translation: “Que s'ouvre l'horizon '”. Translated by Françoise Kenk, Phébus, Paris 2010.
Individual evidence
- ^ Edition: DTV, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-13868-0 , p. 65.
- ^ Edition: DTV, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-13868-0 , p. 123.