Soldiers from Salamis

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Soldados de Salamis is the novel "Soldados de Salamina" by Javier Cercas , published in German in 2002 and 2001 in Spain , which has received several awards in Spain, Italy and Great Britain (" Independent Foreign Fiction Prize ", 2004) since its publication . Its sales figures made it the first successful literary work on the Spanish Civil War in Spain.

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The novel consists of three parts: " Friends of the Forest ", " Soldiers of Salamis " and " Meeting in Stockton ". It is repeatedly passed out by the first-person narrator from Gerona as a " story based on reality ". This corresponds to the author's introductory note in which he thanks the people named in the text as his interlocutors. The first-person narrator, a fictional namesake of the author, who in the last third can initially be addressed as Javier, then also as Cercas, failed because of a career as a writer with two novels published over ten years ago, but without an echo: El móvil (1987 ) and El inquilino (1989), German 2003 “The Tenant”, in fact the title of novels by the writer Javier Cercas. He is hired again as a journalist in the culture department of his former newspaper.

"The Friends of the Forest"

The first part shows the narrator at his journalistic work. In 1994 he is supposed to write an article about the writer and essayist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (* 1927 in Rome) and interview him. Something he does not mention in the article is the story that Ferlosio tells about his father Rafael Sánchez Mazas (1894–1966): At the end of the civil war, he would have been in a monastery with 50 other prisoners of the republicans on their retreat towards the Pyrenees and France to be shot. The bullets intended for him as one of the founders of the Falange would only have grazed him and he could have escaped into the adjacent forest, where he hid in a hole in the ground. One of the Republican militiamen chasing him tracked him down, stared at him for a few seconds, replied in the negative when someone asked if someone was there, and walked away. A couple of young men from a nearby village had hidden and looked after him, who was quite helpless with his broken glasses, until the Republicans had disappeared and the “nationalists” had come up as “liberators”. When telling this story, his father always called the young men by the name they gave themselves to him: "The Friends of the Forest".

At the beginning of February 1999 the narrator was asked to write an article about the poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939), who was on the run from the troops of Franco (1892–1975) in France, shortly before the end of the civil war Mother had died. He publishes the article under the heading “ A necessary secret ”, whereby he sees the secret in the fact that it is no longer possible to find out what went through the heads of Machado's relatives (cf. Manuel Machado ) at the funeral of their brother and mother and who almost at the same time the militiaman was in front of the hole in the ground on the other side of the Pyrenees. To his surprise, he received three letters to the editor about his text about an event that had long since fallen into the past. He made an appointment with one of the writers' letters to the editor, a historian, because his father, who was hidden on a farm near the monastery as a boy, seemed to know more about the events of the time. The young historian, actively involved in clearing up the civil war against the creation of Francoist legends, put him in touch with the son of one of the “friends from the forest”. The narrator notes that he is becoming more and more curious about Sánchez Mazas, “that this cultivated, refined, melancholy, conservative man, who avers physical courage and was allergic to violence, no doubt because he knew that he would never have been able to do it himself exercising it, in the twenties and thirties worked like hardly anyone else to plunge his country into an orgy of blood and violence ”(p. 49 f.). After a ten-year break, he feels motivated to “tell the story according to reality” because he is getting deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of history.

“The Friends of the Forest”, no longer complete, the survivors in the eighties, are delighted to speak to someone who is interested in their youthful experiences and confirm Sánchez Mazas's widely spread version of the events at Collell Monastery. Sánchez Mazas had shown his appreciation to them after the war and again in office and dignity wherever he could and also wanted to write a novel entitled “Soldiers of Salamis” about what happened to him.

"Soldiers of Salamis"

The second part finally focuses on Sánchez Mazas. Born privileged and trained as a lawyer, he felt drawn to the literary. He wrote poetry, newspaper articles, novels and correspondent reports from Morocco and Rome, where he stayed for seven years from 1922 and married there. For the narrator, “a good writer, but not a great writer” (p. 19). Back from Italy, he made friends with José Antonio Primo de Rivera and became his most sought-after advisor. After the founding of the Falange he was "its first ideologue and propagandist, one of the main creators of its rhetoric and symbols" (p. 86). On him, not on Ramiro Ledesma , should the cry “ ¡Arriba España! "(Eng. About" Auf, auf Spanien! ") Go back. He is the author of the " Prayer for the Dead of the Falange " and was involved in the writing of the Falange hymn " Cara al sol ". The narrator locates him among the forces who want to maintain the ancien régime by all means (p. 96), who, based on Oswald Spengler , consider themselves a troop of soldiers who oppose the “wave of godlessness and egalitarian barbarism” of civilization to defend (p. 89). The slogans scattered by Sánchez Mazas had "still contained a flaming promise of modernity" (cf. Fin de siècle ). Captured in the Second Spanish Republic in late 1937, he was tried and convicted with others as the alleged leader of the Fifth Column . After his unsuccessful shooting, he called his real friends, actually Republicans, who were trying to find a livelihood in Spain in the gray area of ​​defeat and transition, “The Friends of the Forest”. After the civil war, Sánchez Mazas became a minister in the first Franco government for a year without a portfolio, saved some of his friends from the forest from imprisonment in the Franco regime, but soon neglected his work and left the government, "a simple government of cunning peasants and clergymen" (P. 141). Comment from an acquaintance: "Before you were a writer and politician, now you are just a millionaire" (p. 140). For the narrator he is a repentant and irresponsible person who glorified the old institutions of monarchy, family, religion and fatherland, but did nothing to maintain them, but someone who had extravagant hobbies and an extravagant fondness for literature. “Few people remember him today, and maybe he deserves nothing else. There is a street in Bilbao that bears his name ”(p. 147).

