Muckensturm (novel)

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Muckensturm. A year in the life of a small town is a novel about the beginnings of National Socialism in a small German town, published by Paula Buber under the pseudonym Georg Munk. It was created between 1938 and 1940, but was not printed until after the end of the Second World War (1953). A new edition, this time under the name Paula Buber, appeared in 2008.

action

At the end of February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, a KPD boss and his colleagues had to rely on the help of Professor Georg Wismar, who lived in the small town of Muckensturm on the Höhenweg and who was one of its “clearest representatives” (p. 510) in the Jewish religious community Is claimed. The bustling sergeant at the site, who considers him one of the “Elders of Zion” , already has an eye on him, but Wismar risks the support of those who are wanted. The Nazi party is before the general election driven by her young local leader, a prince, a "scion of the Crown" (p 120), has announced an advertising speech, but the place is a political black and not an easy prey. The event takes the new, doctorate district leader into the city, who wants to remedy the previous impression of being a “vulgar party”. In addition, a party intellectual arrives from the state capital who seeks a conversation with his brother, a government assessor who is a religious socialist and of the opinion that a goal cannot be pure that stands at the end of a path that is "swamp and blood" ( P. 130) was. He tells the Nazi-enthusiastic big brother that he knows “that an order has to come that overcomes all conditions, but not a coercive system” like that of those opponents from the left or their own, “one as deadly as the other, both born from the cold speculation of the brain and not from the living center of the heart ”(p. 137). Exactly this “cold speculation” is spread to him by his brother, who thinks he knows more than the average party comrades and, according to the new standard of the party “good and bad” (p. 130), wants to have determined where it is going. This relentless thought process is alien to the new district leader of the brown party, when it comes to "flat agitation" (p. 376), he sometimes suffers from his own camp, but he likes to erase it from his consciousness - too often. Because a settler connected with Berlin provokes a fatal course of events, on top of that the opportunism does its part, and the greed of individual citizens. The government assistant's never-silent thought: "How much of what has been recognized as truth do you realize in the course of your day?" (P. 505), may also be the motto of the small group, which after a year still opposes, while the majority of it is the brown party has hitched.

criticism

A starting point for criticism is the fact that the 170 or so people involved in the plot show a "weakness in the training of protagonists that determine the plot". However, this is offset by the way in which the interweaving of the approximately 30 larger storylines turns the text into a message in which “historical reality is comprehensively described”.

The novel Muckensturm corresponds noticeably to Martin Buber's work The Question to the Individual . It says: “Necessity is needed so that people do not get lost, the person's responsibility for the truth in their historical situation.” In Paula Buber's work, the district leader of the Nazi party is the figure who most emphatically demonstrates this getting lost.

“Responsibility for truth” is the core theme of the novel, and accordingly the accusation against the Christian socialists, “Your person is good by nature” (p. 129), is simply contrasted with the person from whom one cannot expect much, “ questionable how we are "(p. 137), but who, if he gets involved," takes responsibility; on becoming a person with a relationship to the truth ”, is far removed from the image of the“ predator ”that Oswald Spengler sought.

“What is truth?” Asks Pilate , who repeatedly seems to be the model for the figure of the district leader of the Nazi party. No coincidence, because Max Stirner was also concerned with this question around 1847 in his work The Only One and His Property came to the point of view: "For me there is no truth, because nothing goes beyond me!" A statement made for National Socialism who did not have a closed world view, absorbed the appropriate and, according to Buber, turned it into a “true is what ours is” in his group language. In 1966, Hans Günter Helms went so far as to assert that “there was no problem in producing a catalog of the parallel passages in› Unique ‹and› Mein Kampf ‹”. The pointer in the novel can be found when the Nazi intellectual says about the “greats of the second degree”, the “people kings”, “they will tear them down” (p. 135), which Stirner sounds like: “Where the German outlines, [ ...]. "

With Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Gogarten, two further influencing factors come into play in that sentence: "Our good and bad are determined by where we are going." (P. 130) That the moral pair of opposites "good and bad", As Carl Schmitt claims that in politics there is the equivalent of “friend and foe”, Martin Buber considers it a mistake, because the friend-foe formula comes from “the shaky sphere of political structures, not their sphere of cohesion”. According to this formula, every rebel who only cares for the “being questioned of the political structure”, the “struggle for the realization of the true order”, “the order dynamics of the political structure” becomes an “internal enemy”. According to Martin Buber, “evil” is “the vortex of the directionless, circling power of possibility of man”, but the state cannot specify “the changing direction of the hour on God”, not “the boundary between participating and not participating”.

