Seascape with Pocahontas

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bulrushes on the bank of the Dumber.

Seascape with Pocahontas is a story by the German writer Arno Schmidt from 1953. It describes an erotic encounter of the first-person narrator during a short vacation at Dümmer , a lake in Lower Saxony . The permissive, sometimes crude eroticism and the aggressive atheism of the characters resulted in criminal proceedings that were eventually dropped.

Origin and publications

Seascape with Pocahontas was written down from July to September 1953 in Kastel in Rhineland-Palatinate , where Schmidt lived at the time. He worked for the first time with a slip box that contained over 700 notes with various ideas. The finished story consists of around fifty printed pages. The Rowohlt publishing house , which had been brought out his works, declined to release negative votes after his lecturers from - Wolfgang Weyrauch had excited about the content of "apology of philistinism" and the "radical onanism" of Schmidt's speech. The Frankfurt publishing house also rejected the text, as Eugen Kogon wrote to Schmidt, mainly because of its "sexual aggregate state". The story therefore first appeared in 1955 in Volume 1 of the Luchterhand Verlag magazine Texte undzeichen published by Alfred Andersch . The text, now known as a “ short novel ”, was published in book form in 1959 in the anthology Rosen & Porree of Stahlberg Verlag . The text was reprinted in 1966 as a paperback by Fischer Verlag and in 1987 in the Bargfeld edition of the Arno Schmidt Foundation. In 2003, Seelandschaft appeared bound with Pocahontas in the Suhrkamp library . In a dedication poem, which only precedes the text in the first edition, Seelandschaft with Pocahontas is dedicated to the philosopher Max Bense .

style

The story is written in the form of the "photo album" invented by Schmidt, which he explains in Calculations I , which was first published at the same time . Since every memory begins with an optically coded highlight, the “photo”, which is then followed by further “fragmentary” memories in text form, each of the 18 chapters (in the typescript Schmidt still calls them “image grid”) begins with a typographically separated, framed short text that presents visual and, in some cases, acoustic memories in a spotlight. The actual chapter is then told, albeit discontinuously, in the form of an internal monologue or brief dialogues . In these, as in Schmidt are common to the rules of orthography are not followed, he wrote the words rather as the dialect embossed figures of the narrative to express them.

content

First-person narrator

As usual in Schmidt's narrative work, the focus of the Seelandschaft with Pocahontas is a first-person narrator who is similar to his author in many ways. In this case his name is Joachim, is a writer, participant in World War II , expellee from the former eastern territories of the German Reich , wearing glasses and lives on the Saar . He shares all these characteristics with his author, as well as various opinions, which he likes to express in a pointed way: like Schmidt, Joachim is an atheist , despises the restoration of the Adenauer years and loves the leather stocking novels by James Fenimore Cooper .

action

The action takes place in the summer of 1953 - the text mentions Alfred Döblin's 75th birthday and the coronation of Elisabeth II . The poor writer Joachim (he gives himself the name "Bomann" and the job of a surveyor in order to avoid any unpleasant consequences of his planned sexual activities) takes a night train ride from the Saar area to Diepholz , where he meets his friend Erich Kendziak , a widowed master painter who was his subordinate during war days. Together they drive on to Dümmer on his motorcycle on a vacation lasting several days. As diary entries have shown, Schmidt and his wife Alice made a similar trip himself in June 1953 . In their pension, Joachim and Erich meet two young women who work as office workers in a textile factory "towards Osnabrück": Selma Wientge and Annemarie Waniek. Although Selma is engaged and Joachim initially finds her ugly, the two quickly grow closer. Erich and Annemarie also find each other, so that they finally swap rooms: Selma moves in with Joachim in the double room rented by the two men, Erich moves to Annemarie's one of the women. You bathe and paddle together, visit the excavations of Neolithic pile dwellings , argue about politics, literature and Christianity, which Joachim and Selma are unanimous in rejecting:

"" This " Lord's Supper ": "This is my body and blood" -: As a child, I always dreaded blood eating; I've read that cannibals also celebrate such graffiti in Inner Africa ... ??. "and continued to think with gestures, helplessly disgusted:" Dearest Pocahontas !! ""

The name Pocahontas , which Joachim Selma gives because she has a hooked nose and an Iroquois profile, comes from an Indian princess who saved a white man named Smith in the 17th century; He also describes her as Undine and calls her “Pultuke” (the Etruscan name for Pollux , perhaps an allusion to the East Frisian River Leda , whose name is also that of the mother of the Dioscuri ) and “my red alpha giantess” - an allusion to the red giant star Betelgeuse or α Orionis , which both of them are currently seeing in the night sky (Selma is very tall and has severe sunburn ).

After eating heavy food, Selma becomes nauseous and vomits. Her friend Annemie reveals that Selma is already having sex with her fiancé, so her nausea could be a sign of an unwanted pregnancy. Selma expects her menstruation on the day of her departure, but she already occurs the evening before.

