Beyond love

Beyond love is a novel by Martin Walser . It was first published by Suhrkamp in 1976 .

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Franz Horn is an employee of the Chemnitzer Zahn company , which is managed by Arthur Thiele. This company, in the post-war period in the south of Germany, in or near Ravensburg founded, and after the old home named Thiele family, produces dentures from plastic . Horn is responsible for domestic and foreign business connections and license agreements. Apparently since the beginning or at least for quite a long time - 17 years - with this company, Horn has built up a network of connections at home and abroad, which now has to be looked after by a whole staff of Thiele's employees.

Once much appreciated by Thiele, Horn has to realize that his star has now sunk: He has become dispensable for Thiele on the tennis court and while sailing and the 29-year-old lawyer Dr. Horst Liszt from Northern Germany took over his duties. Liszt's salary has risen accordingly, while Horn feels that he has been downgraded and steered towards poverty. When Thiele reported to Horn and Liszt one day about new developments in his dental laboratory, as a result of which new license agreements were to be negotiated with foreign partner companies, he reprimanded Horn for grinning at an inopportune moment. Horn is not aware of this, but he is aware of his increasingly physical reactions to situations from which he suffers. He separated from his wife and children five years ago after discovering that he was capable of using violence against them. Now he lives alone in the Galgenhalde housing estate, drinks large quantities of beer every evening after he has given up the fight against getting fat, has a few relationships with women who have gone through all kinds of bad things, and has to find out again and again that his jaws are cramping and his teeth are clenched painfully tight. If his lower jaw is pressed against the upper one with enough pressure, he imagines, this phenomenon can be fatal: the lower teeth will then, he imagines, hit their brains.

Thiele sends Liszt to business partners in Italy and France, Horn is supposed to negotiate with the licensee Keith Heath in England, and he himself wants to fly to New York . In a week, he orders, they should meet again in the office and report on the results.

So Horn flies to London and continues to Coventry , where he stays overnight, and the next day he visits Heath at his Walsgrave facility . But when he gets there, although registered, he doesn't find Heath. The secretary can only tell him that Heath has not appeared in the store for some time and that only his wife and daughter can be reached on the phone. At the moment, Tom, the driver, is also not in the house, who can bring Horn to the Heath family home. Horn sets out to reach this Tom at the Working Men's Club in Cheylesmore , where he is always supposed to be at this time of day, and drinks a long time with a Tommy O'Sullivan beer before it turns out that he is not the Tom he is looking for is. Heath's driver is apparently absent that day.

Thereupon Horn decides to go on foot. Cross country and stopped repeatedly by several obstacles such as streams or swampy meadows, he marches in practice until House Engadine, lives in the Heath, found there but only his daughter before telling him the father considered himself in his two-hour drive away Cottage in the Cotswolds . At least the taciturn young woman lets herself be persuaded to write down the address for Horn. He retires to the hotel and the next day rents a car, with which, after a long search, he finally reaches the cottage, which is above the village of Cam. But now the initiative leaves him: “That was clear, Mr. Heath did not want to speak to him. Mr. Heath was evidently in a position where he could not even say that he did not want to speak to Horn. He just fled. And Horn, not lazy, pursued him to his lair. ”“ He suddenly felt that it was rude to have followed Mr. Heath here. He didn't dare to press the knocker. That would mean: See, you cannot escape us. He was embarrassed at his efficiency. But if he had driven home from Coventry without even reaching Mr. Heath, Mr. Thiele would have said: Franz, you've made better jokes. "

Horn sits down on the stone steps in front of the front door, where Heath discovers him, who actually asks him into the house. Heath, clearly in poor health, tells the silent Horn that his previous business partner Rob Dorset has left him and gone to rival London Dentures , but unexpectedly a new business partner named Steve McPherson has opened up a new perspective for him. He will close his plant in Walsgrave and produce with McPherson in Glasgow , fully automatically, without staff. He has also left his family and will team up with McPherson's daughter. A change in the license agreements with Thiele's company is currently unthinkable. After Heath has given his monologue, he falls asleep.

After this meeting, Horn leaves Heath's house, drives back to London and stays at the Hotel Crofton in Kensington . It is clear to him how Thiele would react to these grotesque occurrences. He would blame Horn for getting involved with the uncertain candidate Heath and demand immediate responses. In other words, Horn would have to immediately terminate Heath's licenses and seek a business relationship with London Dentures and, if that failed, with Wright Dental Supply in Dundee . But there is still a need for clarification with Heath. And when Horn imagines another visit to this man and paints out all sorts of details, he is again attacked by physical symptoms: “He found himself that morning. With the curtains drawn. In the unheated room. Barefoot. No, naked. In the corner. The cool walls on the kidneys. Teeth in the knee. ”Horn is no longer able to deal with the licensing agreements that he should be dealing with. He can only think about Liszt and Thiele and finally only about what would happen if he simply returned home, admitted his failure and asked that travel expenses be deducted from his salary on the grounds that he no longer felt like doing his job which had come to him and would have been much happier with a job in the IT department anyway.

