Without each other

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Without each other (1993) by Martin Walser

Without each other is a novel by the German writer Martin Walser , which was published in July 1993 by Suhrkamp Verlag . The work, conceived as a multi-layered triangular story, depicts an eventful day in the life of a family on Lake Starnberg from different perspectives .

The title Without each other refers to the central themes of alienation and the lack of relationships between the individual members of a family. In a tragicomic portrait, the author describes the failed attempts of his characters to reconcile their ambitious life plans with everyday family life. Martin Walser finds a suitable setting for his plot in the German media environment at the end of the 20th century, whose clichéd motifs and characters largely determine the satirical character of his novel.

The novel represents a turning point in Martin Walser's oeuvre in that it anticipates themes - such as the problematic confrontation with aging and love and sexuality in old age - that will have a decisive influence on his literary work over the next few decades.

content

Without each other is a satirical portrait and at the same time a socially critical examination of the bourgeoisie and the media milieu at the time of German reunification . The novel is divided into three chapters, each of which is told in the third person from the perspective of another family member. At the center of the plot are the powerlessly acting couple Ellen Kern-Krenn and Sylvio Kern and their two adult children Sylvi and Alf in their villa on Lake Starnberg.

The first chapter, which is described from the point of view of the 55-year-old Ellen Kern-Krenn - mother, wife, lover and journalist - takes place in the Arabellapark in Munich's media environment. Ellen, who leads with her husband Sylvio an open marriage and has to deal with the failure of its social model, derived as an editor, the department , life 'in the editorial of the high-circulation weekly magazine DAS (THE MAGAZINE OF OPINION) that "between Spiegel , Stern and TITANIC has found a little space ”. For some time, Ellen has been trying unsuccessfully to suppress her fears of life and writer's block with alcohol and tablets. In order to avoid a stir in the editorial office, she has stopped any independent work and is now concentrating only on editing interviews. During an editorial conference, Ellen receives from the publisher of the magazine Dr. Bertram Spitz, who is only called “The Prince” in the media industry, was given the task of writing a laudatory article about the film Hitler Youth Salomon within two hours in order to dispel suspicions of anti-Semitism in which the magazine based on a review of the famous Literary critic Willi André König, also called "Erlkönig", is advised. In his book review he stressed the dominance of Judaism in organized crime too provocatively . Ellen, unable to put even a single line on paper under time pressure, had the required article written by her unsympathetic, sweat-dripping colleague, who suffers from skin diseases, Wolf Koltzsch. In return for this, Ellen "endures sexual intercourse [...] which she has to accept in the classic office form, sitting on the edge of the desk". After this extorted humiliation, Ellen, disturbed and several hours late, reaches the family estate where she would have had an appointment with her older lover Ernest Müller-Ernst.

In the second chapter, the plot of which takes place parallel to the events described by Ellen in the first chapter, the scene of the family tragedy changes to the family villa on the shores of Lake Starnberg. The events of this Friday afternoon are told from the point of view of the 19-year-old daughter Sylvi, who failed both in school and with her career as a pianist and is now fixated on windsurfing. Sylvi receives a phone call from her mother, Ellen, informing her of her delay and the imminent arrival of her lover Ernest Müller-Ernst. To prevent a catastrophe, the daughter should ensure that her father Sylvio leaves the family estate before the rich and successful lover arrives. Her 27-year-old brother Alf, who has been sitting apathetically in a rocking chair he has been holding in the reception hall for three years and mourning his cellist career, should not meet the guest either. But Sylvi can no longer prevent a "long, embarrassing meeting with Sylvio, who is three times humiliated as a spouse, lover and father" and Ernest Müller-Ernst. To straighten out the precarious situation, Sylvi takes her mother's lover to the lakeshore for surf training. But the seclusion of the idyllic place becomes a trap: Ernest Müller-Ernst, the "old body fetishist", seduces and rapes his lover's daughter in the shallow water of the shore before he follows Sylvi on a second surfboard and drowns in the waves of Lake Starnberg.

The third and last chapter of the novel takes place at the same time as the first two chapters and describes the experiences from the point of view of the unsuccessful writer and family father Sylvio Kern. After meeting his wife's lover, the drunken novelist ponders the humiliation he has suffered from his environment, to which he repeatedly exposes himself masochistically. Sylvio is not only worried about his wife's affair and his estrangement from his children, he has also hit an all-time low in his professional life: his works are exposed to cynical criticism and condemnation by the media, in particular the literary critic Erlkönig wrote him in DAS magazine panned as "tiresome and cumbersome chatterbox". But Sylvio, in his helplessness, has developed his own technique for processing his failed life model. He manages to endure reality by taking up the suffering inflicted on him in his trilogy with the appropriate titles Schwächling , Rohling and Feigling . In the style of his life, his novels, unencrypted and only poorly masked, deal with his wife's affair with the successful factory owner Ernest Müller-Ernst.

After Ernest Müller-Ernst's fatal accident, all four family members meet in the living room. The final alienation and disconnectedness between the figures now reveals itself in the form of speechlessness: “A group of people separated from each other. In the narrowest space. Inseparably separated. ”, As Sylvio expresses it unmistakably. Surprisingly, after three years in the rocking chair, Alf wakes up from his stupor, packs his bags and leaves the family. At the end of the novel, Sylvio retires to his study and writes two words on a blank sheet of paper that express the sadness of the infinite and inevitable separation of those who believed they belonged to one another forever: Without one another.

shape

Without each other is divided into three chapters, each of which focuses on a central figure in the novel, from whose perspective the events of a single afternoon in the life of the Kern-Krenn family are described. The chapters are headed with the name of the family member who determines the narrative perspective (Ellen, Sylvi and Sylvio). The couple Ellen and Sylvio are already connected and separated at the same time through the division of chapters by the intermediary daughter Sylvi. This positioning of the chapters is deliberately chosen and reflects the function of the individual protagonists. In structure and form, the work is reminiscent of Martin Walser's first novel, Ehen in Philippsburg (1957), which is also written in role prose and in a strongly associative style.

