Play instinct (novel)

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Spieltrieb is a novel by the German writer Juli Zeh , published in 2004 . The focus of the action, which is located in a posh district in Bonn , is an intellectually precocious outsider who, over the course of the two years described, maneuvered herself into an explosive triangular relationship with a teacher and a classmate at a private high school.

action

The event spans the two school years that the protagonist Ada completes as a 14- and 15-year-old at the fictional Ernst Bloch Gymnasium in Bonn. The first 12 months are rather unspectacular, as Ada is mostly distant during and outside of class. If she does speak out, it is always decisive and often provocative. She feels mentally superior to her classmates and teachers. For a short time everyone is talking about it, when she even has the last word to the dreaded history teacher Höfling, known as Höfi. She only connects with others through her ears , a school band. The friendship with Olaf, one of the band members, breaks up when she lets herself be induced to "deflower" him against his will on his 16th birthday.

The trigger for the dramatic events in the second year is the appearance of a new classmate, Alev. Although three years older than Ada, he is in the same grade, is mentally equal and, unlike her, is an extrovert. In no time he dominates the class as well as his classmates, even those outside of his courses. Ada falls under his spell and seeks his presence. He provides them with new reading material, including works on game theory . When Ada lets himself be instigated a second time, this becomes more serious, with far greater consequences, as it is about seducing and blackmailing a teacher. The ground is prepared for the success of Alev's plan: He correctly speculates that the seduced, the German and sports teacher Smutek, is a potential seducer of Ada, because she is the only one in his extra-curricular running group who participates out of inner drive, so that she often enough training in pairs and a more intimate relationship has already developed. The immediate trigger for Alev's idea is the moment when he learns from Ada that Smutek - after she had rescued his wife from a frozen lake and thus apparently from suicide - unceremoniously undressed and heaved her naked into a hot tub. Alev then turns Smutek's initial seduction into a weekly ritual in which he is always present, sets the rules and, through the photos he shoots and launches password-protected on the school website, extorted obedience and money from Smutek, from which Ada also benefits. After a few weeks, however, the “game” gets off the rails, not least because the protagonists begin to evade Alev's claim to power. He then declared it ended without further ado. Smutek reacts with an outbreak of physical violence by knocking down Alev and seriously injuring him several times. In the subsequent court hearing, Ada uses her appearance as the main witness for a meticulously prepared plea in favor of Smutek, so that he remains unpunished. This is all the more surprising since the discerning judge, cold Sophie , is considered the most feared of her subject. The adult Alev, who describes himself as the loser of the "game" and seems purified, is given a six-month suspended sentence by her. Separated from his wife, Smutek travels to Vienna with the now 16-year-old Ada in the summer and then further south-east to the injured heart of Europe . Meanwhile, the judge, who turned out to be the first-person narrator, uses the time between the instances to put what happened on paper.

main characters

The main characters are grouped around the focal point Ada: Alev and the cold Sophie are created as parallel figures to her, Smutek more as a complementary or contrasting figure, Höfi combines both.

Ada and Alev have several things in common: They are outsiders, want to be one too, and see their elitist status based on their intellectual plus on the one hand and their deficits in terms of emotion, belief and morality on the other. There is no doubt that Ada is an under-challenged, gifted girl. With no effort, she achieves brilliant academic achievements and voluntarily nourishes her mind with demanding reading from the bookshelves of the three people belonging to her family: her deceased father, her foster father (the brigadier general , a high-ranking official from the Ministry of Defense) and her mother, who has been since then Leaving two years ago with the single parent Adas is clearly overwhelmed. The intellectual qualities of Alev, who seems to be left to himself even more than Ada, appear questionable on closer inspection. Due to his cosmopolitan biography (he has learned five languages ​​without being able to speak one properly ), he is dyslexic , has been sitting down twice and is at risk of being transferred again in the current school year. He is totally focused on excelling orally. Ada also occasionally notices that she is following an alpha animal who may be a blender.

