Snow (novel)

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Snow (Turkish original title: Kar ) is a novel published in 2002 by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk . The book was published in a German translation by Christoph K. Neumann in 2005. It describes the journey of the poet Ka to the city of Kars , where a local military coup takes place the day after his arrival .

The city of Kars is the setting for Pamuk's novel Snow

content

prehistory

The poet Ka, whose official name is Kerim Alakuşoğlu, returns to Istanbul from Frankfurt on the occasion of the death of his mother and takes on the assignment to travel to Kars for the Istanbul magazine Cumhuriyet (The Republic) and from the suicide wave of young girls, some of whom are one Wore a headscarf and had been prevented from studying by the authorities, as well as reporting on the upcoming election due to the mayor's murder. His secret motive, however, is the hope to meet his beautiful fellow student İpek, who lives separately from her husband Muhtar, to marry her and to live with her in Frankfurt. He was friends with both of them during his student days in Istanbul and was separated from them when he had to go into exile in Germany for twelve years because of his socialist views , where he financed his life through government support and income from reading trips. The first-person narrator , the writer Orhan, reconstructs his friend's trip to Kars after the death of his friend and outlines the previous and subsequent years of exile in Frankfurt.

Kas stay in Kars

Tuesday

figure description
Orhan Bey Kas friend,

Author and first-person narrator of
the novel

Ka Poet, main character
İpek Kas former

Fellow student of
Muhtar's ex-wife,
lapis lazuli lover,
Kas dream wife
Kadife Yıldiz Girls wearing headscarves,

İpek's sister,
lapis lazuli lover

Turgut Bey
(Turgut Yıldiz)		 her father,

Hotel owner, republican,
former communist

Muhtar Kas college friend,

İpek's ex-husband,
candidate for mayoral of
the
Democratic Islamism Party
Sheikh Saadettin
Cevher		 More charismatic

Islamist

Lapis lazuli wanted by the police

radical Islamist leader,
İpek and Kadife's lover

Sunay Zaim Actor,

Head one with
Kemalist tendency pieces
gas animal end
theater company

Funda Eser Zaim's wife,

Actress
and belly dancer

Necip , Facil Koran students,

Admirer of Kadifes,
Kas interlocutor

Serdar Bey journalist

and editor of the
Grenzstadtzeitung

Teslime , Hande Girls wearing headscarves
Z. poor iron With Zaim

cooperating
secret service agent
and coup activist

After his arrival in the provincial town and his quarters in the hotel "Snow Palace", which is run by İpek's father Turgut Yildiz, on the evening of the previous day (Chapter 1 The Silence of the Snow), Ka begins his research : He speaks with the Deputy Police President Kasım Bey (Chap. 2 Our city is a peaceful place), the deputy governor and family members of the suicides and learns about their private and social problems. The religious-political aspects of Islamization are presented as exaggerated by the media. The governor's representative rated the killings as a revolt against the role of women in a patriarchal society: "Of course, the reason for these suicides is the feeling of extreme unhappiness in these young women [...]". The journalist of the border town newspaper Serdar Bey, on the other hand, emphasizes the “Islamist movement” as a deeper reason as a result of the dissatisfaction of many young people with corrupt power structures (Chapter 3: Give your voice to the Party of Allah!).

In the “Neues Leben” confectionery shop, Ka İpek proposes marriage (Chapter 4: Did you really come because of the election and the suicides?) And witness an assassination attempt. After a discussion about secularism and religious law (Chapter 5 Professor, may I ask you something?), An Islamist shoots the director of the college of education because he has excluded the girl wearing the headscarf from class. The perpetrator, however, is not the accused lapis lazuli, but, as it later turns out, a 36-year-old tea chef from Tokat .

Encounters with religious people overlap with these experiences during the rest of the day. This is how the poet becomes Necip from the Koran students (chap. 7 "Political Islamist" is a name given to us by Westerners and secularists, chap. 12) If God does not exist, what is the meaning of all the torments they by making poor?, the Ka's) science fiction are read -novel and Fazıl (Ch. 9 Excuse me, are you an atheist?) addressed that are looking for a life coaching and spiritual guidance in Islam to him about the dangers of atheism discuss and arrange a meeting with their guide lapis lazuli (chap. 8 Suicides are sinners) to give him your position and perspective on the events. The headscarf wearers Kadife, İpek's sister (chapter 13 I don't discuss my religion with an atheist), and her friend Hande (chapter 14 How do you write poems?) Talk about their motives and the repression they are exposed to over dinner at Turgut Bey are.

Both his friend Muhtar, who wrote western-style poems in Istanbul and is now running for mayor's office as a member of the Welfare Party (Chapter 6 Love, Religion and Poetry), and his former wife İpek recommend Ka a visit to the Kurdish Sheikh Saadettin Cevher (Chap. 11 Is there another God in Europe?), Who led you back to religion or converted you through his personal address and pastoral and empathetic manner. Ka too, sobered by his utopian dreams based on European models and life in Western civilization, is now open to traditional and religious ways of life. His conversations with representatives of the various groups are therefore linked to the search for a focus of his own and, after four years of writer's block, the rediscovery of his poetic creativity (e.g. Chapter 10 Why is this poem beautiful?) Through personal encounters and dealing with the ancient culture of his country. He is impressed by the depth of the young people's criticism of power structures and the metaphysical search for meaning. At Saadettin Efendi he ponders the path to personal happiness: "The snow reminded me of God [...] of [...] how mysterious and beautiful this world is, the snow, and that living is actually a happiness." writes a poem about the existence of God and believes that Allah sent him the new poems. In an interview in the Volkstheater he said "I came because I was very unhappy [...] I'm happy here".

In the evening, events suddenly escalate. At an event in the Volkstheater, Ka reads his poem "The place where Allah is not", inspired by his conversation with Necip, and experiences how the guest company Sunay Zaims reads about a girl who burns her veil from the Kemalist- enlightenment theater piece ( Chapter 17 "Fatherland or Turban"), the protests of the Koran students in the auditorium led to a coup by the secret service agent Z. Eisenarm (Chapter 18 Don't shoot, the guns are loaded), which the audience initially viewed as a game. Snipers shoot the protesters from the stage. Koran students and other Islamists as well as Kurdish nationalists are arrested and imprisoned, 29 of them among others. a. Necip, die, an exit ban is imposed, tanks control the streets and soldiers occupy the television station (Chapter 19 And how beautifully the snow fell).

