Soul work

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Soul work is a novel by Martin Walser . It was published in 1979 by Suhrkamp Verlag .

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Xaver Zürn lives on the Hungerbühler Hof in Wigratsweiler, a small town in the hinterland of Lake Constance . The Hungerbühler Hof is the only house in Wigratsweiler whose roof should be re-roofed, and it is the only house so close to the restaurant Zur Frohen Aussicht that its residents are disturbed at night by the noise of the departing guests and the farewell calls from the landlady Margot . Xaver Zürn has already planted 22 fir trees on the edge of his property in order to seal himself off, but Margot's voice penetrates every barricade - especially since Zürn, when Margot got married, discovered that he had believed throughout his youth that she would one day marry him and not him thick cook Sepp Mehl.

Xaver himself then married Agnes Guldin, who comes from a large farm and has therefore taken out the right to refurbish Xaver's parents' house - Xaver now sees old furniture and paneling, such as were once found on the Hungerbühler Hof in the homes of the established. The first piano came to Wigratsweiler with Agnes, and the couple's two daughters, now 16 and 18 years old, received music lessons and were sent to high school in Friedrichshafen .

Agnes and Xaver still grow fruit and berries on the area around the house, but the actual farming has been taken over by Xaver's brother Georg. Two other brothers are no longer alive: Johann, once a first-class student at the Wurzach Abbey School , died defending Königsberg in World War II , and Jakob, an excellent shooter, went missing in Karelia . The main source of income on which the Zürn family lives is Xaver's job as the driver of the director of the Gleitze works. The Gleitze family comes from Königsberg, survived the destruction of their hometown without personal loss and is also economically successful in the West. One of the three Gleitze brothers, Albert, only visits once a year from the USA , the other two live and work in the Lake Constance area. Dieter Gleitze, Xaver Zürn's employer, lives in Oberhof, a suburb of Tettnang , is characterized by tremendous hard work and has set himself the goal of writing a book about the more important performances of Mozart operas in the second half of the 20th century which he claims to have finished in 2001. For this reason, it shall inform his driver once apart, be it imperative that he live to see the millennium, and therefore he needed such a reliable driver as Xaver Zürn, who still drink no smoke and also once German champion in small-bore shooting was . However, this picture of Xaver does not entirely correspond to reality: Master Köberle, under whom Xaver once worked in a workshop, has embellished the description of the young man he recommended a little. Even during the Third Reich , the shooting championship was not won by Xaver, but rather his brother Jakob almost won it - if it had not been noticed when counting the hits that there were 61 bullets on the target of his neighbor and only 59 on his own were. Obviously Jakob raised his head after reloading, mistakenly aimed at the foreign disk and thus wasted his chance of winning the title.

For years Xaver Zürn has wanted to clarify his boss's mistake about him, the driver, and for years he has also wanted to tell him that his brother Johann died in Königsberg. But he never gets a word. Only once did Gleitze disclose personal information to him and tell about his family in Königsberg. But here too the flow of information was one-sided. Zürn was unable to give an answer to the rush of talk by Gleitzes.

Large intestine

For years, Zürn Dieter Gleitze, his colleagues, friends and family has been driving to meetings, opera performances and meetings of former Königsbergers, for years he has been listening to the conversations in the back seat and giving answers in his mind. In reality he only has to function and is forced into the role model of the faithful, abstinent former small-caliber master, into which he more or less accidentally got into. He has long been suffering from this situation. He has constant abdominal pain and digestive problems. On the May morning on which the story begins, he gets up out of bed after a largely sleepless night, realizes that the laxative he took before the long drive to Düsseldorf did not work in time, and sets off Captured a busy day. Indeed, he suffered badly on this journey. While he was Dr. Gleitze, director Trummel and the engineer Ruckhaberle transported to their appointment at the Savoy in Düsseldorf, the remedy begins to work and Xaver has a wild fight with his bowels, because apparently the three gentlemen do not need elimination of any kind and as a result did not take a toilet break becomes. Meanwhile, he also hears that Trummel is no longer satisfied with an employee in the alarm system sales department, immediately suspects and soon sees it confirmed: It is his cousin Konrad Ehrle, who has also caused the family some worries. Ehrle tends to drink too much and then give speeches in which he talks about all the things he won't allow himself to be done. Zürn is therefore embarrassed to ensure that Gleitze and the like do not learn anything about the relationship.