As for the self-declared shortcoming of the two, one is largely dependent on their own statements about it. It plays a central role in their disputes and, for Ada, has the character of an incantation ( I was probably born without faith, like other people are born without arms or eyesight ). Since these are adolescents, caution should be exercised in accepting their claims as facts. Even Alev's sexual impotence, which he is open about, is possibly an attitude that makes or should make him even more attractive than he already is. In the case of Ada, who, unlike him, you get to know in detail from the inside, you can very well notice that it takes an effort to always be what she wants to be. Normal human feelings and norms (such as shame) are by no means alien to her, she just keeps them in check consciously, forcibly. One answer to the question of why is her mother, who surrenders to her emotional fluctuations and thus never becomes confident and grown up. She is the daily anti-role model, from which Ada wants to strictly distance herself. The narrator makes another, almost leitmotiv-like demarcation right at the beginning by presenting Ada as the exact opposite of a princess . "Princesses" are all those schoolgirls whose main attributes are a flawless exterior and inner emptiness. From the point of view of pubescent Ada, about whom it is said in the very first sentence that she is not beautiful , the contempt of this type is understandable.

If Ada is conceived as a figure to identify with, but not necessarily as a “popular figure”, this applies to the third main character without reservation. Adas teacher and later lovers is the Polish-born Szymon Smutek (Pol .: sadness), which is a phenomenon and an anti-macho at the same time (his countrymen and wife he calls itself Snow White and treated it as such); as a teacher he is the counter-model to the image of the "lazy sacks" . He seems to be able to keep everything in balance: outer and inner, mind and body, professional and private life, home and adopted home, authority and empathy towards his students, duty and inclination with regard to the subject matter. He seems almost a little too perfect, which is of course wanted, because the greater his height of fall is when he is reduced by the young people to the mechanics of making love, where he very much feels and wants to feel something; what passions Ada arouses in him becomes evident in the first unobserved act of love with her. His seemingly cryptic answer to the judge's question about the motive for his act of violence could refer to this, as well as to Alev himself: "I did it out of love."

In their outward appearance, Smutek and Höfi are the greatest conceivable opposites: one tall, handsome, sporty - an Adonis , a "Siegfried" ; the other small, gnome-like, overgrown , a "cripple" . Her nature accordingly: Smutek an optimist and idealist, Höfi a skeptic and cynical mocker. As teachers, they have at least one thing in common: Both are absolutely committed and have high demands. Smutek, however, is predictable for his students, Höfi is not. His lessons are teacher-centered, authoritarian, tyrannical - and fearful for most students, because Höfi challenges everyone and ruthlessly exposes their intellectual limits. So he polarizes what he is hated by many - including the "Princesses" - but adored and even loved by a few. So also from Ada. Besides her foster father, he seems to be the only adult she looks up to in some ways. She realizes that for her he can be more than a kindred spirit, one whom she can not only rub herself with spiritually, but also with whom she can orientate herself morally. One of the decisive factors for this is the moment when her triumph over him turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory in retrospect : Höfi had given her the last word in consideration of his wife, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and is dying, and Ada has to acknowledge that he - im Difference from her - did not try to get the upper hand at any cost. Höfi's spectacular suicide by jumping from the school roof (symbolically again in front of Ada's eyes, only this time she cannot intervene in a saving manner as with Smutek's wife) should be understood as the result of a personal tragedy; the point in time alone points to something else. It happens immediately before the “game” begins and is therefore primarily of a functional nature. It means the removal of the last barriers on the one hand (for the young people) and last hopes on the other hand (this in particular for Smutek, because he too had sought Höfi's proximity).

The judge, "cold Sophie", occupies a special position among the main characters. Basically, it only has two tasks to perform. The role of a narrator is less compelling, as it is largely indistinguishable from an authorial narrator . However, it is indispensable as a judicial authority and almost predestined for this case, because an ordinary judge would neither have pronounced such a mild judgment for Smutek nor would have given Ada so much freedom. It is not difficult to see that here again an essential relationship is being constructed; In this case one has even the impression that Ada - which itself recently "cold Sophie" from Smutek as has been described, and may evolve Jura will study - above her elder by only a generation alter ego is.