Obviously, no first-person narrators and no authorial narrators describe the events in Without each other . Neither the narrator and the characters are identical to one another, nor does the narrator appear as a character at one point in the novel, so that a heterodiegetic narrative situation is given. The descriptions in Without each other seem like narrative-free narration, as there are no evaluating or commenting statements and the recipient perceives the events of that day exclusively from the perspective of the respective protagonist.

Martin Walser works in this novel, as he did in Ein flehendes Pferd (1978), with a personal narrator , thereby placing the emphasis on the inner plot of the individual characters. Since the events in Without each other are narrated from the perspective of different protagonists - Ellen, Sylvi and Sylvio - a polyphonic narrative mode - a so-called personal multiple perspective - is given in this case. The narrative is limited to the horizon of consciousness of the character described in the respective chapter, which has a suggestive effect on the reader, as the narrated reality is conveyed to him exclusively through the feelings and thoughts of this figure. The proximity between the personal narrator and the characters Ellen, Sylvi and Sylvio is created by the scenic representation and the frequent use of experienced speech and inner monologue , which are integrated into the narrator's speech almost unnoticed by the reader.

On 226 pages, the novel Without each other tells the events that span a single Friday afternoon, i.e. a few hours. Martin Walser achieves the high narrative speed and dynamism of the work despite the time-covering narration by running the three narrative sequences at the same time and depicting the eventful hours of this afternoon in a varied manner from three different perspectives. The succinct brevity and the high narrative speed as well as the dramatic escalation to a decisive moment in the lives of Ellen, Sylvi and Sylvio give the work novella-like features, although without each other is clearly classified as a novel by the author and the publisher.

In Without each other, Martin Walser prefers to work with stylistic elements and rhetorical figures that can also be found in his numerous other works and have therefore become his trademark. This includes the formal trick of starting and ending a narrative with similar sentences or images, as in A Fleeing Horse (1978), Surf (1985), Death of a Critic (2002), The Moment of Love (2004) and also in Without Each Other (1993). Numerous literary scholars and critics are of the opinion that this circular connection is the sign of the hopeless circular movement in which the characters in Martin Walser's works are hopelessly entangled: “The narrative aims to prevent a problem from being resolved through literary transposition and abreaction persists in the eyes of the author. "

However, the literal resumption of the title Without each other at the end of the novel represents a circular narrative structure in its most radical form: “Much more clearly than in 'Flieende Pferd' the beginning and end are related to each other in 'Without each other', since the title tells the reader the reading is most likely to be remembered and when it appears again in such a prominent place as the end, it immediately stands out. ”Since Sylvio's work matches Martin Walser's novel in the title Without each other , Martin Walser creates a relationship between his own with the final words of his novel and the fictional work of Sylvios. This epanadiplosis opens the reader to the question of whether the real author Martin Walser or the fictional writer figure Sylvio is the actual author of this title. The association of literary creation goes beyond the identification of the literary creator: Against the background of Sylvio's motivation as a writer to literarily transform reality into a tolerable form, the recipient asks himself the question of the reality content of the fictional action from his point of view. "Walser stages a filigree identity game based on different levels of fictionality, in which, firstly, the boundaries between empirical author and fictional figure are blurred and, secondly, the transformation process of reality and fiction is discussed so explicitly that the two can hardly be separated from each other." narrative metalepsis wins the empirical author of the novel Without each of fictitious character in the form of the figure Sylvios. With the possibility of delegating the authorship to Sylvio, this metafictional game about author and writer allows Martin Walser to distance himself ironically from the content of his work: “Due to the circular narrative structure, the author Walser takes a back seat as a key figure in creative processes and thereby opens his texts to a pluralistic horizon of interpretation. "

interpretation

characters

In Without each other, Martin Walser consciously resorts to a stereotypical and pointed design of his figures, which makes them more readable as types than as individual characters. The figures appear to the recipient in this novel as puppets; they are caricatured and presented. With his two main characters Ellen Kern-Krenn and Sylvio Kern, Martin Walser exemplifies the network of dependencies and power structures in the media environment. In addition to an alcoholic writer who can only endure reality if he transforms it literarily, the blonde, valium-dependent editor Ellen also serves the clichés of the German media landscape with her fashion trick and a rich lover.

Figure constellation without each other (Martin Walser)

Ellen has long ceased to be a convincing representative of this satirical world. She is disgusted by her work and her colleagues and despises this "transfiguration and degradation industry", which she can only endure with alcohol and Valium. The naive Ellen is no longer able to cope with the tough power struggle within the publishing house and so it is not surprising that her colleagues and her superior are mercilessly exploiting her situation: “She could be blackmailed. […] Different degrees of blackmail, that was the most important difference among the editorial team. The ability to blackmail increased from top to bottom. ”Due to her writing inhibition, unable to deliver the requested text on time, Ellen engages in a prostitution-like barter. She buys herself out of her hopeless situation through sexual intercourse forced by her colleague Wolf Koltzsch; she is prostituting herself for this article. “This devaluation of the writing subject through economic factors as well as through the publication policy of the press and publishing world is thus almost allegorically taken to extremes. The key phrase 'Whoever writes, hurt' sums this up with satirical sharpness. ”Martin Walser distinguishes this figure at the moment of sexual coercion with a disturbing silence and devotion. Ellen fails to speak at the lowest point of her self-loss; she finds no convincing word - no clear no. In addition to the writer's block from which she suffers, her speech inhibition also becomes clear here. Like the other characters in Without One Another , Ellen is no longer able to react appropriately and unadulterated to her surroundings. She lives only on camouflage and pretense, so that the redeeming crying fit at the end of her chapter represents a liberation, which, however, remains an exception: “As soon as you cry, you have the feeling that you are no longer fooling yourself. As soon as you cry, you feel that you are reacting to the world as it should. "

In her private life, too, Ellen can no longer position herself clearly: After her husband Sylvio cheated on her, Ellen tries to integrate the love triangle with her lover Ernest Müller-Ernst into her life, who has long since had a new girlfriend. Ellen has distanced herself emotionally from her husband; Even his literary ambitions she can no longer get anything except embarrassment: “Sylvio's novels always run along life like a dog on a hedge. Now and then he raises his leg. ”Although Ellen only feels pity for her husband, she can no longer express this feeling towards her husband with words. Instead, she complies with his wish for admiration. “Sylvio lived from being praised. She could only kill him by not praising him any more. ”As in everyday professional life, Ellen only lives in her private sphere through camouflage and pretense.