Wednesday

On this day, the development of political tragedy and Ka's private happiness contrast: the response to his solicitation for İpek, although she still doubts the realization of Ka's future dreams, and the beginning of a sexual relationship with her (Chapter 24 Ich, Ka). The poet is brought to the new commanders Sunay Zaim and Z. Eisenarm, questioned about his conversations with the Islamists, which the informants have observed and tapped (Chapter 21, but I don't recognize any of them) and has to identify the dead Necip as a contact for lapis lazuli. During these interrogations about the change in his political stance, he learns how Sunay used the chance of the absence of the commanders in the city these days and staged the coup with Eisenarm's special team and some soldiers (Chapter 22, Quite the man for the role of Ataturk) . Here (chap. 23 Allah is just enough to know that the problem is not a problem of the mind and belief, but one of life) and in further conversations, a discussion about tradition and progress, atheism and religiosity opens up Problem of political engagement in the field of tension between morality and position of power. Ka is confronted with the polar arguments: On the one hand, the Kemalists (e.g. Sunay Zaim) and Z. Eisenarm warn against terrorist fundamentalism that seeks a religious state based on the Iranian model and the prohibition of democratic and liberal ideas. The military is also important for protecting intellectuals, including him, from the attacks by the fundamentalists. On the other hand, Ka experiences the young Islamists who see themselves as victims. Using the example of the headscarf ban in state schools, they (Kadife, Necip, etc.) articulate their right to practice their religion and criticize the regulations and reprisals of a military and secret service system, as well as the suppression of traditions, which in their opinion leads to Western atheism. The poet personally finds himself in this area of ​​tension. As Sunay puts it, Kas is "mind [...] in Europe, his heart with the activists from the prayer and preacher school, and his head is mixed up."

Horrified by the brutality of the military action, Ka continues his contacts with the Islamists. Kadife takes him to lapis lazuli (chap. 25 The Only Time of Freedom in Kars). He would like to publish his opinion against the military coup in a western newspaper and Ka should hand these over to German journalists (Chap. 26 Our poverty is not the reason why we are so attached to God). However, the latter suggests that the resolution not only be signed by Islamists, but also by other opposition activists, and develops the plan for a joint appeal in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Chapter 26 Our poverty is not the reason why we are so attached to God) and one Conference of representatives with lapis lazuli, at which the text is formulated. The project is not altruistic for the poet, namely he proposes Turgut Bey as a participant for the Republicans and hopes during his absence and the struggle of the participants for positions and corresponding formulations in the Hotel Asia (Chapter 31 We are not stupid, we are just poor) to be able to love İpek in his hotel room. This is how it happens (chap. 28 What separates the agony of waiting from love), but his feeling of happiness is connected with a feeling of danger and with the fear of loss (chap. 30 When will we meet again?).

Through his actions, Ka, who had confessed to Turgut Bey the day before that he was "not interested in politics [...] at all", became more and more involved in the political debate. He learns from Muhtar that in a newspaper article appearing the next day (Chapter 33 A Godless in Kars) his poem, which he read in the theater, is criticized as the godless product of an imitator of the West and he is accused of sowing discord. He is now afraid of an assassination attempt on him. In a conversation with Serdar Bey at the Turgut family table, an attempt is made to reassure him with background information: The article was due to the dependence of the newspaper on the subscribers, v. a. government agencies, written on the instructions of the governor's office, which all readers would know.

Thursday

Ka is ordered to Sunay's headquarters in the morning. The actor suggests that the lapis lazuli, arrested that night, be released if Kadife starred in his play based on Thomas Kyd's “ Spanish Tragedy ” and bared her hair. Ka as a mediator is supposed to persuade both of them, but Sunay will protect him from the Islamists who are angry because of the newspaper article about him (chapter 34 Kadife does not accept that). In conversations with İpek, Kadife and Lapislazuli (Chapter 35, I am nobody's spy), he convinces them with his survival strategy in relation to their conflicts of conscience. When asked “What is happiness?” Ka explains: “To find a world in which you can forget all this hardship, this misery. To appreciate someone like a whole world ... «. After negotiations with Colonel Osman Nuri Çolak, who does not want to release the Islamist leader until after the performance, and Sunay, who gives his play priority and is willing to take the risk of breaking his word, Lapis Lazuli is released from custody and can go into hiding (Chapter 36 You won't really die, will they?). He has Ka brought to his hiding place, where he is with his hand, and tells him his wishes that Kadife not perform and that Ka publishes the resolution written in the Hotel Asia in Frankfurt (Chapter 37 Tonight, Kadife's hair is the only text ). Z. Eisenarm found out about this meeting and is interrogating the poet. He wants to find out his whereabouts and tells him that İpek, like Kadife now, was Lapis Lazuli’s lover in the last period of her marriage to Muhtar (chap. 38 We really have no intention of grieving you). Although Ka is beaten, he does not reveal where he is hiding. After returning to the hotel, he speaks to İpek. She asks him for his trust and tells the jealous Ka her story and characterizes lapis lazuli as an imaginative, childlike, compassionate person, he is not a murderer. She and Turgut are afraid for Kadife and ask Ka to persuade her not to perform (chap. 39 The Joys of Weeping Together). He meets the girl at the stage rehearsal with Funda Eser, delivers the news (Chapter 40, being a double agent is certainly not easy) and soon afterwards writes his last poem "The place at the end of the world".

This is where Ka's records end. Four years later, during his stay in Kars, the writer Orhan tries to reconstruct Kas's last hours in the city with the help of conversations with those involved: İpek receives a letter from Kas from the train station, soldiers force him to leave and she should take his and her luggage with him Train come at nine thirty. She prepares everything when Fazil brings the news of Lapis Lazuli and Hand's death by Eisenarm's command. She doesn't go to the train station and breaks off her relationship with Ka, because she suspects that he has betrayed Lapis Lazuli (Chapter 42, I'm packing my suitcase). The narrator reinforces this suspicion after his site visits by interpreting the poems: From their arrangement on the memory level of the snow crystal, he recognizes the importance of the Necips sleeping tract as an atheistic space of experience, as “the place where Allah is not” and “the place at the end of the World ”, and deduces from this that Ka went into this room, in which Eisenarm resided after the coup, and denounced lapis lazuli.

Meanwhile, Sunay is performing his play “Tragedy in Kars” on the tension between tradition and progress using the example of a family with an update by including the headscarf dispute and the suicides of women. In the third act, as in the first event, reality breaks into the theater play. Instead of a fake theater death, the actor stages the end of his own life by using a sleight of hand to insert real cartridges into the pistol unnoticed and let himself be shot by Kadife, who has revealed her hair. Previously, he confessed to the revolution and its failure (Chapter 43 Women commit suicide out of pride).

