Pigeons in the grass

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Tauben im Gras is the first novel from Wolfgang Koeppen's trilogy of failure . Marcel Reich-Ranicki included it in his canon of German-language novels comprising 20 volumes . Tauben im Gras was published in 1951 and describes individual episodes in a major German city in Bavaria in the post-war period , which at first seemed not to be interwoven with one another, divided into 105 narrative sequences . In the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear how the various narrative sequences and storylines are linked.

characters

A striking feature of this novel is that there is no dominant protagonist . Instead, more than thirty characters appear in the story (Germans and Americans; men, women and children; highly educated and “rabble”). Few of them are deeply developed characters.

The following characters play important roles in the plot:

  • Philipp , the frustrated writer who can no longer express himself. He is isolated, portrayed as an outsider to society and no longer finds joy in life. It is difficult for Philipp to bring himself to act because he, a modern Hamlet , is prevented from doing so by his penchant for brooding. Many critics regard Philipp as a self-portrait of Koeppen.
  • Emilia , Philip's wife, was a rich heiress before the war. Today she owns some houses that nobody wants to buy and that only cause costs and trouble. She also owns some antiques, which she gradually sells. Emilia lost most of her mobile assets during the war and currency reform. She drinks a lot and gets out of control in a state of alcoholism.
  • Odysseus Cotton is a dark-skinned American, probably a soldier, who wants to visit the city as a tourist. He is the opposite of Philipp: he acts, he moves and is active, and the most important events in the novel have to do with him. Odysseus spends most of the time with
  • Josef , the porter from the train station. Josef is the only stable character in the book: he is still concerned about his past as a follower during the Nazi era, but that doesn't seem to affect him, the rather simple servant, in his practical life. In the course of the novel, he is slain. The narrator leaves open whether Odysseus will be exposed as the perpetrator.
  • Washington Price is dark-skinned like Odysseus, an American soldier stationed in the city. Washington is the character with the strongest positive idealism in the narrative: he firmly believes in the realization of his dreams of a world without racial discrimination, in which "nobody is undesirable".
  • Carla , Washington's German lover and daughter of Mrs. Behrend, is, like most of the female characters in the novel, described rather negatively. She is a weak woman who becomes dependent on Washington. When she tries to abort Washington's child, Washington still manages to prevent the abortion . Through the unconditional love on the part of Washington, Carla can first put her life back in order before she finally becomes a victim of racist riots together with Washington. She married twelve years earlier at the age of 18; The eleven-year-old son Heinz emerged from this marriage. Carla had her husband, who was missing at the Battle of Stalingrad , pronounced dead.
  • Kay , 21, is the youngest of the Massachusetts teachers touring town. She appears "so uninhibited, so fresh, she [is] of a youth that you can hardly see here anymore". In her impartial, spontaneous way she joins both Philipp and Emilia.
  • Mr. Edwin is a philosophical poet who travels to town to give a speech. With his speech Edwin wants to bring the European spirit up to date; for his audience, however, his lecture is only a social event. Edwin bitterly realizes in the course of his speech that his influence on the audience is rather small. After Edwin's introduction on the radio, a pastor fears that the poet is a “false prophet”. Some critics believe that the model for the Edwin character is TS Eliot . There are also references to Thomas Mann and his character Gustav Aschenbach in the novella Death in Venice . Like Aschenbach, the homosexual poet finally succumbs to the charm of beautiful boys.

All these figures can be compared to pigeons in the grass: “The birds are here by chance, we are here by chance, and maybe the Nazis were just here by chance [...] maybe the world is a cruel and stupid chance of God, nobody knows why we are here. "

content

The day after an orgy in his house, the film actor Alexander prepares for the shooting of the film “Archduke Love”, which is supposed to make the audience forget the suffering of the war. Meanwhile, his daughter Hillegonda is brought to a church by the nanny Emmi, who wants to “free the child from the sins of the parents”. Philipp, who, to the disappointment of his wife Emilia, is unable to work as a writer despite Alexander's assignment to write a screenplay, spends one night in a hotel on Fuchsstrasse, where his house is also located. The heiress of commerce, Emilia, supplies the couple by selling valuable antiques left over in the dilapidated house in which she lives.