The mediating function of the daughter Sylvi within the Kern-Krenn family is already clear from the positioning of her description in the middle of the novel between the two chapters of the parents. At first glance, the strong-willed and vivacious young woman with her sporting ambitions looks like a foreign body within her own family. Although she is initially not involved in the problems of the other protagonists, Sylvi involuntarily becomes the focal point of the action. Although Sylvi endures sexual coercion by her mother Ernest Müller-Ernst's fifty years older lover, she takes revenge on him in her own way. In a sporting challenge, she torments the aging successful man, in which she shows herself clearly superior to Ernest Müller-Ernst with her young body and thus - if not intentionally - causes his death by drowning in Lake Starnberg. With the accidental death of her mother's lover, Sylvi succeeds in breaking free for the entire family: she not only saves her mother Ellen from the threatening humiliation by Ernest Müller-Ernst, who wants to leave Ellen for another woman, but she also redeems her father Sylvio from the supposedly superior opponent. “It is precisely because of her family-contrary characteristics, her physical strength and practically defiant disposition that it is possible for her to influence real events (within the text). In a way, it becomes the catalyst of the event, because Ernest's death is pre-formed in Sylvio's literary drafts, but only becomes a reality through Sylvi. ”Martin Walser chose the similarity of names between Sylvio and Sylvi quite deliberately, because father and daughter own each other in Ohne a close functional connection: while Sylvio poetologically reflects on the death of his rival Ernest Müller-Ernst as a fictional event in his novel on this afternoon, his daughter realizes - albeit unintentionally - Sylvio's fantasy and, unlike her apathetic father, influences reality .

The character Sylvio Kern is portrayed in Without each other as a harmonious aesthetician who can only endure the unbearable reality of life by converting it into fictional texts, slightly modified: “To make everything run more satisfactorily, he rewrote reality. He could only endure reality at all if he had answered it in writing. ”Sylvio explicitly thematizes his motivation for the euphemistic literarization of reality:“ Not that the world is not beautiful. It's just unbearable. In order to make them bearable, one had to force them to cast a white shadow. That was only possible in writing, if at all. ”Like his wife Ellen, Sylvio is no longer able to react to the world in an unadulterated way:“ That is the worst thing, to let you see how you are in a good mood. If he admitted how and what he thought, he would be lost. He would be swept away by the scorn of those who make the difference. "

Sylvio considers the critical attitude of the producers of public opinion to be hypocrisy, of which he himself has long been a victim. He attests to the media industry “self-righteousness and hypocrisy. That was the foundation of opinion production. […] The more hypocritical, the more blatantly critical or the more blatantly critical, the more hypocritical. That is an indissoluble knot of interdependence to prevent an insight into one's own actions. ”With his literary acts of praise and eloquence, Sylvio wants to set a personal mark against this culture of judgment and has to state that he cannot do this because his environment as a writer is critical Expect an attitude towards current events and want to find this again in his works. In the hard struggle for survival in the media business, Sylvio has no choice but to subordinate his idea to the requirements of the strategy in terms of publication and advertising.

With the figure of Sylvio, Martin Walser describes the well-known dilemma of the writer in today's media landscape, who "has to sell his writing as social action [based on the claim] his criticism is already the first step towards overcoming the criticized abuses". In general, the confessions of the writer Sylvio and his eternal struggle against capitalist publishers and critical critics are reminiscent of a self-portrait by the author Martin Walser: “What Walser puts into the mouth of the writer Sylvio in his new novel as bitter knowledge is nothing but the quintessence of his own experiences."

References to real people

The novel without each other bears traits of a key novel in that Martin Walser understands the game with different levels of reality and uses prominent people from the German media and publishing industry as a template for his protagonists. The Munich publisher Dr. Bertram Spitz (the prince), who “got the money from his father or wherever to place his magazine vision on the overcrowded magazine market exactly where only he could see a little space between SPIEGEL , Stern and TITANIC ”, to the Munich resident Patriarch Hubert Burda and his news magazine FOCUS , which was first published on the magazine market in January 1993 . Parallels to other real people in the German media milieu can also be found: Sylvio's publisher Herbert resembles Martin Walser's former Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld , whom the writer had in his letter to Lord Liszt (1982) with the character of Arthur Thiele has immortalized literarily.

The writer creates the greatest resemblance to a real person in Without Each Other with the figure of the influential literary critic Willi André König, who is simply called Erlkönig in the media industry. This metaphorical designation refers to Johann Wolfgang Goethe's famous ballad Erlkönig and suggests to the reader that in the arms of the famous critic Erlkönig “the authors perish like the child in Goethe's ballad”. Willi André König (Erlkönig) - a gifted self-orchestrator and “insult specialist” - is only introduced to the reader in the first chapter of Without each other during an editorial conference. He justifies his loud preaching style and the exaggerated key with which the Erlkönig expresses his devastating judgments with the pain that the bad and boring books of contemporary German literature trigger in him. With this representation, Martin Walser exposes his greatest critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and his empty phrase "having suffered inhumanly from Walser's prose for a lifetime". The critic Erlkönig is particularly pained by the loquacity of the "most unrestrained monologist", which is repeatedly presented as the great and annoying weakness of the writer Sylvio. Marcel Reich-Ranicki says exactly the same in his review of Without each other about Martin Walser: “He likes to chat and chat, he talks and gossips tirelessly. Chattering is his element and his most important means of expression. ”Accordingly, it says in the novel:“ Whenever the Erlkönig needed an example for the habitual abuse of contemporary German literature in his countless appearances, Sylvio Kern always came to mind first, and he even knew the name do not mention without the addition: The tiresome, cumbersome chat. ”The reaction of the media landscape and the critic himself is restrained. Marcel Reich-Ranicki finds the similarities to his person “completely irrelevant”, which is also thanks to the fact that the Erlkönig does not play a central role in this novel. With his main character, the Jewish literary critic André Ehrl-König, who reappeared in Death of a Critic (2002), Martin Walser triggered one of the most intense controversies in the German literary landscape of the post-war period.

