Joseph Kerkoven's third existence

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Jakob Wassermann
* 1873 † 1934

Joseph Kerkhoven's third existence is the last novel by Jakob Wassermann . The work, completed at the end of October 1933, was first presented to S. Fischer in Berlin, but then handed over to Querido Verlag Amsterdam in December 1933 . It appeared there posthumously in the autumn of 1934.

Some readers are familiar with the doctor and psychiatrist Joseph Kerkhoven from the novel " Etzel Andergast ". Kerkhoven's story will be told here until the end of his life. After Kerkhoven's wife Marie had been unfaithful to her husband, the couple came together again and reconciled. Kerkhoven, whose ambitious research project is the investigation of human delusional worlds , counts the writer Alexander Herzog among his patients. Kerkhoven has a recipe against Herzog's severe nervous crisis: the author should write down his marriage story. This turns into a comprehensive novel within a novel. However, Herzog cannot overcome the nervous problem with the text. The patient moves in with his second wife, Bettina, in Kerkoven's institution. Herzog and Marie on the one hand and Kerkhoven and Bettina on the other hand come closer to each other.

time and place

The action begins in the autumn of 1929 in Lindow, an estate north of Berlin. Via Fex , Zuoz , Sils-Maria , Chur and Rotterdam, it leads on the one hand to Steckborn, to Haus Seeblick and on the other hand to the Bucheggergut in Ebenweiler, 500 kilometers away. The timing of the end of the plot cannot be determined from the text of the novel. It is after 1930.

action

Because Kerkhoven loves his wife Marie very much despite her infidelity, he needs distance from her. On behalf of the Dutch government, he goes to Java. He wants to record the sum of his experiences in the work “Pathology of delusions and their influence on religion, society and legislation”. He has to state that his own brain is sick.

Marie sells Lindow and is henceforth committed to raising children in various homes in Berlin and southern Germany. In addition to her welfare organization , she has three children of her own - the girl Aleid from her first marriage and, together with Kerkhoven, two boys, 5- and 9-year-olds.

The life story of Herzog (born 1873), which was mentioned above, shows - now presented broadly - a decisive parallel to the life story of Kerkhoven - “the human madness”; more precisely, the confrontation with it and, above all, attempts to cope with it. Herzog "lost his mother at an early age". In 1898 he made his debut with the novel "Die Schatzgräber von Worms". Alexander is dependent on the benevolence of his publisher. The young girl Ganna appears as a way out of the financial misery. Ganna actively helps so that the bachelor Alexander can make his decision to marry. Herzog says he is marrying part of Ganna's father's fortune, but the dowry is then not as large as hoped. Herzog's novel is a look back - not in anger, but more in head-shaking amazement: "I could have gotten her [Ganna] under control if I had been ... tougher". At least the narrator realizes that he was the weaker one. He lightly ignores his flaw: "In marriage there are ... many opportunities to have no character". The weak find a way out. For Herzog, this is Bettina Merck. The 17 years younger is the mother of two children and divorced her “almost the same age” husband because of Herzog and becomes penniless. The artist Herzog is impressed by Bettina's "nervous understanding of everything rhythmic". Bettina wants to make him happy and relieve him. Ganna is crying, Duke has no tears for his wife. Bettina becomes pregnant. Ganna is at first stunned and then touched. Herzog is now also initiating his divorce. This process takes two years. Ganna is litigating Herzog with the help of a group of lawyers. But on his 53rd birthday, she gave him a divorce. She continues to litigate Herzog with undiminished vigor, contesting Herzog's second marriage. The hostile and Bettina understand that he will succumb. Bettina “takes matters into her own hands”.

Herzog's novel is over and Wassermann continues to tell about Kerkhoven. Herzog appears as a patient with Bettina at Kerkhoven (see above) and presents the psychiatrist with his novel, Ganna or Die Wahnwelt subtitled. Kerkhoven was astonished to see the commonality of the work area - the mad world. The dismayed reader learns that Kerkhoven, the terminally ill, does not have much longer to live. The doctor initially keeps the findings secret. Although the number of patients of the psychiatrist Kerkhoven is growing steadily, he is hostile to the village population.

The above-mentioned - probably more platonic - quadrangular relationship between the married couples Kerkhoven and Herzog does not break the two marriages, but irritates Herzog so much that he breaks away from Bettina for a short time and in the meantime goes to Italy. Herzog only managed to get closer to Kerkhoven when the psychiatrist revealed to him as the only person the limitation of his own lifetime - probably 15 months - and the deadly disease, endocarditis lenta . The two men become friends. Soon after, however, Herzog bitterly disappointed Kerkhoven when the patient failed miserably during a simple messenger service. Herzog loses Kerkoven's manuscript, the life's work of the important psychiatrist, on a train journey. Strangely enough, the above. Hostilities with the day of the irretrievable loss of the precious manuscript, a one-off, the publication of which the professional world has been waiting for for a long time, suddenly arise.

