Children's wedding
Children's wedding is a novel by Adolf Muschg . The first edition was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2008 , and a paperback edition followed in 2009.
content
A prologue tells how a wealthy industrial heiress is found shot dead in her city apartment. What seems like the prelude to a crime story, however, is only the anticipation of a development that will be told after this prologue.
The main location of the action is the fictional town of Nieburg on both sides of the Rhine , which bears a certain resemblance to Rheinfelden . There have been close economic ties between the Baden and Swiss sides of the city for decades. Its development, especially in the Third Reich, interests the 40-year-old Swiss historian and Achim Tobler researcher Klaus Marbach, who collaborated on the Bergier report published in 2002 and now wants to investigate the history of the Bühler-Weiland family company in Nieburg. This aluminum company is the most important employer and financier in the region and thus controls the entire city.
Marbach first visits the company's heiress, Constanze Bühler-Weiland, in 2003 on the last day of her life in her chalet in Visperterminen . She tells him about the beginnings and the history of the company and gives him a stenographic notebook from her father Christoph Bühler from 1923, in which he was already in contact with Hitler , and the original of a newspaper photo from 1949, due to Marbach's interest was awakened: It shows a children's parade on May 1st, at which the wedding from Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale The Cold Heart was depicted. The main characters were all born in 1940 and attended the same school class. Constanze Bühler-Weiland's daughter Imogen has taken on the role of bride . She only accepted the Silesian refugee child Iring Selber as a bridegroom; the sons of notables who surround them in the picture have been given supporting roles.
When Marbach later visits the individual participants in this parade, he finds out that these gentlemen, all of them, have been in love with Imogen since they were children and are still dependent on him today. A foundation for the improvement of Nieburg, from which they all benefit, was generously financed by Imogen's mother. Iring Selber, an outsider even as a child, whom Imogen actually married later, has always remained an enemy for this group.
Marbach is introduced to this group after he introduced himself to his daughter and heir Imogen after Mrs. Bühler-Weiland's funeral, who immediately took an interest in him. She gives him an apartment in the coach house of her villa on the Rhine so that he can do his research from there, and she first sets off on trips herself so that he can think about the use of her inheritance without being disturbed. Marbach soon realizes that several members of the circle before him, who were already gathered in the childhood photo, had already lived in this refuge and possibly maintained closer relationships with Imogen. When he gets to know the gentlemen better, it turns out that all of them have not founded their own families, but are still fixated on Imogen. At the moment, however, they are concerned about the continued existence of the foundation. They try to win Klaus, who is much younger and more attractive than they are and who immediately made an impression on Imogen, for their interests: He should persuade Imogen not to give up the foundation. After some thought, Marbach refuses this order.
His search finally focuses on Iring Selber, to whom Imogen is still married, but from whom she lives separately and whose whereabouts are unclear. Selber launched a self-discovery bestseller in the 1970s. After leading an obscure seminar in Berlin for years that Imogen financed under an alias, he suddenly disappeared. A cryptic message that Marbach receives finally shows him the way to Görlitz . There he comes into contact with the former GDR citizen Balthasar Nicht, who puts him on Selber's trail: the man is in the footsteps of Adolf Traugott von Gersdorff , Jacob Boehmes and Quirinus Kuhlmann , but also probably looking for his own roots Görlitz came into contact there with the scientist nicht, who lives in the house of the former mayor and alchemist Gregor Gobius , and finally, after suffering a stroke in a cemetery, was admitted to the Johanniter hospital. Since Selber traveled without papers and had also adopted the code name Dimitrij Kuhlmann, he could not be identified by the staff at first. Completely paralyzed and unable to speak, he was cared for in the hospital by a Greek woman named Frini, who read to him, the former model student, from the Odyssey and addressed him as "Uti". Marbach recognizes in it the ancient Greek word Οὔτις (nobody, nobody), which Odysseus used in the cave of Polyphemus as a protective pseudonym . Frini and Constanze Weiland-Selber's Indian adoptive daughter Judith, who belongs to an obscure sect, finally took the apparently apallic patient with them from the hospital to Herrnhut , where the sect has settled. There he is worshiped as a kind of god under the name of David. Judith, who claims to be able to feel what he wants to say by his pulse rate, now uses him as a mouthpiece for her messages, but Frini, who has developed a spelling table for herself and can translate the signals he winked with her left eyelid, writes completely different Texts according to his dictation and does not send them to Balthasar. His death is already in sight.
Balthasar Nicht, who is acquainted with Gunther von Hagens , learns that Iring Selber is to be plastinated after his death and to be placed on the sect's altar. Together with Klaus Marbach and covered by Imogen admirer Emil Isele, who has embarked on a police career, he kidnaps the body in a refrigerator truck and takes it to Nieburg, where it is to be cremated. Imogen Selber-Weiland wants the ashes to be deposited in the Quirinus Cave, where Iring was once tortured by his schoolmates.
Imogen Selber-Weiland sought legal help from Klaus Marbach's wife Manon de Montmollin to clarify her estate questions. The latter finally worked out a will, according to which the Bühler inheritance is to be donated to a good cause, namely the care of war orphans. Manon broke up with Klaus at the beginning of 2003 after falling in love with a woman. The divorce has been prepared but not finalized and the couple have not been in contact for months.