place and time

Place of action - the principle of hope

The central location is the fictional Ernst Bloch Gymnasium Bonn, or Ernst Bloch for short. It is similar to the real Otto Kühne School in Bonn, which the author attended as a student. There is agreement in the private sponsorship by a commercial enterprise, in the existence of a boarding school and the upscale parenting clientele. A quality that may also be inherent in the real high school is programmatically assigned to the fictitious one by the namesake alone. The philosopher Ernst Bloch is almost automatically associated with the proverbial title of his main work, The Principle of Hope . Even Ada expresses herself in this sense when, as a newcomer (after being expelled from school because of a violent freak), when asked what is special about Ernst-Bloch, she replies: I felt as if this was a place for really clever, really broken, really categorical people. The narrator notes even more clearly elsewhere: The school looked after a number of last-call children who, after a respectable career, were given one last opportunity to calm down after being kicked out.

The “principle of hope” thus becomes - whether spoken or not - the actual leitmotif of the novel. It expressly includes the perspective for the three main characters (Ada, Smutek, Alev) and ultimately has a stronger effect than certain time-critical or historically pessimistic tendencies.

Action time - turning point?

The events cover the years 2002-04; the novel therefore gave the impression of being extraordinarily topical when published in 2004. Significant historical events that fall in these years or have an aftereffect are repeatedly mentioned or discussed and indicate - also against the background of the millennium change - the possibility of a turning point. This impression is reinforced by Ada's plea, in which she campaigns for a new legal concept, and the admission of “cold Sophie” that she is stuck in a crevasse between the ages that can only close again when one has completely replaced the other .

Such a paradigm shift occurs within a manageable framework at the beginning of the action on Ernst-Bloch. The old headmaster with the eloquent name Singsaal is bid farewell, and instead of the liberal-humanistic spirit under his leadership, part of the teaching staff is now hoping for stricter standards to be enforced. The new director Teuter is supposed to take care of this - characterized or caricatured by the students as perpetrators, killer, Teutons , by the narrator with his frog-Kermit voice and the stereotypical opening phrase Ja nee . At the 100th anniversary of the grammar school, which coincides with his assumption of office and Ada's entry, he feels compelled to counter Smutek's sovereign speech, which is indebted to all of Singsaal's legacy. It is about nothing less than the withdrawal of Bloch's dictum “Thinking means going beyond ” . Teuter wants to have it corrected for walking and also distinguishes this from denying what is undesirable in class. The fact that he later tries to enforce this anger Ada even more against him and makes her easier prey for Alev's game. Because wherever thinking is to be standardized, a rebellious spirit like hers looks for a way out and finds it, for example, in a non-normative act.

Frame of reference

Philosophy and law

It is obvious that the novel has no small ambitions in this regard. It starts in the introductory chapter ( If this is all a game, we are lost. If not - especially ), continues in the Ada / Alev and Ada / Smutek disputes, ends in the legal final and is of course also reflected in the title. Central terms that appear repeatedly alongside play or play instinct / game theory are pragmatism and nihilism . Ada and Alev counter the accusation of being nihilists that they are great-grandchildren of the nihilists , because they no longer even have anything they could not believe in. From nihilism, in Ada's and “cold Sophie” opinion, leads a direct path to pragmatism. People are pragmatic where they run out of ideas - ideas in the sense of ideologies, religions, belief in peace, human rights and democracy . Freed from these constraints , people can always choose one way or another. From pragmatic animal which indeed believe in nothing but the senseless sense of survival , the distinction pragmatic man , however, in an important detail : his playfulness does not go out with the onset of sexual maturity. His play instinct lives forever. From this the "cold Sophie" deduces that there can be no pragmatic justice , at best pragmatic judgments .

However, she does not ask herself or the young people whether the momentous moment in this case was actually the “play instinct” and not more a lust for power. What Alev, on the other hand, seems to realize in court at the latest is that as little as the outcome of the “game” could be calculated, the prisoner's dilemma discussed with Ada cannot be applied to her case, either in its constellation (there are three and all of them both Perpetrators and victims) still in the predictability of their cooperative behavior.

literature

Most obvious are the references to the works of Robert Musil and Vladimir Nabokov .

