Conjectures about Jakob

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Uwe Johnson (middle) received the Fontane Prize in 1960 for speculating about Jakob

Assumptions about Jakob is a 1959 novel by the German author Uwe Johnson .

classification

Uwe Johnson's first published novel manuscript addresses the problems of people in divided Germany , like his entire oeuvre , v. a. in the GDR during the Cold War and continues the ideology discussion of his posthumously published debut Ingrid Babendererde . The protagonists of the conjecture also appear in other works by Johnson. Gesine Cresspahl in particular is the protagonist of his work Anniversaries .

content

The action, which is divided into five parts, begins with the death of the Reichsbahn official (occupation dispatcher ) Jakob Abs, who lives in his place of residence, an unnamed town on the Elbe, which, according to Johnson, is "between, and instead of, Wittenberge and Magdeburg " Crossing the tracks in the fog being crushed by a locomotive. This event justifies the events subsequently described from the retrospective and the narrator's assumptions about Jacob and his death: Was it an accident, suicide, or maybe murder?

Prehistory (Part I)

Jakob Abs, born in 1928 in Western Pomerania , escaped the advancing Red Army with his mother to the fictional town of Jerichow on the Mecklenburg Baltic Sea coast at the end of the Second World War , where they were accepted by the local cabinetmaker Heinrich Cresspahl and his daughter Gesine and live with them like family.

Main storyline

The main plot of the novel takes place in the late autumn of 1956, between October 7th and November 10th, at the time of the beginning de-Stalinization in the Eastern bloc , the Hungarian people's uprising and the Suez crisis .

Because his mother, like Gesine three years ago, left the GDR after an interrogation by the Stasi captain Rohlfs, Jakob is invited by him for an interview the following day. Rohlfs has been commissioned to win Gesine, who works as an interpreter for NATO , for espionage purposes. When she visits Jakob illegally in October and travels with him to her father in Jerichow, she engages Rohlfs, who oversees all actions during the entire novel, in a conversation consisting of threats and fundamental discussions about the advantages of the socialist system over the capitalist and the capitalist Duties of a citizen to support the GDR against the enemies. Nevertheless, trusting in the persuasiveness of his arguments, he leaves the decision to Gesine and Jakob.

In Jerichow, the protagonists meet another main character in the novel: the academic assistant for English studies Dr. Jonas Blach (Part II). He met Gesine in the spring in Berlin and started an affair with her, although she actually only loves Jakob. Now, after his speech at an academic event in Berlin about the necessary democratic reforms in the GDR, he wants to put his thoughts on paper in Cresspahl's house and smuggle them abroad with the help of friends.

Gesine is going back to West Germany. With Rohlf's approval, Jakob also travels there shortly afterwards to visit his mother in the refugee camp. Despite his love for Gesine, who quit her job at NATO and is now producing a German radio language course for American soldiers, he returns to the GDR after just a week, disappointed with life in the Federal Republic and the British occupation of the Suez Canal in his own Confirmed opinion about capitalism . On the way to the signal box on the day of his return, he is hit by a shunter and killed. While Gesine von Rohlfs was given safe conduct several times and had a retrospective conversation with him in Berlin (especially Part IV), he had Blach, whose essay played into the hands of the State Department of the United States , arrested for inciting war and boycotting .

Structure and narrative form

In the framework narrative (part I, beginning and part V) of the novel, which is not chronologically narrated, but is based on the course of the plot, three central dialogues that reconstruct the events are included (parts I and II: Jonas - Jöche, part III: Gesine - Jonas , Part IV: Rohlfs - Gesine), and these in turn imply various narrative forms mentioned in the next section.

In addition to the preference for paratactic stylistic elements, the main characteristic is the assembly technique with changing narrative perspectives : dialogues, inner monologues , authorial narrative and different first-person perspectives alternate with each other, with the abrupt transitions occasionally being indicated by the different types of text. Various languages ​​find their way untranslated into the text of the novel, such as English, Russian and Mecklenburg Platt , in which Father Cresspahl expresses himself. This creates a multi-perspective, fragmentary mosaic image of the people, their actions and motifs. Who the interviewees are only becomes clear from the context or from the further course of the novel. Many other aspects also remain opaque, only the descriptions of the technical processes in the signal box are clearly shown. According to Hans Magnus Enzensberger , the reader, who is “freed from his indulgent passivity”, like in the Brechtian Epic Theater , is given an active role: he has to combine the scattered information like a detective himself into an action.

reception

The West German literary criticism mostly valued speculations about Jakob as a linguistically innovative, outstanding work, u. a. Jürgen Becker ("Uwe Johnson [...] wrote two novels that cannot be compared in German literature today") and made the author known as "the poet of the two Germanys" ( Günter Blöcker ). In 2011, the German-British journalist Alan Posener declared the novel to be a failure: The language was sought-after and dark over long stretches, Gesine and Jonas spoke incorrect and incomprehensible English when they first met, and the GDR appears in comparison to be the better Germany despite everything.