Orhan's literary reconstruction

The snow melts on Thursday night and the military advance into the city via the open streets and end the coup. After an investigation by a major from Ankara, those responsible are punished and later pardoned. Kadife, sentenced to imprisonment for negligent homicide and released early, marries the four years younger Fazıl, who now works for the TV station, and lives with him and their son Ömercan in Kars. İpek continues to live with her father and runs the “Schneepalast” hotel with him (Chap. 44 Nobody likes Ka here anymore). Ka returns to Frankfurt after his adventure in Turkey, where he is murdered four years later. 42 days later, Orhan researches his daily routine, his relationships and reading trips in Germany and searches for documents in his apartment, since the manuscript for the recently completed volume of poetry "Snow" was lost. But he finds travel notes, three booklets with poem interpretations with the sketch of the snow crystal and 40 letters to İpek that have not been sent, in which he complains about his “unbearable feeling of loss and abandonment” (Chapter 29 What I Miss).

Orhan wants to write a novel about his friend. That's why he takes the bus to Kars (chap. 41 Everyone has a snowflake, chap. 44 Today nobody likes Ka here anymore), arrives there in the evening, lives in the hotel “Schneepalast”, is invited to dinner by Turgut and follows the trail Kas, he meets the contemporary witnesses, uses audio and video tapes from the TV station to find out about the events and immerses himself in the friend's experiences so much that he also falls in love with İpek and falls in love with her in the "New Life" pastry shop. meets. Fazıl is very helpful in finding materials and making site visits, e.g. B. the bedroom of the Koran students. But he reacts negatively to the narrator's book plans: “If you let me appear in a novel that is set in Kars, then I would like to tell the reader not to believe anything you have written about me, about all of us. Nobody can understand us from afar. "

analysis

Historical background

The river Kars at the foot of the Kars fortress

Kars is a place with an eventful history in the historical border region between Russia , Iran , Armenia , Georgia and Turkey with a multicultural population history of Turks, Kurds , Armenians, Greeks , Russians and other minorities. These tensions are not just history, they are highly topical. Due to the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan , the Turkish borders with Armenia are closed. The Armenian history, omnipresent in Kars, addresses a taboo subject in modern Turkey, the genocide of the Armenians . With the closure of the borders with Armenia, the once flourishing Kars has lost its economic basis and smuggling and crime play a certain role. Another controversial issue is the conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish nationalists . Orhan Pamuk's candid position on these issues has prompted indictments against the author.

Another area of ​​tension develops between the various religiously oriented currents and the departments of the Kemalist state apparatus. There are numerous supporters of Islamic movements, especially in Eastern Turkey, where rules such as the headscarf ban at universities provoke heated disputes.

Pamuk can therefore develop the turmoil of Turkey in a literarily comprehensible way in Kars within the classical temporal and local limits . Neither side is idealized, the critical approach is based on the demystification of people who only become inhuman because they allow themselves to be made agents of currents that do not represent their real problems. From the perspective of the poet Ka, who follows the events from a distance of the Westerner and yet becomes involved in them, the background of the political engagement and the strange positions that are hidden from the actors directly involved in the constraints become clear.

subjects

As in all of Pamuk's novels, this work also deals with the tensions in Turkey between East and West, between the various political and religious currents and the conflict-ridden history of the country. More than in the other texts, however, the immediate political is in the foreground.

Domestic conflicts

The snapshot of Kars takes place in a situation in which the opposing forces to the secular Turkish military are on the defensive. The aged representatives of left groups have resignedly adapted to the system and can only carry out individual actions with the consent of the nationalist Kurds. Many older leftists only oppose verbally, at the table with friends or with family, while a telenovela is on TV . The supporters of the PKK are persecuted in a particularly hostile manner by the authorities, and only a few still venture into armed resistance. The most important antipole to western-oriented Turkey appear to be the diverse religious currents of moderates who are looking for a place in politics and for compromises, through Sufi groups and Koran schools to terrorists. But here too the state is omnipresent, eavesdropping, arrested and controlled. All opposition groups are interspersed with informers, all public spaces are bugged.

Still, the battle is not over. As firmly as the state organs hold power in their hands, the people are not convinced that this is happening in their favor. The bulk of the unemployed , the small self-employed, the young people are looking for a new orientation in Eastern Turkey, increasingly among Islamic forces.

Pamuk not only describes the political turmoil in Turkey and the omnipresent tensions and fears, but also the wisdom and courage of ordinary people. The survival strategies of the characters in grotesque situations, their outward adaptation to the apparatus of power and the spying, their flight into a fictional world of the Mexican television series “Marianna” (chap. 27 Hold on, girls, help comes from Kars!), Which is also used by the And their self-doubts (chap. 31 We are not stupid, we are just poor) is portrayed by Pamuk with his eye for bizarre, familiar from other novels (e.g. the event in the Volkstheater with the sketches Sunay Zaims, the Advertising parodies Funda Esers and the appearance of the legendary goalkeeper Vural in Chapter 15 or the struggle for a resolution in Chapter 31) and labyrinthine structures and the contradictions of the world. In this way he dissolves the monolithic political and religious blocks and draws, e.g. Sometimes in a satirical escalation, people in their everyday weaknesses and strengths, their worries and entanglements (for example the articles written by newspaper publisher Serdar Bey before the events).

Another important aspect is the contradicting attitude towards the military. For all their fascination with freedom and Western democracy, they are many people, including intellectuals, but relieved that the military sets limits for the Islamists, despite the shame this view creates in individuals. On the day after the coup, Ka saw people doing their usual activities on his way through the city, the children were happily playing in the snow, nobody seemed to be against the military coup, he even felt a “mood of a new beginning and a change in the boredom of the Life in the air. ”Even in Ka,“ this mood of indifference ”arouses“ the feeling of freedom ”and he buys“ a hot cinnamon drink and [drinks] it with pleasure ”at the snack bar.” Experienced the atmosphere of indifference to the brutality of the military the day before he was with his friend Muhtar, who "seemed to accept the ruthlessness of the police and the state as something as natural as a power failure". Ka does not have this “natural flexibility”, but he enjoys the empty, snow-covered streets after the coup: “In the dead light of the pale yellow street lamps of the city everything looked as if it came from a wistful dream that Ka felt guilty. On the other hand, he was grateful for this silent and forgotten land that inspired him to write poetry ”. He also feels the ambivalence in himself on the way to the morgue, where he identifies the dead Necip: “Part of his mind told him that he was secretly happy that there had been a military coup and that the country had not been left to the Islamists . Therefore, to ease his conscience, he vowed not to cooperate with the police and the army. "

