Nothing new
The short story Nothing New by Elisabeth Langgässer , which appeared in “Der Torso” in 1947, deals with the comparison between the Second World War and the Korean acts of martyrs.
content
The story takes place at the Spree tunnel of the Berlin subway . From here, the passengers of a train have to continue on foot, as this section of the route has become full of water as a result of the war. The passengers huddled together towards a bridge. A soldier listens to a conversation between an old man and his companion who are walking in front of him. This conversation is about the murder of people and their cruel torture. However, the soldier misunderstood this, as he associates it with the Second World War, i.e. with the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald , the Stettin Trial or the Scholl siblings . Only at the end do you find out what the conversation was really about. When the old man says goodbye to his companion, the soldier asks the two of them what they were talking about and learns that it was by no means about the Second World War, but about the Korean acts of martyrdom a hundred years earlier.
Interpretative approach
The short story is written from the authorial narrative perspective , which means that the omniscient narrator knows all the time what the conversation is about and only dissolves it at the end, which creates tension. Already in the first sentence "The Spreetunnel, which the madmen in the conquest ..." it becomes clear that the short story either takes place in the time of National Socialism or shortly afterwards and also that the author condemns the actions of the Nazis at that time ("Mad") . In this short story, the author describes how a soldier overhears a conversation between an old man (prison minister) and his companion. However, the soldier gets the conversation completely wrong, because, due to the time and experience as a soldier, he relates everything to the murders of World War II and not to what it really is about and which he does not seem to know - the Korean martyrs' records. The question is also asked what victory and defeat mean. However, the reader does not get an answer. But one can say that one can always draw positive consequences from a defeat, from which one can also learn, but nobody in society does this, the old man says at the end of the conversation. People keep running into their misfortune, committing the same terrible acts again (see World War II), even though they have already committed other terrible acts a hundred years before (see Korean acts of martyrdom). The statement could therefore be, also related to the heading, that people do not draw any conclusions from their actions and neither recognize their mistakes nor do anything against them. This was not only a problem during the Nazi era, it was also a hundred years ago and is still a problem today.
Key issues
The short story is set in the Nazi era and compares the Second World War with the Korean acts of martyrdom that took place a hundred years ago. This can be seen from the fact that the old man tells his companion something about these acts of martyrdom all the time, the soldier who overhears this conversation but does not know this and thus thinks that they are talking about the cruel acts during the Second World War. The actions were apparently similar, so that there is a misunderstanding as the soldier may have never heard of these acts of martyrdom and only knows what happened to the Jews in World War II. Another key topic is the author's realization that people do not learn from their mistakes and do not change their behavior towards other people.
Reception in literary studies
According to Harald Kloiber, the basic constellation of the story is nothing new - the narrator overhears a conversation - a frequent theme in Langgässer's work. In the narrative, the persecution of minorities is not seen as a singular phenomenon of National Socialism, but in comparison with the persecution of Christians in Korea “as a general phenomenon that is shaped in the nature of mankind, an excess, an extreme deviation from the norms of humanity This deviation results from a power imbalance that corrupts the powerful and sets off a chain reaction that leads to unrestrainedness towards the weaker. For Langgasser, the extreme increase in this deviation is the war.
Manfred Durzak attributed the “wolfish nature of man, released from all moral ties” in the story to Langgasser's religious perspective, according to which “fundamental depravity of man” can only be redeemed by “God's grace”. However, the classification of the National Socialist atrocities in "the destruction of a monumental Golgothas of history" leads to their leveling at the same time. Durzak was convinced by the "analytical power of her storytelling" far more than the "salvation-historical background" of Langgasser. For Volker C. Dörr, Langgässer's story Nothing New shows that "politically problematic relativizations of recent history can be derived from cyclical conceptions of history". He feels reminded of Hermann Kasack's novel The City Behind the Stream .
literature
- Paul Dormagen: Modern narrators II. Verlag Schöningh, Paderborn 1958
Individual evidence
- ↑ Harald Kloiber: The war as a theme in the collection 'Der Torso' by Elisabeth Langgässer. In: Ursula Heukenkamp (Ed.): Guilt and Atonement ?: War experience and war interpretation in German media of the post-war period (1945–1961). Rodopi, Amsterdam 2001, ISBN 90-420-1425-3 , p. 355.
- ↑ Manfred Durzak: The German short story of the present. Author portraits. Workshop discussions. Interpretations . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2074-X , p. 191.
- ↑ Volker C. Dörr: Mythomimesis. Mythical historical images in West German (narrative) literature in the early post-war period (1945–1952) . Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-503-06194-0 , p. 371.