GDR reviews (e.g. by Hermann Kant , Peter Hacks ) criticized both Johnson's undogmatic, individual position and his language. BRD writers and scholars also focused on the second aspect: While Hermann Kesten , Kasimir Edschmid or Karlheinz Deschner observed bad German and senseless mannerisms, others (Herbert Kolb Hugo Steger ) emphasized the poetic functions of the stylistic features.

In 1960 the novel was awarded the Fontane Prize of the city of Berlin.

In 1984 the Hessischer Rundfunk produced a reading of the speculations in 21 episodes with Gert Haucke as speaker.

Expenses (selection)

First edition:

  • Conjectures about Jacob: Roman , 1. – 5. Tausend, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt / Main 1959.

Later editions:

  • Conjectures about Jakob: Roman . Facsimile of the first edition from 1959, one-time special edition, 1st edition, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt / Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-42090-4 .
  • Conjectures about Jakob: Roman . Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH: Munich 2004, Süddeutsche Zeitung - Library Volume 18, ISBN 3-937793-19-4 .
  • Assumptions about Jakob: Roman , 4th edition, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main 1995, Edition Suhrkamp Neue Reihe Bd. 818, ISBN 3-518-11818-8 .
  • Conjectures about Jakob: Roman , Suhrkamp: Frankfurt / Main 1974 (Suhrkamp-Taschenbücher No. 147), ISBN 3-518-06647-1 .
  • Conjectures about Jakob: Roman , Rostock edition. Suhrkamp: Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-42702-6 .

English:

  • Speculations about Jakob . Translated by Ursule Molinaro, Grove Press, New York 1963 (English edition also London 1963).

French:

  • Conjectures sur Jakob: roman = (La frontière) (translated from German by Marie-Louise Ponty), foreword by Hans Magnus Enzensberger , new edition, revised by Pierre Rusch, Gallimard: Paris 1994, ISBN 2-07-073754-3 .

Italian:

  • Congetture su Jakob , translated by Enrico Filippini, for Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano, 1961

Korean:

  • 야콥 을 둘러싼 추측 들, translated from 손대영 (Daeyoung Son), Seoul: Minumsa 2010, ISBN 978-89-374-6257-3 .

Spanish:

  • Conjeturas sobre Jakob . Translated into Spanish and commented by Ursula Heinze; Ramón Lorenzo, Madrid: Narcea Publishing House 1973

Polish:

  • Domniemania w sprawie Jakuba , translated by Sława Lisiecka; Wydawnictwo Czytelnik: Warsaw 2008, ISBN 978-83-07-03170-5 .

Dutch:

  • Vermoedens omtrent Jakob , translated by Carolien Brouwer, Meulenhoff 1990, ISBN 9789029038263 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Johnson: "Conjectures about Jakob." Rostock edition, Berlin 2017, p. 363 (commentary).
  2. ^ Hansjürgen Popp: Introduction to conjectures about Jakob . In: Rainer Gerlach u. Matthias Richter (Ed.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp Frankfurt a. M. 1984, p. 56 f.
  3. ↑ Jörg Drews: Conjectures about Jakob. In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 8, p. 6531.
  4. ↑ Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The great exception . In: details . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1962, pp. 234-239.
  5. ↑ Bernd Neumann: Utopia and Myth. About Uwe Johnson: Conjectures about Jakob . In: Rainer Gerlach and Matthias Richter (eds.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp Frankfurt a. M. 1984, p. 106.
  6. ↑ Alan Posener: Those who write incomprehensibly also love the GDR . In: Die Welt from November 21, 2011 ( online , accessed July 20, 2015).
  7. ↑ Deschner, Karlheinz: Uwe Johnson <The third book about Achim> . In: ders .: talents, poets, amateurs . Wiesbaden 1964, pp. 187-202.
  8. ↑ Kolb, Herbert: relapse into parataxe. On the occasion of some sentence structures in Uwe Johnson's first published novel . In: NDH 10, H. 96. 1963, pp. 42-74.
  9. ↑ Steger, Hugo: Rebellion and tradition in the language of Uwe Johnson's speculations about Jakob . In: Gerlach, Rainer u. Matthias Richter (Ed.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 83-104.
  10. ↑ Gerlach, Rainer u. Matthias Richter (Ed.): Uwe Johnson . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1984, pp. 10f.
  11. ↑ Hessischer Rundfunk hr2kultur (ed.): Uwe Johnson: Assumptions about Jakob Unabridged reading with Gert Haucke. The Audio Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-7424-0212-7 .