Kitahara disease (Roman)

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Kitahara's disease is a novel by Christoph Ransmayr . It is a dystopian alternative world story , in which a world is described in which a country defeated in a war (parallels to Germany and Austria after the Second World War ) is deindustrialized after the defeat and transformed back into an agrarian society (parallels to the Morgenthau Plan ) .

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Shortly before the end of the war and the coming into force of the Peace of Oranienburg , the spa town of Moor, located on Lake Traunsee , was shelled by enemy bombers. The wife of the village blacksmith, who has been fighting as a soldier on the North African front for years, escapes into the cellar with a Polish slave laborer just in time, where she gives birth to her second son Bering three weeks early. Two years after the war, returns to the Father with the last train before the beginning of the end of the rail assembly back home and disturbed Bering, who spent his first years of life together with chickens in a chamber so can only cackle that this for weeks and later the nickname Birdman gets .

Moor, on the other hand, is occupied by four occupying powers one after the other, until finally American soldiers take final command. The latter have decided to take the losers of the war back to a pre-industrial era and therefore to dismantle technical facilities such as power plants and factories as well as infrastructure such as railroad tracks. This so-called Stellamour Plan, named after an American judge and scholar, stipulates that the residents should feed themselves and provide for themselves with the lowest possible standard of living. In Moor this plan is carried out by Major Elliot. In the nearby quarry he also had letters larger than a man carved out to commemorate the slave laborers who were tortured and perished there, culminating in the following sentences: “There are eleven thousand nine hundred and seventy-three dead slain by the natives of this country. Welcome to Moor. ”. Several times a year, Elliot also has the residents of Moors compete in prison clothing in the granite quarry and re-enact camp scenes known from photographs as a repeated measure of atonement.

Some people frustrated by de-industrialization or uprooted townspeople are now organizing themselves into marauding robber gangs. Like many other villages, moor is haunted by groups who demand protection money or the fire egg in return for sparing the houses from burning down. One day, when Major Elliot has long since returned to America and the army controls within the occupation zone have decreased more and more, Bering is attacked by such a gang. He can escape to his house, where he shoots one of the attackers with his father's secret pistol. Bering now suffers from feelings of guilt; his gradually blind father, however, loses contact with reality more and more, his life is exhausted in memories of the war experiences. Bering's mother, on the other hand, finally got lost in religious delusions.

From now on, Bering takes care of the parents' farm alone and also takes the job of the village blacksmith in Moor, where he soon develops an unusual mechanical talent, but otherwise remains uneducated. One day, Bering is now twenty-three years old, the quarry manager and army contact Ambras, who is also known as the Dog King , drives his car - the last in the entire region - to scrap; Bering offers to repair the vehicle. Through his repair skills he gains the trust of the Ambras and moves to him and his half-wild dogs in the requisitioned quarry villa, where he u. a. discovered his love for music through several American records found there. He also receives a working military pistol owned by Elliot and becomes the bodyguard and driver of Ambras.

He used to be a photographer and was sent to the Moor quarry for forced labor because of a relationship with a Jewish woman. He suffered agony and torture in the labor camp. B. hung by his arms tied behind his back, which eventually dislocated his shoulder joints. Since then he has felt great pain in his arms and is unable to lift them above his shoulders. After his liberation, he searched in vain for his lost lover and finally returned to Moor, where he was entrusted by Elliot with the management of the quarry. Because of his position as governor of the occupying power, he is hated by the locals, which is later carried over to Bering.

Every now and then, the lonely border crosser and smuggler Lily, also known as a Brazilian , turns up in the villa. She is tolerated by both the occupying power and the village population, as her excellent local knowledge allows her to wander undiscovered between the zones of occupation and to find coveted things such as B. brings fuel, spices, former medals, rare stones, etc. as barter goods. Lily originally came to Moor as a five-year-old refugee child from Vienna, where some of the liberated forced laborers recognized her father as a former overseer of another camp and then tried to kill him. They could be stopped, but their seriously injured father was abducted by the occupying powers; she and her mother waited in vain for him for years. 19 years later her mother died and Lily moved into the weather tower of the former lido. Besides Bering, she is the only civilian in the region who owns a weapon: on her hikes, she discovered a forgotten military depot and thus a sniper rifle, which she rarely carries with her. Two or three times a year she goes “hunting”: Her “game” are members of the gangs that can always mean rape or even murder for a woman wandering alone in the mountains.