Café Schön, the meeting point for American black soldiers like Odysseus and Washington, is on the same street. The baseball player Washington has a loyal love affair with Carla. Carla's mother, Mrs. Behrend, disapproves of her relationship with a "negro".

The lecture by Edwin, the well-known American writer, is what Dr. Behude, the psychiatrist Philipps and Emilias, Alexander, his wife Messalina, but also teachers from Boston who are on a study trip. Philipp, who tried various ways of earning money on the recommendation of the enterprising Anne, failed in the sale of patent adhesives and took over the task of the newspaper "Neues Blatt" to ask Edwin whether he suspected that World War III would break out in the course of the summer.

Heinz, who cannot quite decide whether he should admire Washington for its "wealth" and his athletic talent or whether he should just see him (like those around him) as a " nigger ", meets Ezra. This comes towards him in Christopher's car. Ezra irritates Heinz by admitting his Jewish identity; he is interested in buying the street muck that Heinz found.

Heinz and his friends as well as Odysseus and his servant Josef are also watching the baseball game with Washington that Christopher attended with Ezra. In order to relieve Carla of the social pressure that urges her to have their child aborted, Washington thinks about moving to Paris, which Carla does not comment on, about moving to Paris.

Philipp meets the teachers from Massachusetts while visiting the hotel where Edwin is staying. The women mistakenly think of Philip as a friend of Edwin. However, Philipp cannot clear up the misunderstanding due to his limited command of the English language. He flees the hotel full of shame and meets Messalina, who has been watching the conversation. Philipp is invited to a party by her, at which Edwin is also expected. Philipp then rushes through the back door of the hotel kitchen to the courtyard, where Edwin also arrives later, who fled from Messalina (whom he did not recognize) from the hotel lobby because he found the woman terrible. The two poets, however, do not enter into conversation because of their shyness.

Richard Kirsch, a second-generation American immigrant and Air Force soldier related to Ms. Behrend, is amazed at the state of the rebuilding of the city; the extent of the war damage is apparently smaller than would have been expected based on media reports. When Richard arrived at Ms. Behrend's house, the caretaker's daughter sent him to the grocery store. Here Richard is waiting for Mrs. Behrend. In the shop full of goods, the grocer speaks of the need in Germany, complains that “ negroes ” also entered Germany with the occupiers , and is outraged by Carla's behavior. Meanwhile, Mrs. Behrend argues with her daughter in the cathedral café. Richard and Ms. Behrend did not have a conversation because he met a “ Fraulein ” with whom he went to the brewery and was therefore no longer interested in contacting Ms. Behrend.

Kay meets Emilia in a shop where Emilia wanted to sell jewelry. Emilia spontaneously gives away her jewelry to Kay, whom she has just met. At the end of the scene, the two women whom Messalina had previously imagined as a lesbian couple in her mind .

While Hillegonda asks questions about God and sins, the sound of stones being thrown can be heard outside the church door. Odysseus was stolen from Susanne, who had spent the night before in Alexander's house and who Messalina classified as a "prostitute", initially unnoticed by Odysseus; As a now penniless black man, he is harassed by a “pack” who see him involved in a “war” between whites and blacks. Under unexplained circumstances, a stone hits Josef in the head and injures him fatally. Odysseus flees with Susanne and the money that he gave Josef for his services and then took back.

For Edwin's lecture, Philipp appears late with Kay, who has temporarily separated from the Massachusetts tour group. The two of them see Edwin on the podium, who was thrown off the ground by a defect in the intercom. In front of his audience, which was partly asleep, he continued his speech on literary history and the criticism of Gertrude Stein's theory of chance after the sound disturbance had been corrected . The phrase "Pigeons on the grass alas" comes from their poem From Four Saints in Three Acts .

Alcoholized brewery guests begin to throw stones in the direction of the “Negerclub”, where jazz music is played, out of indignation over Josef's death. Mrs. Behrend also belongs to the mob present. In addition to Odysseus Cotton, Christopher and Washington Price are now in the club. After Odysseus and Susanne fled, Washington and Carla are referred to as “taxi killers” and stones are thrown at them. Even Richard Kirsch, who wants to defend American values ​​by helping blacks, is pelted with stones.

