Retribution (novel)

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Retaliation , the second work of the realistic German writer Gert Ledig , is an apocalyptic anti-war novel that goes back to the author's autobiographical experiences and can be attributed to the epoch of post-war literature.

It was first published in autumn 1956 by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main and is about an almost 70-minute midday bombing raid by the American air force on an unnamed German city towards the end of the Second World War , during which a large number of civilians and military personnel is violently killed. The events are described from both a German and an American perspective with great directness and without leaving out cruel details.

In contrast to Ledig's debut novel Die Stalinorgel , which reports on fighting on the Eastern Front near Leningrad and was also an international success, retaliation was largely rejected by contemporary German audiences. The work was quickly forgotten and was never reprinted. Only towards the end of the 1990s, shortly before Single's death, did the novel find much greater acceptance and a broader readership, combined with several new editions by Suhrkamp Verlag (from 1999) and translations into Dutch (2001 under the title Vergelding ), English (2003 ; Payback ), French (2003; Sous les bombes ), Spanish (2006; Represalia ) and Croatian (2008; Odmazda ). At the same time, there was also an increased and to this day continuing interest of literary scholars in Ledig's work.

action

The fate of the residents and defenders of an unnamed German city and an American bomber crew who approached the city in formation as part of a major attack is described. A total of twelve storylines can be identified, all of which are related to the air attack and operate more or less equally alongside one another, even if they differ in scope.

Eight of these storylines relate to individual characters or groups of characters. During the attack, the American bomber was shot down by German fighters, so the crew was forced to get out. One of the American aviators, Sergeant Jonathan Strenehen, falls into the hands of a few Germans after his successful landing and is cruelly mistreated in contravention of the Geneva Convention , which guarantees him physical integrity as a prisoner of war, even though he had previously deliberately targeted his bomber's target device in a cemetery had aligned to spare the civilian population - which, however, does not learn anything. Although some German civilians later come to his aid, Strenehen eventually dies of the consequences of the brutal mistreatment, which is more the result of the sadism of some civilians than the terrible experience of the bombing.

Next to them are the fates of the suicidal couple Cheovski, a rescue team, a group of hungry Eastern European forced laborers , a war- disabled lieutenant from an anti-aircraft battery, a drunken group of soldiers and a family father who is looking for his relatives and who is almost insane. It also depicts the fate of a young woman who was buried in the air raid shelter after a bomb strike and was later raped by an older German who later committed suicide, taking advantage of the special circumstances. In addition, four other storylines have a fixed reference to a specific location. This includes a command post coordinating the air defense of the city concerned, a gun position, a bunker that can only be found in large cities such as Berlin or Vienna , and a transformer station .

It is noteworthy that - apart from the fate of Strenehen, who is the only character to be consistently named by name and could most likely be described as a protagonist - it remains largely open whether the other actors actually survive the bombing or not.

Structure and narrative structure

The novel is divided into thirteen chapters, which are framed by a prologue and an epilogue with precise information on the time of day: The action takes place exactly between 13:01 and 14:10. It is noticeable that the narration time exceeds the narrated time of a good hour by a substantial amount. It can therefore be assumed that the storylines presented will run simultaneously.

All chapters consist of individual short to very short text fragments, which each represent snapshots of the respective storylines and are assembled in such a way that they contribute to the confusion of the reader when it is first received. This also reflects the disorientation of the characters affected by the bombing on the formal level of the novel. At the beginning of each chapter there are autobiographical abstracts in italics that tell from the first person's perspective the fate of one of the characters involved in the form of résumés, letters and monologues . Retribution , however, does not have a uniform continuous storyline, but rather individual short episodes that repeatedly take up and continue storylines that have already started. There is a constant, rapid change of scenes and characters with sharp cuts. In this respect, the narrative approaches the medium of film.

There is just as little a protagonist in the strict sense as the main bearer of the plot and a central conflict around which the action revolves. Most of the time, the people involved are identified only on the basis of their military rank or their professional role, which creates the impression of a collective experience. A contextualization of the individual narrative strands occurs to some extent through the aforementioned autobiographical sketches at the beginning of the chapter. However, this is incomplete and fragmentary.

