Blackfall

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Schwarzfall is the title of a dystopian novel by Peter Schwindt in 2010 , who is best known as the author of the radio plays and the book series for young people about the time traveler Justin Time . The realistic thriller takes place in Frankfurt am Main and describes the development of society after a long, Germany-wide power failure .

content

General and formal structure

Due to a month-long period of heat, the power supply collapsed in Germany and neighboring countries after a large part of the power plants had to be switched off due to insufficient amounts of cooling water and the pipeline systems were also taken out of service due to the increased consumption and the heat. The power failure comes suddenly, without prior notice and lasts for a long period of time - a blackout , in German a "blackfall", which also affects Frankfurt am Main . The development after the power failure is told through three interwoven storylines with different main characters. Formally, the novel is divided into numerous unnumbered chapters that are not identified as such by subheadings, each of which switches between the individual narrative threads.

The story takes place today, which is partly due to the description of the various vehicles and other objects such as Opel Zafira , Xbox etc. is recognizable. The author also adheres very closely to the details of the city of Frankfurt am Main known to him , some of which are described in great detail. This applies in particular to the district of Frankfurt-Seckbach and the settlement around the Huthpark and the apartment of the main person Harald Hellmann in the street Im Staffel . However, individual details are also invented, for example there is no Beethoven comprehensive school in the Bornheim district of Frankfurt and the Johannes Hospital does not actually exist.

The author refers to historical events that actually took place, such as the murder of the FDP politician Heinz-Herbert Karry from Frankfurt-Seckbach by the Red Army parliamentary group in 1981 and the connection to the Green politician Joschka Fischer , who was foreign minister a good twenty years later and was Vice Chancellor of Germany. The devastation and looting after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans are also mentioned and related to the storylines in the novel.

action

The novel begins with a car accident between Harald Hellmann and Justin, who had robbed him of the right of way. There is an argument between the two, in which Justin hits his counterpart in the face and is only resolved after the police arrive. On the way back after the accident, there was an argument in both Justin's vehicle and the Hellmanns, which both escalated in the evening. Justin's friend Jessie escapes from her apartment with their son Marvin at the height of the argument in which she hits Justin over the head with his Xbox . Justin picks up the elevator chase as she rushes down the stairwell , and the power goes out while they are both on their way down. Jessie flees to her mother and brother, Justin is freed from the elevator shortly after by his friends Slobo and Tayfun and drives after her. When Jessie arrives at her mother's, only her brother Mark is there, who reluctantly lets her in. When Justin appears shortly afterwards in the apartment, there is a fight between Justin, Jessie and Mark, which only ends after the appearance of Jessie's mother Doris Biehler, who has just returned from the mother of the doctor Katharina to get her things.

In the emergency room in the hospital where Katharina works, there is already a massive rush of emergency patients who need care due to the heat wave. When the power fails here too and the poorly maintained emergency power supply does not start due to budget cuts , acute emergencies and deaths occur. When Katharina then wanted to check on her demented mother in her apartment, her condition worsened due to the sudden power failure. She attacks her and Katharina struggles until the domestic helper Doris Biehler, who has just arrived, calms the situation down. Since Katharina urgently needs to go back to the hospital and her mother needs urgent care at the same time, she asks Doris Biehler to take over this for a significantly higher salary. Ms. Biehler agrees and moves in with Katharina's mother.

Harald Hellmann and his wife Claudia also had a long argument after he accused her of being anorexic , bulimic and frigid . Shortly afterwards the power goes out and Harald Hellmann goes outside, where he meets with his neighbors. After Claudia blocks his later attempt at reconciliation and asks him about his "affairs" with high school graduates to improve their grades, he rapes his wife. Since the power failure lasts for a long time, Harald Hellmann supplies himself with money and power generators the next day and sets up an armed neighborhood aid with his neighbors to defend their living area in order to defend it against potential looting and against the residents of the nearby high-rise complex on Atzelberg.