Wassermann brings a deus ex machina into play. A patient of Kerkhovens has the supernatural ability to reconstruct the manuscript from the doctor's dictation. But Kerkoven's “glow of will” goes out.

The novel ends with a ray of hope. Kerkoven's stepdaughter Aleid gives birth to a child against her will.

Quotes

  • The poets are our pacemakers.
  • Every woman you love is a resurrected mother.
  • Compassion is a form of contempt.
  • We cannot look into nature's workshop.
  • The eternal pulling together inevitably leads to constriction, to fear of life.
  • Experience can be communicated any more than pain.
  • I cannot become holy without mortal sin.
  • To live means to consume one's heart.
  • Each of us is equally capable of good and bad in every moment.
  • Walking at night purifies the mind.

shape

The most striking feature of the novel is the novel by the 59-year-old first-person narrator Herzog, which is inserted into the text about Kerkhoven's last years. In it, Herzog mainly tells the story of his marriage to the “unworldly, clumsy” but also “touching” Ganna. The striving of this extremely energetic woman, who “does not tolerate contradictions”, is reported so meticulously, so painfully emphasized that next to her Kerkhoven, the title giver of the novel, almost sinks to the frame figure. Due to the discrepancy just mentioned, the unity of the form of the novel suffers. The reader becomes worried, torn back and forth.

In addition, something else is noticeable.

Repetition

The story of the abandoned wife is taken up twice in the novel. First, Selma Imst fights for her husband, the pharmacist Karl Imst, who has a relationship with Jeanne Mallery. Much more intense and nerve-wracking for the reader, this constellation is repeated in the fight of the Ganna Herzog (born 1878) for her husband Alexander, written in the novel in the novel Alexander and Bettina. Ganna or the delusional world of the adulterer Alexander himself. After all, Ganna lived with Alexander for 19 years. One story is continued in the other down to all essential psychological details. For example, both abandoned women cannot leave their husbands and fall into a delusional state - try every imaginable cunning to approach the faithless again. In both constellations, the adulterous men are "weak characters".

Supernatural

Although Kerkhoven is portrayed as an exact scientist, almost everything in the novel can be explained, but there are the small exceptions. The clairvoyant Emilie Thirriot stimulates the action. This talented woman points out clues to the investigators in the Imst / Mallery poison murder trial. Incredible - everything that has been predicted is true.

Uncomfortable

The author wanted to revise the finished manuscript, had even looked forward to it, but never got around to it. In some places there is still a weakness of form. For example, when the author had the writer Herzog write about the cheerful: “… the dark hours of the cheerful are often much darker than those of the dark.” Or - again from Herzog's pen: “If she [Bettina] weren't the most dear to me Been a person on earth, to be missed was an idea that I could no longer bear ... "

Half-baked

In some places the impression arises that the text has been written down hastily - e.g. B. when Herzog sums up: “Scene: Heckenast's brother-in-law in the hotel. Dramatis personae: Heckenast, Hornschuh, Dr. Fingerling and me. "

Appellation

Sometimes Herzog addresses the reader - e.g. B. "You ask how?"

omniscience

On the one hand, Herzog writes a reminiscence, a contemplation of life with Ganna from his point of view, but on the other hand, he sometimes lapses from the personal narrative standpoint into the authorial one - e.g. B. he writes: "Ganna shudders with relish when she reads the invitation ..." But Herzog was not there at all; so cannot know anything about the emotion.

Four existences

The eponymous term existence appears in very few places in the text and is not further elaborated at all.

Kerkhoven says: "If I had to express my existence here in a formula, I would say that it appears to me as a preparation for another future, the outlines of which are only gradually becoming visible." Admittedly, we are still in the 26th when the term is first mentioned . of 156 chapters. Then in the 65th chapter the reader is confronted with the term again. In fact, back then, in the second volume of the novel trilogy, when it was also about Kerkhoven's friend Irlen , Kerkhoven was in its first existence. From this it can perhaps be concluded that the present third volume deals at the beginning and perhaps even in the middle of Kerkoven's second existence. If that's true, what about the third one?

A more precise specification can be found at the end of chapter 103. Kerkoven's second existence actually began after Irlen's death. And Kerkhoven's third existence begins exactly when he is certain of his fatal illness. Mystical : Kerkhoven assumes his "fourth existence" to be in a "dimension" into which he will "breathe over" while dying.

Words

  • Every letter creates a real head forgy in your heart .
  • the Prussian short ties
  • Even readers with basic philosophical knowledge can no longer keep up when Wassermann writes about the surrogate belief and about the world norm that triumphs over protoplasm .