Although the similarities between Martin Walser's characters in Without Each Other and real people in the German publishing and media industry are obvious, literary scholars agree that this work is not a key novel: “This track is a dead end. It is ensured that the comparisons are lagging, the keys do not fit despite all the similarity. ”Martin Walser deliberately approaches the real people with his figures, only to immediately move away from them again due to an abundance of inhomogeneities and discrepancies. “'Without each other' is certainly not a roman-clef, not just a poorly camouflaged pamphlet that wants to target this or that contemporary, but the biting, cool-headed and elegant portrait of well-off people in the journalists 'and writers' milieu, a nasty endgame metacle. “Martin Walser concentrates the plot of the novel on the family tragedy on Lake Starnberg, which means that his protagonists from the Munich media environment take too much of a back seat to be classified as a roman with the clef:“ 'Without each other' is not a roman with clefs. Walser is first and foremost about the private constellation, about wife, husband, son, daughter, lover, lover. Only, as Walser says, these characters are 'busy in the world of the media' this time. ”The writer Martin Walser himself also insists on having created a fictional work:“ I never said that [it] was a key novel . I don't know if there could be an author who says he wrote a novel of the keys. It's not a literary genre at all. You can write a novella, you can write a drama, but you cannot write a clefs. "

subjects

Martin Walser draws, albeit in a satirical and grotesque way, a realistic, everyday tragedy in which the individual members of a family finally no longer find each other. The lack of relationship of people within a community, the convulsive work against the lack of prospects and against the rest of society with the awareness of senselessness are the central themes of this work. “A family is a misery group. You don't leave something like that ”, it says categorically in the first part of the story. But at the end of the novel there is the bleak realization that there is no togetherness in this family.

A stagnation has occurred in the life of the Kern-Krenn family, which is illustrated by the example of their son Alf, who has been sitting apathetically in the suspended rocking chair for years. While the other family members mask themselves to the outside world and pretend an ideal world, the entire lack of stability and perspective of the individual figures is revealed within the protected space of the family. They suffer from the failure of their life plans and the lack of relationships within the family. The situation is made more difficult by the disturbed communication between the individual protagonists: While Alf no longer speaks to any family member, Sylvio always finds the wrong words at the wrong time and in this way causes even greater harm. Otherwise the characters in this family have nothing to say to each other, which increases the distance between them every day. The title of the novel Without Each Other says it all: Everyone fights for himself and everyone fights against everyone. Ellen, Sylvi, Sylvio and Alf treat their own problems alone and with the means they deem appropriate, be it through drug and alcohol abuse, affairs, sit-in strikes or fleeing on the surfboard. But the supposed survival techniques only lead the characters into self-destruction faster: “They all fled. Or chased those fleeing. There were only persecutors and persecuted. "

Although the focus in this work is on the events within the Kern-Krenn family, the author Martin Walser connects this world with the sphere of the German media milieu through the professional ambitions of Ellen and Sylvio. In addition to the family history , without each other is also a satire on the media landscape, into which Martin Walser has a deep insight due to his activities as a reporter and radio editor as well as his decades of work as an author. The writer, who in recent years has involuntarily become the subject of violent, sometimes vicious media criticism himself, knows from his own experience that power and manipulation are the order of the day in this industry. “The media is the new church. The journalists are the priests who are allowed to do what they want, ”is how Martin Walser sums up his view of the fourth power in the state.

Accordingly, those responsible in Martin Walser's media satire Without Each Other have said goodbye to any human and ethical principles: “That is the division of labor in the media world: some produce glamor, others scratch it off. Reality does not occur. ”The publisher Dr. Bertram Spitz is only interested in the number of copies and not in journalistic quality. He despises the question of what truth is ("There is no truth, only versions.") And advocates the courage to say everything as simply as it is. The two main characters Ellen and Sylvio experience - each in their own way - the media and publishing world as a tough power struggle, which both can no longer cope with independently of one another. “The whole expression trade is [...] an industry of transfiguration and degradation. DAS specializes in putting down, ”says Ellen, summarizing the approach in her editorial team. The writer Sylvio, too, sees himself “exposed to a culture of judgment dominated by opinion tycoons and expressive princes, who attest to their contemptibility in a perfect, namely most critical symbiosis with the most powerful in the world”.

They are relentlessly presented in Without each other - the write-inhibited journalist Ellen with her Valium addiction, the alcoholic writer Sylvio, the corrector Wolf Koltzsch, who suffers from skin diseases and compulsions, the capitalist publisher Dr. Bertram Spitz and the literary critic Erlkönig as gifted self-stage actors - everything that was previously used as a target under the catchphrase establishment. Although the protagonists are portrayed exaggerated and mocked in Without each other , the novel is not a polemical settlement with the German media landscape and its representatives, which the author repeatedly emphasizes ("I am not Neil Postman ."). Nonetheless, this tragic-comic novel can be read as a grotesque but very realistic description of the milieu. “It has been confirmed to me by more than one side that it works exactly as it is in my book in the editorial offices,” explains Martin Walser in an interview shortly after the publication of Without each other .

Work context

Context in the work of Martin Walser

Martin Walser 2010 (Photo: Elke Wetzig / CC-BY-SA)

The novel Without each other is understood in literary circles as a return to Martin Walser's literary beginnings: “With 'Without each other' he actually returned to the social novel that he once began by, in the usual Walser manner, which is now very “Monosyllabic”, if not downright plain, is what West German society in the early nineties targeted at its representatives from the media and artistic industries. ”This is how the sharp literary portrayal of the affluent society and the satirical criticism found in this novel Germany's media and cultural milieu also appears in Martin Walser's earliest works, such as marriages in Philippsburg (1957) and Einhorn (1966). Although familiar themes and motifs are used again and further developed in Without One Another, it is not enough to understand the novel as an inventory of Martin Walser's previous 48 works. Rather, the novel is a 'work on the border', which on the one hand does not deny the socio-critical claim of the early works and on the other hand takes up central motifs and themes, such as the problematic confrontation with aging and sexuality and love in old age, which Martin Walser's literary works in the decades to come after the publication of Without leaving one another significantly shaped.