The next day, on the advice of her mother, Jessie goes to the hospital with her son and has him examined by Katharina, who diagnoses an intestinal obstruction and operates the boy directly. Marvin survives the operation and Jessie stays with him during recovery, helping the nurses at the hospital. Justin and his friends decide to use the blackout to rob an ATM that goes wrong in the evening . In large parts of Frankfurt, chaos had already broken out at this point and the large shopping centers in particular were the target of looting, Justin managed to get hold of a police pistol during a major looting operation. The next day, Justin and his friends decide to steal fuel on a farm in the surrounding area . They are caught and Justin has a serious accident on the way back. It wasn't until a week later that he woke up in the hospital, where he met Jessie and Marvin and convinced them to come back home with him.

When they arrive at the skyscraper, Justin observes that Hellmann and his neighborhood help are accepting and storing aid deliveries from the technical relief organization for the residential area. Justin gets angry and runs to the affluent area where he is overwhelmed by neighborhood help and taken to Hellmann. Shortly thereafter, he incited the young people from the Atzelbergsiedlung to overrun the neighborhood helpers and pillage them in the settlement, while Justin broke into Hellmann's apartment and found plans to intern the Atzelberg residents there. He is caught by Hellmann, who wants to shoot him as a looter - but instead Hellmann is shot by his wife. Justin takes the woman's gun and runs outside, where the youths have surrounded the neighborhood help. Shortly afterwards the electricity starts up again and leads to a fire in the apartment under the one in the Atzelbergsiedlung, where Jessie and Marvin are staying. Justin saves the two and brings them out of the skyscraper, where the police and Claudia Hellmann await him, who accuses him of murdering Harald Hellmann. Justin is arrested accordingly and Jessie is left alone with her son.

In the hospital, there is another emergency wave due to several fires, and during a short break Doris Biehler appears at Katharina's - her mother tried suicide with sleeping pills because of her daughter's threat of being sent to the nursing home , but Katharina is still able to save her become. In order to ensure that her mother and Jessie's son, who is supposed to work in the hospital, are looked after, she would like to offer Doris Biehler another job. The ending leaves both Justin's fate and the future of the other people open.

people

Each of the three storylines is assigned a group of people who only partially overlap:

The Hellmann family and the neighborhood help

  • Harald Hellmann is a teacher at the Beethoven Comprehensive School in Frankfurt-Bornheim and part of the upper middle class in Frankfurt. He lives with his wife Claudia and their two sons Lukas and Malte in the village center of Frankfurt-Seckbach .
  • Claudia Hellmann is the wife of Harald Hellmann. She rebels against her husband, who cheats and rapes her. In the end, she shoots her husband with his own gun.
  • Malte and Lukas Hellmann are the sons of the Hellmanns. The younger Malte is the more dominant one who beats up the older Lukas and later also threatens his father.
  • The neighborhood help consists of the neighbors of the Hellmanns in the upscale Seckbach district.

Justin's family and friends

  • Justin is a young man who lives with his girlfriend Jessie and their son Marvin on the tenth floor of a high-rise building in the Atzelberg high-rise estate in Seckbach. The neighborhood is a social hotspot and Justin is portrayed as an unemployed proletarian who makes a living as an occasional drug dealer .
  • Jessie Biehler is the friend of Justin and mother of their son Marvin, also the daughter of Doris Biehler and sister of Mark. She leaves Justin in an argument and later takes care of her son in the hospital, where she also supports the nurses.
  • Marvin is the two year old son of Justin and Jessie. After Jessie has left her boyfriend, he is diagnosed with an intestinal obstruction, which Katharina operates on.
  • Mark and Doris Biehler: Doris Biehler is Jessie's mother and also Katharina's mother's domestic help. She picks up Jessie after her argument with Justin and puts her in contact with Katharina.
  • Slobo and Tayfun are two friends of Justin, who plan a bank robbery with him and later a fuel theft at a farm in the surrounding area, but both go wrong.