This paradoxical attitude of the intellectuals runs through the leitmotif of the novel, concentrated in the character of the actor Sunay Zaim, who despite his miserable situation represents the Kemalist state ideology as in the propaganda campaigns of bygone times. The story returns here as a farce , Sunay as an operetta dictator for three days appears as a caricature of Ataturk , which he emulates in an actor 's way, which often turns him into a farce. Sunay poses as a dictator and knows the limits of this project. Citing Hegel , he argues that “just as the theater assigns a role to certain people [and only] the brave have their performance”. He now sees the chance in Kars, cut off from the outside world, to assume the role of ruler once, i.e. H. To stage the story yourself.

The headscarf dispute focuses the dispute in Turkey on one visible indicator. Pamuk shows how the number of veiled people in Turkey appears to be an indicator of the non-existent emancipation of women or of their religious freedom. The novel Schnee reflects on both sides, on the one hand the protest attitude of young people against state dress codes and the surveillance of privacy as well as the encroachment on religious beliefs, and on the other hand the destructive effect of this dispute on women, who are instrumentalized as symbols for the political stance of their men. In this situation, every item of clothing, intentionally or unintentionally, becomes a symbol. The novel demonstrates that this conflict is essentially politically and less religiously motivated, right down to the psychological details: Ipek doesn't dare to wear her fashionable western clothes in kars. The headscarf-wearing girls Hande and Kadife are both in love with the Islamist leader lapis lazuli and Kadife has to learn how her lover tells her, depending on his security situation, whether or not to show her hair on stage, i.e. This means that it is not autonomous in its decisions, but is influenced.

East and West

As in all of Pamuk's novels, a central theme is the tension between East and West. The main characteristic of the West appears to be a developed individuality , which is not only portrayed positively, but also in its tendency towards isolation. Pamuk sheds light on the communication problems of western-oriented people with the people in eastern Turkey who are firmly rooted in their communities and are not able to perceive problems abstractly and outside of group contexts. These figures are well aware that this is perceived from the outside as stupidity and narrow-mindedness. They defend themselves against these accusations by pointing out that from the Western point of view every kind of poverty appears as an expression of stupidity, as an effect of medieval and uneducated views. In the world of people, their thoughts make perfect sense, even if they seem limited and naive from a Western point of view (Chapter 31 We are not stupid, we are just poor). The evaluation of Europe is quite ambivalent in a mixture of admiration and rejection. In their discussions with Ka, for example, lapis lazuli and Kadife (Kp. 26 Our poverty is not the reason why we cling to God so much) reveal a stencil image of Western life that revolves around the German figure invented by Ka in a mixture of pipe dream and parody democratic, educated, broad-shouldered, blond and good-looking journalist Hans Hansen from the Frankfurter Rundschau, who lives happily with his blond and beautiful wife Ingeborg and the equally well-designed children, in a beautiful, bright house with a garden and presumably with friendly sympathy the Turks look, which in Lapis Lazuli opinion should actually offend their pride. But Ka replies, “You were very serious. Maybe that's why they were happy. For them, life is serious and requires a sense of responsibility. Not like ours, where it is either a blind effort or a bitter trial. But this seriousness was something alive, something positive. "

But Ka's failure also shows that it is not possible to integrate socially in such an environment with an individualistic perspective of happiness that deliberately wants to distance oneself from all communities. As outdated and sometimes absurd as the existing structures appear from the outside, they are a prerequisite for survival in a torn, violent world.

The internal contradictions of this society cannot be resolved in Pamuk's novel by the individual. In this environment, people have to make compromises. The Islamists are always coming to terms with the military, and the western-oriented Turgut Bey is afraid that if his daughter demonstratively takes off her headscarf, she will end up in the line of fire of radical Muslims. Many of the actors navigate between the various groups, from the socialist who secretly cooperates with the military to the student preacher full of doubts about God and a weakness for Western science fiction literature. In the process, characters emerge with a peculiar humanity, such as the informer Saffet (32nd chapter), who only passes on information that does not cause the eavesdropping to be too distressed.

Forms of religiosity

For most of the people in Pamuk's novel, the confession of Allah is not essentially an individual act of religiosity , but the decision to join a religious community. In this respect, Ka, who repeatedly experiences moments of faith in the fairy tale snow world of the novel, does not succeed in being accepted as a believer. They feel his inner distance to the politicized popular belief and treat him as an atheist without taking the signs of his interest in God seriously.

The headscarf dispute

Women with headscarves near Kars

The suicides of the girls wearing the headscarves irritate both religious and state authorities. For the Islamic parties, suicide is a blasphemous act, even if it is done in the name of the oppressed religion. The state authorities are organizing a campaign against the suicides, but the terrorist Lapislazuli has also come to do something against the suicides. In the novel, the suicides become an occasion to reflect on the situation of women and girls in Turkish families and social groups.

Hande, one of the girls wearing the headscarf, puts it this way: “For a lot of girls in our situation, wanting to kill yourself means being in control of your own body. Girls who have been seduced and lost their virginity and virgins about to be married to a man they don't want all kill themselves for that very reason. "

The portrayal of the life situation of the girls wearing the headscarf is perhaps one of the most depressing moments in the novel. What strikes the Westerner Ka most of all is the lack of private life, which forces the girls to carry out this solitary act in the middle of the family. They are under total social and family control, only the rumor started by a teacher that one of the suicides was no longer a virgin had completely isolated them in the world of Kars. (Ch. 2 Our city is a peaceful place). The pressure from society to take off the headscarf and the pressure from families and Islamic groups to veil themselves create a conflict that makes the girls desperate.

It seems unbelievable to some Islam-oriented characters in the novel that an atheist could be viable without hope of divine power. At the same time, however, the faith of the devout students of the Koran is not free from doubts. For example, Necip hears an inner voice whispering to him not to believe in God. But he holds on to his faith with desperate determination, for the thought that God does not exist reminds him of the childhood fear when he wondered “what [he] should do when [his] mother and [ his] father will die ”:“ Because to believe in the existence of a thing with such fervor is only possible when one has a doubt, a worry that it does not exist ”.

