Tallhover

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Tallhover is the first novel by the German writer Hans Joachim Schädlich . He draws the fictional biography of a political police officer through all German states from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. Tallhover was published in 1986 and was awarded the Marburg Literature Prize in the same year .

content

The protagonist Tallhover works for the political police in Prussia . In the trial against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung he tries to find witnesses against Marx . He is still active in the GDR , for the Stasi . He threatens someone who did not want to testify in the process at the time to punish him for opposing the established system.

The main part of the book is made up of Tallhover's observations of Lenin during a stay in Germany, his criticism of Lenin's journey through Germany on agreement with the Supreme Army Command , because the revolutionaries were given the opportunity to promote the revolution in Germany as well. His report on Karl Radek , his arrest and his contacts. The reports on his activities under the Nazi regime are also important . He always serves the authorities: the Prussian king, the Nazi dictatorship and the SED . That he does not need to change to do this is Schädlich's statement about the role of the SED and GDR.

interpretation

According to Heinz Ludwig Arnold , Tallhover is “a kind of moral history of the German secret police . Your uniform thinking is reduced to a single figure ”. Hans Joachim Schädlich described: “Tallhover embodies the unfortunate type of person who submits to every political system in order to help the opponents to subordinate every system.” Walter Hinck saw Tallhover not as an individual, but as the embodiment of a principle. It is no coincidence that he was born on March 23, 1819, the day of August von Kotzebue's murder , which marked the occasion of the Karlsbad resolutions . According to Theo Buck , Tallhover is completely absorbed in the system, which leads to an alienation of oneself. The identification with his task leads so far that Tallhover's dissolution is only possible through the use of the secret service means of prosecution and justice against himself.

The 82 narrative sequences read like factual protocols , but precisely in this way expose the irony inherent in them . The author accurately observing a widest possible distance to his narrative subject, the protagonist Tallhover is already by its durability to the fictional character . According to Buck, the novel presents a history of illness, the reification of a person, which results from social causes. Hans Joachim Schädlich described as the construction principle of the novel that he “placed factual 'fragments' under his poetic idea and imagined the factual that he lacked according to the factual history and linked the invented facts with the factual history” to “the boundary between facts and Fiction seemed to become blurred "and in the end some readers" regard the fictional character Tallhover as something factual and factual history as something fictitious. "

reception

Tallhover was awarded the Marburg Literature Prize in 1986 . Fritz J. Raddatz expressed himself enthusiastically about “a masterful book - which probably deliberately does not call itself a novel and which Robert Musil's demand for the essayistic in modern prose brilliantly fulfills. What Hans Joachim Schädlich presents here is a great, terrible, and also horribly funny essay ; and at the same time it is prose . ”The author“ achieved three things with his terrible sinister look: a literary crime thriller; a macabre fault; a bitter menetekel . " Reinhard Baumgart spoke with" admiration, dismay, but also with a kind of respectful boredom "of a" narrative investigation "that" starts dry and safe, then develops an astonishing tension, density, eeriness, but in the end it does loses in emptiness and virtuosity. "

1989 brought Christof Jahl Tallhover for the RIAS to as a radio play. Directed by Norbert Schaeffer . Werner Eichhorn spoke the title role .

In the figure of Hoftaller, a Stasi employee who exercises even after 1990 Legacy, Tallhover occurs in the novel A broad field of Grass again. Grass had asked Schadenlich in advance for permission to update his figure, which he was granted. In retrospect, however, Schädlich judged “that Grass had perverted my Tallhover figure in a populist way, that is, falsified it by playing down the Stasi system and equating the informant with its object”. With his permission he "could not have known that Grass would abuse the Tallhover figure in such a way."

In 1992, when he inspected his Stasi files , Schädlich learned that his own brother Karlheinz Schädlich had been collecting information about him for years as an IM for the Ministry of State Security . Damaging processed this knowledge in the story The case with B. Walter Hinck judged with a view to Tallhover : "If ever an author has been caught up with his literary topic in reality, then it is Hans Joachim Schädlich."

expenditure

literature

  • Theo Buck : From “attempted closeness” to “attempted distance”. Harmful narrative path to "freedom in history". In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Hans Joachim Schädlich . Edition text + kritik 125, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-88377-490-1 , pp. 21–24.
  • Walter Hinck: With language fantasy against the trauma. Hans Joachim Schädlich. The writer and his work. In: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): Information from and about Hans Joachim Schädlich . Literature footnotes. University of Bamberg , Bamberg 1995, ISSN  0723-2950 , pp. 37-40.
  • Frauke Meyer-Gosau: In German service - Hans Joachim Schädlich's “Tallhover”. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Hans Joachim Schädlich. Pp. 30-37.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prussian Sea Trade Foundation (ed.): The Berlin Literature Prize 1992 . Gatza, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-928262-12-2 , p. 70.
  2. ^ Hans Joachim Schädlich: Between the scene and the ivory tower. Wallstein, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-89244-492-7 , p. 17.
  3. ↑ Walter Hinck: With language fantasy against the trauma. Hans Joachim Schädlich. The writer and his work. In: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): Information from and about Hans Joachim Schädlich , p. 37.
  4. ↑ Theo Buck: From "attempted closeness" to "attempted distance". Harmful narrative path to "freedom in history". In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Hans Joachim Schädlich , pp. 21–22.
  5. ↑ Theo Buck: From "attempted closeness" to "attempted distance". Harmful narrative path to "freedom in history". In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Hans Joachim Schädlich , pp. 21, 23–24.
  6. ^ Hans Joachim Schädlich: The novel. In: The other look. Essays, speeches, conversations . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-499-23945-0 , p. 134.
  7. ^ Fritz J. Raddatz : The coincidence was called Lenin . In: The time of October 3, 1986.
  8. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart : The eye of the state. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 1986.
  9. ^ Tallhover (Part 1) . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from October 3, 2009.
  10. ^ Tallhover in the HörDat database.
  11. ^ Hans Joachim Schädlich: Tallhover - a wide field. In: The other look. Essays, speeches, conversations . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-499-23945-0 , p. 151.
  12. ↑ Walter Hinck: With language fantasy against the trauma. Hans Joachim Schädlich. The writer and his work In: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): Information from and about Hans Joachim Schädlich , p. 40.