Martin Buber sees Friedrich Gogarten's sentence as a version of the old police state concept that the state has "its ethical quality in the fact that with its sovereignty, with its right to the life and property of its subjects, it fends off evil to which people have fallen" . The processing of Paula Buber's novel: “Ours is man. It is not good, it is not aligned, it does not know where it is going, […]. We put a brain in him, we put a heart in him, we tell him who he is and where he is going. "(P. 129)

A criticism of the novel Muckensturm to attach specifically to its chapter 16 is an obvious one, since it reveals the intertwining of Martin Buber's work. Anyone who wants to criticize him for behavior during the Nazi era has to include the share of his wife Paula Buber in view of the division of labor towards the Nazis - despite the constant emphasis on independence by using a pseudonym. Skepticism, like that of Haim Gordon that Martin Buber, despite known horrors, found the Bolshevik form of totalitarianism to be better than National Socialism in a work in 1942 , then comes to nothing. In the novel ("... but not a coercive system like that of your opponents from the left or like yours, one as deadly as the other ..." / p. 137) the experience just made is reflected as Buber's daughter-in-law Margarete Buber -Neumann was detained in the Moscow Hotel Lux in 1937 , whose sister fought for an exit visa from Paris and Paula Buber's assistance was unsuccessful.

Muckensturm as a key novel

Following Thomas Mann's idea that a poet appropriates the externalities of a person, deepens them with unfamiliar features and allows them to go through situations that are far removed from the original, the novel cannot be regarded as a “reflection of the historical Heppenheim at the beginning of the Nazi regime” and also not as a roman a clef. The fictitious Muckensturm on the Höhenstraße has much of the topography of Heppenheim an der Bergstraße . The references to some people are sometimes quite clear in the novel, but sometimes also hidden. The figure of Professor Georg Wismar obviously alludes to Martin Buber. In a letter to the publisher in 1953, however, he complained that “what was specifically Heppenheim” was “only accessories”, and disapproved of a reviewer “that he had the Dr. Wismar identified with MB with great emphasis, while the two have nothing more in common than that both are Jews and that both of them have their desk lamps burning until late at night ”.

It then takes almost 30 years for the retired Mayor of Heppenheim, Wilhelm Metzendorf, to take up the subject with a book that also contains appropriate visual documents. The wording of a letter is printed that the head of the Odenwaldschule Paul Geheeb wrote to the President of the Hessian state parliament in March 1933, in which he denounced attacks against his country school home, which occurred under the pretext of combating communism, actually came from an unfounded, privately and personally justified thirst for revenge and led to the mistreatment of a sponsor of the school. No matter how much the motivation for the crime points to Heppenheim, the Cologne Villa Stollwerck could be used as a model for the modern country house on the river . There, the industrialist and art collector Ottmar Strauss was attacked by 30 armed National Socialists and needed the help of a doctor - the incident was then in the press.

If the attack in the novel takes up the space of one of seventy chapters, on the other hand, a “brother-in-law Ewald” is mentioned in just two sentences, to whom a Mercedes is supposed to fall as a result of the described escape of a Communist Party functionary, despite concerns that “the brother-in-law doctor can't drive around with his peasants in the pompous wagon ”(p. 29). Apparently what is meant is the relatives of the author's daughter-in-law, Margarete Buber-Neumann . The former had lived with Bubers in Heppenheim before their divorce in the 1920s and gives an insight into this in the first volume of her autobiography. A Communist fate is her way through the Soviet labor camp to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where her brother-in-law Bernhard Fleiß puts her in danger on the one hand simply by asking her - her files are dug out, it becomes visible - and on the other hand later strengthens her perseverance through cleverly placed information in mailings: " My brother-in-law, who is a doctor by profession and had been to prison and concentration camp himself after 1933, knew what to write to a prisoner. He was a consoling artist and not only brought my lust for life back, but also some of my comrades. "

She also connects Willi Munzenberg , “Head of Propaganda of the Communist International for the Western World”, with the novel, who is surprised by the fire in the Reichstag on a trip . His partner is Babette Gross : “It suddenly occurred to me that my sister Margarete's father-in-law, the Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, lived not far from Darmstadt. Maybe he or his wife could advise us. I only knew them briefly, but we decided to go to Heppenheim. ”As described in the novel, they ended up in Saarland and then to Paris. For Gross and the chauffeur Emil Berger, an exile in Mexico followed. The latter became the best man at Gustav Regler's third marriage in 1946 .