Musil's major work The Man Without Qualities is even integrated into the text and the plot. Alev suggests that the novel be dealt with in a German course, whereupon Ada reads it immediately; Smutek is delighted because he intended to do so anyway; Teuter prevents the advanced course trip from going to Vienna, but Höfi convinces Smutek that what he has planned can just as easily be implemented in the traditional location. The treatment of the novel seems to occupy or dominate German lessons throughout the year; Half a year later, on May 6, 2004, it is the subject of a lesson that deals with the text of an inconspicuous schoolgirl who solves the not exactly original homework (retelling a chapter) surprisingly elegantly by using Musil's programmatic first chapter empathetically and creatively modifies or "rewrites". The intended side effect of this digression is that the attentive but possibly inexperienced reader can understand that the author has done the same thing in her first chapter and does it again in the penultimate chapter. - It is also worth mentioning that the title of the French translation, “La fille sans qualités”, explicitly refers to Musil's novel. It corresponds entirely to Ada's self-image, more precisely: the image that others should have of her. ( When her new class teacher asked her to introduce herself to the others, she gave her first name and had nothing else to say. )

Musil's early work The Confusions of the Zöglings Törless refers to the play instinct through the common plot core: Both are adolescent and school novels in which bored intellectual youths blackmail a victim and sexually coerce them. The criminal energy of the perpetrators is increased in Zeh by the fact that the victim is not a classmate, but a teacher, and that they themselves bring about the act that makes him vulnerable to blackmail.

Zeh has borrowed the name of her protagonist from Nabokov's Ada or The Desire ; what connects the novels thematically is the description of pubertal sexuality and a symbiotic relationship between two young intellectuals. The closeness to Nabokov's best-known novel Lolita is even closer , the literary model case of a prohibited sexual relationship between a minor - especially a wards - and a much older man. The perpetrator-victim scheme, already relativized by Nabokov, is further resolved by Zeh, if not the other way round; consequently with her it is the girl who speaks to the court, not the man; And finally, the common car trips are under completely different omens: in “Lolita” both unfree (he is driven, she is practically a prisoner), whereas in play instinct a relationship emerges that both seems to advance without this depending on the continuation of their relationship got to.

If you bring the play instinct to the short formula "Unsatisfied intellectuals allow themselves to be seduced by the devil into evil deeds", one can easily recognize the main work of German literature, Goethe's Faust . The fact that the seducer Alev bears the traits of Lucifer / Mephisto is implied several times - albeit denied by himself. Similarly with regard to the seduced Faust / Ada it is further that they - although thinkers - are ready to act, that this then consists in their first experience of love, that they can never evade the observation and influence of the devil and that they themselves knowingly brought into conflict with applicable positive law .

If one reads play instinct as a philosophical detective novel , a comparison with Dostoyevsky's “ Guilt and Atonement ” (more modern: “Crime and Punishment”) is close . One essential similarity is particularly noticeable: The main motive of the crime is that of self-awareness. While this was undoubtedly a pioneering literary act in Dostoevsky's time, it is still unusual enough today. What drives Ada and Alev is less to verify a game theory (according to Alev's claim in court), but rather to want to experience firsthand what “it” does to them, what they “get from it”. ( Because it gives me something , Ada says when Olaf's question about her motive, and doesn't mean it materially). Your desire for self-awareness does not rule out the possibility of failure. Not even that of a purification. That something of this nature is happening to Alev is obvious. Without having to additionally authenticate it through an inside view, it becomes clear that its main weapon - the tongue - is not only literally deprived of its point. Although he has neither lost his urge to communicate nor his spirit of contradiction, he gives in. He even seems relieved: like a child who has never been shown the limits and who provokes so long until it happens - no matter how late and how brutal. This would confirm a reading that avoids burdening the figure of Alev with too much philosophical baggage, “demonizing” him. It would also come very close to a translation of Dostoyevsky's title of the novel, which reproduces the original Russian words even more precisely than the previously common ones: "Transgression and rebuke".