Apart from the short biographies, the novel has an authorial narrative situation . The omniscient narrator, who does not participate in the plot, reproduces the feelings and thoughts of different characters, but concentrates primarily on the external perspective and largely dispenses with an evaluation or commentary on the portrayed, which is left to the reader. This almost entirely neutral narrative approach, which approximates the documentary, makes the novel appear authentic and credible. At the same time, the extensive omission of comments sometimes creates the impression of a nihilistic attitude. Only at the very end is the neutral narrative attitude broken for a moment. Although the narrator admits at this exposed point that the air raid described in the course of the novel and the Allied bombing war against German cities in World War II were inevitable, at the same time denies the Allies the right to exercise the moral authority of the youngest Court, as it is known from Christian moral teaching.

stylistics

In terms of linguistic art, Ledig's second novel is mainly characterized by an extremely laconic and staccato nominal style, which generates an extremely high narrative speed and is strongly reminiscent of the rubble lyric, especially Günter Eich's famous poem Inventur . This also applies to the use of parataxes , statements , ellipses and the overall relatively low image content. Judging adjectives and adverbs are only used extremely sparingly in order to reinforce the impression of the factual in the sense of a realistic literary term.

Occasionally, symbols are used that mostly create a religious reference, for example to the theodicy problem or to the passion story . In this context, the symbolism of the cross is of particular importance, which is used as a leitmotif with both Christian and military connotations in the form of the 'Iron Cross'.

reception

In contemporary Federal Republican literary criticism of the 1950s, retaliation was largely met with sharp rejection. It is true that there were occasional positive reviews in various GDR magazines as well as in less important West German publications; In the dominant print media of the West German feature pages of the time, however, Ledig's novel was unanimously panned. Peter Hornung ( Die Zeit ), for example, criticized Ledig's style of speaking as "simplified to a true subsistence level and desolate".

Wolfgang Schwerbrock ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) complained that the novel was "too pathetic and too declamatory".

The diverse portrayals of violence and death also took offense. ER Dallontano ( Rheinischer Merkur ) rated Ledigs with the description of a rape-related breaking of a taboo as "disgusting" and as the "mainspring of his horror". Rolf Becker ( Kölner Stadtanzeiger ) complained that the novel only delivers "accumulated variations of the gruesome" and breathes "the fatal smell of naked sensation". Statements like these gave contemporaries the impression that Ledig's novel should not be viewed as a serious work of art, but as a trivial novel . The fact that Ledig's work represented a serious attempt at a literary reappraisal of the Second World War was hardly noticed, probably also because the aesthetic concept behind the novel is a relentless and unvarnished depiction of the all-encompassing and indistinguishable brutality of modern engineered war, for example in the so-called . “ Home front ”, while at the same time there was fierce controversy in the Federal Republic about rearmament and NATO accession, which led Ledig's work to the bone of contention for the conservative literary critics, who focused on the remilitarization of West Germany and who were not interested in per se, military conflicts to portray precariously.

Only Günther Rühle recommended Single's novel for the Bundeswehr libraries and as required reading as early as 1956.

In 2003, Marcel Reich-Ranicki retrospectively judged the reception at the time:

“At that time nobody was interested in war, in war as the subject of novels or plays. Hence the failure of single. That was too hard, because one of the peculiarities of these two important books by Ledig [ Retribution and the Stalin Organ ] is that he did not spare the reader at all. "

In the course of the re-publication of the novel at Volker Hage's instigation in autumn 1999, which began in the debate about WG Sebald's Zurich Poetics Lecture in 1997, the position of German literary criticism changed fundamentally. Obviously, the reception conditions for Ledig's work had improved considerably in the meantime. Reinhart Baumgart ( Die Zeit ) now expressly praised Ledig's “tightly hammered sentences” and his “breathlessness of language”.

Stephan Reinhardt ( Der Tagesspiegel ) attested Ledig an “astonishingly dense realism”. Even Peter Roos ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) showed from Ledig "desperate [r] documentary literature" deeply impressed.

On October 29, 1999, in addition to works such as Michel Houellebecq's bestseller Elementary Particles , Retaliation in the Literary Quartet was presented to an audience of millions, which is likely to have contributed significantly to the work's popularity today. On August 26, 2005, Radio Bremen broadcast a radio play adaptation of the novel of the same name, directed by Klaus Prangenberg.

Text output

German-language editions

Radio play edition

  • Retaliation: radio play . By Klaus Prangenberg (director) based on the novel of the same name by Gert Ledig. With Nina Petri , Hannes Jaenicke , Stefan Aretz. Bremen: RB, 2004, 65 min.

