Nothing (novel)

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Nothing ( Danish original title: Intet ; German subtitle: What is important in life ) is a book for young people by the Danish author Janne Teller from 2000, which was published in German in 2010.

The novel is about the meaninglessness of life and has been highly controversial since its publication due to its pronounced nihilistic statements.

content

One day in the fictional Danish town of Tæring, the pupil Pierre Anthon says that nothing in the world means something and that it is therefore not worth doing. From then on he stayed away from class and instead confronted his peers from an old plum tree with logically sharp arguments that question the classic consensus of values ​​and irritate the young people so much that they decide to end the situation.

After initial attempts to immobilize Pierre Anthon by force failed, a group of 20 girls and boys began to gather things that mean something in secret gatherings in a disused sawmill, thus logically refuting Pierre Anthon's claim that nothing meant anything . Initially, the resulting “mountain of meaning” consists of arbitrary and donated contributions, but soon they begin to demand “sacrifices” of personal importance from each other, whereby the victim can determine who has to make which sacrifice next. If it is initially purely material goods such as favorite sandals, beloved boxing gloves or the new racing bike , a spiral of psychological violence soon sets in, initially unnoticed, in the group: the more painful the victim is felt, the more the next victim will ask , contenting oneself with the explanation that a particularly painful victim is also particularly significant. The devout Muslim Hussein has to sacrifice his prayer rug , the pious Kai the crucifix from the church, Elise the coffin (with contents) of her recently deceased younger brother, Sofie her innocence (the process is not described, but several of the boys are involved ) and Rosa the life of a stray dog ​​who has joined the group. Finally Rosa (apparently in consultation with Sofie) asks Jan-Johan, who plays the guitar excellently , to sacrifice his right index finger. In a gruesome, detailed scene, Sofie chops off the violently reluctant boy.

Jan-Johan then reveals the project. The police and the public are paying attention, which leads to a worldwide media hype around the mountain and the small town. Finally, a New York museum buys the mountain, which has become a work of art, for $ 3.62 million. The students are initially reassured that at least the material damage can now be replaced.

Pierre Anthon is unfazed by all of this. He sees the media hype that quickly subsided as evidence of insignificance and argues that if the mountain had ever had significance, it would have lost it the moment it was sold for money.

Little by little, the students have to reluctantly agree with Pierre Anthon; they only close themselves to his arguments out of defiance and because of Sofie's prayer-wheel-like affirmation that they would betray "the meaning". When they finally have to admit that the mountain carries a subjective, but not absolute, meaning and that their victims were ultimately in vain, the anger over what they have asked of each other leads to a solid fight. In this scene, Pierre Anthon appears confident of victory and thoroughly mocks the mountain and its individual components. When he turns to leave, everyone else jointly vent their anger on him until he lies lifeless and cruelly battered next to the "mountain of meaning". That same night, the sawmill with the "Mountain of Meaning" and Pierre Anthons body burned down completely for an unexplained cause.

After Pierre Anthon's funeral, the participants in the project clean the scene of the fire and divide the ashes of their mountain among themselves. They no longer talk to each other and are generally avoided. Sofie, severely traumatized and psychologically shattered, is admitted to a closed institution.

At the end, the first-person narrator soberly observes her share of ashes that one should by no means joke about meaning.

characters

Agnes

Agnes is the first-person narrator of the novel, 12 years old and is in 7th grade at a school in Tæring. While she may seem nice and compassionate at first, she expresses more and more radical ideas as the action progresses. So she is the first and only to suggest that the boys beat up Pierre Anthon to get him down from the plum tree. The decisive initiatives for the "increase in importance" also originate from it.

After her own sacrifice, she becomes increasingly heartless and tries to consciously hit the sore points of her classmates with the sacrifice demands. When it is her turn to choose a victim for a classmate, she takes several days, driven by revenge, to find out by being nice what would hurt Gerda the most, even if Agnes admits that she was never interested in her before . So she is the first to ask for an item that cannot be replaced identically by asking Gerda to sacrifice her hamster. She is also present when the coffin is obtained and makes the phone call that calls the world press on the scene. Nevertheless, she later realizes that things are getting out of hand and tries in vain to prevent further victims. In the end, however, she justified the use of force against Pierre Anthon by stating that he was ultimately to blame for everything.