The name of Ludwig Metzger , mayor there in the post-war period, member of the Bundestag and active in supporting Israel , is also associated with Darmstadt - in the novel only the “capital” is mentioned . The figure of the assessor “Justus German” is said to be inspired by him. An interview with Buber's secretary Moritz Spitzer , printed in Haim Gordon's book about the “other Martin Buber”, gives a hint . And when there is talk of the “little son” that the mother “never left her side”, “a shadow of her secret fear had also spread over the child” (p. 505), Günther Metzger leaves no doubt the reason arise: "I was born seven days before Hitler came to power."

A sharp rejection of Hitler, ties to the Netherlands and an interest in economic history make Otto Wolff a possible role model for the steel industrialist described in Chapter 56.

Information about Paula Buber-Winkler is rare. Sieglinde Denzel and Susanne Naumann come to the opinion in their biography that they correspond to "the archetype of a truly strong woman". Her femininity is elementary, earthy, unbendable. "Just like the female figures that the poet Paula Winkler creates."

reception

The novel did not appear until 1953, but even then it was still struggling with difficulties. In a review by Werner Wirth in the Südhessische Post on March 20, 1954, it was said: “It is not the right place here to weigh precisely to what extent Paula Buber rightly made use of her poetic license. You have to admit to a writer that he is not obliged to reproduce all events and people with the utmost meticulousness. It seems to me, however, that the author made very generous and sometimes too extensive use of her rights. ”The publisher Lambert Schneider foresaw difficulties with the sale:“ I know the book will have to overcome great resistance. That has nothing to do with its quality. [...] You don't like to read what happened here, you don't want to think about guilt and reparation, and I get to feel that clearly. "

literature

  • Sieglinde Denzel and Susanne Naumann: "On the living water". Paula Buber June 14, 1877 - August 11, 1958 , in: Esther Röhr (ed.): I am what I am. Women alongside great theologians and religious philosophers of the 20th century , Gütersloh 1997, 2nd edition 1998
  • Johannes Waßmer: "Words have a long life" - Paula Buber's novel "Muckensturm" , in: Wolfgang Krone, Thomas Reichert and Meike Siegfried (eds.): Dialogue, Frieden, Menschlichkeit. Contributions to thinking by Martin Buber , Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-942476-14-0 , pp. 211-225