But, he imagines, neither Thiele nor Liszt would simply accept this request and leave him alone in the future. They "would become more amiable and amicable from round to round, and Horn would become an increasingly hopeless case under this treatment and they would therefore have to be more intimate with him until they would have made a lot of misery out of him," says Horn his future in the company under these conditions. He has already had experience with such degrading measures by Liszt in the past. Nevertheless, Horn no longer tries to negotiate contracts for Chemnitz teeth in England . After all, he just flies back to Germany.

When he arrived in Ravensburg, he left his car in front of the train station and set off on foot to his residential area. He is still busy with the subject of Liszt and Thiele. It is by no means the case that Liszt would only ever show solidarity with his superior Thiele, on the contrary: Horst Liszt and his wife, a von Müller born, who both found their stay in southern Germany beneath their dignity, had already enjoyed each other extensively in Horn's presence mocked Thiele, the noisy Saxony. And Thiele has already stated to Horn that “Dr. Liszt is a weirdo after all, maybe even a really crazy person and a thoroughly opinionated, self-satisfied and self-centered person, someone with whom no company is possible in the long run ”. But the fact that Horn has become a plaything for these two men, constantly observed, corrected and humiliated by them, cannot be ignored, even in view of these differences between Thiele and Liszt.

Horn, having returned to his apartment, cannot stop thinking about this dilemma. Again his lower jaw begins to make snapping movements and press against the upper jaw. Finally, Franz Horn fetches three tubes of tablets from his medicine cabinet and with relish begins to chew a handful of tablets, which he then flushes down with beer. He repeats this process several times. Already in a kind of delirium , he sees Thiele and Liszt watching his suicide attempt. First, Thiele gives a farewell speech in which he regrets that Horn has given up and was therefore able to afford less and less at work. She ends with the conclusion: “First of all, you should not have separated from your family. A demon like you must earn twenty times as much as you if he is to make such a separation bearable. Second, you should have stayed on the ball in terms of femininity, you idiot [...] In other words: You are the total failure as it is written in the book. Life passes over you. On quiet feet. Always on. Into the unpredictable. And it belongs to the strong and the weak, but not to the bad guys, forever, amen. ”Liszt is shorter than Thiele in Horn's visions and vigorously asks him:“ Finish your preparations. Before us, declare yourself ready to carry on with the normal burden. Where would we go if everyone just ran away. ”In the run-off, however, Liszt still predicts his own future: He is Horst, the drunkard ...

Horn continues to delirious. He means Thiele and Liszt, he's finally fed up with them and only wishes he had never met them. When he regained consciousness, he realizes that he is probably lying in a hospital bed. Instead of his wife Hilde, whom he had hoped for when he woke up, Thiele and his wife are in the room and he hears Thiele saying: "He's alive."

References to other Walser novels

Beyond Love introduced a series of works that Walser wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Walser himself, their heroes mostly come from the Lake Constance area , and they all react as sensitively as Franz Horn to the insults and humiliations that everyday and professional life inflicts on them. Many of these heroes are related or at least known to one another. Franz Horn himself reappears as the main character in a Walser novel a few years later: In a letter written overnight to Lord Liszt , Franz Horn, who now lives with his family again and still works for Arthur Thiele, makes it clear to Liszt what he has been doing for him for years has done. Meanwhile, Dr. Liszt, who once bullied Franz Horn on the pretext of having to train him, in turn fell victim to a younger successor. The Austrian Ryynänen has ousted Liszt from his position. In addition, his wife has left him and Liszt has surrendered to alcohol.

Horn also plays a supporting role in the novel Das Schwanenhaus , whose protagonist, Dr. Gottlieb Zürn is a real estate agent who no longer succeeds in closing deals and who has to watch a wonderful Art Nouveau house on the lake fall into the hands of the competition and be demolished. Dr. Zürn is a cousin of Horn. Another cousin in this widespread relationship is Xaver Zürn, who suffers mentally from it, never from his boss, Dr. Glide to be perceived as a person and develop physical symptoms similar to those of Franz Horn. The house of Dr. Zürn, in turn, is a setting in the novel A Fleeing Horse , which came out shortly after Beyond Love . Zürn, the landlord, only appears in a supporting role here; the main character is the teacher Helmut Halm, who is confronted with a friend from his past while on vacation. This Klaus book tries to tear the civil servant Halm, who once also had other career ideas, out of his usual routine and to dare a new beginning with him in the Bahamas , but finally turns out to be a completely insecure person and a failed existence. Years later, Helmut Halm appears again as the main character in a novel: For a few months in the waves he goes to a university in the USA, where he again meets a desperate childhood friend in the form of Rainer Mersjohann, but on the other hand also deals with the topic of aging and Out of the question is confronted when he takes interest in one of his students. The theme of the aging man versus the young woman reappears several times in Walser's later works; the network of people from the environment of Beyond Love is no longer maintained there.