At the same time, Imogen Selber-Weiland approached the attractive Klaus - and, as she wrote to Manon and the responsible authorities, asked him to shoot her in her apartment after she had burned part of her inheritance and pretended to to suffer from an incurable disease. Klaus also complied with the request for assistance in suicide. Manon later reveals to him that Imogen Selber-Weiland corrected her will at the last moment and awarded her entire inheritance to Klaus. However, the latter does not want to know anything about it and destroys the last version of the will.
Various theories about this case are immediately put forward in the press. Among other things, the Marbach-de Montmollin couple are accused of deliberately approaching Imogen Selber-Weiland and thus acquiring the inheritance - the will is not yet known to the public at this time. In fact, Imogen Selber-Weiland's death reunites Klaus and Manon. Klaus explains to Manon that he has been commissioned to deposit Imogen's ashes in God Tamangur and that he wants to do so now, in the middle of winter. Then he wanted to meet again in Müstair with Manon, who was to drive him to the mountains .
In Müstair, after Klaus set off on his mission on snowshoes, Manon uses a hiking map to find out that his company is more than risky. Nevertheless, as he planned for her, she still visits the Benedictine convent of St. Johann . In front of the portrait of Saint Catherine or Hypatia , she meets Balthasar Not. He has withdrawn to Müstair in order to be clear about whether he should marry Frini, who is supposedly expecting a child from Iring Selber. He proves to be of great help when Manon panics about Klaus' absence and wants to go blindly to look for him.
Professional search teams who are finally sent out finally find Klaus' equipment in God Tamangur, as well as a buried urn which, however, does not contain ashes, but Christoph Bühler's notebook from 1923. Klaus Marbach has a few pages, who also had his in the summer on the Nieburger industrial history and its amalgamation with Nazi Germany destroyed records made illegible. There is no trace of Klaus Marbach himself, he will never be found.
Five years later, Judith has built a global empire. The old men, who once gathered around Imogen Selber-Weiland, made a career under her leadership.
reception
Critics often noted that in the plethora of storylines and literary allusions - in addition to the ones already mentioned, the work includes numerous Sophocles quotes, reflections on William Shakespeare's play Cymbeline , biblical reminiscences and reflections on Las Meninas - the reader gets lost can.
The decision not to resolve the mysterious disappearance of Marbach and other puzzles causes Eva Pfister, for example, to feel uneasy : “Adolf Muschg's new novel is full of episodes that are very exciting to read, but repeatedly lead to nothing dramaturgically. While reading, one sighs in agreement when one encounters the Kantian definition of the joke: It is 'the dissolution of a tense expectation into nothingness'. Seen in this way, the novel is full of wit - as if the author's thrilling plot had repeatedly slipped away. "
Muschg himself stated that one of the starting points for him was the narcissistic offense that the Bergier report had triggered in Switzerland. He asked himself what would have been probable on both sides of the Rhine, and where the evil came from. A second important motive for him was the love affair between an older woman and a younger man. At first he could not foresee the religious dimension of the book.
Hermann Schlösser was impressed by the book: Although “it remains unclear until the end what is really being searched for here” , one should use the sentence “Those who find, did not search properly” when reading the “completely strange book in the Keep sense ” . Schlösser comes to the conclusion: "None of this is easy to read, but it offers dreamy people the opportunity to get lost for a while in a confusing text area."
Andreas Isenschmid put the focus of his reflections in the NZZ on the fatherlessness of the main characters of the novel and on the genealogical interrelationships and questions developed from it. Children's weddings , he says, “amounts to an expedition into the deepest psychological labyrinths and to climbing the highest religious heights.” He protests against considering the book as a failure only because of the questions it leaves open: “Even mysterious books have their place in literary history. And they deserve it if they are written in such a compellingly beautiful language as this; but above all: if their secrets also deserve the name secret. Real secrets can't just be confusion - that would be the author's inability. And they must not disappear when they understand, like a brain teaser after they have been solved - that would only be riddles. "
“You don't have to grasp real secrets, but you have to seize them. This is exactly what happens to Muschg's characters. "
Burkhard Müller , of the novel on 24 February 2009 in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung -reviewed, and Dieter Borchmeyer from which the time a review on 27 November 2008 on children's wedding appeared, seem to have been less enthusiastic. Martin Ebel also wrote in the Berner Zeitung that Muschg had said "unfortunately too much" here .
The work was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize.
output
- Adolf Muschg: Children's wedding. Roman (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 4123). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-46123-5 .
literature
- Hans-Bernd Bunte: Antikratos' smile. Myth, love and death in Adolf Muschg's novel “Children's Wedding”. Tectum, Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8288-3070-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendung/buechermarkt/891446/
- ↑ http://wienerzeitung.at/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3950&Alias=wzo&cob=391929&Page12024=14 ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ A mysterious skill. In: nzz.ch. September 20, 2008, accessed October 14, 2018 .
- ↑ http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/30365.html
- ^ New Muschg novel: Complicated Scavenger Hunt , Berner Zeitung, September 13, 2008
- ↑ http://www.badische-zeitung.de/rheinfelden/das-adelt-schon-ein-wenig--6168701.html
