Child of all countries

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Kind of all countries is an exile novel by Irmgard Keun , which was published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1938 .

The little first-person narrator Kully, the pre-pubescent emigrant child from the Rhineland, defines and inspects the pre-war world from 1936 to 1938 in Lviv , Salzburg, Prague, Ostend , Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, San Remo , Nice and New York. Kully's narrative tone is consistently full of stunning comedy , unsophisticated and therefore so close.

action

Kully and her parents - that is Peter and the 30 year old Anni - had to flee from Frankfurt am Main before Hitler . Kully's maternal grandmother lives in Cologne. So the narrator can “mainly Kölsch ”. Kully's father, a writer who also writes for newspapers, now receives almost all of his income from Amsterdam. The books don't sell well. In the constant hunt for cash, his father drove to Eastern Europe. On his adventurous, mostly unsuccessful procurement tours, he leaves his wife and daughter in Belgium or Holland for security reasons. The novel is about 1938. Although - as I said - Kully is sometimes not allowed to travel with her father, she knows how to tell vividly how things went, for example, in Lemberg during their earlier stay together. While Kully and his mother are waiting freezing for their father in Brussels - the three winter coats are hanging in the Salzburg pawn shop - the writing child overlooks world politics: the Germans have occupied Vienna .

Kully doesn't say a bad word about her reckless father, the gambler, habit drunkard, and immoderate spendthrift. Nevertheless, one fatherly escapade after the other becomes known from the story. For example, the father gives the mother detailed stage directions, according to which she and Kully should beg the Amsterdam publisher for further advance payments for the unfinished novel. The kind-hearted publisher partially responds to this, but does not want to finance his father's bigamy as well. In Lemberg, he consoles the married Manja, who is something of a relative. Kully would like to finish the novel herself.

Life in the hotel is exhausting. The bill cannot be paid. Kully feels most comfortable on the train on the journey to the next hotel. Despite such adversities, things usually go on somehow in the current hotel. So the "old lift man" Kully lends money for a telegram to his father. The mother's illness must be reported in it. Kully is cut from exactly the same cloth as the frivolous father. On the way home from the post office, she buys two guinea pigs from a begging boy with the last of her money. One of them is pregnant. After the birth under the hotel room cupboard, the entire rodent family is removed from the room by the rigorous management, much to Kully's chagrin. In response to the telegram, the father arrives in Benelux and has several Polish and Czech emigrants in tow. There are always difficulties with the visa. The father is now illegally in Holland. The mother is pregnant. Despite being away for weeks, the father knows of her affairs with a French coffin manufacturer and a Dutch romantic. The German threat is omnipresent. At night in Amsterdam someone sings the Horst Wessel song on the street . The grandmother travels from Cologne and takes in the mother and Kully in their holiday home in Bordighera , near San Remo. The grandmother has “strength in her eyes” when she scolds Kully's father, but the old lady is afraid of Hitler. There in Italy the mother can handle money just as badly as the rest of the family. She has her cash stolen from her by a dentist from Cologne. In Italy, Kully finds more Germans than Italians. So she can't learn Italian, but Berlinisch .

The only bright spot is the US visa that the father got hold of for the small family. The trip to the United States was overshadowed by an incident. On the train journey from Nice to the ship in Rotterdam , the worried father leaves the sick, pregnant mother in Amsterdam in the care of the publisher, and she promptly misses the ship. Father and daughter have to set sail alone. The business with Metro Goldwyn is too tempting. The mother doesn’t travel because she makes a living from selling the boat ticket. Big business won't happen in the US. Father can't help it - he's giving away the last few dollars to poor emigrants. Kully has to travel to Europe alone to get her mother. Because the father sold a few stories to newspapers in New York. However, he can't make a living over in America. At the end of the novel, the small family sees themselves reunited in Amsterdam. The father wants to be there when Europe goes under.

Definitions

What is striking is the astonishing strength of the narrator in any infallible determination of position as the basis for more in-depth “assessments”.

  • According to Kully, beautiful flowers bloom in Amsterdam “on royal orders”.
  • Kully's definition of the light-flooded Mediterranean world: "The sky" is "three times as big and as high as anywhere else ...".
  • Kully's father, who is constantly looking for money, usually doesn't get any. Clearly, Kully defines the rich as potential donors: rich never give money; "That's what makes her so rich".
  • "Berlinisch is a different German than Kölnisch".
  • After Kully, England consists to a considerable extent of golf courses.
  • “American national lemonade” tastes “like brown, liquid moth powder”.
  • “Washington” is “not a city, but a cake made of sugar and white foam”.

reception

At first glance, Blume examines Kully's view of the mother, but it also provides apt assessments of the novel.

  • The prevailing moods in the novel are sadness and melancholy .
  • Kully's father is reminiscent of Joseph Roth , Irmgard Keun's partner in those years.
  • Kully is "a ten year old girl who experiences the breaking of tradition and homelessness as a very physical experience".

Inconsistent

At Kully the annexation of Austria by Germany takes place twice - once when she is waiting for her father in Brussels and then again when Nice celebrates Carnival and the confetti afterwards "gushes" out of the narrator.

literature

source
Secondary literature
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 331.
  • Gesche Blume: Irmgard Keun. Writing in a game with modernity. (= Work on modern German literature. Volume 23). Dissertation. Dresden 2005, ISBN 3-937672-38-9 .
  • Liane Schüller: Irmgard Keun: Kind of all countries (1938). A life on the go. In: Jana Mikota, Dieter Wrobel (Ed.): Flucht-Literatur. Texts for the classroom. Volume 1, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2017, ISBN 978-3-8340-1693-5 , pp. 120-126.
  • Liane Schüller: Everything is a secret under the stones. Children's figures from Irmgard Keun. In: Gregor Ackermann, Walter Delabar (ed.): Writing women. A chart in the early 20th century. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-89528-857-9 , pp. 311–326.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Blume p. 207.
  2. ↑ Blume p. 95, 10th Zvu
  3. ↑ Source p. 62, 4th Zvu
  4. ↑ Source p. 140, 8. Zvo
  5. ↑ Source p. 140, 1st Zvu
  6. ↑ Source p. 146, 13. Zvo
  7. ↑ Source p. 174.
  8. ↑ Source p. 193, 7. Zvo
  9. ↑ Source p. 208, 11. Zvu
  10. ↑ Blume pp. 95-104.
  11. ↑ Blume p. 98.
  12. ↑ Blume p. 100.
  13. ↑ Blume p. 103, 15th line vo
  14. ↑ Source p. 46, 10th line from
  15. ↑ Source p. 154, 7th line above