Young light (novel)
Junge Licht is a novel by Ralf Rothmann , which was published in 2004 in Frankfurt am Main . The novel is about the summer vacation of the twelve-year-old miner's son Julian and, in a second narrative level, about his father's work underground . The world of miners and their children around 1960 appears essentially from the boy's perspective. Rothmann received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for the novel in 2004 , which is awarded by Deutschlandradio and the city of Braunschweig .
action
The school year ends for Julian with blows from the teacher and his mother because he cannot finish the arithmetic problems. Unlike the son of the landlord in the mining settlement, he knows that he will not go to high school. Even for a vacation trip with the whole family, there is not enough money, so Julian has to stay at home alone with his father, while his mother and the lovingly drawn little sister Sophie will spend the vacation with their grandparents.
In the small world of the miners' settlement everyone knows everyone, everyone suffers from financial difficulties, the way adults deal with children appears to be wrong and sadistic. There is the chain-smoking mother who brutally beats the boy and humiliates him by forcing him to undress in front of the landlord's fifteen-year-old daughter because she wants to wash his pants. The landlord, also a miner, hunts down the boys in the settlement in a suspicious manner. The neighbor's daughter, who lives in a room in the Julian's family's apartment, confronts the boy with sexual innuendos and brings a lover into the apartment when Julian's father is on the night shift. Finally she begins a relationship with her father, after which the family has to leave the apartment.
Despite these burdens, the children build their own alternative world, such as Julian's “animal club” in an old construction trailer or the tree hut of another youth gang. Julian finds a refuge on the property of the widower Pomrehn, there are rabbits and a parakeet, but above all a dog. The alcoholic Pomrehn appears as one of the few adults who carefully observes the world of boys and finds a language that they understand. But this counterworld is always endangered. Pomrehn is threatened with eviction, other children destroy the animal club, but Julian's colleagues in the animal club also appear brutal and only accept Julian because of the cigarettes the boy steals from his mother.
structure
The (in the paperback) 237-page text is divided into 36 different long unnumbered sections, between which there is usually a time jump. In 30 sections, a first-person narrator of undefined age chronologically tells about a quarter of a year (summer months) from his childhood of 12-year-old Julian in a miners' settlement in the Ruhr area . In the remaining 6 sections, the third person (“The man” begins most of these sections) describes the work of an adult, nameless man underground, in whom one vaguely, but not necessarily, believes to recognize the father of the first-person narrator. The sections in 3rd and 1st person are distributed as follows: 3111113111111111113111311111113131. The underground sections get the fact that the protagonist there is always completely alone and is confronted with noise phenomena and mining locations ( the hanging wall ) that the reader who is not trained in mining does not or hardly can judge something dark and threatening. In the last underground scene, in which the protagonist prepares a demolition, this almost becomes the prelude to a catastrophe that could lead to the death of the father. These passages, with their abundance of montane technical terms , which interrupt the text, although it is not idyllic, but at the same time alienating over long stretches, stand like erratic blocks, after which the reader has to find his way around again - unless he skips these sections because they are the Interrupting, even irritatingly, not tension-free childhood action.
criticism
Most of the criticism received the novel positively, for example the Süddeutsche Zeitung on October 5, 2004:
- “The book has its merit and its limits in the calm precision with which it presents this milieu. It knows that this literary landscape has been well prepared and does not want to shine through originality. Rothmann speaks of Sinalco, signature books and raffia coasters for juice and beer glasses, and of the lost accessory par excellence, the ashtray in its countless fashionable variants (even in a proletarian ambience) without succumbing to the infantility of the Nutella generation, two decades younger. Nowhere does he succumb to the great danger of his material, the transfiguring retrospective of a late childhood that apparently bears strongly autobiographical traits. And where it still threatens, especially with the figure of the wise bum Pomrehn, who has a heart for children, the suspicion is invalidated when this modern Diogenes demonstrates extremely precisely how he recognizes that a dog was previously beaten. "
With small reservations, the WAZ of August 10, 2004:
- "Who narrates? Julian, but it has to be a grown-up Julian who dreamily plunges down into childhood. He tells the episodes without a fixed connection, the reader has to put them together himself, and sometimes he notices the thread of the story until late. Some things are as moving as only calculated trivial literature, but history is broken by the distance of time. Ralf Rothmann has lived in Berlin for 30 years, which is as far away as puberty. He tells succinctly and at the same time with a smiling look back. "
- “This also explains style breaks. 'Well then', says the father, 'it works', or: 'This is a flop'. Nobody spoke like that in the 1960s. And if Julian says to his sister: 'I am not allowed to light the stove', then that would be implausible if you didn't hear the adult who helped shape your memory. "
- “Then there are insertions, two to three pages each, on which a man who goes about his work underground is reported in calm language. It's atmospheric, but nothing more. The details remain incomprehensible to the reader. You can tell about the life of a shepherd in the Alps, but there is no recognition of the man underground, and ass leather and tacky box remain a minor matter in a story that does without such folklore. "
- “The novel is big in the little things. The boy who turns up the radio because he knows that his mother will hit him and he will scream. The girl who speaks in a childlike clear voice as soon as she turns to adults. The homeowner who lasciviously chases Julian: It's tight and real and told so quietly, as if it had hardly been noticed. Or known for a long time. "
Movie
The Ruhr area film Young Light by Adolf Winkelmann was shot in 2015 on original locations in Bottrop, Bochum, Marl and Dortmund. Charly Hübner , Peter Lohmeyer and Nina Petri are among the main actors. The soundtrack comes from the musician Tommy Finke. It started on May 12, 2016 at the Church Film Festival in Recklinghausen. The film received the main prize at the Recklinghausen Church Film Festival in 2016 .
literature
- Ralf Rothmann: Young light . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-41640-5 .
Web links
- Young light in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ quoted from: buecher.de ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ quoted from lyrikwelt.de ( memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , there also more reviews
- ^ "Young light" by Adolf Winkelmann - NRW-Studios WDR. In: www1.wdr.de. March 2, 2015, archived from the original on January 11, 2016 ; accessed on February 16, 2016 .
- ↑ Press release from the city of Dortmund. In: dortmund.de. February 1, 2016, accessed March 4, 2016 .
- ↑ Young Light - Film 2016 - moviepilot.de. In: moviepilot.de. May 12, 2016, accessed February 16, 2016 .
- ↑ Official website