Inconsistent

  • Kerkhoven was born in 1880 and Etzel was born in 1908. At the beginning of the novel, Kerkhoven was 49 and Etzel was 23 years old.
  • Penzlauer Berg
  • As is well known, Wassermann took medical advice. In the text, however, the author names Kerkoven's disease as “endocarditis lenta, a gradual decomposition of blood”.

Self-testimony

October 30, 1933: “7.30 in the evening. 25 minutes ago I finished the novel 'Joseph Kerkoven's Third Existence' . I started the book in May 1932. "

reception

  • On November 5, 1933, Oskar Loerke , who was an editor at S. Fischer, found the novel moving because of the many unobjective problems it contained.
  • The novel is "a single autobiography, the self-talk of the poet at the end of his journey."
  • The novel is strange. With the novel by the writer Herzog, broadly based in the middle of the novel, Wassermann portrayed himself. Ganna is designed after Julie ( Julie Speyer ) and Bettina after Marta .

Letterpress

In 1995, the printing error devil was in Nördlingen .

  • "... the sensation ... that has its seat in the Neven ."
  • I am "a pop seer ".

trilogy

The work includes the novels

Arrangement for music theater

literature

source
  • Jakob Wassermann: Joseph Kerkoven's third existence. Novel. With an afterword by Peter de Mendelssohn Munich in January 1989 (2nd edition December 1995), 559 pages, ISBN 3-423-10995-5
First edition
  • Jakob Wassermann: Joseph Kerkoven's third existence. Novel. Amsterdam: Querido, 1934. 643 pages.
expenditure
  • Jakob Wassermann: Joseph Kerkoven's third existence. Carl Posen Verlag Zurich 1946. 562 pages
  • Jakob Wassermann: Joseph Kerkoven's third existence. Novel. Frankfurt a. M. and Munich, Kindler and Schiermeyer 1947. 677 pages
Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Koester, p. 80
  2. ↑ Koester, p. 80 below
  3. ↑ quoted in de Mendelssohn in the source, p. 559, 15. Z. v. O.
  4. ↑ Source, p. 50 above
  5. ↑ Source, p. 404, 5th line from u.
  6. ↑ Source, p. 229, 3rd line v. u.
  7. ↑ Source, p. 42, 16. Z. v. u.
  8. ↑ Source, p. 49, 1st line v. u.
  9. ↑ Source, p. 65, 6th line v. O.
  10. ↑ Source, p. 117, 15th line of v. O.
  11. ↑ Source, p. 159, 8th line v. O.
  12. ↑ Source, p. 211, 1st line v. u.
  13. ↑ Source, p. 259, 9th line v. O.
  14. ↑ Source, p. 260, 19th line from O.
  15. ↑ Source, p. 418, 15th line v. O.
  16. ↑ Source, p. 508, 21st line v. O.
  17. ↑ Source, p. 527, 8th line v. Below: Marta Wassermann-Karlweis in her follow-up remark
  18. ↑ All criticism of Herzog's style (see, for example, source on p. 375 “Conversations in Another World”) could of course easily be averted with a counter-argument: In the novel, Wassermann temporarily gives the floor to a sick person. However, the narrator also shows weakness in the following Kerkhoven part of the novel, for example when he intersperses “what do I know” (source, p. 469, 12th line from below).
  19. ↑ Source, p. 281, 16th line v. O.
  20. ↑ Source, p. 293, 13th line v. O.
  21. ↑ Source, p. 340, 18th line v. O.
  22. ↑ Source, p. 350, 14th line v. u.
  23. ↑ Source, p. 378, 11th line v. O.
  24. ↑ Source, p. 47
  25. ↑ Source, p. 479
  26. ^ Source, p. 145, 12th line v. u.
  27. ↑ Source, p. 340, 23rd line. O.
  28. ↑ Source, p. 475
  29. ↑ Etzel Andergast
  30. ↑ Source, p. 19, 5th line from u.
  31. ↑ Source, p. 50, 14th line v. O.
  32. ↑ z. B. by the Viennese doctor and private lecturer Dr. Oswald Schwarz , quoted in the afterword in the source, p. 551, 9th line v. u.
  33. ↑ Source, p. 478, 1st line v. u.
  34. ↑ Diary entry, quoted in de Mendelssohn in the source, p. 556, 11th line. u.
  35. ↑ quoted in de Mendelssohn in the source, p. 557, 5th line from O.
  36. ↑ de Mendelssohn in the source, p. 554, 4th line v. u.
  37. ↑ Koester, p. 81 below
  38. ↑ Source, p. 302, 8th line v. O.
  39. ↑ Source, p. 448, 16th line v. O.