Mediocre homesickness

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mediocre Homesick is a novel by the German writer Wilhelm Genazino that was published in February 2007. Before that, it appeared as a preprint in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . In the novel, Genazino takes up one of his main themes: the life of small employees and their social isolation and uprooting. This is linked to the failure of the protagonist's marriage and - unfamiliar to Genazino - surreal elements such as the loss of body parts.

The reception of Mediocre Homesickness in the German-language feature articles was mostly positive. The linguistically condensed observations, rich in aphorisms , and the humor inherent in the tragedy of his antihero were particularly praised . Many reviewers felt reminded of well-known works by Genazino, both in terms of subject matter and design. The novel was awarded the Corine Literature Prize 2007 in the fiction category.

content

Dieter Rotmund is 43 years old and works as a controller for a small pharmaceutical company in a big city, recognizable as Frankfurt am Main . His wife Edith and six-year-old daughter Sabine live separately from him in the Black Forest , where Rotmund visits them on weekends. The double housekeeping burdens the budget of the small employee, who feels compelled to make the daily commute to work without a ticket and in constant fear of ticket controls. He is even more burdened by the increasingly desolate relationship with Edith, who is looking for fulfillment in her SPD local group and an extra-marital relationship. Soon the couple only met in Karlsruhe for the weekend handover of the child, after all there was talk of divorce.

Rotmund leads a provisional life in his small apartment without ever having made himself comfortable. The relationship with his colleagues is distant, office meetings are anathema to him, and he does his work with half attention. He feels that he is becoming increasingly lonely, but does not dare to contact Ms. Grünewald, an obviously interested colleague, because he is afraid of trying again to create happiness. Instead, he visits a brothel and strolls through the streets of the city, where he observes all kinds of people, animals and things, and sees his impressions sometimes as a little luck, sometimes as unreasonable demands of life.

Unusual things happen to the feeling of an increasingly mediocre life: when watching a football game in the noisy crowd of spectators at a sports restaurant, Rotmund loses his left ear, when visiting a swimming pool his right little toe. In the end he even sees a child lose his thumb while playing. Rotmund feels like an outsider because of his lost body parts. Using a bandage, he conceals the missing ear as an otitis media . Only later does he take off the bandage and stand by his losses.

Due to his private aimlessness, Rotmund often works overtime in his company. But he is surprised when he is suddenly promoted to finance director, which releases him from his financial bottlenecks and from the duty of communicating with colleagues. In his private life, the initially unwilling contact with the previous tenant of his apartment, Sonja Schweitzer, develops into a sexual relationship. Their inability to survive arouses Rotmund's sympathy. Sonja is also damaged; she lives in a dormitory and her left breast is missing. The relationship breaks off, as Sonya's criminal double life comes to light, and for credit card fraud in custody is taken. When Rotmund, shocked by these revelations, wants to return her stored belongings, he meets the debt counselor Katja. With her, a new, positive phase of his life suddenly seems possible; Rotmund already calls it his "Katja phase".

Form and language

At almost 200 pages, Mediocre Homesick is a short novel . His narrative perspective is that of a personal narrator in first- person form. The novel is in the present tense . Wolfgang Schneider sees this as the only possible way of depicting the immediacy of Genazino's observations of reality. Jörg Magenau emphasizes that Genazino's prose does not live from the events described, but from the conciseness of their observation. Genazino condensed his sentences in such a way that they could exist individually as aphorisms . Typical for Genazino are images that his protagonist looks at closely while the description merges into an interpretation of deeper contexts.

With the loss of body parts in Rotmunds holds Mediocre homesickness an unusual for Genazino Surrealism way into the characteristic hyper-realism of his prose. Helmut Böttiger sees in this a kind of fantastic magical realism . In keeping with the average mood of the protagonist, the language is also carefully relativized. More precise statements are put in brackets, professionally an “or” becomes a frequent phrase, in private everything is just a “little”.

interpretation

A middle employee

With a mediocre homesickness , Genazino returned to the milieu of the little clerk, which he had already described at his literary beginnings in the Abaffel trilogy of the 1970s. Even then, the employee for Genazino had become a symbol of alienation and anonymity in the German working world, his life virtually vanished into non-existence. In contrast to Abaffel, who was drawn more as a comic figure, whose punchy life was viewed from outside in a distant manner, Rotmund is designed as a figure of identification with which the reader empathizes. Genazino's still existing criticism of civilization is now linked with self-irony .