Despite the tried and tested themes, such as the alienation of the individual and the lack of relationships within society, the prevailing mood in Without Each Other is much more pessimistic than in the other works of the writer. The problems are no longer carefully distributed among the individual characters; Instead, "Walser is now venturing into an indivisible mixed bag: the mess has become universal and can no longer be divided into portions". This conglomerate leads the protagonists in Without each other into “a world of perfect desolation”, in which, despite the routine of everyday family life and work, they remain lonely and misunderstood behind their own expectations. Compared to Martin Walser's other works, the situation seems even more hopeless to the reader, as the characters can no longer find their way to each other and the failure of the respective life plans is final. As a result, there is a “ominous end-time and doom mood that Martin Walser has imposed on his novel from the start” in Without Each Other , which cannot be equated with the lack of perspective of the characters in earlier works.

Numerous literary scholars regard the position of without each other in Martin Walser's oeuvre as outstanding insofar as the writer narrates for the first time from a female perspective of observation and description. It can be speculated whether this is a reaction to the question asked again and again by interviewees and conversation partners whether it wasn't time to make a woman the main character of his works. With the representation of the events from the point of view of two protagonists - Ellen and Sylvi - Martin Walser takes this decisive step, which, however, meets with a mixed echo in the public. "The reviewers do not agree on whether he has won new votes through the women in this novel, but for the first time in Walser, critics discovered feminist views and direct criticism of men." The literary scholar Gunhild Kübler also welcomes the "leap over the Gender equator ”, but criticizes the fact that with the female figures Ellen and Sylvi, in comparison to the other works of Martin Walser, only paralyzed women are presented:“ Now these women figures who speak convincingly from their own experience are there. They are tall, sporty and vital and yet inferior specialists just like Walser's male heroes. ”In an interview, the author pragmatically explains that his female protagonists are no better off than the male characters at the end of Without each other :“ Women feel the same from the inside like men. "

Literary history background

The writer Martin Walser describes his literary project as “the history of everyday life”. His works focus on the inner conflict of their characters, who are not up to the demands that their environment and themselves place on themselves. With the study of failed life plans and the lack of perspective of the individual within society, Martin Walser allows the reader to gain insight into the inner workings of his protagonists in his works. Among the literary currents of contemporary literature, he is one of the representatives of the New Subjectivity , which represents a counter-movement to the politicization of literature in the 1960s. The family tragedy and the description of the inner life of the protagonists are also in the foreground in Without each other , while contemporary political topics, such as the historical coming to terms with the Holocaust in Germany, are only briefly touched upon in the first chapter of the novel:

After the DAS magazine came under suspicion of anti-Semitism due to a review by the famous literary critic Erlkönig , an explicitly pro-Jewish comment is intended to be used as a corrective to the public opinion that has been impaired. For this reason only, Ellen was given the task of writing a praiseworthy review of the internationally acclaimed film Hitler Youth Salomon (1990), which, based on a true story, tells the life of the Jew Sally Perel , who was a member of the Hitler Youth during the Holocaust survived in Germany. In an exaggerated grotesque manner, Martin Walser caricatures what he perceives as the typical way Germans deal with the issues of National Socialism and anti-Semitism in the figure of the publisher Dr. Bertram Spitz. During the conference he expressly declares that he will take responsibility for everything, and that he will not be branded under any circumstances with the worst suspicion of anti-Semitism. In the evenings at home he reads the propaganda pamphlet Mein Kampf , "firstly to see that he himself is not an anti-Semite at all, secondly to make himself resistant to possible attacks of anti-Semitism, which seems to be a German hereditary evil". The eccentric factory owner Ernest Müller-Ernst also complains about the constant presence of National Socialist crimes in the media and points out the risk of ritualization: “A never-ending blackmail through continuous presentation of the German atrocities in all media. Generations ago who could not have anything to do with the atrocities! But who should deliver confessions of guilt! And nothing ruins a society in the long run more thoroughly than a morality that is only at home on the lips. "The disturbed handling of the Germans with their history, which is reminiscent of a self-imposed taboo and censorship, explains Ellen with her statement" About Auschwitz can you can't discuss it "in a nutshell. "Here, Walser is clearly ironic about the German coming to terms with the past, part of which is to circumnavigate issues about Israel, the Jewish faith and Jews in general with uncertainty."

Martin Walser's confrontation with the subject of the Jewish literary critic Erlkönig and the latent anti-Semitic failures of the two characters Dr. Bertram Spitz and Ernest Müller-Ernst in Without each other went almost unnoticed by the public and his critics, which is surprising in view of the debate that followed a few years later. Because in Without each other , mind games and set pieces are already laid out, with which Martin Walser causes a heated controversy both in his key novel Tod einer Kriter (2002) and in his speech for the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1998. In this speech, the writer warns - similar to the figure Ernest Müller-Ernst in Without Each Other - of the danger of the Holocaust being instrumentalized as a relevant part of an ethos industry: "But if this past is held up to me every day in the media, I notice that something in me is resisting this permanent presentation of our shame. [...] Auschwitz is not suitable for becoming a threatening routine, a means of intimidation that can be used at any time, or a moral club or even just a compulsory exercise. What comes about through ritualization is of the quality of lip prayer [...]. "

reception

The novel Without Each Other - like many other works by Martin Walser - was published as a preprint in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in the summer of 1993 , under the responsibility of Frank Schirrmacher , the then head of the 'Literature and literary life' editorial team, who gave the Critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki also left this novel for review. In the FAZ , of all places , Martin Walser, with his work Jenseits der Liebe , published in the spring of 1976, had to put up with the harshest criticism of his career by the influential literary critic.