Bibliographical information

  • Georg Munk (pseudonym for Paula Buber): Muckensturm. A year in the life of a small town , Roman, Heidelberg 1953; 2nd edition, with an afterword by Judith Buber Agassi, edited and commented by Henriette Herwig and Johannes Waßmer in: Lit, Berlin / Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-1757-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. a b Waßmer 2011: p. 219
  2. a b Martin Buber: The question to the individual , Schocken Verlag, Berlin 1936, p. 97
  3. Martin Buber 1936: p. 78
  4. Gospel according to John , chapter 18, verse 38, in: The Bible. Old and New Testament. Standard translation , Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1980, p. 1221
  5. Max Stirner: The One and His Own , Stuttgart 1972, p. 399
  6. Hans G Helms: The Ideology of the Anonymous Society. Max Stirner's ›Einsiger‹ and the progress of democratic self-confidence from Vormärz to the Federal Republic , Cologne 1966, p. 7
  7. Max Stirner: About B. Bauer's trumpet of the Last Judgment , in Max Stirner: Smaller writings and his response to the criticism of his work "The Single and His Property" , Treptow near Berlin 1914, p. 19; also Grete Schaeder: Martin Buber. Hebrew Humanism , Göttingen 1966, p. 178
  8. Martin Buber 1936: p. 80
  9. a b Martin Buber 1936: p. 82
  10. Martin Buber 1936: p. 81
  11. a b Martin Buber 1936: p. 88
  12. a b Martin Buber 1936: p. 84
  13. ^ "The essay [ People and Leader , in: Pointing the Way , p. 150 (German: Martin Buber: Volk und Führer . In: ders .: Notes. Gesammelte Essays , Manesse Verlag, Zurich 1953, p. 297 f.)] Was published in 1942 when the West already knew about the mass extermination of the kulaks , about Stalins's 1938 purges of the Bolshevik Old Guard and Red Army Leaders, about the Gulag, about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Despite these well published facts Buber still believed that the bolshevist brand of totalitarianism was better than Nazism because in Lenin's writings one finds 'a vital relationship to a real idea'. "In: Haim Gordon: Existential Guilt and Buber's Social and Political Thought , in : Haim Gordon u. Jochanan Bloch (ed.): Martin Buber. A Centenary Volume , Beersheba 1984, p. 229
  14. Michaela Wunderle (ed.): Apropos Margarete Buber-Neumann , Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 26 and Margarete Buber-Neumann: As prisoners with Stalin and Hitler. A world in the dark , Stuttgart / Herford 1985, p. 26
  15. Waßmer 2011: p. 222
  16. Judith Buber-Agassi, who knew her grandmother well, calmed the minds if there were still fears that the novel was a reckoning: “She only described people with the positive qualities in detail. The negative characters are mixtures of several people. My grandmother was careful about that ”. Bergsträßer Anzeiger October 21, 2008, p. 18.
  17. Grete Schaeder (ed.): Martin Buber. Correspondence from seven decades. Vol. III: 1938-1965 , Heidelberg 1973, p. 358; His granddaughter Judith Buber-Agassi also emphasizes: “The intellectual named Professor Wismar in the book cannot be equated with Martin Buber. Although the descriptions of the rooms apply exactly to the Buberhaus on Werlestrasse, Paula Buber did not let her husband act in it, but a fictional person. "Bergsträßer Anzeiger October 21, 2008, p. 18.
  18. ^ Wilhelm Metzendorf: History and fortunes of the Heppenheim Jews , Lorsch 1982
  19. “In one of the cellulose factories of my father-in-law, the city councilor a. D. Max Cassirer in Berlin, years ago a certain Mr. G. was active; Differences with the factory management caused him to resign; and after his death his widow and children took a very unkind attitude towards my father-in-law. The family has lived in our neighboring town of Heppenheim for a long time, and the young son said years ago that as soon as his party, the National Socialist, had power in their hands, action would be taken against the Odenwald School immediately. On the 5th of M. were the elections, on the afternoon of the 7th young G. actually appeared at my school at the head of about a dozen police officers who pretended to have to look for communist material and threatened our children with revolvers. "Walter Schäfer (Ed.): Paul Geheeb - Letters. People and ideas in personal testimonies , Stuttgart 1970, p. 144 f. Also Henry R. Cassirer : And everything turned out differently ... A journalist remembers , Konstanz 1992, p. 81.
  20. ^ Elfi splendor : Ottmar Strauss: industrialist, state official, art collector . In: Julius H. Schoeps et al. (Ed.): Menora. Yearbook for German-Jewish History. 1994 , Munich 1994
  21. ^ Margarete Buber-Neumann: From Potsdam to Moscow. Stations on a wrong path , Stuttgart 1958, pp. 58, 68 f., 84, 130 and Margarete Buber-Neumann: As prisoners with Stalin and Hitler. A world in the dark , Stuttgart / Herford 1985, pp. 302, 350 f.
  22. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography , Stuttgart 1967, p. 247
  23. Gustav Regulator: The ear of Malchus. A life story , Stroemfeld Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Basel 2007, pp. 276, 691
  24. ^ Haim Gordon: The other Martin Buber. Recollections of his contemporaries , Ohio 1988, p. 149
  25. Patrik Schwarz: Pride and Pain. The SPD rebel Dagmar Metzger and her father-in-law Günther - a family story , Die Zeit No. 16 of April 10, 2008, p. 2 [1]
  26. Denzel / Naumann 1998: p. 83 f.
  27. a b Bergsträßer Anzeiger October 21, 2008, p. 18.

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