"Meeting at Stockton"

The narrator notes that Sánchez Mazas and the handful of cultured men who were ready to plunge the country into an unleashed bloodlust do not wear his draft novel and that he has to end his renewed leave of absence to write without success. His girlfriend had wanted to convince him from the start that it would not be a good thing to write about a “fascist”. He met the exiled Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) and a follower of Salvador Allende to interview important people living in the Gerona province but from outside the country . Bolaño had worked on a campsite in Castelldefells for four summers between 1978 and 1981 in order to be able to support himself and his family until he could live on the money from literary prizes. In the interview, he starts talking about Miralles, a Catalan who has become French and who regularly spent his holidays at the campsite. Miralles, on his left side a single scar from the ankle to the eye, had told Bolaño his impressive life story, which he is now passing on to the narrator. Miralles had served under Enrique Líster (1907-1997). This famous Spanish communist was also the commander of the republican troops that were in the Collell Monastery at the time of the shooting. From there, Miralles and 80,000 other refugees from Spain ended up in the French concentration camp in Argelès-sur-Mer and quickly reported to the Foreign Legion . He marched across the Maghreb under Major General Leclerc through the desert to French Equatorial Africa , where contact was established with de Gaulle and France libre . Together with the English, Miralles fought for the first time in a squad of six French soldiers after the defeat of France in 1940 indirectly against the Germans as part of the Axis powers formed with Italy . Because Italy held an oasis in Libya . From Tripoli he took part in the last part of the Africa campaign in 1943, landed on August 1, 1944 at Utah Beach , moved into Paris with the first allied force and then fought against the Germans as far as Austria, where he stepped on a mine and almost torn to pieces has been. He was restored to a French citizen with a life pension.

In the sleepless night that followed, the narrator is certain in “overwhelming clairvoyance” (p. 174) that Miralles must be the militia officer who spared Sánchez Mazas. He and his companion set out to find Miralles in Dijon by phone , where they finally track down the now 82-year-old after a week-long telephone odyssey in a nursing home. The narrator sets out for Dijon as if he were going to the city of Stockton from the film "Fat City" by John Huston , finding old Miralles, who lost his wife and daughter early, orphaned, lonely and finally relieved, to be asked to speak, but also giving free rein to his disappointment that he “left his youth in the fight for a shitty country” and that nobody thanked him with a word, a gesture or a letter. The question then asked by the narrator, however, whether it was he who spared him who deserved death like no other (pp. 204, 215), is denied with a broad and winning smile (pp. 217 f .).

Narrative means

A story based on reality Cercas has put his novel under the motto " The gods have hidden / what keeps people alive " by Hesiod . What he distributes throughout the text as a " story based on reality " and provides a wealth of historical data that illustrate the fight against fascism and National Socialism as a European phenomenon, ultimately confirms the "necessary secret" behind reality, the Makes people act like the narrator or Sánchez Mazas or Miralles. The No Miralles, wrapped in a smile, only hides half a, almost understood, "necessary" secret (p. 191), because in the second part Sánchez Mazas identified the soldier who was sparing him as one of his guardians who came to him because of his pasodoble dance the song " Suspiros de España " (roughly "Sigh over Spain") in the prison of Barcelona was catchy (p. 126 f.).

Suspiros de España With its text, this song constitutes a further structural element of the plot (p. 47 f., 126 f., 172, 216 f., 220 f.) And is most conspicuously assigned to Miralles, the pasodoble in prison and on danced at the campsite and would like to invite Sister Françoise to the sad music in the old people's home. Because while Sánchez Mazas, as the victor, ensured the broadest dissemination of his salvation and even had himself filmed for one of the first newsreels after the war while telling it, Miralles took his story to Stockton (= Dijon), a city of those who failed in battle, and felt it for five years in the nursing home as unearthly as somewhere in space (p. 194). Every day he thinks of his companions, all of whom died in the civil war, sometimes dreams of them and, with tears, enumerates their long-forgotten names in Spain. He feels guilty about you.

