And they touched the sleep of the world

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And they touched sleep is a 1997 novel by the German writer CS Mahrendorff , which is set in Vienna in the late 19th century. It forms the first part of the Vienna trilogy, which is completed by The Waltz of Fallen Angels (2001) and The Dark Game (2003).

title

With the title of his book, Mahrendorff refers to Friedrich Hebbel's tragedy " Gyges und seine Ring ", published in 1854 , which he quotes in the introduction. The main characters in the tragedy are the Lydian king Kandaules and his friend Gyges . Hebbel “describes King Kandaules as a man who finds it increasingly difficult to uphold the old, implausible conventions. He is a descendant of the great Heracles and a modernizer. ”But the people don't want to know anything about modernization,“ the weary world has fallen asleep over these things ”and holds firmly to tradition. When King Kandaules realizes his failure, he implores his friend Gyges to entrust himself completely to fate and never to do one thing: "Just never touch the sleep of the world!"

At one point, towards the end of the book, Mahrendorff takes up the title again. Here he uses it in the sense that the findings of psychoanalysis affect the sleep of the world when it brings to light something repressed, perceived as a taboo and shock.

Content and structure

The protagonist of the novel, which is divided into three sections, is the internist and psychologist Dr. Leonhard Heydinger. The actual novel plot is prepared with a prologue about the fact that during a summer vacation on the Italian island of Elba an enigmatic Englishman caused a sensation and the fascination of the psychologist.

Back in Vienna, he met the man again some time later, initially by chance. The first contact occurs when the man, who calls himself John Stuart Livingston , reports to Heydinger's office hour. Livingston, who is addicted to cocaine, is also a detective and investigates an apparently anti-Semitic secret society called "The Black Hand", which extorts Jewish artists and business people with letters.

Together with Heydinger, who is quickly integrated into the investigation, Livingston gropes his way forward in a nebulous tangle. When Gustav Mahler , who was first conductor of the Hamburg City Theater at the time, came into the focus of society, the situation came to a head.

In the first section in particular, a panorama of Vienna in 1892 is developed. The reader is immersed in a time of cultural flowering one, meets in the cafe on Sigmund Freud , who is nearing its first release, on Arthur Schnitzler and other authors of the Young Vienna to which at that time still very young Karl Kraus and Arnold Schoenberg and is confronted with the Wagner cult of the Vienna Court Opera . But it is also a time in which the liberalism of the Wilhelminian era is over and Vienna has become a city of fear, in which anti-Semitic slogans are increasingly met with broad approval. In view of the anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner and the writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Heydinger, the main character of the novel, asks himself whether this has not made culture itself a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Against this background, there are increasing signs that an anti-Semitic Viennese secret lodge called the “Black Hand” has developed.

In the second section of the book, the detective narration and the hunt for the black hand take off. The author is very well aware that the Black Hand is generally accepted to be a Serbian nationalist secret society that was founded a few years later. The author suspects, however, that there was already a completely different, antisemitic predecessor organization to the later Black Hand.

The third section shifts the scene from Vienna to Hamburg; the city in which Gustav Mahler was the first conductor of the city theater at that time. While the trace of the Black Hand is cleared up on the one hand, but also lost on the other, the last chapter contains a homage to the personality and work of Gustav Mahler. Among other things, Mahler's interpretation of Richard Wagner's music is presented to the reader in an urgent and precise manner. In addition, the progress of the story and Heydinger's psychoanalytic abilities reveal the causes of the master detective Livingston's cocaine addiction, which also contain the secret of his extraordinary talent. For this, Heydinger, as it turns out, has to touch the world's sleep.

Miscellaneous

  • Various indications suggest that Livingston's person is a sketch of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective character Sherlock Holmes . For example, Livingston plays the violin, comes from England and, in the context of his role as an investigator, has similar combinational skills as the well-known character Doyles.
  • As early as 1929 Johannes R. Becher wrote the poem "He touched the sleep of the world (Lenin)". It celebrates Lenin as an energetic hero of the October Revolution , who with his actions refuted a position of Hebbel that was resigned after the failed revolution of 1848 (the tragedy “Gyges and his Ring” was published in 1854).
  • In 1953 Hanns Eisler composed music for Becher's poem, which was sung as a song in particular by the actor Ernst Busch . A biography about Busch published in 2010 is entitled: “He touched the sleep of the world. Ernst Busch ”.
  • In 2006 the Hamburg band " Die Goldenen Zitronen " released the album " Lenin ". Its title song is a processing of Eisler's setting of Becher's poem "He touched the sleep of the world (Lenin)".

Reviews

“This furious, linguistically outstanding novel is a fascinating socio-critical cultural panorama of the turn of the century in the guise of a great suspense and crime novel. In addition, the author shows the personality and work of Gustav Mahler in a new light and creates a gripping portrait of the legend of Victorianism that founded the modern detective myth. Above all, there is hardly any other work in fiction today that gives the reader so much information about the prerequisites for the course of history in our century. He cannot escape the pull of the story and at the same time has an inkling of how the development could come about that finally plunged Europe into the abyss ... "

- Buecher4um.de

Book editions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolf Banitzki: Tolerance or Long Live the Veil? In: Theater reviews Munich. for the performance of "Gyges und seine Ring" by Friedrich Hebbel in the Residenztheater
  2. ^ Friedrich Hebbel: Gyges and his ring. A tragedy in five acts, written in 1854, Amazon Kindle Edition 2015, item 932.
  3. ^ F. Hebbel: Gyges and his ring. 2015, item 951.
  4. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. Langen Müller Verlag , 1997, p. 459.
  5. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 1997, pp. 33-48, 28, 175.
  6. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 1997, p. 7f.
  7. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 1997, pp. 9, 357-362, 459.
  8. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 3. Edition. Munich 1997, p. 57.
  9. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 3. Edition. Munich 1997, p. 121.
  10. ↑ CS Mahrendorff: And they touched the sleep of the world. 3. Edition. Munich 1997, p. 243 ff.
  11. ↑ erinnerorte.de - materials on cultural history ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / erinnerorte.de
  12. ↑ To listen to e.g. B. on Youtube .
  13. ↑ Jochen Voit: It touched the sleep of the world. Ernst Busch. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-351-02716-2 .
  14. ↑ Book review by Urs Heinz Aerni on Buecher4um.de