M. Blecher

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M. Blecher (born as Max Blecher , September 8, 1909 in Botoșani , Kingdom of Romania ; died May 31, 1938 in Roman ) was a Jewish-Romanian writer who wrested a narrow but weighty work from his serious illness. The effects of the National Socialist rule in half of Europe pushed his books into oblivion and only led to rediscovery decades after his death.

Life

Blecher's first name is in the dark. Carmina Peter gave the last word on this in her dissertation submitted in 2014, according to which his name is Max. The German National Library specifies three forms of referral: Mihail, Marcel and Max. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit, on the other hand, decided that he had “Max L. Blecher "was called. According to the source work of the translator and rediscoverer Ernest Wichner , it is certain that the young Romanian did not like his first name, but did occasionally sign letters with Max or Marcel. He published all of his books exclusively under the self-chosen author name M. Blecher.

The factory owner's son went to Paris at the age of 19 to begin studying medicine. It was soon discovered that he suffered from bone tuberculosis . He was operated on in a sanatorium in France. While he was bedridden, he wrote poems and two autobiographical novels that deal with his observations and introspections . Later, on a trial basis, he was transferred to other sanatoriums in Switzerland and Romania. For years the patient spent his life lying down. His joints stiffened, the muscles dwindled. Around him, the often young patients died many times or had to suffer amputations. He meticulously recorded his own "losses" and those he had seen. Blecher died in 1938 and was not even 30 years old.

Effect and afterlife

What is special about Blecher's prose is its conciseness without illusions, its style, similar to Franz Kafka or Gottfried Benn, completely unsentimental. Blecher directed the “bright light of the mind” on the pain. The consequences and experiences in the personal relationship environment often weigh worse than the purely physical: the amputated leg of a former dancer means that she can no longer cover up or hide her condition from her lover.

In 2006, the Romanian-German author Herta Müller described Blecher's pictorial language as follows in her accompanying text: “Blecher's eroticism of perception always needs the comparison of one thing with another that was never thought possible.” There is also the intense desire for a woman and that Jealousy of her fiancé. Nevertheless, Blecher's Scarred Hearts is not a “ magic mountain ” à la Thomas Mann, despite the similar threats, desires and “horizontal life situation” .

The publication of his first novel Out of Immediate Unreality was enthusiastically received by Eugène Ionesco in 1937 . After that, his books were erased from memories in subsequent years under the Nazis and later under the Communists. The novel was republished in Romania in the early 1970s. A little later, in 1972, a translation into French, arranged by Maurice Nadeau , followed . The FAZ saw the book in 2004 "temporally and structurally" placed in a middle position between Henri Michaux ' Plume (1935) and Jean-Paul Sartre's La nausée (1938).

The book was first published in German in 1990. Since it was a small publisher, the Berlin “Edition Plasma”, it initially received little attention. It was not until 2003 that the new edition in the Suhrkamp library attracted greater attention and numerous discussions. In 2006 the second novel, Scarred Hearts , first published in Romania in 1937 and again in 1995, was published again by Suhrkamp. It was not until 2008 that the sanatorium diary followed there under the title Illuminated Cave , again translated into German by the same translator. The title is an allusive reference to Plato's allegory of the cave . Only the volume of poetry Corp transparent from 1934 and the letters and short prose are still missing from a German edition. In Bucharest the Collected Works were published in 1999 and the complete correspondence in 2000. Blecher conducted extensive correspondence with numerous French and Romanian intellectuals of the time.

Despite efforts to establish a museum in the house where he was born in Roman, Roman city council allowed it to be demolished in July 2013.

In 2016, the novel Scarred Hearts served as the template for the film Scarred Hearts by director Radu Jude , which premiered on August 7, 2016 at the Locarno International Film Festival.

literature

  • Lucia Gorgoi: The problem of fear in Franz Kafka and M. Blecher In: Jura Soyfer (magazine of the Romanian Germanist Association) No. 2/1997
  • Doris Mironescu: Viaţa lui M. Blecher. Impotriva biography i . Ed. Timpul, Iaşi 2011. ISBN 978-973-612417-4 .
  • Carmina Peter: Literature in the context of phenomenological perception theory: M. Blechers Poetics of feeling . Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016 ISBN 9783110496727 Dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Deutschlandfunk book market from February 25, 2009: “Fall into Nothing” review of Illuminated Cave. Sanatorium diary
  2. ↑ Carmina Peter: Literature in the context of phenomenological perception theory , 2016, p. 2
  3. ↑ a b Die Zeit from May 18, 2006: Review of M. Blecher's novel “Scarred Hearts”, book “is a discovery - and already a classic fresh from youth”
  4. ↑ a b Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from April 16, 2006, page 28: A volatile glued person. Almost seventy years after his death, M. Blecher's novels appear in German
  5. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 22, 2006: A milky glow: "Scarred hearts": M. Blecher's novel from the death zone
  6. ↑ a b FAZ of February 3, 2004: My skin like a sieve. A journey of discovery under the skull: M. Blecher's enormous prose
  7. ^ Markus Bauer: A cultural outrage. In the Romanian city of Roman, M. Blecher's house was demolished - it was one of the greats in world literature . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (international edition) of July 30, 2013, p. 22.
  8. ↑ http://www.soyfer.at/zs/97_2.htm
personal data
SURNAME Blecher, M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Max L. Blecher (speculative)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish-Romanian writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Botoșani
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 1938
Place of death novel