People without space (novel)

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Volk ohne Raum is a novel by Hans Grimm first published in 1926 , the title of which is known as a phrase because of its entry into the language of National Socialism .

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The main character is Cornelius Friebott, who was born in the same year as Hans Grimm in 1875. Grimm, who worked on the novel in Lippoldsberg in the Weserbergland from 1920 , decided on Jürgenshagen, a town very close, as the place of birth for Friebott . Unlike Grimm, Friebott has a rural and not an urban origin.

The whole life from Friebott to his romantic death in 1923 is determined by the thesis that German people, if they are not doomed to doom, need more space to live. The book is divided into four parts: “Heimat und Enge”, “Foreign Space and Irregang”, “German Space” and “The People Without Space”.

The book title is also the argument of the novel: “The huge narrative effort that Grimm drives serves to play through his idea that the Germans are a people who 'don't have as much farming land as theirs Economy needs'. "(Kreutzer 2007)

The plot begins around 1890: the son of a quarry worker, when he sees the surrounding landscape, gets into a disgruntlement that all the land that can be farmed profitably has already been taken, that several tradespeople are already local and that the rest of the growing population is in underpaid and health ruining employment relationships, so that the capable person without the luck of an inherited entry in the handicrafts register or the land register has no possibility of advancement according to his ability.

Together with a friend, the plan matures to migrate to the Ruhr area that is just being created in order to participate in the boom in the coal and steel industry . The grandeur of the blazing fires and smoking food , the monumental feature of heavy industry , impressed the young man very much. After various unpleasant experiences in the bachelor dormitories and collieries in Bochum, which were widespread at the time, his illusions of a working world that supposedly rewards performance and decent morality vanish very quickly. It takes at various meetings of that time as an underground organization working worker associations in part and is impeccable on this occasion despite morally arrested courageous behavior even for short periods. This gave rise to the decision to emigrate to southern Africa .

When he arrived in South Africa, he met the population that was then made up of Boers , German settlers , Xhosa and Bushmen . On the basis of detailed observations of the modes of action and moral concepts, a more solid picture of the alleged “national characteristics” of those groups is formed. He took part in the Boer War on the side of the Boers and achieved initial successes in the free and unregulated exercise of his talent and inclination in manual activities.

The life of Germans in South Africa is marked by severe setbacks, intrigues , the envy of the less hardworking, but more likely settled Boers and the difficulties of maintaining cultural identity far away from home, acting morally impeccable and still protecting belongings and to increase.

So he dared a new start as a farmer in the former trading base Lüderitzbucht or German South West Africa . After the First World War , Friebott was arrested there by the English police on an excuse, but escaped through the Portuguese colony of Angola and returned to Europe.

In Germany, Friebott marries the daughter of his childhood sweetheart Melsene and appears as a speaker at public festivals and meetings to promote the acquisition of new “space” for Germany. He dies shortly before November 9, 1923 ( Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch ) by an angry worker throwing a stone.

The last third of the book is becoming more and more detached from a concrete and understandable story told throughout. They are replaced by ever broader and more tendentious passages about the perceived suffering of the Germans in the colonies and the perceived narrowness of the motherland.

style

Grimm writes historically, especially using words and grammatical constructions that were long out of use at the time of the plot; Especially the dative endings -e and -en , which had almost been forgotten in the twenties ( towards the valley , Melsenen felt strange ), are used excessively by him. Nevertheless, the style is not old-fashioned as such, since the gradual transition from a factual report to a sequence of set pieces that reaches into the absurd shows the Sisyphean aspect of the life of a virtuous settler on two levels.

ideology

The ideological juxtaposition here consists of the decent, devout and hardworking craftsman or peasant who sees himself at the mercy of speculators, big industrialists and profiteers. The dependent wage labor is contrasted with the honest added value through tillage, animal breeding and craftsmanship. The Ruhr area episode is explicitly anti-socialist. The characterization of the inhabitants of the German colony is consistently racist ( lazy Kaffirs , mean Boers , lying Englishmen ).

reception

Kurt Tucholsky reviewed Volk ohne Raum as follows:

“One of the Bibles of Germanness, where it is most jarring, is a thick tome, 'People without Space' by Hans Grimm. The man lived in German Southwest and published some remarkable short stories before the war. (›The Walk through the Sand‹; all of his works have been published by Albert Langen in Munich.) But after the war it hit him; Like all Germans a bad loser, he metaphysically boiled up the defeat he had suffered and demonstrated by means of the existing overpopulation of the German land and through a moderate novel that Germany again needs colonies. Style and poetry are reminiscent of Pastor Frenssen , for example - the same amateurish intimacy that believes that if the writer is touched, it must be the reader too, the same Protestant provincial rhetoric with humble humming of bumblebees and the rustling of the forest, which indeed shows a connection to nature, from the soul of the But nature only knows as much as is evident from the rural land register. "

- The world stage, September 4, 1928

Rosenberg's view of Volk ohne Raum in the myth of the 20th century , published in 1930, is quite different : “The bells that ring from the village on the Weser and accompany Cornelius Friebott through the world are an expression of the longing for space, for fields, for indigenous uses Creative powers. These longing bells from Lippoldsberg also ring as a wake-up call to all Germans around the world, beyond the death of the seeker brought about by the hand of misguided national comrades. ”He therefore attested the novel“ eternal value ”. For Martin Wellmann it is at least a “classic” of the “ blood and soil literature ”.

In National Socialist Germany the book became a school reading. In 1933/34 at the world exhibition “ A Century of Progress ” in Chicago, it was the only book that represented “German literature”.

After the end of the war, People without a Room in the Soviet Occupation Zone was placed on the list of literature to be segregated.

In 1989, Manfred Bieler wrote about the novel after praising Grimm's early novels: “How does the change from plausible narrator to boiling prophet take place? Grimm is not alone. This happens to every author as soon as he starts from political slogans instead of himself, his life experience and imagination. "

The title, however, is discredited , among other things, by the changed attribution of meaning under National Socialism : The reason for gaining new settlement areas in the east (cf.Living Space in the East , General Plan East ) was the people-without-space thesis, which assumed that Germany was itself can produce neither natural resources nor food for its population, and these must be obtained through area expansion. The discrediting does not arise solely from the use of the novel by National Socialism.

Publishers and editions

People without space was first published in 1926 by the Munich publishing house Albert Langen . By 1933 the book had sold 220,000 copies, and by 1944 another 330,000 copies were sold. After Grimm switched to C. Bertelsmann Verlag , a new edition could only be realized in 1944, of which only 20,000 books could be sold due to the chaos of war. Another edition of half a million copies for the Organization Todt could not be realized.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hans Grimm, People without Space (Munich: Abert Langen, 1926) . Polunbi catalog
  2. ↑ leokreutzer.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.leokreutzer.de  
  3. ↑ Die Weltbühne , September 4, 1928, No. 36, p. 353.
  4. ↑ polunbi.de
  5. ↑ Manfred Bieler: Between Weser and Windhoek. Manfred Bieler on Hans Grimm: “People without space” (1926) . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Read novels from yesterday today . Volume 2: 1918-1933 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-10-062911-6 , p. 78.
  6. ↑ Tobias Schneider: Bestseller in the Third Reich. (PDF; 8 MB) In: VfZ . 52, H. 1, 2004, pp. 77-98, here p. 85.
  7. ↑ Martin Wellmann: book note on people without space. 2003