During a rock concert hosted by the Americans, Lily and Bering briefly get closer and finally kiss in a rush of enthusiasm. After the concert, they notice that Ambras has disappeared and find him surrounded by a gang of bald men who Bering can scare off with his weapon. On the drive home on the dirt roads, he tries to avoid the potholes, which at night are only dark shadows and spots on the road; but he has to realize that some of these spots move with his gaze and also cloud his field of vision the next day. Bering fears he will go blind, but does not tell his master, fearing that he will lose his job as bodyguard and driver.

Lily, who has been distant to Bering again since the kiss at the concert, finds Bering's father completely disturbed in the middle of a mountain pass in the restricted zone. He believes he is still in the desert war and, accompanied by his son and Lily, is taken to the “lowlands” in a military hospital in the city of Brand. When crossing a field of sinkholes , they come across chicken thieves who are still carrying the chickens with them to keep the meat fresh. Bering is deeply angry and takes Lily's weapon before she can react and shoots one of the two. She does not understand his motives, which is why this act clouded their relationship very much and lets Lily keep her distance from him.

When Bering draws her attention to his growing poor eyesight during the further ride to Brand, she advises him to visit a paramedic who specializes in eye diseases in the hospital the next day. The night before, during a public celebration, he learned that, after more than twenty years of world war, the Americans had now also defeated Japan by dropping the atomic bomb and that "world peace" was near. The next day he is examined by the paramedic and is told that his illness is called Kitahara's disease , that the dark spots were caused by Bering's "staring" and that they would disappear on their own if he stopped. With a helicopter flight arranged by Lily, the relieved Bering gets back to Moor.

But together with the military helicopter, the order comes to Moor to clear the entire lake area, since the granite quarry is no longer profitable; the entire region is to be converted into a military training area. Even before Bering left for Brand, Ambras had laid off half of the workers in the quarry because too much gravel and too little pure green granite had been extracted.

Together with the technical systems of the quarry, which have since been dismantled, Ambras and Bering are ordered to Brazil to another mining site for the rare green granite, accompanied by Lily, whose dream has always been to emigrate to Santos, the original destination of their parents. While crossing the ship, Bering notices that the dark spots on his eyes have disappeared. Once in Brazil, they are met by a woman named Muyra. She shows them the area and u. a. also the new quarry, from which you can see a group of islands in the sea. When they learn that one of these islands is called Dog Island because it was once a prisoner island and is now inhabited by feral dogs, they decide to take a boat trip there on Epiphany. In front of the island, Lily, who is waiting in the boat and who has meanwhile become impatient, meets two fishermen who have brought her back to the coast, as she fears that she will miss the bus to Santos; Muyra gives her her military raincoat as a goodbye. Bering and Ambras have meanwhile explored the island and become more and more entangled in their memories of the years of relatively isolated Moor life in the camp. Eventually Bering accidentally shoots Muyra, who he takes to be Lily for wearing her coat; then, in his desperation, he climbs a rock face and instructs Ambras to secure him. Ambras, however, no longer recognizes Bering, takes him for a camp guard and lets the rope go before he himself stumbles into the abyss and, as he falls, believes he can lift his arms freely over his shoulders for the first time since his torture.

expenditure

  • Christoph Ransmayr: Kitahara disease . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-10-062908-6 .

literature

  • Katja Stopka: Another story. Aesthetic historical alternatives within the reflection horizon of historical and cultural identity. Christoph Ransmayr's “Kitahara's disease”. In: Triëdere - magazine for theory and art. Issue 2/2010.
  • James P. Martin: The crisis of cultural knowledge in Michael Koehlmeier 's “Telemach”, Christoph Ransmayr's “Morbus Kitahara” and WG Sebald 's “The Rings of Saturn”. Washington 2004, OCLC 177275147 ( dissertation . Georgetown University Washington DC 2004, 227 pages, English ).
  • Metamorphoses succeed where the imagination is great and the skin of the individual is thin. In: Insa Wilke (ed.): Report on fire. Conversations, emails and phone calls about Christoph Ransmayr's work. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-062953-1 .
    • Christine Abbt and Thomas Wild think, speak and write in dialogue with the novel "Morbus Kitahara". Pp. 191-202.
    • Thomas Wild: Wording of the memory. Pp. 203-228.
    • Christine Abbt: Walking through fear. Pp. 229-270.

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