Maigret and the shadow play

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Maigret and the shadow play (French: L'Ombre chinoise ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It belongs to the first season of 19 novels of a total of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective inspector Maigret . The novel was written in Cap d'Antibes in December 1931 and was published a month later, in January 1932, by the Paris publisher Fayard . The first German translation Maigret and the shadow at the window by Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1959. In 1982 the Diogenes Verlag brought out a new translation by Claus Sprick under the title Maigret and the shadow play .

In the middle of the night, a concierge calls Commissioner Maigret to Place des Vosges , where the owner of a pharmaceutical drug laboratory was shot. The open safe suggests a robbery . But the attention of Commissioner Maigret is captured by the shadow play behind the illuminated windows of the house. He suspects that the perpetrator does not come from outside, and investigates in the personal environment of the deceased, in which there are three women and a son who got off the beaten track.

content

Place des Vosges in Paris
Backyard of Place des Vosges N ° 21

Paris , Place des Vosges 61 on a cold November night: Raymond Couchet, the owner of a pharmaceutical laboratory that produces the famous Dr. Rivières is found shot dead in his office in the back yard of the building. The upcoming salary payments of 360,000 francs are missing, the safe is open, but is locked by Couchet's corpse, so that Inspector Maigret quickly suspects that it is not a simple robbery, since the theft must have preceded the murder.

Couchet's lover Nine Moinard, a dancer from the Moulin Bleu cabaret , who lives on Place Pigalle and who had an appointment with Couchet for the evening, arrives at the crime scene . And several times the Martin couple draws attention to themselves from the second floor, who seem to be looking for something on the garbage cans in the courtyard. Juliette Martin was Couchet's first wife. During the marriage she complained about her husband's unsuccessfulness, eventually got divorced and married Edgar Émile Martin, a stiff clerk at the registry office who promised a better match with his pension. But while Martin proved to be listless and had no career, Juliette had to watch with envy how her ex-husband made millions with his pharmaceutical laboratory after the divorce. In order to prove to himself that he had arrived in the bourgeoisie , Couchet married the elegant Germaine Dormoy, with whom he lived on Boulevard Haussmann , without this preventing the well-established petty bourgeoisie from taking a simple friend, with whom he became more closely connected felt.

A will found benefits all three women in Couchet's life, Juliette, Germaine and Nine, in equal parts of the inheritance. Only Roger Couchet, the son from his first marriage, should not receive any money. He is a listless young man who is dependent on the narcotic ether and lives his life on Montmartre exclusively from his father's begging for money. Inevitably, the son is targeted by Maigret, who considers the drifter without an alibi as a thief of 360,000 francs. Roger committed suicide that same day by jumping out of his hotel window. Shortly afterwards, someone else, whom Commissioner Maigret had previously interrogated intensively, loses his nerve: Martin wants to take the train to Belgium with his suitcase packed, but is stopped by the Commissioner who has traveled with him shortly before the border crossing and shown back to his apartment.

It turns out that Martin's escape was only intended to divert suspicion from his wife. Martin was actually the thief of the 360,000 francs. But he only stole the money from the abandoned office on the instructions of Juliette, who had previously spied on her ex-husband's daily routine from her window. Martin turned out to be an unsuitable thief in two ways: he left a glove at the scene, and when he felt remorse, he threw the loot into his own . Juliette, who was watching her husband's faux pas, went to Couchet's office with a handgun to dispose of the glove. However, she was surprised by her returning ex-husband, who had to mistake her for the thief, and shot him. As she hid her pistol by the trash can, she watched her son, who, as so often, wanted to borrow money from his father. Roger rhymed the event, but remained silent about it until in the end he saw no other way out than either betraying his mother or taking the deed himself, a dilemma that he believed he could only escape by suicide . Juliette is also on the verge of psychological breakdown because her cowardly husband simply threw away the money, which was so much coveted and stolen with so many complications, because of burgeoning feelings of guilt. The fact that Couchet considered his first wife in his will despite her broken marriage turns out to be the last irony, because as a convicted murderer Juliette, who was always concerned only with her ex-husband's money, will not receive a centime from her.

