Journey of an earthman to Mars

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Journey of an Earthling to Mars , title page from 1790

Journey of an Earthling to Mars is a satirical utopian short novel from 1790. The text was published anonymously. Its author was the radical educator Carl Ignaz Geiger . In it he describes an interplanetary balloon ride, a civilization on Mars and an early socialist ideal state without private property .

Historical background

The first Montgolfière on June 4, 1783

As early as 1744, the Saxon astronomer Eberhard Christian Kindermann from Weißenfels described a literary journey to Mars and its moon, which is considered the first science fiction text in German: The speed of travel on the Lufft ship to the upper world, which recently featured five people hired to find out whether it was a truth that the planet Mars appeared on July 10th of this year for the first time, as long as the world stood still, with a satellite or a moon? Carl Ignaz Geiger, described in Meusel's writers' lexicon as a “candidate for the rights and wandering writer who declaimed for money on his travels”, seems to have known the book, because his introduction is brief, “so as not, like any German Travel writer, by describing my vehicle, fill almost half the space of my book. "

In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers started the first flight with a hot air balloon and thus opened the age of aviation. Geiger devalues ​​this contemporary invention right at the beginning of his story and refers to the Jesuit “P. Lana "( Francesco Lana Terzi ) and the Spaniard" P. Bartholomeo ”( Bartolomeu de Gusmão ), two true aviation pioneers from previous centuries.

The literary scholar Jost Hermand claims to have rediscovered Geiger's short novel, of which only one copy can be found in public libraries. While researching the balloonist motif in Jean Paul's work ( The Airshipman Giannozzo Seebuch ), he came across the almost lost journey of an earthly dweller to Mars . Hermand published an annotated facsimile edition in 1967 and included an expanded version of his epilogue Der 'Fall Geiger' in his book Von Mainz nach Weimar (1969).

content

The story is told in the first person; an anonymous narrator pretends to have seen it himself. Through literary knowledge, he came up with the idea of ​​flying to Mars in an airship, since everything had already been discovered on earth:

“I now realized that it was not impossible to travel beyond our planet either, and decided once and for all to try it: because everything else in ours seemed to me to be on water due to the many travelers and travelogues and on land, so completely exhausted that not a hand-size square was left, of which something could have been said that had not already been said a hundred times satirically, morally, politically, geographically, historically, statistically, etc. etc. "

Both the first-person narrator and his “air helmsmen” lose no time, and already on page 8 it says: “We were - in Mars!” Mars is inhabited and divided into four states known by name: Papaguan, Plumplatsko with the capital Wirra, Biribi with the capital Sepolis and Momoly with the capital Whashangau. One converses with the locals in "corrupt Latin".

In Papaguan, people live in one-story mobile houses, which they drive through the country with draft animals like mobile homes and gather to spontaneous cities : "So some cities suddenly grow to be the largest in the country and then suddenly become the smallest". The strongest force in the country are the clergymen (basically Catholics, without it being said). In conversation with local believers, the narrator makes fun of their concepts of original sin , transubstantiation and the Trinity and therefore has to leave the country soon. The airmen get to Plumplatsko, where the reader can easily recognize Prussia . All citizens and visitors without exception have to do military service so that the prince can wage war . The aeronauts are arrested and put in prison. There they succeed in weighing a guard with alcohol and pulling them over to their side. Together they flee to Whashangau. In Momoly, however, people live in a natural state. There is no such thing as private property , everything belongs to everyone. Love is free too, and residents mate in public. But homesickness is stronger than free love and collective property , the airship returns to earth with its crew.

reception

Röhling's journey of a Martian to earth

A contemporary violinist, the theologian and naturalist Johann Christoph Röhling , responded after the appearance of the short novel journey of an earthling in Mars with a 300-page rebuttal: Journey of a Mars resident on the ground , with the subtitle the time of the election and coronation of Leopold II for German emperor . The book was also published anonymously; the place and year of publication are given as “Auf der Erde, 1791”. In this, Röhling refers specifically to violinists, but without mentioning his name or book title. There is a short chapter entitled “Review” (p. 42), in which the Martian judges Geiger's book: “It seems to me that the man has his favorite hypotheses, with which he dreamed himself in Mars and them afterwards on earth sold for truth. "

expenditure

  • Journey of an earthman to Mars. ( Digitized version of the original edition ), Philadelphia (d. I. Frankfurt a. M., with Johann Gottlob Pech) 1790.
  • Journey of an earthman to Mars. With an afterword by Jost Hermand . Edition Die Falschen Bücher, Verlag A. Jungkunz, Fürth 1996, 226 pages. ISBN 3-9804804-3-7
  • Journey of an earthman to Mars. Revised new movement edited and set up by Michael Holzinger, Berlin edition, 2019, 4th edition. ISBN 978-1530659517

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Georg Meusel : Lexicon of the German writers who died from 1750 to 1800, Volume 4, Leipzig: 1804, p. 66.
  2. ^ Robinsonade socialism , in: FAZ.net of April 24, 1999.
  3. Jost Hermand: The 'Geiger Case' , Springer-Link.
  4. The Red Planet: Life on Mars? On the intertextuality of the three Martian novels Speed ​​Voyage on the Lufft Ship , Voyage of an Earth Dweller to Mars and Voyage of a Martian to Earth .