When Zürn finally dropped the three men down at the Savoy and then relieved himself in the station toilet, he had to fight against the desire to buy something. This desire has become more and more common recently. Xaver usually buys cufflinks or even prefers knives , although he already has five of them. He keeps one of them in the glove compartment.

Ruckhaberle is later brought from Zürn to the station and returns by train to Lake Constance, while the other two gentlemen have to be brought to Cologne , where they stay at the Dom Hotel and where Gleitze goes to the opera . Zürn himself is housed in the much more modest Hotel Drei Kronen, which immediately reminds him of how he once caught a bad cold in the draughty breakfast room. The aggression is already rising in him again: “Five weeks of unpleasantness of all kinds. That is a form of bodily harm. At least now, immediately throw an ashtray into this glassed-in Mediterranean picture and when they come and ask, scream in their faces. Yes, did he have to put up with everything? And when, when would he finally stop? Hit it, nothing but hit the next best food, Heilandzack! Constantly choking everything down. Everything. All the time. How much longer? Xaver closed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. The knife flashed in his mind [...] “Already that evening, Xaver wants to call Agnes at home, but refrains from doing so because he only left in the morning and a long-distance call from the hotel would be too expensive. The next day he drives the gentlemen to Giessen , then they continue to Heidelberg , from where Ms. Trummel also rides. Xaver, who expected to come home that evening, was given the job of dropping off the Trummel couple in Stuttgart and then bringing Gleitze to Munich , where they would like to see a Figaro performance. When he was supposed to pick it up from a pub the next day, Gleitze ordered, as he regularly does, a large portion of ice cream with whipped cream for Xaver Zürn. This is about Gleitzes idea that a non-alcoholic, non-smoking former small-caliber master prefers to eat sweets, as always inwardly indignant and, as always, does not show anything. He brings Gleitze home on his favorite route and is about to leave Tettnang-Oberhof when the Gleitzes housekeeper, Aloisia, stops him: He should pick up another piano that is in Hottingen near Zurich . For this purpose, Xaver first has to pick up a van, the transport worker Hermann Lustig, who comes from Silesia , and two Turkish helpers in Markdorf . The grand piano that Gleitze is supposed to have for his 50th birthday was brought to Switzerland by a composer from Königsberg with a lung condition. Xaver transports the piano to Tettnang-Oberhof, then he brings the van back to Markdorf, then he drives the Turks to their quarters in Unterraderach and Lustig to Eriskirch .

When he finally arrives at the Hungerbühler Hof after this odyssey, almost passed out from longing for Agnes, Agnes immediately assaults him with reports about the two adolescent daughters. Julia, who has one new boyfriend after the other, is not home yet at half past one in the night, and Magdalena refuses to have any contact with her mother. Xaver Zürn's aggression is now directed against the children and his wife, who has not tried to enable him to return home in another way: “If she had wanted to return home in a different way, she would have had to manage it, this eternal one Don't dish out child grief on the first night. She should have managed to threaten or bribe Julia so that she would have come home before twelve. "

But Agnes has other priorities. She worries about her daughters, she admires Master Köberle's daughter Sabine, who, in contrast to her own offspring, is learning purposefully and adapted to the Abitur and is also socially engaged, she is silent about the Gleitze couple when they appear at the Hungerbühler Hof and asks about Xaver Zürn, not even that he is visiting the problematic cousin Konrad Ehrle, and she does not hide her husband's intestinal problems from Gleitze. Then Xaver Zürn is immediately sent to the University Hospital Tübingen for an examination and subjected to colonoscopies , x-rays , endoscopic gastric examinations and similar procedures for a week until you finally find out: "We have it, we have it for sure: it is definitely nothing." Instead of being as happy as the doctors expect him to be, Xaver Zürn feels after this result the feeling of a “pervasive failure”. On the drive home to Wigratsweiler he suddenly realized why that was: “He had a different feeling about himself than they had about him. The slide. And the difference didn't get smaller, it got bigger. Agnes finds it easy to call him ambitious [...] She had no Dr. Glide and no Dr. Slide over yourself. Now he understood why Agnes, in almost all discussions about his work, understood the Gleitzes' point of view better than his [...] He didn't know anyone, not someone who thought of him as he thought of himself. There was no one to whom he could ever tell what he thought of himself. The difference seemed too big to him. Worse still: he couldn't have said what he thought of himself. He just felt the difference. ”When he returned home, he aggressively accused his wife of exaggerating his suffering towards his boss and that he was now standing there like a simulator. But Agnes disarms him with the remark that the doctors don't know everything either.

