Lies in times of war

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Lies in Times of War (English original title: Wartime Lies ) is a novel by the American writer Louis Begley . It appeared as the literary debut of the 57-year-old Begley in 1991 with the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf and was subsequently awarded numerous prizes, including the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award and the Prix ​​Médicis étranger . In 1994 Suhrkamp Verlag published the German translation by Christa Krüger, which received the Jeanette Schocken Prize .

The first-person narrator of the novel is a Polish-Jewish boy named Maciek, who experienced the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland from 1937 to 1944 . He has to hide at the side of his aunt and constantly invent new camouflages in order not to be recognized as a Jew and to survive the Second World War . The experiences shape the further life of the narrator. Begley, who himself comes from Poland, processed his own experiences of the Holocaust in the novel .

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Maciek was born in 1933 in the eastern Polish city of T. After his mother's death, he is raised by his father, a respected doctor, and his aunt Tanja. With the annexation of Austria and the approaching threat from Hitler's Germany , the first shadows fall on his sheltered childhood in the Jewish family. The German attack on Poland drives the grandparents into the Soviet occupied T. With the attack on the Soviet Union , German troops move into T. and confiscate their house. While Maciek's father is evacuated to the Soviet Union as a doctor, Maciek, his aunt and grandparents stay behind in T. and experience the first anti-Jewish attacks. It is now up to Tanja to ensure the survival of the family by getting on well with influential people, first with the lawyer Bern, who is active in the Judenrat , and later with the German officer Reinhard, who hides her in his apartment. When he is discovered, he kills himself and Maciek's grandmother. Maciek and his aunt go into hiding and hide in various shabby quarters full of vermin.

With false papers obtained for them by an underground Jew named Hertz, they arrive as mother and son in Warsaw in 1943 , where they track down their grandfather and see from a distance how the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto is put down. In constant fear of exposure, they try to win over the widow Pani Dumont, with whom they have moved in to sublet, with a web of lies. Tanja pretends to be a Catholic doctor's widow, while Maciek attends catechism classes and receives first communion with agony of conscience . When the Warsaw Uprising was put down in October 1944 , the occupiers took revenge with brutal reprisals against the civilian population. Again it is Tanja's presence of mind that saves them both. While she first disguises herself as an old woman in order to avoid the rape, on the day of the threatened deportation to Auschwitz she slips into the role of a doctor widow who was accustomed to the rule and who only happened to get onto the deportees' trek. She convinces a German officer at the station to let them change to a train to R., which they leave halfway.

Tanja and Maciek spend the next few months in the Polish village of Piasowe, which is so far off the beaten track that no news from Warsaw can get here. The farmers are neither aware of the ban on sheltering refugees, nor of the possibility of blackmailing them. Maciek tends the cows and plays with the village youth, while Tanja enters the trade in black- distilled vodka (so-called “bimber”). After receiving news of his grandfather's whereabouts, Tanja goes in search of him, but returns with the devastating news that he was betrayed and murdered. When she defends herself against the intrusions of the wholesaler Pan Nowak, they are no longer safe in Piasowe either and flee to Kielce , where they experience the liberation by the Red Army in January 1945 .

Even after the end of the Second World War, Maciek retained his non-Jewish cover identity. Anti-Semitic pogroms such as the Kielce pogrom also occur in liberated Poland , but Tanja and Maciek have learned their lesson and are adapting. They now live in Krakow , where their father is returning with a new wife from Russia. Son and father cannot talk to each other about the war years. Maciek has his first friend at high school, who protects him, but the friendship cannot last, because Maciek will always remain untraceable under the false name. At 50, the man who was once Maciek cannot bear the memory of his childhood, and he still suffers from the shame of having survived.

Background and history

The novel Lies in Times of War is based on the childhood memories of Louis Begley, who - at that time still under his maiden name Ludwik Begleiter - experienced the war and the persecution of the Jews in Poland and only survived through fortunate coincidences before he and his family in 1947 at the age of 13 the USA emigrated. However, Begley himself repeatedly emphasized the novel character of the book, which is not an autobiography , as in his fundamental essay Who the Novelist Really Is (German: Who is the novelist in reality? ) In the New York Times . His memories of the period from 1941 to 1944, which he spent at his mother's side in constantly changing hiding places, are only sporadically and exclusively restricted to interiors. The time gap of half a century blurred and changed his memories, but he made it possible to come to terms with his childhood in the first place. In it he reminds Christa Krüger of the narrator of the novel: "He had a childhood that he cannot bear to remember, he had to invent one."