While Emilia gets drunk, frustrated by Philip's absence, the attempt at a “one night stand” ends in disappointment for Philipp and Kay. Philipp receives jewelry from Kay Emilias. In front of the window, the two hear Edwin's cries for help , who is being beaten with fists by Bene, Kare, Schorschi and Sepp, unemployed youths who work as prostitutes in the “area of Oscar Wilde's golden adders”. The young people see Edwin only as "an old suitor, an old idiot, an old wealthy aunt".

Form and style, place and time

The author actually intended to write the whole novel without dots to make it seem even more like a single thought. But he was not allowed to use this stylistic device. To do this, he forced the publisher to compromise punctuation. The compromise version of the text is also an example of the modern novel.

Reading demands a lot of attention from the reader, as the text (typical of assembly technology ) uses hard cuts, after which another thread of the story is regularly told. The end of a narrative sequence is usually followed by a blank line. In addition, the quick mention of signal words, especially in the form of the acting people, but also of objects (for example the “green traffic light” at an intersection) makes orientation easier. Newspaper reports that are integrated into the narrative sequences have been printed in small caps in the first edition of the novel and in the paperback editions since 2007 . The italics of these text passages in the intermediate editions of the novel are considered not to be authentic.

The reviewer of Der Spiegel wrote : “The book is written in a rushed, random scraps of thought strung together style. The representation does not appear to be anything other than vomiting, as a jerky surrender of the sediment, experiences that can never be fully processed. "

Munich is often seen as a Roman town. So called Gustav Seibt the novel as "daring [s] of all Munich-books". In fact, however, Koeppen deliberately avoided giving a name or clearly describing the city to make it clear that his story could have taken place in any post-war city with US Army soldiers stationed there. Nonetheless, he accepted that many readers, for. For example, when you hear the word "Bräuhaus" you immediately think of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. The fact that there is an America House and a production facility for cinema films in the Roman city also speaks strongly in favor of Munich.

In reviews, the years 1951 and 1949 are given as the narrated time. There are many built-in newspaper headlines that speak for the year 1951, in particular the news that André Gide died the day before (which happened on February 19, 1951), as well as the fact that the song The Roving Kind was not published until 1951. Some reviewers relocate the narrated time to 1949, including the publisher of Suhrkamp-Verlag. Josef Quack sees the attempt to date it exactly as an overestimation of the chronology, which does not correspond to the time concept of the novel. In particular, a trip to Germany by teachers who are still in office does not match the time “February”. Bernd W. Seiler clarifies Quack's statement by stating: “Koeppen's post-war novel 'Tauben im Gras', although only given the date 'Spring', is consistently based on the year 1951 in the reviews of the 1950s due to the newspaper headlines cited in it , and this as explicitly as if Koeppen had given this year himself. Interestingly, as the time lag increases, the depicted milieu appears older and is brought forward to 1950 or 1949, but it is still a certain year. It seems as if temporal indeterminacy cannot be tolerated in publicly thought actions ”.

In the preface to the second edition of the novel, Koeppen does not commit himself to an exact date: The novel plays “shortly after the currency reform [...], when the German economic miracle rose in the West , as the first new cinemas, the first new insurance palaces Rubble and the makeshift shops towered over them, at the high time of the occupying powers , when Korea and Persia frightened the world and the economic miracle sun would perhaps go down bloody again in the east. It was the time when the new rich still felt insecure, when the black market winners looked for investments and the savers paid for the war. The new German banknotes looked like good dollars , but they trusted the material assets more , and there was a lot of need to catch up on, the stomach could finally be filled, the head was still a bit confused from hunger and bomb blast, and all the senses were looking for pleasure before maybe the third world war came. Koeppen described this time, the reason for our today.

Philosophical foundations of the novel

The title of the novel also refers to its central message: Everything that happens happens by chance, and individual people move through life like "pigeons in the grass", with movement patterns that do not reveal any deeper meaning to outsiders. For example, a reader who has read Homer's Odyssey is highly irritating that a figure called "Odysseus" allows himself to be "charmed" by a figure expressly compared to Kirke and drifted offside as if on a raft instead of sticking to its goal. to return home to his wife Penelope . Edwin criticizes that the “civilization spirits” who “endeavored to expose the senseless and seemingly accidental of human existence” are wrong because “every pigeon already knows its loft” and “every bird is in God's hands”; however, at the end of the novel, Edwin's fate shows that Koeppen considers him naive.