Another aspect is the presentation of the strategies of the Islamic groups by the journalist Serdar Bey: They bring gifts to the poor, men talk to men, women to women. And they are "harder working, more honest and more humble than everyone else". The sheikh of the dervish convention kisses the hands of Ka, who dares to come to him drunk, sees the poet as something like a Sufi. In Sufism Ka is most likely an approach to religion, the green notebook in which he writes his poems, it seems to be given by God. He sees the regaining of his poetic creativity in Kars as a religious inspiration: “When I feel that a poem occurs to me, I am full of gratitude for whoever sends it to me, because then I am very happy. […] It is Allah who sends me the poem, ”Ka said suddenly, inspired.

However, this feeling of happiness is associated with fear and this special spiritualistic mood is also transferred to the other participants in the round table in Turgut's apartment, to the domestic servant he even seems like an enlightened person. She “reported that a light had shone in the room that had bathed everything in its shine. In her eyes, from that day on, Ka was surrounded by the halo of a saint. At that moment someone in the room must have said: "A poem must have been sent to him!" And everyone reacted to this with even greater excitement and fear than if a weapon had been pointed at them. "

love

It is the love for İpek that brings Ka to Kars, motivates his actions there, it is the love for lapis lazuli that moves İpek and her sister Kadife. As the leader of the moderate Islamic party, Muhtar is trying to win İpek back for himself. The Koran students adore the girls wearing the headscarf with a kind of traditional love , rave about them and dream about them without knowing them. Kadife tells Ka what Lapis Lazuli thinks about him: "You should be a Sufi [...] he believes that Allah made you innocent from birth to death." Pamuk reveals a connection between East and West, which is his entire work runs through. The Western concepts of romantic love and chivalry are heavily inspired by Sufism, as is older Western literature by ancient Sufi stories. From this point of view, one can also see the novel Snow in the Sufi tradition, as a collection of stories that thematize the individual and his development, his relationships with other people and ultimately with God.

For Ka, love is both an emotion and a construct. His plan to marry İpek, although he hardly knows it and has not seen it for years, has something embarrassingly traditional for him. The construct becomes emotion and Ka gets to do with fear: "Ka felt [...] with horror that he loved İpek and that this love would determine the rest of his life." Ka fluctuates between deeply in love and doubt, his belief The secret symmetry of the world makes him fear in moments of happiness that the compensation for misfortune could be just as massive, and the course of the novel confirms this.

As in Cevdet and his sons , The silent house , The new life , Red is my name , The Museum of Innocence , the protagonists' longing for perfect love in the form of a lover does not come true. Even in the snow , rows of one-sided relationships and unfulfilled wishes are formed: The feelings of Muhtar, Kas and, as a reproduction of the friend and not very seriously, as his interlocutor comments, Orhans concentrate on İpek. Fazil and Necıp, in turn, worship Kadife. Both women, however, see the ideal in lapis lazuli, which repeatedly appears and disappears from a distance like an unreal fairy tale hero. So even in snow the pain of unrequited love and the awareness of the unattainability of the desires of a life in perfect transcendent harmony are combined with melancholy. Either people adapt professionally and privately to the scope of reality, like Kadife and Necıp, who is confronted with his situation as double deputy by reading the letters of his friend Fazil to the former lover Lapis Lazuli, or they resign and renounce failed attempts to finally establish partnerships like İpek and Ka. The author emphasizes the importance of this topic again with a literary reference at the end of the novel. As a farewell, Turgut Bey gives Orhan on the platform the novella First Love by the Russian writer Turgenev , which he translated into Turkish during his prison years , which is about an unfulfilled childhood love.

After escaping from Kars, Ka falls back into the loneliness of German exile. All that remains of the great love of his life is a miserable consumption of American porn films with a star Melinda who looks vaguely like İpek.

Love seems sickly in the muddy world of Kars, it is kitsch feelings that move people. The enthusiasm for a Mexican telenovela unites all political groups, and the streets are empty when it is broadcast. Moments of real encounter rarely succeed. İpek's request to Ka is simple: "Be yourself!", But Ka, the homeless person between all worlds, cannot meet this requirement. In the coincidences of life, love only succeeds in isolated moments, for example when Ka İpek explains why he loves her even though he doesn't even know her: “Because you are beautiful… Because I dream of being happy with you… Because I do can tell you anything without being ashamed I keep imagining how we love each other. "

There is a secret rivalry between the sisters Kadife and İpek for the love of lapis lazuli. For a long time Ka has no idea that İpek is also involved in this game. Nevertheless, he senses the self-interest in Kadife's attempts to promote the relationship between Ka and İpek. When Kadife claims "Every younger sister wants her older sister to be happy", the poet senses the feelings of competition between the women and senses the "deep dislike and forced solidarity between all Turkish siblings".

Love controls again and again the actions of the actors to the point of absurdity. After İpek Ka asserted that she could not sleep with him while her father was in the house, Ka constructed a meeting of all opposition members at which İpek's father should represent the Democrats , with the aim of publishing a statement on the military coup in the Frankfurter Rundschau . To this end, he invents the figure of a committed German journalist, the blond and blue-eyed Hans Hansen (alluding to Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger ), whose appearance he empathizes with the salesman who sold him his gray coat in Germany.

Literary form

Cut off from the outside world by the snow, the political forces of Turkey face each other in an isolated microcosm . The classical spatial and temporal limitation of the event demonstrates the political and religious currents in individual people, whose individual fates and motives the novel investigates.

References to Kafka's novels

Kerim Alakuşoğlu, or Ka for short, is the name of the hero of snow and this abbreviation is reminiscent of the two protagonists “K” in the novels The Trial and The Castle by Franz Kafka , who increasingly get lost in labyrinthine structures when trying to find their way around. The first sentence of the castle novel in particular is reminiscent of Ka's trip to the remote provincial town: “It was late in the evening when K arrived. The village lay in deep snow. […] Fog and darkness surrounded him […] and [he] looked up into the apparent emptiness ”. For Pamuk it is similarly: “When the bus […] turned into the snow-covered streets of Kars at ten o'clock in the evening, Ka did not recognize the city at all. […] Under the snow everything was as if extinguished, as if lost. ”Both novels are followed by an odyssey by the surveyor K. as well as the poet and journalist Ka through the strange environment that they are tasked with exploring. In the process, they fall in love, which is another of many similarities, with women with social-private relationships that are opaque to the protagonists. A reference to this literary reference could also be seen in the play on words with the name of the Kafkas Üniversitesi (German: Caucasus University) of the city.