Katharina, her mother and the hospital doctors

  • Katharina Debius is a doctor and works in the hospital's emergency room , which was already overloaded by the heat wave before the power failure. She comes from a small town in the vicinity of Siegen and moved with her mother to Frankfurt after the death of her father.
  • Katharina's mother Helene Debius is demented. Triggered by the power failure, she developed a war psychosis in which she felt transported back to the final phase of the Second World War and did not recognize her daughter and therefore needed intensive care, which was taken over by Doris Biehler.
  • Basim Anwari is also a doctor and colleague of Katharina, their joint boss is Professor Beinlich.

Doris Biehler plays a special role in the novel, as Jessie's mother and carer for Katharina's mother, she brings together these two storylines and the people involved.

reception

Peter Schwindt, author of the novel Schwarzfall , 2010

According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, the novel Schwarzfall was published as part of a boom in regional crime thrillers with Frankfurt local color and was related to corresponding works by various authors with different focuses. These include Jörg Reckmann and Nele Neuhaus , whose crime novels are currently set in Frankfurt and in the nearby Taunus . Compared to these, Peter Schwindt "pulls" the thumbscrews on the pace and scenario (...) at Schwarzfall and focuses his action on a "dark and humid Frankfurt" in which "groups fight for survival and public order dissolves" .

In addition, Schwarzfall was discussed in several reviews with varying results. In the review on dystopischeliteratur.org the author certifies that the novel has a plot that “actually has everything you need to knit an interesting thriller” and that is “quite convincing”, but in the end comes to the conclusion that “Schwindt unfortunately did not make use of his possibilities” and that “due to the less loving design and presentation of the characters” and the linguistic style “tarnished” the novel “so much” that he “did not recommend it for reading” and “even not even more than mediocre ”. Silke Schröder from “Hallo Buch” sees Schwarzfall as “an exciting catastrophe novel that is perhaps not that far removed from reality”, but criticizes the pale figures and, in many cases, the lack of focus. Carina Schöning largely agrees with this position, according to her review, Schwarzfall is "a successful thriller that captivates the story of a Germany-wide catastrophe and its effects on society and individuals", while the small size and the "somewhat clichéd characters" are negative.

According to Michael Lehmann-Pape, on the other hand, the author succeeded in “linguistically balanced form” and “with a keen eye for detail and in a calm narrative style”, “using the initially presented stereotypes of his protagonists to intensify a lively and comprehensible development of the people convey. ”He sees the development of the two main characters Justin“ from irresponsible man of the lower class (...) to a responsible father ”and Harald Hellmann to the leader of the militant neighborhood aid and their contrast as the actual topic of the book.

expenditure

Supporting documents and comments

  1. ↑ In the book the author writes: Even a state minister had his domicile here, but Heinz-Herbert Karry had not lived for thirty years. In May 1981, terrorists shot him in his sleep. The pistol, along with other weapons stolen from an American barracks, was transported in a car owned by a man who had become Vice Chancellor and Secretary of State less than twenty years later. In: Peter Schwindt : Blackfall. Piper Verlag, Munich 2010; Pp. 22-23. ISBN 978-3-492-25816-6 .
  2. ↑ In the book, the author writes: Katharina still remembered the pictures when the cyclone that bore her name destroyed New Orleans. In: Peter Schwindt : Blackfall. Piper Verlag, Munich 2010; P. 226. ISBN 978-3-492-25816-6 .
  3. ↑ a b Frankfurt thrillers - beautiful to die for . In: Frankfurter Rundschau, September 30, 2010; accessed on January 17, 2015.
  4. ↑ Pretty Zappenduster: A reviewer sees black. ( Memento of December 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Review of dystopian literature, undated; accessed on January 17, 2015.
  5. ↑ Silke Schröder: Peter Schwindt: Blackfall . Review on hallo-buch.de, April 9, 2010; accessed on January 17, 2015.
  6. ^ Carina Schöning: Blackfall by Peter Schwindt . Review on fantasyguide.de, undated; accessed on January 17, 2015.
  7. ↑ Michael Lehmann-Pape: Peter Schwindt - Schwarzfall . Review on rezensions-seite.de, undated; accessed on January 17, 2015.