Sitara and the way to get there

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Sitara and the way there (subtitle: A study on essence, work and effects of Karl May ) is a study by the German writer Arno Schmidt , who examines and analyzes the work of Karl May from the perspective of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis . Sitara was first published in 1963 by Stahlberg Verlag , Karlsruhe .

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In the treatise, Schmidt wants to show unconscious images of homosexuality in May's travel stories. Schmidt took up this thesis formulated by the Austrian Paul Elbogen . Schmidt refers to the stereotypical weapon symbolism, the preference for sadistic scenes, to the erotic and loving depiction of the Indian noble people, to the depiction of the nocturnal or joint rides as well as to transvestite figures such as Aunt Droll , Hobble Frank or Langer Davy . Schmidt also highlights the erotic and latently phallic motifs on Sascha Schneider's title templates , which are all the more astonishing since Schneider never left his friend May in the dark about his (Schneider's) homosexual orientation. While Schmidt's theses were relativized or ignored by the “bourgeois” Karl May research in the 1960s / 1970s, it had a great influence on the cinematic interpretations ( Hans-Jürgen Syberberg , Michael Herbig ) and on the integration of May works into the academic literary canon. Schmidt's work did not convince many readers in the 1960s / 1970s, but is considered an important component of Schmidt's theory of organ mapping in literature. According to this theory, a description of sexual organs can be found in literature, especially in trivial literature, as a subtext, for example in descriptions of landscapes. For Schmidt, this theory was a step up from his later etym theory in his work Zettel's Traum .

Schmidt's theses received wide attention, but little approval. It was not until Schmidt's student Hans Wollschläger succeeded in portraying Schmidt's relationship with May in a more relaxed manner.

Sitara with Karl May

Sitara, "The Land of Star Flowers", is a recurring landscape from the novels of Karl May. The sultana of this empire is Marah Durimeh . The area of ​​Märdistan mentioned in Babel and the Bible also belongs to Sitara , "in whose gorge, as one secretly tells, lies the spirit forge, in which the souls are forged into steel and spirit through pain and torment" (cf. Ardistan and Jinnistan , Vol. I ). The city of Ikbal is the residence of Marah Durimeh, where she lives in a white marble castle.

Sitara is mentioned, among other things, in the works In the Kingdom of the Silver Lion and My Life and Striving . On December 8, 1909, May gave a lecture in Augsburg entitled Sitara, the land of the human soul .

criticism

"While the book about de la Motte Fouqué is bizarre, but serious, but not really necessary because of the subject, a monograph on Karl May would certainly be necessary, only that the one by Arno Schmidt seems bizarre and dubious to me."

- Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Die Zeit , October 13, 1967

“Arno Schmidt tears apart Karl May's poetic webs with brute force in his study“ Sitara and the way there ”(1963). He wants to prove how an uptight gay man messes with himself and his readers. The penetrance of the four-hundred-page “Sitara” exegesis of anal landscapes and haunting metaphors falls back on Schmidt: Here, in fact, or rather in word and writing, someone has terrible problems with his homosexuality, but that is not necessarily Karl May. Uncle's dream of pornography appears, Karl May was dead half a century - and the morality of the Adenauer era as narrow and depressing as that of Wilhelmine. "

- Rüdiger Schaper : Karl May: Subject, impostor, superman , page 121.

“Schmidt is extremely conscientious about this. He makes it difficult, he prefers to prove thirty than twenty times, he attests to his game in good faith wherever he can, he finds mitigating reasons wherever such things can be found - and that is precisely what his abstruse, brilliant book makes for the, who can read, to a pleasure of the intellect that compared to the best detective novel seems pointlessly stale. "

- Robert Neumann : Karl May on the index. The mirror 10/64

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Man for Man , page 495/496
  2. ↑ a b Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : man for man , page 497/498
  3. ↑ Harald Eggebrecht (ed.): Karl May, the Saxon fantastic. Studies on life and work (= Fischer 6873). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-26873-7 .
  4. ^ Hans Wollschläger : Arno Schmidt and Karl May. In: Yearbook of the Karl May Society. 1990, ISSN  0300-1989 , pp. 12-29, online .