References to real people

In a review of Martin Walser's diaries, Peter Hamm wrote: “In Walser's diary, the central sun Unseld and the unhealthy Reich-Ranicki revolve around other Suhrkamp authors who Walser, even if they are friends, primarily see as competitors. First and foremost Uwe Johnson , the "moral narcissist" and unbridled drinker, with whom there is a constant hail of crowds, from which the key novel "Letter to Lord Liszt" results, in which Walser caricatures the cock fights between himself and Johnson for Unseld's favor. " But Walser also once said that you don't necessarily have to read a work as a roman clef just because you can recognize the teeth of a living person - in this case Siegfried Unseld - in a literary figure.

An encounter with the archetype of Tommy O'Sullivan and the stories he told is recorded in Walser's diary.

Reviews and Walser's reaction

Martin Walser 2008

Martin Walser noted many reactions to Beyond Love in his diaries . Even before sales began, Thomas von Vegesack is said to have prophesied a place in world literature for the book and the reader Franz Barth saw the book “as a memorial for those who were ruined in the world of work”. After these positive reactions noted Walser in a diary entry on a phone call with Unseld, this was his complaints about a unilateral review by Rolf Michaelis in the time announced to the fact that Marcel Reich-Ranicki was expected much worse.

Michaelis had indeed devoted a section of his review to Martin Walser's temporary sympathy with the DKP ; He had also stated that Franz Horn could stand as an example for many: “Who would doubt that the conditions of paralysis and cramping, emptiness and despair, lack of contact and loneliness, through which Walser sends his unhero heroic novel heroes, not only personally , but are also socially determined. For how many people applies what can be said of Franz Horn: "He considered it the greatest disadvantage that he did not have the opportunity to express himself." "Beyond the reference to current social problems, however, he also had reference to the novel extensively analyzed for its literary value. For him, the “love triangle among men” was also a “parody of the novel of purification”. "Jenseits der Liebe" has already been successful as a diagnostic critique of the times ", he finally stated, as a novel it sometimes still creates an impression that Walser described with the comparison" like someone trying to light a match underwater ".

Marcel Reich-Ranicki 2007

Walser did not return to this criticism later. Reich-Ranicki's slap in the FAZ of March 27, 1976, however, led the author to a long-lasting offense that was repeatedly discussed in his diaries. It was entitled Beyond Literature and began with the following sentences: “An irrelevant, a bad, a miserable novel. It is not worth reading even a chapter, even a single page of this book. ”This was followed by a look back at earlier works by Walser, before Reich-Ranicki also spoke about the author's political interests:

“Quickly and gracefully following the fashion of many German intellectuals, he turned to communism . If the poetry doesn't want to go on, the barricade of the class struggle is an attractive and usually also a cozy place to stay, but definitely a decorative backdrop [...] "Walser used the left to be successful again in the cultural scene, but that couldn't change the quality of his works in the early 1970s. After having dealt with this topic in detail, Reich-Ranicki finally came to the conclusion: "Walser's political changes still have no influence on the quality of his epic or drama ". Now finally the criticism turned back to its real topic: After some speculation about the names of the protagonists, Reich-Ranicki complained about the blurred character drawings of the two employees Horn and Liszt, whose characteristics and experiences were "derived without scruples directly from their age" by Walser's susceptibility to tones and nuances remained nothing, everything was sterile, lifeless and bad. Reich-Ranicki's remarks culminated in the following sentences: “It is inconceivable that the editing department at Suhrkamp Verlag would have accepted such a manuscript if it had been submitted by an unknown author. There were times when the S. Fischer Verlag did not shy away from even sending back a failed work to a Gerhart Hauptmann . How bad does a play by Walser have to be so that no theater is staged in the Federal Republic, how bad a Walser manuscript has to be so that Suhrkamp Verlag rejects it? ”This prose is neither left nor right, just boring. The only positive thing Marcel Reich-Ranicki said about Beyond Love was the hope that this book was a turning point in Walser's work.