“Walser is not a narrator, I don't think so. He cannot write novels to die for ”, is the merciless reckoning by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in front of an audience of millions in the literary quartet on the occasion of the review of the novel without each other . Although the critic finds this story far more interesting than the last works of Martin Walser, he never tires of pointing out the writer's lack of narrative talent: “Since I've been dealing with Walser's books, I can't get rid of the suspicion that he always writes a little below his level. "This is how Marcel Reich-Ranicki displeases without each other, in addition to the constant unchanged means of expression of the author, as well as the decades of constant adherence to one and the same choice of topics, such as the lack of relationships and the loneliness of the individual:" Walser's people all suffer from the same disease : of fear of life. It shows how deliberately old-fashioned this novel is, more precisely: how resolutely Walser ties in with his beginnings. "

Marcel Reich-Ranicki recognizes the greatest linguistic inadequacy of the novel in the stubborn repetitions of the writer, whom he calls “a representative of verbosity”: “He likes to chat and chat, he gossips and gossips tirelessly. Chattering is his element and his most important means of expression. Yes, our dear Martin Walser has made his way chattering: He, the 'most unrestrained monologist', is Germany's smartest chatterbox. ”Furthermore, the literary pope criticizes the fact that the philosopher Martin Walser does not succeed in“ even one clear developing, thus imaginable, figure: Because he has a sharp eye, not for characters, but for individual character traits ”. For this reason, the protagonists of the novel without each other fade into mere synthetic figures that do not exist in reality. According to Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Martin Walser also uses his characters as lifeless mouthpieces: “For not exactly shameful, but at least foolish views, for outright stupidities, for careless formulations, for crooked and cramped images - for all of that he needs, no, he abuses his heroes. "

Towards the end of his review, Martin Walser's greatest critic adopts a conciliatory tone and, despite its numerous weaknesses, attests the work the rating 'worth reading': “Yes, for the time being we have him for the novel Without being grateful to each other . Thankful for what? For crystal clear perceptions and surprising observations, for brief and wonderful reflections. Because this novel, too, [...] lives from an abundance of details and minutiae, from astonishing nuances of all kinds. [...] Oh, it's a cross with this Martin Walser. But what luck that we have it. "

The German writer and literary critic Reinhard Baumgart is also disappointed by the superficiality of the narrated plot in Without Each Other and compares the work to a comic strip . On closer inspection, the novel turns out to be a "new staging of ancient Walser constellations: a reckless power and competition between the sexes, the age groups, the income classes, which is rather veiled by fancy dress and scenery". According to Reinhard Baumgart, Martin Walser persistently sticks to the themes, motifs and characters of his thirty years of writing in Without Each Other . The tenacious repetitions in his choice of motifs ensure that the actions and figures in his works, such as Without Each Other (1993), Surf (1985) and A Fleehendes Pferd (1978), appear interchangeable. But the greatest weakness of the novel - from the point of view of the critic - is the “chatty delirium” into which Martin Walser falls again and again: “As a narrator, he still cannot do what every real narrator has to do: shut up. Because discussing, even reviewing, the world and telling something are still strictly two things. As a narrator, Walser is still trying to escape from himself, from telling and talking, but also from the terrible monotony of his basic theme. ”It was only after reading Without Each Other that the critic Reinhard Baumgart clearly saw that it was the writer Martin Walser lacks any real interest in the political and social suffering of his protagonists: “If there is angry suffering in Walser's world, then it is not because of a certain, historically fixable, politically reformable or revolutionary social constitution, but rather that the human being as an animal sociale must be such, forced into a society that falsifies everything, talks to death, lies, disillusioned. "

The Walser biographer and literary critic Jörg Magenau notices the superficiality of the plot as the only weakness of the work. In his view, "the plot is pretty stupid and obviously caricature of itself." The critic justifies his positive overall impression with the plastic and lifelike depiction of both the locations of the novel and its protagonists. In contrast to other critics, Jörg Magenau expressly praises Martin Walser's art of designing expressive and realistic characters with a high potential for identification in his review of Without Each Other : "He does not just pose his characters, does not make fun of them, but draws them lovingly, carried by the awareness that they are no different from himself and his readers: we petty bourgeoisie. "

Reading Martin Walser without each other , Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, June 1993, from left: Gunhild Kübler, Martin Walser, Hajo Steinert, Martin Lüdke

The literary scholar Gunhild Kübler is enthusiastic about the satirical social criticism in Without each other : "Confident, funny and with bitter clarity, Martin Walser described the society of the Federal Republic as shark waters, which is horny for prosperity and career, power and prestige." She finds the link particularly successful of the two different spheres in Martin Walser's work: “Anyone who wants to can read Martin Walser's new novel 'Without each other' as an exciting, malicious report from the beautiful new German media world. […] But you can also take off the media satire of the novel 'Without Each Other' like a costume. Then a family novel comes to the fore - with familiar contours. ”In particular, Gunhild Kübler cannot agree with the opinion of some reviewers who deny Martin Walser the ability to portray his characters and their characters in a differentiated manner:“ In this book, the zeitgeist has taken shape, and Walser makes you dance with noticeable desire. There has always been something like comedy air around his characters. Now there is a sharp satirical breeze in which the staff of this novel thrives surprisingly abundantly. ”The literary scholar also points out that this novel differs from other works by the author, despite its similar subject matter, since it was written in Without Each Other for the first time during its writing Activity uses innovative forms of expression by telling large passages of the novel from the perspective of women.