Anyone who knows Pamuk's texts knows that the similarity of sounds is no coincidence, as is the name of the narrator and novelist "Orhan", who follows in the footsteps of his dead poet friend Ka. "Ka", the name of the main character, "Kar", the snow, and "Kars", the location of the novel, form a poetic triad and are reminiscent of Kafka's "K".

teller

The narrator of the novel is the " novelist " Orhan, who has researched the journey of his dead poet friend Ka and appears more and more in this role in the course of the novel. a. when he follows the various traces on his trips to Frankfurt and Kars. In doing so, he follows the poet's stations during his three-day stay, he records the statements of the actors, lets characters in the novel speak to one another and presents audio and video documents. In the opening chapters, the first-person narrator accompanies the experience of Kas like an omniscient narrator who occasionally reports on Kas' previous life. In the course of events, the narrator increasingly intervenes: first by explaining the origin of the information (e.g. widow of the director of the university) and predictions, later as an acting figure who has traveled to Frankfurt and Kars himself, around the last years of his life To trace poet friends. Orhan also takes on the role of a detective to investigate İpek's suspicion that Ka was involved in the murder of Lapis Lazuli and to confirm it with a chain of circumstantial evidence.

The multiple perspectives of the novel, with which Pamuk sees himself in the tradition of Dostoevsky , is also shown by the author through other means, for example through materials such as fictitious articles in the local newspaper, pages from Kas records, recordings of the secret service and television reports of the events. The role of the researching and reporting narrator and author creates the impression of a reality of the fictional , sometimes operetta-like fantastic and unreal events. There is, for example, the head of the Grenzstadtzeitung, Serdar Bey, who writes the reports on the events before they happen, and there are theater performances staged by a director that cross borders with reality and lead to the death of many people.

Leitmotiv snow

The leitmotif of the novel is the snow that cuts Kars off from the outside world. For Ka, the individuality of the snow crystals is a model of human originality, he arranges the poems that he writes in Kars in his notes according to the pattern of a snow crystal (Fig. In chapter 29). He finds the elements of his personality on the axes of “memory”, “fantasy” and “reason”. Ka follows a scheme by Francis Bacon from the second book of “De Dignitate”, in which human knowledge is divided into the three basic categories of history , poetry and philosophy .

Like the falling of a snowflake, the narrator wants to follow the life of his friend Ka until death; the snowflake, in its unique beauty, also becomes a metaphor for transience. From Ka's point of view, there is something fatalistic about this perspective ; despite repeated attempts, he lacks the courage to really take his fate in hand. There is deep resignation in Ka's self-image: “What am I doing in this world? thought Ka. How helpless the snowflakes look from a distance! How poor is my life! Man lives, decays, passes away. He thought that on the one hand it passed away, on the other hand it existed. He loved himself, followed the path his life took like a snowflake with love and sadness. "

But the snow also hides the poverty of Kars, covers everything with a shining beauty, muffles the noises of the military coup. The snow gives all events something fairytale-like, unreal: “What's more, the same blindness that forced him to fix his eyes on the snow falling outside enveloped his brain like a kind of tulle curtain, like the silence of snow; and his mind, his memory, now denied the stories of poverty and misery. "

For Ka, snow also represents “joy and purity from his childhood”. In the search for happiness, "the snow falls once in a lifetime, even in our dreams," he writes in an early poem. After his mother's death in İpek, Ka also looks for maternal love.

The snow cuts Kars off from the outside world, but at the same time connects people; As she put it in the first conversation with Ka, Kadife has the feeling "as if the snow was sinking on all enmity, desire and hatred and people were drawing closer to one another."

Snow crystal

The snow crystals embody a secret symmetry of life that Ka tracks down and in which he sees Allah. He believes in a balance of happiness and unhappiness in life. Although he remains true to his western perspective, he sees again and again its one-sidedness and the danger of his individual isolation and he searches for the feeling of community on the way back to Allah: “Under the thick snowstorm outside, Ka felt how strange he was in Kars [...] but the feeling didn't last long. He abandoned himself to believe in his fate, felt intensely that the life that was logically inaccessible to him had a secret geometry, felt a deep longing to understand this logic and to be happy, but at this point did not find it strong enough. "On his On the way to the theater the "snow [...] falls with a magical, almost holy silence, nothing could be heard but the muffled sound of his steps [...]." It was as if the end of the world had come, as if the whole universe, everything he saw, focused all his attention on the falling of the snow. "

It is the magic of this image that holds the torn elements of the world together. Kas's diverse and diffuse impressions and experiences in Kars find such an order.

Color symbolism

Another typical stylistic device of Pamuk is the construction of a symbolism of colors and light. A glow emanates from the snow that people can also radiate: the amorous İpek, the poet Ka, who succeeds in writing a poem, the mystical Sheikh Saadettin Effendi from the Dervish Convention is characterized by a light that fascinates and attracts other people. The metaphor of light also refers to other works by Pamuk, above all to the novel Das neue Leben .

Just as the book there fascinates and enlightens the reader, here it is people with a special charisma who open up new paths. The new life with all its hopes for a common future with İpek is melancholy ironic, never taken very seriously, for example with tea kas and, in his successor, Orhans in the pastry shop called “New Life” or with the sober analysis of the Mechanisms of action of the Sheikh through İpek.

The bluish light of the snow conveys something powerful, a cool elegance, as do the bright blue eyes and the name lapis lazuli and the lights of the police vehicles. Positive counter-worlds are characterized by light red and brown tones, the pink sign of the hotel that İpek's father runs, the orange light from the lamps in the bright house of the invented German host Kas, the huge brown eyes of İpek.

Green is not only the book of poems Kas, which is traced in vain, it is also the huge green eyes of Necip, the Koran student, who attracts and fascinates Ka with his honest humanity. Marianna, the heroine of the TV melodrama that Kars loves, has huge green eyes. The beautiful girl on the Istanbul prince island of Büyükada, whom Ka cannot forget, also has green eyes. In the Islamic context, green appears as the color of faith, but Ka in his memories rather associates the randomness of life and his encounters with this color.

Purple is the "place where Allah is not", but also the color of Kadife's coat, who slips into the role of the leading Islamist out of love for lapis lazuli, but at the same time realizes and asserts her life dreams very confidently and emancipated.

The glow of the snow contains all colors at the same time.