interpretation

According to Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon draws in Maigret and the Shadow Play a "dark family drama" in which success (the rise of Raymond Couchet) and failure (in the person of the weaklings Martin and Roger Couchet) are juxtaposed. Joachim Campe sees this family drama presented using the means of analytical drama , in which the conflicts of the characters are reduced to their family and erotic relationships. Madame Martin's visit to the police station takes on the role of an exposition in which the two antagonists of the drama are set up. The following dialogue is shaped by Madame Martin's theatrics, while Maigret, unlike in classic tragedy , remains a cool observer who is not involved in the action. The opposite pole to the “anti-family” presented is Madame Maigret and her Alsatian relatives who have traveled here, conveying that familiar warmth that was not noticeable between the Couchets and Martins throughout the novel.

Tilman Spreckelsen sums up the novel: “A murdered factory owner leaves three widows: the wife, the ex-wife and the lover, who are now wrestling for the inheritance with alternating efforts.” According to Josef Quack, Maigret's sympathy belongs only to the woman who ends up will come away empty-handed, namely Beloved Nine. The three women formed a “psychology of the social classes ”. According to Joachim Campe, each of the women symbolizes a class : Madame Dormoy the upper middle class , Madame Martin the petty bourgeoisie and Nine the subculture . Simenon draws a static, impermeable image of society in which each figure remains in its ancestral milieu , from which it proves impossible to detach. Nine says at one point that she will never get any money, and Raymond Couchet, who is the only one who manages to break the barriers of milieu and class, does not feel at home in the upper class either. He cheats on his noble wife with a simple mistress, and social advancement almost inevitably takes revenge with his murder. None of the milieus presented, not even the life of the upper class, is presented as really worth striving for. The counterpoint to all forms of society are nature in Maigret's impressionistic considerations and the home of the commissioner in its cozy, petty-bourgeois immobility.

In Simenon's static social order, in which immobility is presented as the “decent”, according to Joachim Campe, Madame Martin's desire for social advancement is considered “abnormal”. Her motive does not arise from a social conflict, but from her very own psychological deformation, which is even genetically explained by the madness of an aunt. From this point of view, the desire for social advancement becomes an almost religious temptation that must be resisted. Its counterpart at the end of the novel is a kind of redemption of the perpetrator, which is already echoed at Couchet's funeral, when Maigret's conjectures about Madame Martin are answered with the Christian formula of redemption from evil (“Libera nos, Domine”). The “redemption” of the murderess consists in madness, the outbreak of which is described in the final chapter as a religious rapture. According to Campe, Simenon transfers a concrete social conflict to a metaphysical , as it were "eternal" level.

background

Front of Simenon's former home, Place des Vosges N ° 21

Maigret and the shadow play is one of the few cases from the period of the first 19 Maigret novels that actually play Commissioner Maigrets in the formal area of ​​responsibility, namely in the French metropolis of Paris. With the Place des Vosges , Simenon chose a familiar place where he himself lived between 1924 and 1929. The house number 61 mentioned in the novel does not exist; the square is surrounded by only 36 residential buildings. Details such as the street names in the area indicate that Simenon set the scene at the site of his former apartment in house N ° 21. At the time, the Hoffmann-La Roche company also operated a pharmaceutical laboratory in the courtyard .

The German publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch won several well-known German-language writers for its translations of the Maigret series in the 1950s. In 1955, for example, Paul Celan translated the novels Hier errt Maigret and Maigret and the terrible children into German. L'Ombre chinoise in 1959 by the Austrians Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann as Maigret and the shadow at the window translated. According to Tom Appleton, the two authors made fun of getting Commissioner Maigret from Paris to Vienna . Although the translation was ostensibly written in standard German , traces of an Austrian tongue as well as elements of Yiddish , Polish , Hungarian , Czech and Romanian were secretly woven into it, without this being noticed by the Cologne publishers' editors. After the license was transferred to Diogenes Verlag , Claus Sprick re- translated the novel under the now familiar title Maigret und das Schattenspiel .