The publicist Klaus Bellin also recognizes clear differences compared to the writer's earlier work. He praises Martin Walser's newly discovered pleasure in an ironic-satirical style of writing and in aphoristically prepared malevolence and observations, which make the work an extraordinary reading pleasure: “Seldom has Martin Walser in a novel so merciless and clairvoyant, so amusing and pointed formulated. He replaces epic breadth, which (as in the previous epic The Defense of Childhood ) carefully illuminates the last corner of a story, with aphoristic conciseness. In his story he constantly weaves polished sentences, biting, satirical, ironically luminous sentences that give the book a shine and a wonderful sharpness. Only Martin Walser can do this today. "

With great pleasure the author Hans Christian Kosler recognizes the satirical intention of the writer Martin Walser, who with the caricature of his characters in Without each other creates a more complex picture of society than in his earlier works: “Walser's ingenious ability to assign characters in a few sentences by means of an inner monologue sketching, is now even more pronounced, his desire for sentences and aphoristic shortage has increased. Every sentence fits, every word hits: the angry magician lets language become a unity out of the gap between word and essence, which the unswerving moralist laments in our media age. "

The literary scholar Martin Lüdke also praises the fact that the novel is “authentic, with extremely sharp contours and an accuracy that is not only due to the experience of the author, but, far more, to his feelings and resentments”. As a result, the novel has a greater openness and at the same time more finesse compared to earlier works by Martin Walser. So it is hardly surprising that Martin Lüdke came to the following conclusion at the end of his review of Without each other : "The effect: Walser at it's best."

filming

On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the writer Martin Walser in 2007, director and screenwriter Diethard Klante filmed the novel Without each other , which will be broadcast for the first time on March 19, 2007 as a television production by ZDF . The decision for this work by Martin Walser is made in close consultation with his eldest daughter Franziska Walser , who plays the leading role in the film alongside Jürgen Prochnow and Klaus Dieter Pohl.

Diethard Klante adapts the novel based on cinematic needs and gives the television production its very own artistic character. In the film adaptation, the plot focuses solely on the family tragedy on Lake Starnberg. The events in the Munich media environment described in detail in Martin Walser's work - especially the way the media dealt with the subject of National Socialism and anti-Semitism - are hidden in the film. This decision is not only due to the shortness of the film, but should also take the edge off the subject and thus prevent a renewed kind of debate about Martin Walser's speech on the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade on October 11, 1998.

Up until this point in time, Martin Walser was critical of direct comparisons between film adaptations of his novels and the literary work: “Constantly comparing a film from literature with the literary original and finding one better or worse than the other is nonsense, comes from aesthetic Helplessness and no idea. ”The writer perceives earlier film adaptations as“ embarrassments [...] because afterwards he always had to try to be dishonest ”. At the premiere of Without Each Other in the spring of 2007, however, the author was impressed and particularly praised the work of director and screenwriter Diethard Klante, because this time "my book is not being filmed".

Others

As early as the summer of 2007 the writer Martin Walser has the German Literature Archive in Marbach (DLA) a large part of his manuscripts as a premature legacy passed. The numerous archive boxes contain the most important narrative and dramatic works by Martin Walser, including the preparatory work and manuscripts for his novel Without Each Other .

The illustration of the cover of the book without each other comes from Martin Walser's third eldest daughter Alissa Walser , who is a successful painter and writer.

expenditure

  • Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-40542-X . (First edition)
  • Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-518-45907-2 (new edition)

literature

Secondary literature

  • Klaus Bellin: “Final at Lake Starnberg”. In: NDL New German Literature . Volume 41, issue 490 (October 1993). Pp. 141-144.
  • Dorea Dauner: Literary self-reflection . Dissertation University of Stuttgart, 2009. here: pp. 144–170.
  • Heike Doane: “The shadow of the comic. Observations on Martin Walser's novels 'Without each other' and 'A springing fountain' ”. In: Colloquia Germanica Volume 35 (2002). Pp. 311-338.
  • Gerald A. Fetz: Martin Walser . Metzler: Stuttgart 1997. pp. 145-151. ISBN 978-3-476-10299-7
  • Kirsten Harjes: "Martin Walser 'Without each other'". In: Focus on literature . Book Reviews Vol. 1, No. 2, 1994. pp. 208-211.
  • Hans-Jörg Knobloch: End times visions: Studies on literature since the beginning of modernity . Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. pp. 213–225.
  • Jörg Pottbeckers / Lutz Graner: “I drew a line and it became a circle. On the circular narrative structure in Martin Walser's 'A fleeing horse', 'Without each other' and 'Death of a critic' ”. In: Text & Context 2010. pp. 49–70.
  • Petra Weber: Nothing happened - but we have to report. The journalistic profession in German literature from 1945 to 1995 . Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004.