The place where Allah is not

At Kas's repeated insistence, the Koran student Necip describes his vision of a strange place at the end of the world: “I look out of a window at this scene during the night, in the dark. Outside there are two white walls, high and without windows, like the walls of a castle. Like two castles facing each other. I look fearfully into the narrow abyss between them, which stretches out in front of me like a kind of narrow alley. The alley in the place where Allah is not is snowy and muddy like in Kars, but its color is purple. In the middle of the alley, there is something that says 'Stop!' says to me, but I look to the end of the street, to the end of the world. There is a tree there, a bare tree without leaves. Because I look at him, he suddenly begins to blush and catch fire. Then I feel guilty because I was curious about the place where Allah is not. The red tree then takes on its old dark color again. "

Necip describes this vision shortly before his death. The reader knows this by a preliminary interpretation: "He opened his eyes wide, one of which was to be torn apart along with his brain in twenty-six minutes." The classic horror motif of the tattered eye, the situation shortly before the military coup and Necip's senseless death make this haunting image a central point in the novel.

The individual elements of this mysterious metaphor open up a wide field of associations and questions: Is it the tree of knowledge , the fall of man, that is being updated here? Perhaps even the burning bush in which God appears? Is it the walls of the white fortress on which the Ottoman attempts to conquer Europe finally failed, which Pamuk depicts in his novel of the same name? The color purple is reminiscent of the liturgical function in the Christian church , where it symbolizes transition and transformation, for penance. At the same time, the color name first came to Europe from the Orient in the Middle Ages , it was previously unknown in the West, was translated into blue or red.

In the scenery seen by Necip, the motifs of the uncanny accumulate and open up a wide scope for interpretation. Are they just imagined thoughts or do they have a core of reality? Does this articulate Necip's fear of the abyss of atheism or a prophetic vision of the transformation of the bare tree into a tree of flame? The "Halt" is reminiscent of the young circus visitor from Kafka's parable Auf der Galerie , who suspects the cruel reality but wants to believe in the beautiful appearance. The impressive picture appears as the enigmatic key scene of the novel.

Four years after the events, the narrator examines the question of the source of the anxiety dream. Ka processed Necip's vision in his poem “The place where Allah is not” and placed it on the axis of memory. Orhan therefore assumes that the picture denotes a real place, like all poems that are assigned to this category. Fazıl shows the writer the locations of the events, u. a. also the dormitory of the former Koran school. At night he looks out of the window from Necip's bed: “I saw a two-meter-wide passage that couldn't even be called an alley, wedged between the blind side wall of the agricultural bank right next to the courtyard and the windowless back wall of an apartment building. A violet neon light shone on the muddy ground from the bank's first floor. To ensure that no one mistook the passage for a street, a red sign somewhere in the middle said 'No entry!' posed. At the end of the passage to which Fazil, inspired by Necip, said 'this is the end of the world', stood a dark tree without leaves; and just as we were looking it turned fiery red for a moment, as if it were burning. 'The red lighting of the Aydin Photo Palace has been out of order for seven years,' whispered Fazil. 'Every now and then it lights up and comes on again. And then from Necip's bunk the olive tree looks as if it has caught fire. [...] '"

For the novelist Orhan, this correspondence is proof that his poet friend Ka was in this room after Necip's death and, like him, glanced at the night from Necip's bed. Otherwise he would not have assigned the poem to his memories. At that time, however, the Koran school served as the headquarters of the brutal Z. Eisenarm and his special unit, which carried out most of the murders during the coup. Orhan concludes that Ka was here before he left to lead the coup plotters to the hiding place of Lapis Lazuli, his competitor at Ipek, that Ipek rightly rejected him and that he was therefore murdered years later by unknown Islamists in Frankfurt. So the poet could not resist the temptation to unscrupulously solve his personal problem with the help of the military.

Necip was startled by the sight because he “sometimes suggests, under the whisper of the devil, that this image might belong in this world.” He goes on to argue: “If there were a place in this universe that is so, then it means that […] Allah does not exist. Since that cannot be right, the only remaining possibility is that I no longer believe in God. And that's worse than death. ”He does not understand an atheist to be“ someone who does not believe in God, but a lonely person whom the gods have forsaken. [...] A person must first be a Westerner in order to be able to become an atheist. " Before his betrayal, Ka saw “the end of the world” according to the narrator's chain of circumstantial evidence from Necip's window and, according to Necip's prediction, became a “lonely man whom the gods have forsaken”. In his unsent Frankfurt letters to his mistress in Kars, he takes up this idea in the formulation of the “unbearable feeling of loss and abandonment”.

reception

The novel attracted international attention, mainly because it approaches sensitive political issues in a differentiated way and does without any form of black and white painting. The New York Times celebrated snow as the best foreign book of 2004. In 2006 the novel was chosen as the book for the city in Cologne .

In addition to many other awards, Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2005) for his works . The Board of Trustees justifies the awarding of the award primarily with its commitment to international understanding: "With Orhan Pamuk, a writer is honored who, like no other poet of our time, traces the historical traces of the West in the East and the East in the West, is committed to a concept of culture, which is based entirely on knowledge and respect for the other. [...] As idiosyncratic as the unique memory of the author reaches back to the great Ottoman past, he fearlessly addresses the burning present, advocates human and minority rights and repeatedly takes a stand on the political problems of his country. "

In his speech of thanks for the award of the peace prize, Orhan Pamuk apologized for his eminently political position on the conflicts in Turkey and the EU integration of his homeland. Nevertheless, this is not a retreat into the ivory tower of poetry. Pamuk consciously uses the novel form to reflect on political conflicts and cultural self-image and to open up possibilities for thought. The novel functions essentially as a counter-world to polarizing tendencies in the media.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the author explains that quite late in his writing career he “decided to write a political novel and put in everything that was on his mind. But “Snow” [is] not a political novel in the traditional sense of the word - no propaganda, no melodrama, no simple separation between good and bad! Everyone, every important trend, has their say in the novel: the Turks and the Kurds, the nationalists, the secularists, the army, the believers and the Islamist fundamentalists. The subject [is] political, but the novel is about something else, perhaps about the meaning of life in this eastern Anatolian corner of the world. [...] [He was] in Kars in the early 1970s. Since then [he would] have been haunted by the wonderful small town images of decline and melancholy for thirty years. After [he] had decided to banish the whole country in the microcosm of a small, cold and remote Turkish provincial cafe, [...] [he] had to return there. [...] A great many details that may seem surreal to [his] readers, [are] exact descriptions of Kars' daily life: newspapers with a circulation of 150 copies that are bitterly competing with one another; Plainclothes policemen following every stranger, every suspicious movement in the city; [...] The bizarre joke of these little marginal observations [had] saved him from embellishing the poverty of life there too theatrically and melodramatically. The greatest challenge [was] to empathize, to identify [oneself] with everything and everyone in Kars [...] For [him], the art of the novel is not just about being able to express oneself and seeing oneself as others, but also identifying with others who we [would] believe are not like us. But this identification should be reflected. In “Schnee” [he] also addressed [his] dubious position. [He] also raises the question of [his] reliability and credibility when [he], a "westernized" observer from Istanbul, spreads a judgment about such a troubled and battered place [his] country. "

