Sleepless days

Sleepless Days is a novel by Jurek Becker (1937–1997) from 1978.

The novel criticizes the GDR system by depicting everyday problems . A personal narrator tells the story , and the reflector figure is Karl Simrock.

Becker's novel Schlaflose Tage , written in the GDR, was not allowed to appear there.

content

The protagonist , Karl Simrock, decides after a little heart pound to change his life fundamentally. The first step in his well-thought-out plan to do this is to leave his wife. He also decides to swap his job as a teacher at a high school for a job in the company for a few weeks. His dissatisfaction with his previous life thus affects his entire environment. In a bar he meets a woman named Antonia. In her he sees everything that he didn't have with his ex-wife. In the course of the novel, the protagonist even changes so much that he can no longer work in the teaching profession.

people

• Karl Simrock - The Protagonist. He works as a teacher at a secondary school in the GDR .
• Ruth Simrock - Simrock's wife at the beginning of the novel, later ex-wife.
• Antonia Gramm - Simrock's new relationship. Simrock thinks he loves her, but Antonia tries to overcome the Iron Curtain while on vacation together in Hungary to flee to Austria. She is arrested while trying to escape.
• Boris - Simrock meets Boris in the bread factory. With him he drives out the bread. He is the opposite of Simrock. However, he is also friends with Simrock.
• Kabitzke - the deputy headmaster of the school where Karl Simrock works as a teacher.

reception

Fritz J. Raddatz judged after the novel was published in Die Zeit that it was Becker's “most vehement, bitterest book, testimony to the integrity of a noble man”, but at the same time also his “weakest, most inartistic book, testimony to the artistic harmlessness of a chronicler”. It is "moving - through its renunciation of any literary technique". Raddatz found numerous “stylistic derailments” in it and describes Becker's writing method as “a-literary”, as “explanatory prose” or “explanatory style”. The book has not become art "because everything is proclaimed". But he does not deny the book its importance on other levels: "Its value is extra-literary".

expenditure

• Sleepless days. Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-518-02112-5 , 157 pages.
• Sleepless days. 15th edition. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-37126-8 .
• Sleepless days. Translated into English by Leila Vennewitz. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich , New York 1979, ISBN 0-15-182982-9 .
• L'heure du réveil. Translated into French by Barbara Spielmann. B. Grasset , Paris 1980.

filming

The novel was first filmed and broadcast under the same title in 1982 on behalf of ARD . Directed by Diethard Klante, the main roles were taken on by Hans Peter Hallwachs and Hannelore Hoger . In 1991 another television adaptation followed by the DFF under the direction of Gabriele Denecke with Axel Werner and Ulrike Krumbiegel in the leading roles.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz J. Raddatz: The new novel by Jurek Becker: Schlaflose Tage ". Integral truth - true literature. In: Die Zeit. March 10, 1978.