Translations

  • Czech ( Odplata , 1958)
  • Dutch ( Vergelding , 2000)
  • French ( Sous les bombes , 2003)
  • English ( Payback , 2003)
  • Spanish ( Represalia , 2006)
  • Croatian ( Odmazda , 2008)

literature

Specialist literature

  • Dominic Berlemann: Second coding 'Reputation' - air war literature . In: Niels Werber (ed.): Systems Theoretical Literature Studies. Concepts - methods - applications. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 455–468.
  • Dominic Berlemann: The social memory and the secondary code of the literary system using the example of Gert Ledig's aerial war novel Retaliation . In: Matthias Beilein, Claudia Stockinger, Simone Winko (ed.): Canon, evaluation and mediation. Literature in the knowledge society , Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 77–92.
  • Fritz Gesing: Dying in a hail of bombs. Hans Erich Nossack's 'Der Untergang' and Gert Ledig's 'Retribution' . In: Der Deutschunterricht , Heft 1, 54th year, 2002.
  • Volker Hage: Epilogue to the edition of retaliation as a Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch, Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, pp. 201-211
  • Volker Hage: Witnesses to the Destruction. The writers and the aerial warfare. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003. (Addresses Gert Ledig's novel; Review ( memento from January 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) by Uwe Schütte)
  • Gabriele Hundrieser: The empty space of the empty space? The Gert Ledig phenomenon, the aesthetics of violence and literary historiography. In: Weimarer contributions , Heft 3, 49th vol., 2003, pp. 361–378.
  • Lars Koch: A fragmented existence in a hail of winds - To Gert Ledig's aerial warfare novel 'Retribution'. In: War and Memory , ed. by Waltraud Wende. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, pp. 190–204.
  • Florian Radvan. Religious imagery and transtextual references in Gert Ledig's aerial war novel Retribution . In: Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan , ed. by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 165-179.
  • Gregor Streim: The bombing war as a sensation and as a documentation. Gert Ledig's 'Die Vergeltung' and the debate about WG Sebald's 'Luftkrieg und Literatur' . In: War in the Media , ed. by Heinz-Peter Preußer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 293-312.

Reviews and interviews

  • Reinhart Baumgart: Massacre at noon . In: Die Zeit , December 9, 1999.
  • Rolf Becker: A bomb war novel . In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger , 13. October 1956.
  • ER Dallontano: Cabinet of horrors with bombs . In: Rheinischer Merkur , December 7, 1956.
  • Literature is there to show people's suffering. Interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, by Volker Hage. In: Der Spiegel , July 24, 2003.
  • Volker Hage: Reports from a house of the dead. In: Der Spiegel , April 1, 2003.
  • Peter Hornung: Too much horror . In: Die Zeit , November 15, 1956.
  • H.-Georg Lützenkirchen: Displaced Air War? Three counterexamples by Hans Erich Nossack, Gerd Ledig and Alexander Kluge. In: Literaturkritik.de , February 2, 2003. (Review.)
  • Stephan Reinhardt: Presence of Nothing . In: Der Tagesspiegel , February 27, 2000.
  • Peter Roos: There is no time for the dead . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 19, 2000.
  • Wolfgang Schwerbrock: In the style of Malaparte . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 22, 1956.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Hornung: Too much of horror . In: Die Zeit , November 15, 1956 (link to the website with the review)
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Schwerbrock: In the style of Malaparte . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 22, 1956.
  3. ↑ ER Dallontano: Chamber of horrors with bombs . In: Rheinischer Merkur , December 7, 1956.
  4. ^ Rolf Becker: A bomb war novel . In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger , October 13, 1956.
  5. ↑ Stephan Reinhardt, Tagesspiegel online from February 25, 2000 (link to the website) , accessed on January 17, 2017
  6. ↑ Literature is there to show the suffering of people . Interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, by Volker Hage . In: Der Spiegel , July 24, 2003.
  7. ↑ Reinhart Baumgart: Massacre at noon . In: Die Zeit , December 9, 1999.
  8. ↑ Stephan Reinhardt: Presence of Nothing . In: Der Tagesspiegel , February 27, 2000 (link to the website) , accessed on January 17, 2017
  9. ↑ Peter Roos: No time strikes the dead . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 19, 2000.