reception

The New York Times summarized the novel in 1964: “Maigret works against the backdrop of respectable middle-class apartments, a cheap cabaret and a shabby hotel on Place Pigalle, all of which are vividly described to solve a robbery that is an unusually well-characterized killer unmasked. "Tilman Spreckelsen described a" depressing novel "with" terrible consequence "and characters that" you don't necessarily want to get to know better ". Klaus N. Frick read “almost a chamber play ” which was “[not] a gripping suspense hit”, but “an intense drama” that “grabbed him more from side to side.” Frank Böhmert recognized a typical Simenon novel about the “everyday dirt of the petty bourgeoisie”, which was written in a style “that many talkative authors of the present should take an example from it”.

Peter Foord classified Maigret and the shadow play among other novels from the first period of the series such as Maigret Fights for the Head of a Man and Maigret with the Flemish , who offer a well-characterized opponent with whom Maigret measures himself. These formed the interface between the classic Maigret novels, which are written entirely from the inspector's point of view, and Simenon's stylistic development in the first non-Maigret novels such as The Engagement of Monsieur Hire or The House on the Canal , in which the author completely takes the perspective of other characters. For Thomas Narcejac , a later non-Maigret classic such as Das Testament Donadieu , Simenon's most extensive novel about the decline of a family, the family drama from Maigret and the shadow play did not add anything in terms of content. On the contrary, it lacks something compared to its early counterpart, namely the figure of Commissioner Maigret.

The novel was filmed a total of five times. The episodes in the Maigret series with Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1961), Gino Cervi (Italy, 1966), Jean Richard (France, 1969) and Bruno Cremer (France, 2004) were followed by an Italian television production with Sergio Castellitto in 2004 . In 2003 SFB - ORB , MDR and SWR produced a radio play adapted by Susanne Feldmann and Judith Kuckart . The speakers included Christian Berkel and Friedhelm Ptok .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: L'Ombre chinoise. Fayard, Paris 1932 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the shadow on the window. Translation: Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1959.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the shadow on the window. Translation: Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann. Heyne, Munich 1971.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the shadow play. Translation: Claus Sprick . Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-20734-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the shadow play. All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 12. Translation: Claus Sprick. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23812-9 .

literature

  • Joachim Campe: The Stabilized Conflict. Aesthetic technology and its addressee in a novel by Simenon . In: Anton Kaes, Bernhard Zimmermann (Ed.): Literature for many. Studies of trivial literature and mass communication in the 19th and 20th centuries . Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, Goettingen 1975, ISBN 3-525-21002-7 , pp 151-163.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Notice bibliographique to L'ombre chinoise on the Maigret page of Yves Martina.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions. In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 72.
  3. ^ A b Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 167.
  4. ↑ Joachim Campe: The stabilized conflict , pp. 158-160.
  5. ↑ a b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 12: The shadow play . On FAZ.net from June 28, 2008.
  6. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , p. 38.
  7. ↑ Joachim Campe: The stabilized conflict , pp. 153–155, 160–161.
  8. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the shadow play. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 141.
  9. ↑ Joachim Campe: The stabilized conflict , pp. 155–157, 162–163.
  10. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: L'Ombre Chinoise (Maigret Mystified) on the Maigret page by Steve Trussel.
  11. ↑ Tom Appleton: Hear voices . In: Telepolis of September 25, 2005.
  12. ^ "Maigret works against a background of respectable middle-class apartments, a cheap music hall and a sordid hotel in the Place Pigalle, all vividly realized, to solve a safe-robbery-plus-murder that reveals an unusually well-characterized killer. In: The New York Times, September 27, 1964.
  13. ↑ A bourgeois shadow play in the blog of Klaus N. Frick .
  14. ↑ Read: Georges Simenon, Maigret und das Schattenspiel (1931) ( Memento from February 17, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) in Frank Böhmert's blog .
  15. ^ Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, p. 3.
  16. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.
  17. ↑ Maigret and the shadow play in the HörDat audio play database .