Rotmund is a middle-class employee and a petty bourgeois , an average person who leads an average life. His “petty bourgeois fear and over-control” never allows him to break out of the barriers of his life. The separation from the family becomes the ultimate proof of the mediocrity of a life plan that once aspired to the dream of the extraordinary. It leads Rotmund back to his petty-bourgeois origins, which he could not escape: "My parents were mediocre, my childhood was mediocre, as well as my school days, my high school diploma and studies, but since the last call I have been heading for the most mediocre things there is at all: to a divorce. ”Rotmund's emotional budget also settles down to a mediocre level with increasing emotional impoverishment. He only perceives extreme experiences in a leveled manner. "At first the jealousy became mediocre, now the homesickness too."

Rotmund senses its increasing isolation. A single low shoe confirms the realization: “It is not easy to be a single one.” But Rotmund does not want to make a fuss about his “loneliness. I am comparatively educated and have known for a long time that loneliness is inevitable. ”An ironic counterpoint to Rotmund's increasing decline in his private life is his unexpected career advancement. However, it does not protect against private failure either. Standing in front of an existential abyss, Rotmund averts his gaze and turns to the little things of everyday life. His struggle with the banalities of existence becomes the everyday heroism of the little man. But it is also Don Quixote's fight with the windmill blades.

The stroller

The daily outbreak of his employee existence is Rotmund's existence as a flaneur . In aimless wanderings through the city and the observation of people, animals and objects, he seeks his rescue, at least temporarily. He looks so long "until the silence of the things I see slowly seizes me and also makes me calm". Again and again his gaze gets caught on seemingly insignificant little things that nobody else notices: "Has anyone ever seen a seagull looking after a bus and getting a painfully beautiful face?" The natural behavior of animals becomes the opposite for Rotmund to the complicated world of human relationships. So he envies the birds their "buzzing satisfaction in the sky" and can already delight in the name of a pied flycatcher.

Another way of internal self-defense are often shallow jokes that Rotmunds call "emergency stupid". They are a self-defense reflex: “I don't want reality to play out before me. If she does it anyway, I belittle her inwardly and enjoy her plaintiveness. ”Rotmund's observations are not limited to the disparagement of details, but grow again and again into a general cultural criticism , for example when he adds a plastic animal a bag of oranges immediately perceives "the progressive infantilization of all areas of life". Rotmund appears to be meek to the outside world, but there is an underlying form of insubordination in his distant observations. He often stands at right angles to the processes of everyday life, his gaze seems like sand in the machine, under which the activities of people lose their meaning, he, as it were, robs them of their meaning.

Loss of body parts

Rotmund's fallen body parts appear Kafkaesque . But in contrast with Kafka's metamorphosis , come to pass, in such a physical metamorphoses form the core of the narrative it at Genazino only in passing. The surreal elements do not pull Rotmund into a counter-world from which there is no more escape; they remain set pieces. It is precisely the lack of a disaster that becomes the real disaster. While Martin Lüdke leaves the interpretation to the reader, as with Kafka and Borges , Jörg Magenau recognizes a symbolic loss of identity in Rotmund's physical losses. Gerhard Köpf calls Rotmund's ailment a “addiction to disappearance”, a term coined by Hugo Ball . At the same time he compares Rotmund's condition with the clinical picture of a mental disorder , the disturbed body perception of dysmorphophobia . This hypochondriac syndrome suggests weakness of the ego and communication disorders in the patient.

The course of Rotmund's disturbed body awareness begins with the sudden loss of his ear in the midst of the noisy human community of an international soccer game: "I see my ear lying on the ground like a small, light-colored pastry that a child has fallen into the dirt." The loss does not lead to any physical consequences, but he stresses Rotmund even more psychologically. From now on he sees himself as a social outsider, as a person with a "sign of weirdness". He tries to hide his flaws as best he can, but in the company of others there are always interruptions such as his speech distortions when he reads “Volkszornbrot” instead of whole grain bread or pronounces paprika sausage as “panic sausage”. Because of the rejection of his wife, who no longer wants to hear his voice, he finally feels that he has "entered the circle of disabled people".

The loss of the right little toe leads to the first physical discomfort. Rotmund is now limping, and he feels “so much shame that I don't consider my life worth continuing”. His mental illness progresses: “My sadness makes me unsuitable everywhere.” The crisis comes on Rotmund's 43rd birthday. His depression increases, as does his excessive sensitivity to noise, which becomes "constant fear of noise". He only feels “a millimeter away from madness”. The external damage is reflected in an internal "feeling of being torn". Finally, the changed body perception also affects strangers: Rotmund observes a child who is playing and losing his thumb. There is even a newspaper article reporting the incident. In the end, the certainty spreads in Rotmund that it will take some time before the self-dissolution will be generally recognized. With his remaining dignity, he sums up: "I am damaged, I have time."

reception

Mediocre homesickness was mostly welcomed by the German-language feature pages. The novel was awarded the 2007 Corine Award -Literaturpreis in the category of fiction and reached # 2 on the SWR Best List as well as the sales bestseller list of the mirror .

