Solar eclipse (novel)

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German first edition, Hamish Hamilton, London 1946

Sonnenfinsternis (English title: Darkness at Noon ), Arthur Koestler's best-known novel , takes place during the Stalinist purges in the 1930s. The author addresses the submission and self-denial of old revolutionaries who confessed to "crimes" they had not committed. With the publication of the book in 1940, Koestler broke with communism . As a result, the book was opposed by French communists.

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The focus of the novel is the story of NS Rubashov, who gets caught up in the mills of the Stalinist secret police for alleged counterrevolutionary crimes. Through a complex process that includes intellectual argumentation, torture, and moral reflection, Rubashov is gradually led to publicly admit that he has committed several crimes against the state. He made the decision to make these confessions because he still hoped that they would serve the ideals of the revolution; His reflections have also led him to conclude that his behavior has caused suffering and agony for those close to him.

The characters in the book have Russian names, but Russia and the Soviet Union are not named as the locations of the action. There has been speculation as to whether Koestler used the life stories of Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin as models for the figure of Rubashov . However, one can assume that Koestler mainly processed his own experiences. He implements experiences that he had to gain as a prisoner of the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War .

Reception history

Koestler published his novel at a time when most of his former comrades from the KPD and the Protection Association of German Writers (SDS) refused to admit the crimes of the Stalinist regime. Many representatives of the left in Europe and America assumed that the law at the Moscow trials was on the side of the Soviet prosecutors. Bertolt Brecht expressed himself in this direction in his writings on politics and society, as did Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Havemann . Havemann got the novel on loan from an American officer in 1945 after he escaped Nazi death row, and saw only class-hostile propaganda in it.

However, it soon became clear that Koestler had based himself on actual events in writing the novel, and over time his novel has been translated into over 30 languages. The French edition Le Zéro et l'Infini, published in 1946, caused a particularly sensation, sold over 400,000 copies and prompted the French Communist Party to take desperate countermeasures. So she initially bought up all available copies and removed them.

The German original version of Solar Eclipse was lost, so that the German-language editions of the book before 2018 are back translations from English. In 2015, the original manuscript, believed to be lost, by Matthias Weßel, a doctoral student at the University of Kassel , was discovered in the Zurich Central Library . The rediscovered original text was published by Elsinor Verlag .

expenditure

  • Darkness at Noon. Translated from the German by Daphne Hardy. Cape, London 1940
  • Solar eclipse. Hamish Hamilton, London 1946.
  • Solar eclipse. Retransmission from the English by Arthur Köstler, Atlantis-Verlag, Zurich 1946.
  • Solar eclipse. Behrendt, Stuttgart 1948.
  • The gladiators. Solar eclipse. A man jumps into the depths. Revised edition by the author. Scherz, Bern / Stuttgart / Vienna 1960.
  • Solar eclipse. Novel. dtv, Munich 1967 (paperback).
  • Solar eclipse. Novel. Europa-Verlag, Vienna / Munich / Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-203-50654-8 .
  • Solar eclipse. Novel. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1979, ISBN 3-548-20029-X (paperback).
  • Solar eclipse. Novel. With an afterword by the author. Revised new edition. Europa-Verlag, Vienna / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-203-51124-X ; ibid. 2000, ISBN 3-203-79150-1 .
  • Solar eclipse. Novel. First edition based on the original German typescript. Foreword by Michael Scammell, afterword by Matthias Weßel. Elsinor Verlag, Coesfeld 2018, ISBN 3-94278840-3 .

Edits

Dramatization

  • Sidney Kingsley: Darkness at Noon. New York 1952

radio play

  • Solar eclipse. Director: Christian Gebert, HR / MDR 1992

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Myth of Stalin: Inheritance from this time . In: taz , November 22, 2007.
  2. ↑ News of the rampage of reason .  ( 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. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 5, 2005@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / sz-shop.sueddeutsche.de  
  3. ↑ Reinhard Mohr: Reality whistled . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1998 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Lost Koestler original found in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 14. August 2015, accessed August 22, 2015.
  5. ↑ Arthur Koestler's "Sonnenfinsternis" (1940) first published in the original text press release of the University of Kassel. Last accessed on June 6, 2018.