Tettnang Forest

On one of his next trips, Zürn has to go to Dr. Bring Gleitze to Stuttgart and wait a long time for him. Contrary to his habits, he goes into a pub and drinks beer there. An incident occurs promptly; two drunks are violent against each other. Zürn should actually remain on the spot as a witness to the brawl, but leaves as quickly as possible before the police arrive so as not to keep his boss waiting. This shows up late and in the company of several tipsy people; it will be very late before Xaver Zürn and Dr. Glide back towards Lake Constance. For the first time on this trip, Gleitze asks Zürn to stop for a moment. While Gleitze empties his bladder, Zürn takes his knife out of the glove compartment and indulges in violent fantasies. Nothing else happens, Gleitze arrives at home alive and undamaged, but he has noticed that his driver is carrying a knife.

The next day, Xaver Zürn's successor turns up at the Hungerbühler Hof: The forty-year-old Xaver is getting too old for the grueling job as a private driver, Gleitze probably also noticed that he couldn't always go without alcohol, and that's why he should get his first now take the accumulated vacation and will then continue to work as a forklift driver in Plant 2. Zürn, who intercepted the young man on the doorstep, portrays this degradation to Agnes as if he had initiated it himself, and is extremely surprised when his wife falls happily around his neck: she never has anything want to say because Xaver always praised his boss so much and portrayed his boss positively, but she was infinitely happy about this change, because Gleitzes are not good people.

On his daily walk into the forest, Xaver Zürn can now sink all the knives he has bought over the years as well as the farewell gifts from the Gleitze family in a body of water whose archives he has always entrusted with what has burdened him or what he wanted to get rid of.

References to other works by Walser

How things will continue with Xaver Zürn can be found in another novel by Walser. He can stand it as a forklift driver for two months, then quits his job, buys a used truck and goes into business for himself. He works almost day and night now, but he still owns what he works with. However, this is mentioned in passing; Xaver Zürn does not appear as the main character in any other of Walser's novels. But soul work is one of the series of Walser novels whose heroes, all of whom come from the Lake Constance region, usually deal with newcomers who are more successful professionally than they are. Among the insults that come with contact with these people , as well as not being noticed or not being understood, Walser's novel heroes suffer endlessly and often tragicomically. All of these heroes are related to each other. The series begins with Franz Horn, the main character in Beyond Love (1976) and Letter to Lord Liszt (1982). Horn, a cousin of Zürn, is rescued after a suicide attempt by his boss, Mr. Thiele, who produces "Chemnitz teeth" and, like Xaver Zürn, who is discharged from the university clinic, has to state that he is unsuccessful even with disasters: he succeeds not to kill himself, just as Xaver Zürn cannot return home with a diagnosis of a terrible illness. In the letter to Lord Liszt , Franz Horn can explain to an employee who once bullied and dethroned him what is now being done to him by an even younger and even more exotic employee. Jörg Magenau wrote about such Walser heroes: “These heroes are hardly capable of hostility. Instead, it turns out again and again that they have to love their competitors because they can only endure competition as an effort of friendship. "

The first doctorate in the widespread relationship of the Horns and Zürns is Dr. Gottlieb Zürn, the real estate agent, who no longer succeeds in closing deals and who cannot save the beautiful Art Nouveau house he fell in love with from demolition. He is mentioned in both soul work and in a letter to Lord Liszt . All of the heroes from the Zürn / Horn family have a strong woman at their side, who quietly holds the family together and sometimes prevents economic ruin.

Between Beyond Love and Soul Work , the novella A Fleeing Horse (1978) came out. Helmut Böttiger described it as “an exercise in the small form that fades out all social ruminations and political self-tearing and circles the midlife crisis in classical psychology - a prose that is clearly capable of a majority, according to the standards of popular criticism.” But this “exercise is completely remote in the small form “the main themes of Walser in the 1970s and 1980s: Helmut Halm, the main character of the novella, is only on vacation on Lake Constance and does not belong to the Zürn / Horn family. But he has his vacation quarters in a granny flat in Gottlieb Zürn's house - which in turn is modeled on that of Walser in Nussdorf . Halm's job is often similar to Messrs. Zürn or Horn from the Lake Constance region; the main enemy in the staff room is called Kiderlen. Halm also states that outsiders are often completely mistaken in the way they imagine him, Halm. In contrast to Xaver Zürn, who threatens to lose his own self-image, Halm enjoys this situation and is even expanding it further and further. Helmut Halm appears again as the main character in a Walser novel. In Brandung (1985), meanwhile 55 years of age, he experienced his midlife crisis in the USA and a love affair with a much younger woman.