Autobiography

At least the following aspects are relevant to the conception of the novel: Juli Zeh is a law graduate; she was born in Bonn and grew up there; With the Otto Kühne School, she attended a school very similar to Ernst Bloch; In 2000, she stayed in Krakow, Poland , for eight months as part of her studies .

reception

The novel was received very differently by the critics. There are few balanced reviews; mostly a benevolent or negative tone dominates. This is also reflected in the assessment of individual aspects (action, figure drawing, language, ambition, etc.), where there are hardly any uniform tendencies to be identified, but on the contrary, the same facts are praised once and criticized another time.

Examples:

It is astonishing, it is admirable how the just thirty-year-old writer chases her story over 500 pages on all horses with a well-trained language and highly educated acumen, a story that could not be more uncomfortable. […] Juli Zeh describes the colorful staff of her novel in a drastic and plastic language that makes the unbelievable believable. Trained by Musil (whose 'man without qualities' plays an important role in the book), she plays a self-reflective ironic game that goes at a fast pace and at high frequency to the risk limit. [...] Such sentences stand out from the good German performance prose that can be found in all publishing programs. (Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit)
As impressive as it is how Juli Zeh tries to integrate old and new ideologies into a novel that is equipped with numerous cliché elements [...], the linguistic effort that Juli Zeh makes sounds shrill. (Rainer Moritz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
This plot could have made an exciting novella, especially since Juli Zeh can tell an exciting story. […] In addition to this excessive plethora of action, there is the chronic use of sought-after and often crooked metaphors. […] But what annoys most of all is the pretentious loquacity with which precocious teenagers' readings are spread without any ironic break. (Richard Kämmerlings, FAZ)
Juli Zeh rarely lets the other characters in the book speak or think about anything other than the basic questions of philosophy. Consequently, not only is there regular talk of nihilism and the decline in values ​​in the consciousness of our youngest generation, but every few pages also of the proof of God or the essence of things, of the meaning of life or the world spirit, of the absence of the soul or the question of the human Free will. (Uwe Wittstock, Die Welt)

Scientists recently accused the novel of relying "on surface effects in every respect" and, measured against its claim to realism, of being "above all a clever fake".

Adaptations for stage and film

The theater version of playfulness has Bernhard Studlar written. This was premiered on March 16, 2006 in the Hamburger Schauspielhaus . Jana Schulz played the role of Ada and Marco Albrecht was seen as Szymon Smutek, with Roger Vontobel directing. From September 20, 2012, Spieltrieb , directed by Sebastian Stolz, could be seen at the Eisenach State Theater .

In the same year Gregor Schnitzler filmed the novel with Michelle Barthel as Ada and Jannik Schümann as Alev. The production, starring Sophie von Kessel and Maximilian Brückner in other roles , premiered at the World Film Festival 2013 in Montreal. The film was released in German cinemas on October 10, 2013 under the same name .

In Brazil, the book was also filmed under the title A Menina sem Qualidades as part of a miniseries. The broadcast took place in May and June 2013.

swell

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Major works of Russian literature. Individual presentations and interpretations. Kindler Verlag, Munich, 1997.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Greiner: The Age of Fish. In: Die Zeit No. 44 of October 21, 2004
  3. ^ Rainer Moritz in the NZZ of January 5, 2005, quoted from Perlentaucher.de
  4. ^ Richard Kämmerlings: In the literature advanced course. In: FAZ of December 24, 2004, quoted from buecher.de
  5. ↑ Uwe Wittstock: Ada's confusions. In: Welt.de of October 2, 2004
  6. ↑ Günter Helmes: "No author would write a long book if he knew in advance in which way it will be read later ." About narrative efforts, female fantasies and abuses of this and that kind in Juli Zeh's clever play instinct . In: Smart, Smarter, Failed? The contemporary image of schools and teachers in literature and media, ed. by Günter Helmes and Günter Rinke. Hamburg, Igel-Verlag 2016, pp. 43–79, here p. 79. ISBN 978-3-86815-713-0
  7. ^ Eva Mackensen: Ready for a film . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 19, 2012, p. 14.
  8. ^ Film profile in the Internet Movie Database (accessed September 24, 2013).
  9. ^ Deutsche Welle (accessed June 8, 2013).
  10. ↑ YouTube clip (accessed March 1, 2017).
  11. ↑ Filmstarts : Film review for the adaptation of Spieltrieb , Christoph Petersen, accessed on October 3, 2013