Father-son stories The narrator recognizes in Miralles someone who is now as old as his deceased father would be. With this, he names another moment that drives the action forward, namely how memory work can bring the past and the life lived by others to mind in such a way that it becomes reality. Right from the start he had the impression that it was about father-son stories with a shadow of guilt (p. 31). All those interviewed tell him about people who "died in wars that were lost from the start" (p. 214). The time of the fathers sometimes seems as distant as the battle of Salamis (p. 56). The narrator makes the reader witness his attempts to get hold of the reality to be told step by step , beginning with the 1999 text “ A necessary secret ”, until he finally completes his narrative with the Miralles part can.

Soldiers from Salamis The word “ soldiers from Salamis ” is brought into play by Sánchez Mazas (p. 74) and by the troop of soldiers in whom the Falange founders (after Oswald Spengler ) supposedly save Western civilization from ruin , resumed (pp. 89, 143). “ Soldiers of Salamis ” is also the name of the first unfinished novel with part two, which Sánchez Manzas actually wanted to have written under the same title. However, it is not the group of Sánchez Manzas and his companions who save civilization from ruin, but in the eyes of the narrator they do not deserve to be part of him (p. 222). Rather, it is Miralles who marches through the desert with the flag of the freedom of another country, “which is all countries” (p. 206), with four Arabs and a negro and in the end looks like a decommissioned soldier from Salamis, like an abandoned one "run over old truck driver" (p. 195).

It is the narrative means used by Cercas in his " Narrative According to Reality " that, in their constant repetition, make the many facts of the historical background into a different reality than that of the facts, so that in the narrative a memory of the forgotten dead of the 'sad history of Spain' (p. 23,185) is created.

Reception in Germany

For Paul Ingendaay the “immense success” of the book in Spain in his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 9, 2002 is a mystery. Compared to William Faulkner and Marcel Proust , Cercas only found “a form” for his plot. He accuses the book of not making contemporary history hurt, but rather "slips into the pleasantly picturesque". He makes literary criticism partly responsible for the fact that the subject of the Spanish Civil War with Cerca's novel is "released for elevated sentimentalization".

For Volker Breidecker, Süddeutsche Zeitung , on September 11, 2002, it was a “great novel”, the sensational success of which was all the more captivating, “as this book is not a Schmonzette, not a historical ham, but a rather intricate story acts ". For the reviewer, the Pasodoble Miralles' is a variation on " Play me the song of death ", with which Cercas comes up with a sad message at the end: "Forward, always forward - but in a circle."

filming

There has been a Spanish film adaptation by David Trueba called "Soldados de Salamina" since 2003 , which was proposed by Spain for an Oscar nomination in the category Best Foreign Language Film (see Goya 2004 ).

Remarks

  1. ↑ The following page references refer to Javier Cercas, Soldiers von Salamis, Berlin (Berlin Verlag) 2001, ISBN 3-8270-0464-0 .
  2. ^ Javier Cercas, The Tenant, Berlin (Klaus Wagenbach Verlag) 2003, ISBN 3-8031-1217-6 .
  3. ^ Fat City in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) .
  4. ↑ Cf. Carlos Collado Seidel, The Spanish Civil War. History of a European Conflict, Munich (CH Beck) 2006.
  5. ↑ Enzo Traverso underlines this guilt in his book on the "European Civil War 1914-1945" when he writes that he starts from the idea that "we, citizens of a democratic Europe, owe a debt to those who fought for it to build it up "(Traverso [2007], p. 17).
  6. ↑ In the sea battle of Salamis 480 BC A Greek fleet stopped the expansionist efforts of the Persians and thus saved civilization from the oriental barbarians according to the traditional understanding of history.
  7. ↑ A process that is called " hacer memoria " (= to create memories) in Spain in an effort to address this repressed past (cf. Elisabeth Suntrup-Andresen, 2008; Poland and Spain in comparison ).
  8. ^ FAZ and SZ on "Soldiers from Salamis" and other reviews .

literature

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Elisabeth Suntrup-Andresen, Hacer memoria. The Civil War in the Literature of the Later Born: Typology and Analysis of Spanish Contemporary Novels from the 1980s to Today , Munich (Martin Meidenbauer Verlag) 2008, ISBN 978-3-89975-668-5 .
  • Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914-1945 , Paris (Stock) 2007, ISBN 978-2-234-05918-4 . See especially chap. 6 “ Imaginaires de la violence ” and chap. 8 “ Les antinomies de l'antifacisme ”.