Decades later, Helmut Böttiger described Reich-Ranickis Verriss as an “attempt to exterminate the author in an exemplary manner”. Far removed from the political debates of the 1960s and 1970s, he also stated: “ Beyond love shows the life of the employee Franz Horn up close and relentlessly. And although Walser's political furor has more to do with Kafka than with Lenin , some critics review the book less than the author's political stance. "

Walser read Reich-Ranicki's criticism and on the same day, on a train journey, formulated an open letter to the booksellers who Reich-Ranicki had insinuated that, seduced by the name of Martin Walser, they had certainly ordered far too many copies of the novel and now difficulty getting rid of this. Then he drafted a speech for Marcel Reich-Ranicki, which included the following sentences: “I can only reach the general audience, in front of whom you defamed the motifs of my ten years of journalism, if I litigate you or slap you. Since I don't have the money to [...] litigate, I have nothing left but the slap in the face. So I'm telling you that if you come within my reach, I'll slap you in the face. ”In the diary, after the drafts for the open letter and the speech, there was another entry of several pages: Walser traveled to Frankfurt on March 27, 1976; There he agreed to speak on a live television broadcast of the third HR program on April 6th, because “Franz Horn, I suddenly thought, could this require me to stand up for him now. In the 25 years in which I have read reviews, I have never read a sharper, more vicious condemnation. ”On the same day, Walser told Siegfried and Hilde Unseld of his plans with the open letter and the speech against Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Siegfried Unseld was against it because it only weakens an author when he shows how much he has been hurt by criticism; Hilde Unseld made an I-Ching experiment with Walser in order to be able to sound out the further procedure, which in turn impatient Siegfried Unseld, who finally pleaded that the defense of the book should be left to the publisher, and that Walser be through during the evening Behavior and some comments about Marcel Reich-Ranicki were quite irritating. The woundedness of Walser by Reich-Ranicki's criticism can also be read again and again from the diary entries of the following days and weeks. Years later he wrote The Death of a Critic . When Martin Walser's diaries from the corresponding period were published, Volker Weidermann assumed: “He wants to show how the hatred came about, which 25 years later came like a stopper from a bottle that was closed for too long when Walser wrote the fatal novel“ Death of one Critic "published."

A week after Reich-Ranicki's criticism, Rolf Becker's review of the book was published in the Spiegel . Becker described Reich-Ranicki's text as “a disconcertingly excessive and therefore unconvincing condemnation”. Walser tells, as always, "with melancholy sarcasm, with a kind of aggressive gallows humor and an occasional somersault into the satirical-grotesque." Unlike Reich-Ranicki, Becker also takes a look at the approach of Horn's antagonists and states: It is "not brutality." what destroys him - he is crushed under the apparently troubled friendliness, under the hypocrisy of human beings with which boss and rival anoint his descent ”. With Horn, who has to agree to the assessment of his person by the superior or professionally superior, this leads to self-devaluation, and in "the bitter comedy of such self-devaluation [...], in such psychological ironies, Walser does his best. "Although Becker also cited passages in the novel that seemed a bit too shallow or dispensable to him, he came to the conclusion:" I like that and how Walser is brief here and makes his story quick; that he slows down his well-known, brilliant Suada, his tendency to verbal debauchery, without skeletonizing the narrative as in the Gallistl case. I like that Horn is a somewhat more objectified Walser hero, a little less a Walser mask than the author's earlier ego-ill figurants. "And:" The narrator Walser formulates individual and social psychological sensitivities, strategies for gaining and renouncing pleasure, of domination, adaptation and submission [...] as intelligent and concentrated as ever. He wants to show [...] what internalization of performance dictates and the imperative for success can do and in which tragicomic varieties of deprivation of love can be suffered. And he comes along, if you look around in contemporary German literature, if not to the goal of all papal literary wishes, then quite a long way. Which colleague, which employee may disagree? "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 77
2. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 70
3. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 69
4. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 78
5. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 94
6. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 120
7. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 148
8. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 149
9. ↑ Martin Walser, Jenseits der Liebe , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-37025-4 , p. 155
10. ↑ Peter Hamm, I despise someone like me - but not myself , October 17, 2014 on www.faz.net
11. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 94
12. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 200
13. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 206
14. ↑ ^{a b} Rolf Michaelis, life from second hand , in: Die Zeit , March 26, 1976
15. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 208
16. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Beyond Literature at www.literaturkritik.de
17. ↑ Helmut Böttiger, Das große Wüten , March 17, 2010, at www.sueddeutsche.de
18. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 212
19. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 214
20. ↑ Martin Walser, Life and Writing. Diaries 1974–1978 , Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-25884-8 , p. 215 ff.
21. ↑ Volker Weidermann, The most famous dispute in post-war literature. Criticism and Despair , in: FAZ , March 12, 2010
22. ^ Rolf Becker, Der Fall des Franz Horn , in: Der Spiegel , April 5, 1976