Cocaine (novel)

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Kokain (Italian original title: Cocaina ) is a 1922 novel by the Italian writer and journalist Pitigrilli .

action

The main character, Tito Arnaudi, falls in love with a middle-class girl who is kept under strict discipline by her parents. In order to prevent the beginning affair, the parents send Maddalena to an educational institution. Desperate, Tito travels to Paris after having printed business cards pretending to be a doctor and professor. There he got in touch with journalistic circles and made friends with people who introduced him to the demi-world and drug scene of Paris, in which the upper class bourgeoisie frequented. Initially still critically distant, he gets more and more involved with cocaine and eventually becomes dependent on it. In Paris he meets Maddalena again, who now calls herself Maud and has become a glamorous cocotte . Tito has a relationship with both her and Kalantan, the widow of an oil magnate , whose death he is complicit in and whom he met at an orgy . He is professionally successful with completely fictitious, sensational false reports in his articles. He commutes sexually between Kalantan and Maud until he falls in love with Maud, even though or perhaps because she is getting fat and unattractive. This is because she had her ovaries removed so she couldn't get pregnant. Tito steals from Kalantan and accompanies Maud to South America, where both of them live on the stolen gold. Since Tito cannot stand Maud's constant infidelity, he leaves her, but later returns to her. Meanwhile he argues about life, especially about sexuality and the relationship between the sexes. In the end he is tired of life. He stole a serum containing deadly bacilli from a doctor friend of his, and poisoned himself with it. His body is taken to the crematorium in a grotesque funeral procession and cremated. Maud, who has vowed not to take any more men after him, soon afterwards agrees to meet Tito's best friend for an erotic rendezvous.

Topic and effect

The novel, considered Pitigrilli's most important work, caused a literary scandal when it was published. He became famous and notorious above all for his drastic, but not only negative, portrayal of the consequences of cocaine consumption, the cynical description of love and sexuality and social conditions in general. He describes a decadent world in which nothing and nobody is important anymore and only drugs, the superficial beauty and luxury are valid. Love and life are presented as a purely biological function, in which nature asserts itself under the guise of ideals that man has created for the purpose of reproduction.

The novel was classified as junk and dirty literature in Germany on July 18, 1933 . On the basis of this decision, the Federal Testing Office for Writings Harmful to Young People (BPjS) indexed the novel in 1954; the administrative court in Cologne confirmed this decision, since the book is suitable to "sexually arouse the imagination of young people in an unhealthy way". In 1988 the BPjS again issued an indexing against which the Rowohlt Verlag successfully defended itself .

In 2004 the director Frank Castorf staged cocaine as a play at the Berlin Volksbühne ; the stage design was created by artist Jonathan Meese .

expenditure

  • Cocaina: romanzo. Sonzogno, Milan 1921 (original edition)
  • Cocaine. Novel. Authorized translation from Italian by Maria Gagliardi. Eden Verlag, Berlin 1927 (German first edition)
  • Cocaine. Novel. Translated from the Italian by Maria Gagliardi. With a preface and an afterword by Peter Weibel . Matthes and Seitz, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-88221-308-6
  • Cocaine. Novel. Edited edition of the translation from the Italian by Maria Gagliardi (= rororo. 12225). Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988, ISBN 3-499-12225-1 ; (= rororo. 23233) ibid. 2002, ISBN 3-499-23233-2

literature

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Andreas Conrad: Cocaine in Berlin (Part 4): The crash into purple nothing . In: Der Tagesspiegel . October 31, 2000
  2. ↑ Popular existence endangered . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1988, pp. 230 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Dirt & trash . In: The time . No. 39, September 23, 1988
  4. ↑ Paul Stänner: Tarzan was not chaste enough. 50 years of the Federal Testing Office for Media Harmful to Young People . In: DeutschlandRadio Berlin . May 16, 2004 (RTF)
  5. ↑ Peter Hans Göpfert: The snow of today . In: Berliner Morgenpost . February 2, 2004
  6. ↑ Robin Detje : Theater: Djangotts blood bath . In: The time . No. 7, February 5, 2004