Leviathan (Arno Schmidt)

Leviathan or The Best of the Worlds is a story by the writer Arno Schmidt . Created in 1946, it first appeared in 1949 in the anthology Leviathan , together with the stories Enthymesis or WIEH and Gadir . The book was Schmidt's first literary publication.

The text begins with an editor's fiction: An introductory letter dated May 20, 1945 in English reveals that a notebook containing a soldier's booty is being sent to the United States and is the framework narrative . The notes turn out to be the diary of a German soldier, which he kept on a train journey in February 1945 from Lauban in Upper Lusatia to Görlitz towards the end of the Second World War and that of his pupil love Anne Wolf, whom he meets among the refugees, of the destruction of the War, the Nazi dictatorship and the evil of creation .

Threshold ripper ( Military Museum Belgrade )

About the process: Towards the end of the Second World War , a motley group of men, women and children, including a pastor with his family, Hitlerite boys and soldiers, succeeded in getting an abandoned locomotive with a freight wagon in motion in order to get out of it under heavy enemy fire lying town of Lauban to flee by rail. A defective sleeper breaker is coupled to the wagon, which destroys the track structure behind them. The main part of the story is made up of the observations of this disagreed group, which is shrinking due to deaths, and some conversations - especially between the first-person narrator and an aged postman - about the insanity of the enterprise. The recordings end when the protagonist finds himself alone on the very high viaduct over the Neisse , which he has long secretly adored, but has now found again, alone on the very high viaduct over the Neisse , throwing the recordings into the abyss and with her on the fatal leap prepared down.

The role model for Anne Wolf, the young lover of the first-person narrator, is a student at the Görlitzer Lyceum , Hanne Wulff, for whom Arno Schmidt raved as a student driver. Her figure also provided the template for the Primanerin Katherine, with the narrator in From the Life of a Faun is received (1953) an affair, even in List's Dream (1970) it comes in the form of a dirty joke before: "Hah: ne vulva ".

Railway viaduct over the Neisse

This narrative text is not just about a radical confrontation with National Socialism and militarism . The diary writer's cosmological considerations on a multi-dimensional universe are also inserted into the plot , the understanding of which is closed to people reduced to their spatial three-dimensionality. Against this background, the notator also discusses the theodicy problem: In view of the diversity of human suffering, he comes to a radical criticism of the church and faith and not only rejects the hope of the work of a good God, but also leads (analogous to earlier attempts at proofs of God and following on from this Schopenhauer's concept of the “ world as will ”) is a veritable “ evidence of the devil ”: He states a malevolent chaos power dominating the world, embodied by the Leviathan: “We ourselves are part of it.”

effect

For the story “Leviathan or The Best of the Worlds”, Arno Schmidt received the great Academy Prize for Literature from the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature from the hand of Alfred Döblin, whom he admired .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinz Jerofsky: Memories of Arno Schmidt . In: Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Bernd Rauschenbach (eds.): “Wu Hi?”. Arno Schmidt in Görlitz Lauban Greiffenberg . Edition of the Arno Schmidt Foundation by Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1986, p. 36 f. and 48; Wolfgang Albrecht: Arno Schmidt . JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1998, p. 22 f.
2. ↑ Tilman Spreckelsen, “Like the windows of burning madhouses” , Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, No. 17, May 1, 2005, p. 13
3. ↑ Lars Clausen , Axiomatic in Arno Schmidt's World Model , in: Hefte zur Forschung der Arno Schmidt Stiftung , 1992, no. 1, pp. 53–63