Text book 9
The "textbook 9" by Helmut Heißenbüttel emerged in period 1981 to 1984, was published in 1986 in the Klett-Cotta Verlag Stuttgart. Heißenbüttel declines on 75 pages, in three chapters with 13 texts of 13 sentences each, reality patterns and stories from everyday life. The headline printed on the cover, "Textbook 9", was designed as an optical illusion and thus offers a formal and semantic introduction to the book.
Content structure
The text collection is divided into three chapters. In addition to the affluent society, politics, everyday life and the production of literature, the subject matter also includes sexual fantasies. Each text can be viewed as an independent text, at the same time the texts are in a relationship to one another that can be described as an exciting advance. By declining the individual texts, the author creates a high degree of variation and tries to mislead the reader. In particular, situations from everyday life are first described, then further developed by advancing the thought process and finally brought to a sometimes unforeseen end. Thus, every short story also shows itself as a thought process and development story, as the culmination of a previously selected train of thought. In terms of content, everyday processes are often portrayed from a completely new perspective and thus appear absurd to the reader, as in the text "The Rat's Limp". Thinking and behavior patterns emerge that seem transferable to many different situations.
Example: "Disarmament Conference" :
This example shows how the constant repetition of individual words and sentences creates a complexity in the context of the text, so that in only 13 sentences there is an enormous confusion of content. This demands an intensive reading and thinking process from the reader. With regard to the period in which the texts were created, a historical background can also be found here, for example, the “Disarmament Conference” chosen. In terms of content, this is reduced to a minimum by Heißenbüttel, but at the same time retains its explosiveness and key messages.
Formal structure, linguistic design
When looking at the form, the structure of the three chapters of 13 texts each, consisting of 13 sentences each, quickly becomes apparent. This structure, which is accompanied by the constant recurrence of the number 13, gives the text book 9 a first formal basic structure that acts like a basic framework for all the texts it contains. At the same time it must be said that the length of the individual texts, although they all consist of 13 sentences each, is very different. The affinity to the number 13 can also be found in other places in Heißenbüttel. When looking at the individual texts, it is also noticeable that each of the 13 sentences is numbered. Furthermore, individual words, word sequences or entire sentences are used repeatedly or repeatedly in the texts. Especially in the text "The Future of Socialism", Heißenbüttel uses this formal linguistic peculiarity in every sentence. This linguistic design element partly emphasizes and partly indicates the urgency of a statement. In special cases, such as in the text "Disarmament Conference", the frequent repetition of testimony fragments even seems to develop a momentum of its own that involves the reader in the development process of the text.
Text overview
Chapter 1
The incident at the Institute for Mental Hygiene
King of the Cross added
The end of an affair
Botnang stories
The rat's limp
At the dike
The pastor who was a dog
When I ask the traveler
Veronica Sgrilla a legend
Tristan and Isolde a dialogue
The witch's husband by Hansel and Gretel
On the nature of literature
Literature as Therapy
Chapter 2
Origin and end of tradition
Faithful servants of their masters
The righteous suffer much
Self-bare of all countries
Gradual approach
From the consumption of the body
The temptation of Saint Anthony
Il sueno de la razón
Attempt at a reconstruction
Double Doris
Disarmament conference
Economic policy
The new future of socialism
Chapter 3
About a sentence by Berthold Auerbach
Even as a bunuel
Kinsey's bow tie
Lamenting on the stage of world events
Island thriller
The stuff that imagination has come up with
transcendence
All i know
Autobiography
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see
Alexander Kluge and Paul Pörtner in Frankfurt
The progress of the discovery of the hidden
Try about the truth
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heißenbüttel, Helmut. (1984). Textbook 9. Wiesbaden: Klett