Museum of Hate. Days in Manhattan

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Museum of Hate. Days in Manhattan is the title of a book by Jürg Federspiel . It was first published in 1969 by Piper Verlag .

Content (selection)

Museum of Hate. Days in Manhattan is a collection of essays, diary entries, poems and dramatic texts. In terms of content, New York and the USA are discussed.

Paratuga

Dr. Charles Huntington-Paratuga is an American businessman who visits the narrator frequently. Paratuga prefers to stay in hotels and is described by the narrator as a half-friend , a person whom he treats with more dislike than sympathy. The appearance of Paratugas is often associated with the occurrence of an accident.

Short story and musical

Federspiel sees in the short story and the musical , whose literary quality he greatly appreciates, the expression of a genuinely American literature that no longer produces heroes and which takes into account the complexity of reality.

Vietnam War

An American soldier who is asked by a journalist in Vietnam what communism he is fighting against is embarrassed. This story is in stark contrast to the rest of the book, which shows the grotesque excesses of American capitalism.

New York and its museums

A popular hobby of the American money nobility is patronage, which is why so many museums are opened in New York. Federspiel mockingly remarks that if he were a murderer he would build a museum for his victim.

Homage to Marcel Duchamps

A drunk man is being taken away from a New York restaurant. When he is overpowered by the police, he loses his shoes. Guests look at the shoes left on the floor like a work of art.

A murder

While Alfred Hitchcock's films are looking for more and more unusual ways of death, reality in New York has already caught up with fiction. There a murderer tickled his victims to death.

plastic

Federspiel sees plastic as a symbol for the 20th century: it is cheap, indestructible and soulless.

criticism

“In this book about New York, a Swiss person occasionally finds some harsh words for the provincial narrow-mindedness of the Swiss and with this book he practices the good old literature, with which he immediately makes his own contribution to proving the accuracy of his own harsh words about the Swiss . The title of these records promises more than they hold. "

- The time

“With exact imagination and an intrepid, thoroughly sarcastic look at the night side of human existence, [Federspiel] came to grips with this monstrous city, a city that noticeably accommodated his preference for grotesque and absurd situations. The fabulous and dissecting closeness to horror, which can only be endured through spellbound and spellbound gazing, was henceforth the watermark of his prose. "

- Neue Zürcher Zeitung

literature

expenditure

  • Jürg Federspiel: Museum of Hate. Days in Manhattan. Piper, Munich 1969 (first edition).
  • Jürg Federspiel: Museum of Hate. Days in Manhattan. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-22050-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ REVIEW IN BRIEF . In: The time . No. 49/1969 ( online ).
  2. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/articleEUZQ3-1.118546