Begley, who made a career as a lawyer in the United States, said he hadn't written a story since college. However, he kept making up stories on his way to work. After all, one day he spontaneously bought a laptop, took a three-month “training leave” and wrote a story that had long since taken shape in his head: “I was long finished with my story, I had analyzed it for a long time and everyone looked at it Pages". From August 1, 1989, he worked on the novel for a good three months, first in Long Island , later in Venice and Seville . Friends and acquaintances encouraged him to publish the finished novel. His wife's agent Anka Muhlstein put him in touch with the renowned Alfred A. Knopf publishing house , where he was edited by Elisabeth Sifton. The novel was published by Suhrkamp in 1991 in the United States and three years later in Germany. Begley's encounter with the publisher Siegfried Unseld resulted in a long-term friendship.

After the success of lies in times of war , critics and readers awaited more novels on the subject of the Holocaust. Begley countered this: “Can one expect that an author who once processed experiences with the Holocaust, such as he had as a child of seven to eleven, in a novel, would henceforth remain attached to this subject? [...] I don't think so. ”As a writer, he always draws from his own experiences. According to Christa Krüger, his later novels are more like “testimonies to the assimilation of an immigrant”. Its protagonists, who belong to the upper class on the American east coast, have to deal with humiliation, self-deception and lies, just like the melancholy narrator from Begley's debut. The author described in an epilogue to the novel from 2004: “The fact that I tried to be fundamentally honest in lies in times of war applies not only to this one, but to all of my novels. It has always been my goal, out of aesthetic, if not for moral reasons. [...] I had a story to tell that wasn't a lie. "

reception

After its publication in 1991, Wartime Lies was discussed in all the major American features and hailed as a “literary sensation”. The New York Times included the novel in its list of the ten most important books of the year. The novel received the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award and The Irish Times - Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize . The French translation was awarded the Prix ​​Médicis étranger in 1992 . In terms of content, most of the reviews focused on the author and his 40 years of silence about the story of his childhood. Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times praised the child's perspective, which offered "an unexpected new perspective" on the horrors of the Holocaust. Janet Malcolm emphasized in the New York Review of Books the "restrained, almost speechless tone" of Begley, which appeared "as if the words wanted to get stuck in his throat". Stanley Kubrick planned a film adaptation under the title Aryan Papers , but gave up the project after the publication of Schindler's List .

The German translation was awarded the Jeanette Schocken Prize in 1995. Gert Heidenreich praised in the laudation: "The book does not argue, it convinces through the power of visualizing a survival strategy." It shows how strong the destruction is after survival. Leon de Winter accused Begley of the fact that no "dividing line between fiction and reality" was recognizable. In times of war , for example, lying is a "heartbreaking book", but "with means that range from the greatest reduction to shameless showmanship". Paul Ingendaay, on the other hand, justified: “Survival through lies may enter the realm of literary fiction”. With his novel, the author did not write free of his past, but "exposed himself beyond recognition" in the style of Max Frisch . Ruth Klüger summed up: "The excavation of the buried childhood and its utilization in an 'invention' has evidently brought to light a first-class novelist".

A review on the television program Das Literäre Quartett in August 1994 also contributed to the sales success of the novel in the German-speaking world . From Marcel Reich-Ranicki Begley was praised as a "conscientious rapporteur" and "sober chronicler," the writing with the pen of a "spirited storyteller". As a result, the novel is “both at the same time and at once: a unique contemporary document and a moving novel.” The initial print run of 8,600 copies rose to 44,000 copies sold one month after the program was broadcast. The novel spent several months on the bestseller list of the mirror and reached in December 1994 ranked 6th

expenditure

  • Louis Begley: Wartime Lies . Alfred Knopf, New York 1991 ISBN 0-679-40016-8
  • Louis Begley: Lies in Times of War . From the American by Christa Krüger. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994 ISBN 3-518-40652-3

literature

  • Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 65-76.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Louis Begley: Who the Novelist Really Is . In: The New York Times, August 16, 1992.
  2. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 8, 17.
  3. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 46-48, 52.
  4. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 8-9, 54-55.
  5. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 48-49, 73-74.
  6. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , p. 74.
  7. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , p. 75.
  8. ↑ Leon de Winter : Shoah for the couch . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1995, p. 135-137 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 53-54.
  10. ↑ Ruth Klüger : The normality of lies . In: Die Zeit of October 7, 1994.
  11. ^ History of the Suhrkamp publishing house. July 1, 1950 to June 30, 1990. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-40319-2 , p. 258.
  12. ^ "The Literary Quartet" - the longstanding literary talk show on ZDF . In the series: Tele-Visions. TV history of Germany in West and East . Download from the Federal Agency for Civic Education .
  13. ↑ Fiction . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1994, pp. 216 ( online ).
  14. ↑ The cover design by Hermann Michels shows a photo by Joe Heydecker , on which a group of four street musicians is depicted in front of ruins, probably in Warsaw.