Pierre Anthon

Pierre Anthon is the son of a computer technician and a former 7a student who dropped out of school for lack of interest. It is he who denies the meaning of the values ​​of his peers and inspires them to take action to collect meaning. However, he is not interested in the "mountain of meaning". Only when Agnes tells him about the fight in the sawmill does he look at him, but denies him any meaning, whereupon the situation gets out of hand and everyone else vent their pent-up anger on him. His body burns with the entire sawmill in the same night.

Sofie

The pupil Sofie is shy at the beginning, but helps the group with good ideas. However, after being forced to sacrifice her innocence to the mountain of meaning , she becomes emotionally cold. As the only one of the participants, she doesn’t mind chopping off Jan-Johan’s finger. According to the first-person narrator's reconstruction, it was probably precisely this finger that played a key role in the loss of Sofie's innocence. With her aggression, presumably based on revenge, she contributes a large part to the final escalation and the fatal fistfights against Pierre Anthon. At the end, Sofie is admitted to the closed psychiatry.

Jan-Johan

Jan-Johan is a 7a student, plays the guitar and sings Beatles songs . As class leader, he calls the class together to do something about the "Pierre Anthon" cause, but holds back during the emergence of the mountain of importance. When it is finally his turn to sacrifice his right index finger and refuses, he loses his role as a leader and is considered a coward. After his sacrifice, he reveals the class and the “mountain of importance” by telling his parents about it.

Marie-Ursula

Marie-Ursula is Agnes' best friend and, according to Agnes, something very special. She wears only black clothes and has blue hair with six braids. However, these are demanded from Elise for the mountain out of importance and cut off from her and Hussein.

Elise

Elise feels that she is not loved by her parents because her sick little brother Emil received more parental attention than she did until he died at the age of two. She is asked by Ole to sacrifice Emil's coffin (with its contents). Cinderella, the dog of a recently deceased man, follows the young people from the cemetery and from then on lies on Emil's coffin. Elise loves Cinderella and goes for a walk with her every evening. When Rosa, who cannot see blood, is later asked by Kai to sacrifice Cinderella's head, this means a greater sacrifice for Elise than for Rosa.

Lady Werner

Dame Werner likes to use French words. He has to hand in his diary, which is an important part of his life, and asks Anna-Li to hand in her adoption certificate.

Author's style

Janne Teller mainly uses the past tense when the first-person narrator Agnes reports on the events. The dialogues in particular are characterized by colloquial language , although the vocabulary is generally not very varied. This is related to the age of the characters. Their idiolects can therefore be characterized as juvenile language . The typified figures become noticeable through adjectives that Teller assigns to them (e.g. the pious Kai). In the course of the narrator's descriptions, parataxes are mostly used. In the rest of the text there is a mixture of para- and hypotaxes . These are interrupted in some places by asyndetic sentences. All of this can be traced back to the conceptual oral language , which is why sentences, for example, often begin with the conjunction “and”. Teller uses in this book numerous anaphora , Klimaxe and Antiklimaxe and also makes use of onomatopoeia .

reception

The novel has been the subject of controversy since the Danish edition was published in 2000. It caused a scandal in Denmark and was temporarily banned in Danish schools.

Notwithstanding this, Janne Teller has received several awards for her book Intet .

A stage version of the novel by Andreas Erdmann premiered on October 13, 2011 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and was subsequently performed at numerous other German theaters.

Awards

output

  • Janne Teller: Nothing: what is important in life . Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23596-0 (Danish: Intet . Translated by Sigrid C. Engeler).

Radio play adaptations

literature

  • Sascha Löwenstein: “Nothing. What is important in life ”. To deal with the crisis of meaning in contemporary literature. An outline . In: Thomas Maier (Ed.): Literatuur in crisistijd. Crisis - what crisis !? Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Berlin 2011, pp. 175–197
  • Christiane Althoff, Christiane von Schachtmeyer (eds.): Janne Teller: “Nothing. What is important in life. ” , Oldenbourg Schulbuchverlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 3-637-01256-1 .
  • Achim, Roschmann: EinFach German lesson models. Janne Teller: "Nothing. What is important in life. , Schöningh Verlag, Braunschweig, Paderborn, Darmstadt 2012, ISBN 978-3-14-022530-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nothing: What is important in life, Janne Teller, page: 18
  2. ↑ Nothing: What is important in life, Janne Teller, page: 31
  3. ↑ Cover cover of the book, right page
    Janne Teller: Nothing: What is important in life .
  4. ↑ http://www.rowohlt-theaterverlag.de/artikel/Nichts_von_Janne_Teller_erstaufgefuehrt.2977626.html