After an unsatisfactory last short night, the two women leave early in the morning. The story ends with Joachim, who is usually never at a loss for a knowledgeable explanation, a contradiction or a bon mot, remains silent about his friend's chats: "My head was still full of her clothes and I didn't answer."

interpretation

Pocahontas. Engraving from 1616

According to the literary scholar Bernd Rauschenbach , Schmidt combined two experiences in this story that had haunted him up to that point: In the Oldenburg area in the spring of 1945, before his capture by British troops, he got into a life-threatening battle for the first time; He had spent most of the world war in a writing room in Norway. The figure of Selma is shaped after Hanne Wulff, a student at the Görlitz Lyceum , whom Arno Schmidt raved about as a driving student , but whom he never spoke to. It appears as early as 1946 in Leviathan . Schmidt in Seelandschaft with Pocahontas was concerned with coping with these two existential experiences. In this respect, love and death are repeatedly linked in the text .

Wolfgang Albrecht is based on the nicknames Schmidt has his first-person narrator invent for Selma: The mermaid Undine and the Indian princess Pocahontas could not have saved their lover from the water, although they tried to. Therefore, Selma will also Pulthuke named after the immortal of the two Dioscuri , which in ancient times as emergency responders were called in shipwreck. Joachim himself chose the name Uthütze , the Etruscan name of Odysseus : like this he had come from the war , like this he had not yet returned home.

Klaus Theweleit advocates the thesis that the seascape with Pocahontas is about the attempt to extinguish destructive influences from the Nazi era with the means of freely lived sexuality . In fascism and war, the body is always only the object of violence , destruction and murder. While Schmidt now describes his war-experienced Joachim in the embrace of Selma, his text undertakes a "ceaseless attempt to transform (Nazi) violence into a politics of body contact that preserves and enlivens the body by smiling (about itself) instead of itself ( ceaselessly) to kill and kill ”.

For the literary scholar Marius Fränzel, the focus of the story is the experience of foreignness: like Undine, who tries to live with people but is one of the water spirits, like Pocahontas, who lives as an Indian among whites, who marries the settler John Rolfe , even though if she loves John Smith , Selma, as it says in the text, has to be “back among the rough people”, which means back to the textile factory. The story portrays - like Schmidt's other love stories - the "attempt of two lonely people to find each other against all their experiences".

Criminal proceedings

The author, the editor Andersch, and the publisher Hermann Luchterhand reported criminal charges from two lawyers for blasphemy ( §166 StGB of 1953 ) and dissemination of indecent writings (then §184 StGB), which were brought before the extended Trier judges' court by the chief public prosecutor in Trier (3rd March 1956): The "indecent writing" contains "religious abuse and blasphemy [...] and further descriptions of a sexual character" that are likely to "hurt the sexual sense of shame and morality of healthy people." Andersch already calculated with a three-year prison sentence , while Alice Schmidt was already making plans to flee to Switzerland and possibly further to the "Eastern Zone" . However, her husband was against it:

“It's going to be terrible. What am I supposed to do in Switzerland? And in the end they hand me over. Andersch seems to want to stay. He's been in a concentration camp before . Prison is nothing more than that. "

The threat of legal persecution was the main reason why the Schmidts moved in September 1955 from the village of Kastel , which was in the Trier judicial district, to Darmstadt , where they hoped for a more liberal judiciary. The proceedings were continued by the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office, which requested a report from the then President of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Hermann Kasack . On July 21, 1956, Kasack came to the conclusion that the seascape with Pocahontas is "a work of language art to be taken seriously, even if it contains a number of daring passages". Arno Schmidt was "one of the most interesting phenomena in our post-war literature in his language-revolutionizing way"; the prose study is "fundamentally different from the pornographic literature"; even the atheistic “imprints” could not be understood “as an insult to the Christian church or as blasphemy”. In addition, the magazine aims “at the avant-garde experiment” and, as Kasack suspected, given its “high price of DM 4.80 for issue 1”, it had a circulation of less than 1000 copies. Above all, the novel was not a “treatise”, as the complainants had claimed, but a work of literature. The proceedings were discontinued on July 27, 1956 with reference to Article 5, Paragraph 3 of the Basic Law ( freedom of art ).

As a result, Stahlberg Verlag , to which Arno Schmidt had since switched, dared to publish his next novel Das steinerne Herz in October 1956 only in a version purged on the advice of a lawyer. An uncensored version, which contained all the erotic and political expressions of opinion of the original version, was only published in 1986 as part of the Bargfeld edition . The amendments mainly concern personally insulting statements about living people.