Schnakenbach, the chronic sleep addict , sums up the thought criticized by Edwin: “Either God did not exist or God was dead , as Nietzsche had claimed, or, that too was possible and was as old as new, God was everywhere [ ...]. God was a formula, an abstraction. [...]. Wherever Schnakenbach was, it was the center and the circle, it was the beginning and the end, but it was nothing special, everyone was center and circle, beginning and end, it was every point [...]. "

The narrator comments on this attitude with the words: “Schnakenbach's view of the world was inhuman. It was completely abstract. ”Nonetheless, it seems that Koeppen's handling of his characters exactly follows this worldview.

This impression is confirmed by a statement by Philip, who is considered Koeppen's alter ego: “Massachusetts was just as far away and just as close as Germany, seen from the writer's point of view of course, the writer was in the middle, and the world around him was far and near everywhere , or the writer was outside and the world was in the middle, the task around which he revolved, something that could never be achieved, never managed, and there was no distance and no near [...]. "

Influences

The literary role models who inspired Koeppen to write his novel are

literature

  • Georg Bungter: About Wolfgang Koeppen's 'Pigeons in the Grass' . In: Journal for German Philology . 87, 1968, pp. 535-545
  • Irmgard Egger: Perspective - Abyss - Background: Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 'Carceri' with Wolfgang Koeppen . In: Günter Häntzschel , Ulrike Leuschner (eds.), Yearbook of the International Koeppen Society, 2. Munich 2003, ISSN  1617-7010 , pp. 29–50.
  • Horst Grobe: Explanations to Wolfgang Koeppen: Pigeons in the grass. König's Explanations : Text Analysis and Interpretation, 472, C. Bange Verlag , Hollfeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8044-1945-2
  • Monika Köpfer: Wolfgang Koeppen: "Tauben im Gras" , supplement to the text edition of the work at RM Buch und Medien , series: Worth reading. German-language literature in the mirror of the last hundred years, no number; Rheda 2008, without ISBN, (text interpretation).
  • Wolfgang Koeppen: Pigeons in the grass . Suhrkamp, ​​Munich January 6, 1974, ISBN 3-518-37101-0 .
  • Albert Meier : pessimism from the left. Wolfgang Koeppen's 'Tauben im Gras' in the context of the German and Italian post-war novel. In: Günter Häntzschel, Ulrike Leuschner (eds.), Yearbook of the International Koeppen Society, 2. Munich 2003, ISSN  1617-7010 , pp. 135–150
  • Wolfgang Pütz: Wolfgang Koeppen: "Pigeons in the grass". Reading key for school pupils. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-15-015429-8
  • Friedbert Stühler: Wolfgang Koeppen: "Pigeons in the grass". The modern German city novel . Beyer Verlag, Hollfeld 2005, ISBN 3-88805-501-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Josef Quack: Wolfgang Koeppen in discussion . Section II: On the new edition of the "Pigeons in the grass" . February 7, 2007
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , Suhrkamp 2006, ISBN 3-518-41804-1 , p. 100
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 186
  4. ↑ Hilda Schauer: Forms of thought and value systems in Wolfgang Koeppen's post-war trilogy . Vienna (Edition Praesens). 2004. p. 53
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 171
  6. ^ Gertrude Stein: From Four Saints in Three Acts
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 217 f.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 226f.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 224
  10. ^ Josef Quack: Wolfgang Koeppen in discussion . Section II: On the new edition of the "Pigeons in the grass" . February 7, 2007
  11. ↑ A respite on the battlefield Der Spiegel . Issue 52/1951. December 26, 1951
  12. ↑ Gustav Seibt: Lost Souls . Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 28, 2008
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 2
  14. ^ Josef Quack: Wolfgang Koeppen. Narrator of time . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, ISBN 3-8260-1379-4 , p. 101.
  15. ↑ Bernd W. Seiler: The tiresome facts. On the limits of probability in German literature since the 18th century . Stuttgart (Velcro-Cotta). 1983, p. 136
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 7
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 215
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 211
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 210
  20. ↑ Wolfgang Koeppen, Tauben im Gras , p. 103