In the phase in which Walser conceived and wrote these books, as Böttiger wrote, “a new course was set, from the first-person perspective to authorial narration .” At that time, Walser had “a formal distance from his material, the inner complications of the aspirational path West German petty bourgeoisie ", won.

Böttiger, who commented on Walser's diaries from 1974 to 1978, stated: “The diary writer repeatedly articulates his feelings of powerlessness and despair -» Can rulers read? «- and an associative connection to his is established Alemannic existence [...] "

From 1976 onwards, Walser's thoughts were dominated by one major offense in particular: the radical condemnation of his novel Beyond Love by Marcel Reich-Ranicki . Böttiger explains that Walser found a new attitude in the 1970s: “Every now and then the author exposes himself to his aggressions and feelings of competition without protection. But he always stylized himself through writing and designed the sovereignty of a writer's attitude that immediately incorporated what he had experienced into a fictional cosmos. "At that time, Walser opposed the crude world courses with a" thoroughly narcissistically enjoyed poet "and the devastating criticism of the afterlife love gave the appearance of destroying this possibility. But, according to Böttiger, Walser went through a catharsis . Magenau points out, however, that z. For example, the figure of Gottlieb Zürn was already included in the diaries in 1963: "When he was released into the public eye, Zürn was a long-term conversationalist."

reception

The tortured Seuse

In his review in the Spiegel, Rolf Becker responded to a full-bodied publisher's propaganda with the following sentences: “Isn't it enough to say that“ soul work ”is once again a good, clever, funny Walser? Perhaps a Walser who is a bit more melancholy and relaxed, almost a little careless, continues his story of the circumstances and people who are not what they should be with even more gallows wit. "Overall, Becker reviewed the novel very positively:" A The narrator, confident in the mastery of his considerable resources, cultivates his terrain, the geographical and social as well as the motif terrain peculiar to him. We are on familiar ground, and that doesn't have to be a well-trodden path, in this case it is still fertile land. "Walser has never told his sad and comical failure and loser story, including its socially critical aspects, so relaxed and relaxed like in this, his seventh novel. ”Becker merely commented critically that Zürn's differentiated inner life and his remarks about the piano playing of his wife and daughters did not seem necessarily appropriate to the environment.

Anthony Edward Waine put his main focus on Walser's political positioning when he stated: “Even though Walser had distanced himself from the West German Communist Party by the mid-1970s, his class-based analysis of German society can be sensed in novels such as soul work (1979) as well as later ones, and one also senses his belief that individuals can learn to liberate themselves from class fetters. "

Magenau, on the other hand, classified soul work among the “Walser novels with the most Lake Constance” and reported that editor Elisabeth Borchers had even suggested the title “Heimatroman” for the book. “This is how characteristic the landscape is for the driver Xaver Zürn.” He pointed to Walser's appreciation towards the homeland, including the dialect, and on the fact that Heinrich Seuse is “the epitome and paragon of the local” for Walser, and explained: “Seuse sings pain. If you only put it a little less lyrically, that is also Walser's literary program. His novels are answers to »added things«. "

output

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Walser, Seelenarbeit , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1983, ISBN 3-518-37401-X , p. 42
  2. ↑ Martin Walser, Seelenarbeit , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1983, ISBN 3-518-37401-X , p. 95 f.
  3. ↑ a b Martin Walser, Seelenarbeit , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1983, ISBN 3-518-37401-X , p. 169
  4. ↑ Martin Walser, Seelenarbeit , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1983, ISBN 3-518-37401-X , p. 169 f.
  5. ↑ On Walser's “Einsilbern” cf. Jörg Magenau: Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek near Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , pp. 339-375.
  6. ↑ Jörg Magenau, Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 341
  7. ↑ a b c d e Helmut Böttiger, Das große Wüten , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 17, 2010 ( online )
  8. ↑ Jörg Magenau, Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 340
  9. ↑ Only the Russians remain. Rolf Becker on Martin Walser: "Soul work" , in: Der Spiegel 11, 1979, March 12, 1979, p. 216 f. ( online )
  10. ^ Anthony Edward Waine: Changing Cultural Tastes: Writers and the Popular in Modern Germany . Berghahn Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-57181-522-4 , p. 83.
  11. ↑ Jörg Magenau, Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 363
  12. ↑ Jörg Magenau, Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 360
  13. ↑ Jörg Magenau, Martin Walser. A biography , Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04497-4 , p. 361