Under the dragon wall

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Under the dragon wall is a novel by the Austrian writer Arno Geiger . It was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2018 . The focus of the action is the young Wehrmacht soldier Veit Kolbe, who is recovering from a war injury at Mondsee and there he gets to know different people. The title refers to the Drachenwand , a rock face on Mondsee

content

The story takes place in the last years of the Second World War . The young Wehrmacht soldier Veit Kolbe is seriously wounded on the battlefield on the Dnieper . He is transferred to the Saar region and operated on in a hospital. When he returned to his home with his parents in Vienna , where he had not been there for 15 months, he did not last long, especially since his father's slogans to persevere get on his nerves. He decides to leave for Mondsee , where his uncle Johann holds the position of post commander of the gendarmerie.

Veit is given a place to stay with the malicious roommate Trude Dohm, where he is supposed to recover until he is fit for war again. Opposite the roommate's brother runs a gardening business. Everyone calls him the "Brazilian" because he has spent the best years of his life in Brazil and dreams of returning there after the war. A woman from Darmstadt named Margot and her daughter Lilo, who is only a few weeks old, live in the same quarter as Veit. Margot is married to a soldier from Vöcklabruck who is at the front.

A school class from Vienna with their teacher Margarete Bildstein is housed in the district of Black India (municipality of St. Lorenz ), also on Lake Mondsee. Veit is interested in her, but she lets him down. He also met the schoolgirl Annemarie "Nanni" Schaller and became friends with the Brazilian, who often talked about the Third Reich and National Socialism until he was reported one day and then picked up by the Gestapo . Around the same time, Nanni Schaller also disappears without a trace. Veit, who helps his uncle to find the missing person, has the opportunity to read the love letters from her 17-year-old cousin Kurt Ritler. Other letters are also interwoven in the novel, such as those of the Jewish dental technician Oskar Meyer, who fled the Nazis from Vienna to Budapest with his family , and those of Margot's mother, who told her daughter about the destruction of Darmstadt by Allied bombings.

Later, an intimate love affair develops between Veit and Margot, which is disapproved of by the woman in the neighborhood and by Veit's uncle. Veit, who is still suffering from the consequences of his injury and the traumatic experiences of war on the Russian front, succeeds in postponing his new deployment to the front during a medical examination. Nanni Schaller is found dead on the Drachenwand . The Brazilian returns from custody, but soon gets into an argument with his brother-in-law, an SS man who is visiting, and insults the NSDAP again . Therefore he has to flee and hide. When his hiding place is betrayed and Veit's uncle tries to arrest him, Veit intervenes and finally shoots his uncle to enable the Brazilian to escape. Nobody suspects Veit of the murder.

When Veit is called up again, he can no longer evade military service and is sent back to the front. Before that, he was looking for a new apartment for Margot. The two plan to start a new life together after the war. Veit later passes Nanni's letters to Kurt Ritler, who has meanwhile also been drafted into the military. With that the novel ends.

In the follow-up remarks it is reported how the further life of the most important characters in the novel went.

Awards

Unter der Drachenwand was nominated on the long list of the German Book Prize and the Austrian Book Prize in 2018 . The novel took first place in the SWR best list in February 2018 and first place in the ORF best list in February and March 2018 . Arno Geiger received the City of Bremen Literature Prize in 2019 for the novel and the Europese Literatuurprijs for the Dutch translation.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Longlist 2018 at the German Book Prize .
  2. ↑ Longlist 2018 at the Austrian Book Prize .
  3. ^ Archive of the SWR best list at Südwestrundfunk .
  4. ↑ Arno Geiger leads ORF best list with record value . Austrian Broadcasting Corporation , February 1, 2018.
  5. ^ The ORF best list in March 2018 . Austrian Broadcasting , March 1, 2018.
  6. ↑ The Bremen Literature Prize 2019 goes to Arno Geiger / Prize for Heinz Helle on the Rudolf-Alexander-Schröder-Foundation's website .
  7. ^ Onder de Drachenwand at the Europese Literatuurprijs .