The media rate the novel mostly positively and praise the differentiated portrayal of the political conflicts in Turkey, but above all the fairytale love story:

Margaret Atwood emphasizes in her review for the New York Times the importance of Pamuk for Turkey, she sees his role between guru and rock star, diagnostician and political expert, whose novels devour the audience as if they were the opportunity to feel their own pulse . In view of the conflicts between political Islam and the West, she wishes Pamuk more readers' interest in the USA: “In Turkey, Pamuk is the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist and political pundit: the Turkish public reads his novels as if taking its own pulse . "(Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Rev., Aug. 15, 2004)

“Pamuk manages to tell fairy tales in the reportage tone and to turn newspaper reports into fairy tales [...] 'Snow' is a grotesque, cruel and infernally comical book, a political farce in which one is never on the safe side and always between laughs and crying fluctuates. "(Bruno Preisendörfer, Der Tagesspiegel , March 3, 2005)

“Orhan Pamuk staged this novel effectively. Fast and slow, romantic and political scenes alternate. He throws the bright backlight of the grotesque onto the darkest events - such as the recurring power failure or the informers they spied on or the extremely current provincial newspaper, which reports events that are likely to occur in advance as fact and only thereby brings them about. And the snow falls forever. ”(Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit , literature supplement, May 11, 2005)

Criticism can be found of the style principle and the language, but also of Pamuk's occasional inaccuracies:

“It is teeming with sentences like this, sometimes imprecise, sometimes pleonastic. Many pages are written extremely carelessly, filled with a complacent redundancy. That's a shame, but it shouldn't prevent you from reading the novel. He paints a clever, committed picture of that torn country that may soon be included in Europe. How far it is from it, how much it is reminiscent of overcome (hopefully overcome) struggles of the European past, this book tells about it. "(Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit, literature supplement of May 11, 2005)

In the Washington Post, Ruth Franklin puts Pamuk's novel in a row with the great stories from East and West, such as the fairy tales from 1001 nights and Boccaccio's “ Decamerone ”. Politics in literature, she quotes Stendhal, is like being shot in the middle of a concert. Pamuk knows precisely this when he creates his theater scene in which the military suddenly shoots at the audience. She experiences this as a shock after the highly literary red is my name , sees disorientation and confusion as the stylistic principles of Pamuk's political novel. In the end, however, she is fascinated: "Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow." (Ruth Franklin, Washington Post, August 29, 2004)

Text output

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pamuk, Orhan: Snow. Fischer-Taschenbuch , Frankfurt a. M. 2009, p. 23. ISBN 978-3-596-51077-1 . This edition is quoted.
  2. ↑ Pamuk, p. 38.
  3. ↑ Pamuk, p. 117.
  4. ↑ Pamuk, p. 148.
  5. ↑ Pamuk, p. 173.
  6. ↑ Pamuk, p. 243 ff.
  7. ↑ Pamuk, p. 247.
  8. ↑ Pamuk, p. 200.
  9. ↑ Pamuk, p. 393.
  10. ↑ Pamuk, p. 393.
  11. ↑ Pamuk, p. 437.
  12. ↑ Pamuk, p. 315.
  13. ↑ Pamuk, p. 501 ff.
  14. ↑ Pamuk, p. 315.
  15. ↑ Pamuk, p. 313.
  16. ↑ Pamuk, p. 412.
  17. ↑ Pamuk, p. 511.
  18. ↑ Pamuk, p. 262.
  19. ↑ Pamuk, p. 263.
  20. ↑ Pamuk, p. 263.
  21. ↑ Pamuk, p. 263.
  22. ↑ Pamuk, p. 78.
  23. ↑ Pamuk, p. 78.
  24. ↑ Pamuk, p. 199.
  25. ↑ Pamuk, p. 217.
  26. ↑ Pamuk, p. 238.
  27. ↑ Pamuk, p. 279.
  28. ↑ Pamuk, p. 148 f.
  29. ↑ Pamuk, p. 163
  30. ↑ Pamuk, p. 163.
  31. ↑ Pamuk, p. 37.
  32. ↑ Pamuk, p. 149.
  33. ↑ Pamuk, p. 150.
  34. ↑ Pamuk, p. 267.
  35. ↑ Pamuk, p. 61.
  36. ^ Ian Almond: The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard . Tauris IB, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84511-398-8 , p. 110.
  37. ↑ Pamuk, p. 503.
  38. ↑ Pamuk, p. 505
  39. ↑ Pamuk, p. 511.
  40. ↑ Pamuk, p. 153.
  41. ↑ Pamuk, p. 152.
  42. ↑ Pamuk, p. 267.
  43. ↑ Pamuk, p. 267.
  44. ^ Franz Kafka: The castle . Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. / Hamburg. P. 7.
  45. ↑ Pamuk, p. 13.
  46. ↑ Pamuk, Orhan: A School of Understanding . Acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2005. 2005 börsenblatt FRIEDENSPREIS. (PDF, 265 KB)
  47. ↑ Pamuk, p. 315.
  48. ↑ Pamuk, p. 106.
  49. ↑ Pamuk, p. 20.
  50. ↑ Pamuk, p. 10.
  51. ↑ Pamuk, p. 10.
  52. ↑ Pamuk, p. 133.
  53. ↑ Pamuk, p. 158.
  54. ↑ Pamuk, p. 159.
  55. ↑ Pamuk, p. 170.
  56. ↑ Pamuk, p. 168.
  57. ↑ Pamuk, p. 500 f.
  58. ↑ Pamuk, p. 171.
  59. ↑ Pamuk, p. 171.
  60. ↑ Pamuk, p. 171.
  61. ↑ Pamuk, p. 170, cf. P. 502 f.
  62. ↑ Pamuk, p. 171.
  63. ↑ Pamuk, p. 313.
  64. ↑ Orhan Pamuk: I will think very carefully about my words . In: FAZ , July 5, 2005


This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 12, 2006 .