Maigret's memoir

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Maigret's Memoirs (French: Les mémoires de Maigret ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 35th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from September 19 to 27, 1950 and was published by Presses de la Cité the following year . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1958 . In 1978 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Roswitha Plancherel.

The novel Maigret's Memoirs occupies a special position within the Maigret series. It is not a crime novel in the strict sense of the word. Instead, Simenon lets his famous commissioner write his memoirs . The roles change: Maigret becomes the narrator , Simenon his literary figure . Maigret reports the beginnings of his police career and his first meeting with Madame Maigret. He also tells of a young writer who makes him the subject of detective novels, and he takes the opportunity to correct the image he has spread, to describe the real police work and to correct some of Simenon's mistakes.

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Quai des Orfèvres as seen from the Seine

In 1927 or 1928 - Maigret doesn't remember exactly - the head of the Paris Criminal Police, Xavier Guichard, calls Maigret and introduces him to the 24-year-old Georges Sim, who is interested in police work. Maigret is supposed to lead the young man, who insists that he is not a journalist but a writer, through the Quai des Orfèvres . But Sim shows a noticeable lack of interest in specific details, especially professional criminals do not interest him. Instead, he primarily wants to get to know the atmosphere on the quai. Months later, Maigret finds a dime novel called The Girl with Pearls , written by Georges Sim, and the main character is him, Maigret. Some time later, Georges Sim became Georges Simenon, and he is now bringing a whole series of "semi-literary" Maigret novels onto the market.

Maigret became famous through the novels, but also the target of ridicule from his colleagues. He attaches importance to the fact that his real life is different from what has been described, that the real investigations are rather an interplay of all forces of the criminal police than a commissioner single-handedly questioning all witnesses. But Simenon defends himself that he is making the truth more real than it is. He condenses the processes in order to simplify them for the reader. Also in details to Simenon allows this simplification: Since he once Maigret's office a melon has seen and an overcoat with a velvet collar, he endows his fictional character so that, although the true Maigret is hardly ever dressed like that. And Simenon is still warming up his character in an old cast-iron stove, although the quai has long since been converted to central heating. In other details, however, in the smoking of his pipe, in the corridor, even in the way of speaking, the writer seems to be approaching his creation conversely, as Maigret notes with a certain satisfaction.

Maigret now reports a few episodes from his life himself. From the father who was the manager of the Saint-Fiacre castle, from his mother, who died of complications during the birth of her second child when Maigret was eight years old. Maigret then lived with his aunt in Nantes , studied medicine for two years, dropped out when his father died and went to Paris. There it is a neighbor, Inspector Jacquemain, who interests Maigret in the police service and arouses in him the longing to get to the Quai des Orfèvres. But before that Maigret has to go through numerous stations in the police service. One evening, a friend named Félix Jubert takes Maigret to a party organized by employees of the Roads and Bridge Construction Office. There Maigret meets Louise Léonard, who would later become Madame Maigret.

Maigret tells of everyday police work, which mainly consists of patrol duty, so that the police officers are nicknamed "nail socks" because of their high wear and tear on shoes. He reports on the Paris customs and immigration police and finally his appointment to the criminal police, including his first arrest. He describes the special relationship between police officers and criminals: both accept each other, although they are on different sides of the law, both just do their work every day. Maigret's job is simply to prevent the others from causing too much harm and to ensure that the bill is settled in the end by paying for what they have done. Although Maigret actually belongs to the milieu of the good citizens, he also knows this other side, and he has learned to understand it. He accepts them without curiosity, hatred or disgust, and quotes his religion teacher: "Little knowledge removes us from people, much knowledge leads us back to them."

Maigret complains about Simenon's bad habit of constantly messing up the data. In addition, one day he retired much too early because he was tired of the atmosphere on the quay. Maigret has crossed out all the mistakes in Simenon's books that the latter made due to lack of knowledge or from the freedom of a writer, but a correction now seems too pedantic to him. Only Madame Maigret presented him with a small piece of paper with points that he was supposed to correct: Simenon wrote several times that they lived on the Place des Vosges instead of on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir . In fact, this is Simenon's apartment, into which he let the Maigrets move in for a few weeks while he was in Africa and the boulevard was being renovated. Maigret's nephew had once been placed with the police by his uncle himself, but was later not mentioned because he did not prove himself in the police service and accepted a job in his father-in-law's company. One of Maigret's colleagues is now sitting in his office with a Maigret pipe as a souvenir. Little Janvier is also still working on the quay, while fat Torrence has opened a detective's office. Finally, one point is particularly important to Madame Maigret: the plum brandy that Simenon Maigret always drinks is in reality Alsatian raspberry spirit .

reception

According to Uwe Nettelbeck , it is “an old literature game to let first and second degree fictions compete against each other.” With Maigret's memoirs , Simenon dedicated an entire book to this ruse, “an ironic variation on Simenon's theme: Nothing is what it seems. " Julian Symons described this" very witty book "as a" prose piece that at the same time credibly deepens the Maigret myth and yet emphasizes its artificiality ". Fenton Bresler suspected, however, that the reaction of many readers might be “more discomfort than pleasure in view of the rather dry humor . The whole novel has something eerie about it ”. For Stanley G. Eskin, the "initially relaxed and cheerful tone" of the "wonderful" memoirs became serious in the end, when Maigret expressed "his sympathy for the lower members of society", to whom he himself could have belonged.

Georg Hensel summarized: “In Les mémoires de Maigret , Georges Simenon made himself a real memory of his fictional commissioner Maigret. He exchanged creator and creature, reality and fiction. " Tilman Spreckelsen judged:" A nice idea, sometimes tough reading, a book for fans ". Oliver Hahn also recommended the book on maigret.de to Maigret lovers and came to the conclusion: “It is and remains one of the best books that Simenon has left us. The writer recognized that Maigret was already becoming a myth at this time and wrote an (auto) biography that deals with the life and being of the inspector in a very ironic way. "

The Bayerische Rundfunk produced in 1983 a radio play implementation under the direction of Gerhard Aberle . Among others, Wolfgang Hess as narrator, Walter Richter as Maigret, Cordula Trantow as Madame Maigret and Bernd Herberger as Simenon spoke . In 2018, Audio Verlag published an audio book read by Walter Kreye .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Les Mémoires de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1951 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1963.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1972.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . Translation: Roswitha Plancherel. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-20507-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 35. Translation: Roswitha Plancherel. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23835-8 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-13035-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 69.
  3. ↑ Uwe Nettelbeck : The murderer lives next door. Georges Simenon and his friend Maigret . In: Die Zeit of May 13, 1966.
  4. ↑ Julian Symons : Simenon and his Maigret . In: Claudia Schmölders , Christian Strich (Ed.): About Simenon . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-20499-X , p. 128.
  5. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 137.
  6. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 410.
  7. ↑ Georg Hensel : Simenon and his commissioner Maigret . In: Claudia Schmölders, Christian Strich (Ed.): About Simenon , p. 153.
  8. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 35: Maigret's Memoirs . On FAZ.net from December 15, 2008.
  9. ↑ Maigret's memoirs on maigret.de.
  10. ↑ Maigret's memoirs in the HörDat audio play database .