Adaptations

Anna Pein realized Arno Schmidt's novel as a radio play in a production by HR and RBB in 2010 . Directed by Oliver Sturm . The speakers included Tilo Werner , Inga Busch , Martin Engler and Larissa Fuchs . The German Academy of Performing Arts called the radio play "a mimetically clever transfer of Arno Schmidt's novel". In 2005 the ensemble Die Kulturtechniker staged a seascape with Pocahontas as an electronic music theater.

reception

For Walter Kempowski , the seascape with Pocahontas Schmidt was “probably the most beautiful love story”.

literature

  • Susanne Fischer , Bernd Rauschenbach (ed.): Arno Schmidts “Seascape with Pocahontas”. Notes and other materials . An edition by the Arno Schmidt Foundation published by Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-251-80079-5 (new edition by Suhrkamp Verlag: ISBN 978-3-518-80079-9 ).
  • Klaus Theweleit : "You give me fever". Arno Schmidt. Seascape with Pocahontas. Writing sexuality according to WW II. Pocahontas IV . Stroemfeld Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-87877-754-X .
  • Irmtraud and Dietmar Noering: The button in the rose garden . Bangert & Metzler, 1985, ISBN 3-924147-25-6
  • Sabine Kyora, Uwe Schwagmeier (Eds.): Pocahontas revisited. Cultural studies views of a complex of subjects (= Bielefelder Schriften zu Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft 21). Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89528-502-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Martynkewicz : Arno Schmidt . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 70.
  2. ↑ Michael Töteberg : "This is a brilliant man with a thousand bad habits." A look inside the publishing house. Expert reports, memos and envelopes in the Rowohlt archive . In: Bargfelder Bote , Liefer 354–356, pp. 3–41, here pp. 30–39, citations p. 30f.
  3. ^ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Arno Schmidt . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 71.
  4. ^ Arno Schmidt: Bargfelder edition. Work group 1: novels, stories, poems, juvenilia. Study edition , Vol. 1/2. Arno Schmidt Foundation, Bargfeld 1987, p. 518 ff.
  5. ↑ Photo album on the Arno Schmidt Foundation website (accessed on September 2, 2012).
  6. ^ Arno Schmidt: Bargfelder edition. Work group 1: novels, stories, poems, juvenilia. Study edition , Vol. 1/2. Arno Schmidt Foundation, Bargfeld 1987, p. 518.
  7. ↑ Bernd Rauschenbach : A tray full of glittering snapshots. Preliminary considerations for a biography of Arno Schmidt . Lecture at the conference of the Society of Arno Schmidt Readers in Ahlden on October 2, 2004 (accessed on September 8, 2012).
  8. ↑ Susanne Fischer, Bernd Rauschenbach (ed.): Arno Schmidts "Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas". Notes and other materials . An edition of the Arno Schmidt Foundation published by Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 2000.
  9. ↑ Bargfelder Edition I / 1.2., P. 435 f.
  10. ↑ Dario Borso (with the help of Karl-Heinz Müther): Comment on Arno Schmidt's seascape with Pocahontas  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 39 (accessed September 9, 2012).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.gasl.org  
  11. ↑ Bargfelder Edition I / 1.2., P. 436.
  12. ↑ Bernd Rauschenbach: "... a very mad affair ..." Love and death at Dümmer See . In: Ponds between the North and South Seas. Five lectures . Edited by the Arno Schmidt Foundation, Bargfeld 1994, pp. 55–74.
  13. ^ Wolfgang Albrecht: Arno Schmidt . JB Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 1998, p. 40 f.
  14. ^ Klaus Theweleit: " You give me fever". Arno Schmidt. 'Seascape with Pocahontas'. Writing sexuality according to WW II . Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, Frankfurt am Main and Basel 1999, p. 189.
  15. ↑ Marius Fränzel: "This miraculous mixture". An introduction to the narrative work of Arno Schmidt. Ludwig, Kiel 2002, p. 101 f.
  16. ^ Giesbert Damaschke: Arno Schmidt "Seascape with Pocahontas" on the ASml-News website. News and information about Arno Schmidt and his environment (accessed on September 10, 2012).
  17. ↑ Alice Schmidt: Diary from 1955 . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2008, p. 133, quoted by Helmut Böttiger : Die Gruppe 47. When German literature made history . DVA, Munich 2012, p. 183.
  18. ↑ Marius Fränzel: "This miraculous mixture". An introduction to the narrative work of Arno Schmidt. Ludwig, Kiel 2002, p. 95 f.
  19. ^ Hermann Kasack: Expert opinion (PDF; 51 kB) from July 21, 1956, accessed on October 3, 2012.
  20. ^ Giesbert Damaschke: Arno Schmidt "Seascape with Pocahontas" on the ASml-News website. News and information about Arno Schmidt and his environment (accessed on September 10, 2012).
  21. ^ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Arno Schmidt . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 85.
  22. ↑ “Seascape with Pocahontas” by Anna Pein according to Arno Schmidt ( memento of the original from June 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Henschel Schauspiel. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.henschel-schauspiel.de
  23. ↑ Seascape with Pocahontas in the HörDat audio play database .
  24. ↑ Seascape with Pocahontas as electronic music theater .
  25. ↑ Walter Kempowski: He always seemed to me to be the better person. An obituary for Arno Schmidt . In: Die Zeit , No. 25, June 15, 1979, p. 41 (also in: Hans-Michael Bock, Thomas Schreiber (Ed.): About Arno Schmidt II. Complete presentations . Haffmans, Zurich 1987, pp. 262–264 ).