Reviews

  • Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993 (available online: Lesson from Sex and Surf )
  • Torsten Gellner: “The hard and the delicate - you can't come with us, but can you also 'without each other'? On the relationship between Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Martin Walser ”. In: Literaturkritik.de of October 1, 2003 (available online: Der Harte und der Zarte )
  • Jochen Hieber: "'Without each other' - a novel by Martin Walser as a preprint in the FAZ". In: FAZ No. 125 of June 2, 1993. p. 31.
  • Hans Christian Kosler: “I like the soul attack. Martin Walser's new novel 'Without each other' ”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 31, 1993. p. 132.
  • Martin Lüdke: "Politeness powerlessness". In: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 31, 1993. Page ZB4.
  • Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  • Jörg Magenau: “The tolerable lightness of literature. The writer as whitener: Martin Walser's novella 'Without each other' ”. In: Friday No. 32 of August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  • Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 25.
  2. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. P. 90.
  3. ↑ Jörg Magenau: "The tolerable lightness of literature". In: Friday , August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  4. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 145.
  5. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 27.
  6. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 210.
  7. ↑ Heike Doane: “Inside and outside world in Martin Walser's novella 'A fleeing horse'”. In: GSR III / 1 (1980). P. 83.
  8. ↑ Jörg Pottbeckers / Lutz Graner: “I drew a line and it became a circle. On the circular narrative structure in Martin Walser's 'A fleeing horse', 'Without each other' and 'Death of a critic' ”. In: Text & Context 2010, p. 58.
  9. ↑ Jörg Pottbeckers / Lutz Graner: “I drew a line and it became a circle. On the circular narrative structure in Martin Walser's 'A fleeing horse', 'Without each other' and 'Death of a critic' ”. In: Text & Context 2010, p. 61.
  10. ↑ Jörg Pottbeckers / Lutz Graner: “I drew a line and it became a circle. On the circular narrative structure in Martin Walser's 'A fleeing horse', 'Without each other' and 'Death of a critic' ”. In: Text & Context 2010, p. 61.
  11. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 74.
  12. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 13.
  13. ↑ Dorea Dauner: Literary self-reflexivity . Dissertation University of Stuttgart, 2009. p. 168.
  14. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 93.
  15. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 79.
  16. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 81.
  17. ↑ Dorea Dauner: Literary self-reflexivity . Dissertation University of Stuttgart, 2009. p. 150.
  18. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 165.
  19. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 165.
  20. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 180.
  21. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 176.
  22. ↑ Jörg Magenau: “The tolerable lightness of literature. The writer as whitener: Martin Walser's novella 'Without each other' ”. In: Friday No. 32 of August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  23. ↑ Hans Christian Kosler: “Like from the infarction of the soul. Martin Walser's new novel 'Without each other' ”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 31, 1993. p. 132.
  24. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 25.
  25. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: "Friends and Enemies". In: Literaturkritik.de .
  26. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 26.
  27. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  28. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  29. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  30. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. pp. 27/28.
  31. ↑ The literary quartet with Marcel Reich-Ranicki - episode 26 broadcast on ZDF on August 15, 1993. (1:10:19)
  32. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  33. ↑ Klaus Bellin: "Endgame at Lake Starnberg". In: NDL New German Literature. Volume 41, issue 490 (October 1993). P. 142.
  34. ↑ NN: "Aussen hui." In: Klartext - Das Schweizer Medienmagazin . Issue 4 (1993).
  35. ↑ Stephan Sattler / Rainer Schmitz: "The effect of literature." In: FOCUS magazine No. 20 (May 13, 1996).
  36. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 80.
  37. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 92.
  38. ↑ Martin Walser. Quoted from: "Aussen hui." In: Klartext - Das Schweizer Medienmagazin. Issue 4 (1993).
  39. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 73.
  40. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 14.
  41. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 74.
  42. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 180.
  43. ↑ Martin Walser. Quoted from: "Aussen hui." In: Klartext - Das Schweizer Medienmagazin. Issue 4 (1993).
  44. ↑ Stefan Scherer: “Literary modernization in the restoration. Martin Walser's 'Marriages in Philippsburg'. “In: Between Continuity and Reconstruction . P. 115.
  45. ↑ Martin Lüdke: "Politeness-Powerlessness". In: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 31, 1993. Page ZB4.
  46. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993.
  47. ↑ Hans Christian Kosler: “Like from the infarction of the soul. Martin Walser's new novel 'Without each other' ”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 31, 1993. p. 132.
  48. ↑ Gerald A. Fetz: Martin Walser . Metzler: Stuttgart 1997. p. 149.
  49. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  50. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  51. ↑ Martin Walser. Quoted from: Jörg Magenau: “The tolerable lightness of literature. The writer as whitener: Martin Walser's novella 'Without each other' ”. In: Friday No. 32 of August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  52. ↑ NN: “Nothing half, nothing whole”. In: DIE ZEIT issue 13 (March 20, 1987).
  53. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 61.
  54. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 69.
  55. ↑ Martin Walser: Without each other . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1993. p. 66.
  56. ↑ Kirsten Harjes: "Martin Walser 'Without Each Other'". In: Focus on literature. Book Reviews Vol. 1, No. 2, 1994. p. 209.
  57. ^ Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 1998 - Martin Walser. Laudation by Frank Schirrmacher and acceptance speech by Martin Walser Paulskirchenrede ( memento of the original from June 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de
  58. ↑ The literary quartet with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, episode 26 broadcast on ZDF on August 15, 1993 (1:13:15)
  59. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  60. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  61. ↑ The literary quartet with Marcel Reich-Ranicki - episode 26 broadcast on ZDF on August 15, 1993 (1:02:22)
  62. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  63. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  64. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  65. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Those who love less are superior. Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' ”. In: FAZ No. 175 of July 31, 1993.
  66. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993.
  67. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993.
  68. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993.
  69. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: "Zapfenstreich and Endzeit-Comic: Martin Walser's novel 'Without each other' - lesson from sex and surf". In: ZEIT of July 30, 1993.
  70. ↑ Jörg Magenau: “The tolerable lightness of literature. The writer as whitener: Martin Walser's novella 'Without each other' ”. In: Friday No. 32 of August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  71. ↑ Jörg Magenau: “The tolerable lightness of literature. The writer as whitener: Martin Walser's novella 'Without each other' ”. In: Friday No. 32 of August 6, 1993. p. 12.
  72. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  73. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  74. ↑ Gunhild Kübler: "'Without each other'". In: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 173 of July 29, 1993. p. 17.
  75. ↑ Klaus Bellin: "Endgame at Lake Starnberg". In: NDL New German Literature . Volume 41, issue 490 (October 1993). P. 143.
  76. ↑ Hans Christian Kosler: “Like from the infarction of the soul. Martin Walser's new novel 'Without each other' ”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 31, 1993. p. 132.
  77. ↑ Martin Lüdke: "Politeness-Powerlessness". In: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 31, 1993. Page ZB4.
  78. ↑ Martin Lüdke: "Politeness-Powerlessness". In: Frankfurter Rundschau of July 31, 1993. Page ZB4.
  79. ↑ Without each other (2007) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  80. ↑ Siegmund Kopitzki in an interview with Martin Walser: “Faithfulness to the work means loyalty to the motive”. In: Südkurier.de . (Formerly in the original; page no longer online)
  81. ↑ Claudia Tieschky: “Very charming artist people”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 19, 2010. (available online: Walser's 'Without each other': Very charming artist people )
  82. ↑ Claudia Tieschky: “Very charming artist people”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 19, 2010. (available online: Walser's 'Without each other': Very charming artist people )
  83. ↑ Press release 040/2007 Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach from June 11, 2007 (available online: Press release 040/2007  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove it this notice. )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.dla-marbach.de