In a controversy at the time , Eberhard Falcke and Ulrich Greiner exchanged arguments for and against the novel. For Eberhard Falcke, Dieter Rotmund was “the latest representative of Genazino's art of failure”. The author turns out to be an "existential humorist" who does not report on noise of size, but of "noise of smallness". Genazino's deep black humor elicited the exclamation: “Wonderful! Anyone who can tell about the mediocre misfortune in this way must be spared any prospects of improvement. ”Ulrich Greiner, on the other hand, has never made friends with Genazino's novels. So he admitted that he also found the latest "not very funny, rather dreary." Genazino delivers "philosophy of life for building society savers". His jokes are “bad and they repeat themselves. […] Genazino's prose of neediness is dreary uniformity, his orgies of wretchedness quickly exhaust themselves. ”Klaus Zeyringer judged less vehemently but with the same tendency. For him, Genazino "mercilessly performed his figure in its ridiculousness and the banality of the constant babbling about." However, the redundancy and arbitrariness of the portrayed wear out. It becomes "quite bland in the last third" and shows "the limits of literary observation of mediocre employees."

Jörg Magenau , on the other hand, rated the new Genazino as “good as always”. He serves his readers "as reliably as the baker's wife on the corner" without varying his offer over the years. Gerrit Bartels also saw Genazino's latest novel "at the height of his art". He offers “the full Genazino program: humor and melancholy, irony and everyday life,” until in the end “the typical Genazino desolation novel has long since become a typical Genazino exhilarating novel.” In Wolfgang Schneider's assessment, Genazino was mediocre homesick “Added a successful copy to his anti-hero arsenal and pushed his humor a little further into the heart of the heart.” He admired “the sovereignty with which Genazino now unfolds his material. With floating ease he reports of downcast souls and the stresses of being an employee. Again and again the flow of narrative coagulates into valid aphorisms; the pleasure of reflection is great. ”Martin Lüdke did not discover anything new in Genazino's new publication. And yet a good old Genazino "with" nice insights "such as" inevitable break-ins "and the conclusion:" All in all: a remarkable book. "

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edo Reents: All ears . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 8, 2007.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Wolfgang Schneider: The whirring satisfaction of the pied flycatcher . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 17, 2007.
  3. ↑ a b c Jörg Magenau : The futility makes a strong impression . In: the daily newspaper of March 3, 2007.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Martin Lüdke : News from the damaged life . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 7, 2007.
  5. ↑ a b c Eberhard Falcke: Pro . In: The time of February 8, 2007.
  6. ↑ a b Helmut Böttiger : The misery of the employees . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from March 16, 2007.
  7. ↑ a b Klaus Zeyringer: And sigh a little . In: The Standard of April 1, 2007.
  8. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 142.
  9. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 109.
  10. ↑ a b c Gerrit Bartels: The loneliness of the earless . In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 6, 2007.
  11. ^ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 182.
  12. ↑ Gerhard Köpf: The lost ear , p. 105.
  13. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 7.
  14. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 12.
  15. ↑ a b Fitzgerald Kusz : When the flaneur's ear fell off in the pub . In: Nürnberger Nachrichten of February 22, 2007.
  16. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 150.
  17. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 18.
  18. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 87.
  19. ↑ a b Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 112.
  20. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 187.
  21. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 99.
  22. ↑ Gerhard Köpf: The lost ear , pp. 106-107.
  23. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 10.
  24. ↑ a b Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 19.
  25. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 20.
  26. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 61.
  27. ^ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 93.
  28. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 112.
  29. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 152.
  30. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 181.
  31. ↑ On the last two sections: Gerhard Köpf: Das verlorene Ohr , p. 106.
  32. ↑ Genazino: Mediocre Homesickness , p. 189.
  33. ↑ Philipp Oehmke: Without an ear . In: Der Spiegel from March 19, 2007.
  34. ↑ Reviews of Mediocre Homesickness for Pearl Divers .
  35. ↑ SWR best list from March 2007. (PDF file; 93 kB)
  36. ↑ Fiction . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 2007 ( online - February 17, 2007 ).
  37. ^ Wilhelm Genazino. About the new novel "Mediocre Homesickness" . In: The time of February 8, 2007.
  38. ^ Ulrich Greiner : Contra . In: The time of February 8, 2007.