Olympia (novel)
Olympia is the title of a 1961 novel by the Austro-British writer and parodist Robert Neumann .
To the book
In his novel, Robert Neumann describes the life of the impostor Olympia. The book, written from the perspective of an adolescent, tells how a young girl, out of defiance and disappointment over her adored easy-going mother, runs off to Vienna to become a prostitute. Neumann used the eponymous sister of the title character, who briefly appeared in Thomas Mann's novel Confessions of the Conjurer Felix Krull, as a model for the character. He also lets her aging brother Felix appear in his book.
Neumann had dedicated the book to Thomas Mann, and Neumann's regular publisher Kurt Desch announced that it would be a "supplement and cheerful continuation" of Mann's work. Critics' opinions of the book varied widely. While Marcel Reich-Ranicki panned the book, Hermann Kesten thought it was funny and praised it.
Plagiarism dispute
The dispute began when Erika Mann had her publisher S. Fischer banned advertising with her father by means of an injunction before the work was published . After reading the book, she accused Neumann of his impostor novel being a partial plagiarism of Felix Krull , and sued Neumann for "breaching the personal rights of a Mann novel character". Neumann should withdraw the book or at least rewrite it. He also took over entire parts of the novel My Beautiful Mama by the unknown author Mathilde Walewska.
Walewska's book, according to Spiegel, a literarily indisputable “bad Sagan copy”, appeared in 1956 and became a bestseller, not least because its publisher (also Kurt Desch) used the author's unknown identity for a large advertising campaign. The novel had 6 editions, was translated into 12 languages and filmed in 1957 with Barbara von Nady and Paul Hubschmid .
Both sides were not squeamish about each other in this dispute, as they had an old hostility that they also liked to express in public. Erika Mann insulted Neumann as “professional droll pug”, Neumann countered by comparing her with the eccentric Nietzsche estate administrator Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche . Erika Mann added the assumption that Neumann was Walewska himself, and asked “whether an author may 'steal' himself in order to sell under a new name what he has already sold”. Neumann admitted to having taken over 38 pages from Walewska's novel, but at the same time turned the tables: Erika Mann herself had a “substantial part” in the writing of the novel of her old “friend” Walewska. Maybe she is the sole author herself. In addition, Walewska plagiarized his 1931 novella "Karriere" for her work. For Erika Mann it was finally "too much to copy."
Apparently Neumann realized that he had taken the fun a little too much and admitted that the author of the "beautiful mom" was his wife Evelyn Milda, who died in 1958. When writing the book he "helped her a little within very narrow limits" and used parts of his books "Karriere" and "Tibbs". Erika Mann was taken aback: "If I had known that she would be drawn into this sorry affair, I would never have revealed Robert Neumann's authorship - or co-authorship, for my part."
The proceedings before the Stuttgart district court ended with a settlement after a year. After Neumann had rewritten nineteen lines from 340 pages, Olympia could continue to appear.
As the cause of the whole mess, the author and literary critic Werner Fuld later suspected that Robert Neumann had “not wanted to publish his somewhat frivolous novel 'Meine Schöne Mama' under his own name in 1956”. All further twists and turns of the story are attributable to Neumann's biting humor.
Individual evidence
- ↑ With own pens , in: "Der Spiegel" No. 47 v. Chr. November 15, 1961, p. 90
- ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann . Frankfurt / M. 1997, p. 345ff.
- ↑ all quotes: Whose mom? , in: "Der Spiegel" No. 41 v. Chr. October 4, 1961, p. 92
- ↑ all quotations: “Der Spiegel” v. November 15, 1961, p. 90
- ↑ Werner Fuld: The lexicon of forgeries . Frankfurt / M. 1999, p. 195
literature
- Robert Neumann: Olympia . Desch, Munich 1961
- Mathilde Walewska: My beautiful mom . Desch, Munich 1956
- Robert Neumann: Career . Engelhorn, Stuttgart 1931
- Robert Neumann: Tibbs . Weller, Constance 1948