Waiting for the barbarians

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The novel Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee was published in the original English in 1980 under the title Waiting for the Barbarians .

action

The novel is largely set in a border town of an empire that is not specified in terms of time and place . The highest representative of this realm in the city is the magistrate , an administrative officer who is also responsible for the administration of justice. As a first-person narrator, the magistrate describes his experiences, his reflections and the events in the city after the arrival of Colonel Joll . Colonel Joll is an officer in Department III , a political police force that acts with extreme brutality against all supposed internal and external enemies of the Reich . There are rumors that the barbarians, Nomadic tribes living on the borders of the empire are planning an attack on it. Colonel Joll was therefore sent from the capital to the border region to prepare a punitive expedition. Colonel Joll uses torture to try to obtain evidence of their warlike plans from some captured barbarians. The magistrate, who has an old-fashioned understanding of the rule of law, finds himself in an internal conflict between his role as a loyal civil servant and his rejection of the violent methods of securing political rule. After Colonel Joll has left for the time being, he takes the girl , a young barbarian woman, into his home. The barbarian woman was blinded by the torturers and her feet were broken. An ambivalent relationship develops between the magistrate and the girl. He cares for her and is drawn to her, but both suffer from his inability to open up to their personalities beyond his fetishistic interest. Finally he decides to bring the girl back to her people.

When he comes back from this trip, Colonel Joll is back in town, he has brought an army with him. The punitive expedition is to begin. The magistrate is captured, ill-treated and tortured as a traitor. In his cell he experiences how difficult it is to uphold moral principles when all thoughts revolve around avoiding pain and the longed-for next meal. During a public torture and humiliation of captured barbarians, there is another confrontation with Colonel Joll. But the city's residents, intimidated and full of hatred for the barbarians who are supposed to be responsible for their misfortune, have long since taken the seemingly safe side of Colonel Joll. After being publicly humiliated and humiliated, the magistrate is released.

The punitive expedition turns out to be a failure. The barbarians lure the army into the desert without engaging in direct combat. Many soldiers perish there. Months later, Colonel Joll returns from the desert with only a few companions. Panic breaks out in the city. Colonel Joll and many of the city's residents flee to the center of the empire. The magistrate takes over the administration of the city again. The wait for the barbarians follows.

Behind Coetzee's taut and laconic story, one can assume an allegory of South Africa before and after apartheid. Coetzee presents "the political commitment of the magistrate as something that can at the same time be completely ideological and devoid of any ideology."

The magistrate, who in his leisure hours collects wood carvings from the desert that bear unknown characters, assumes that these fragments represent an allegory that does not result from the individual characters themselves, but from the order and the way in which they are to be read. Seen in this way, the novel is above all a general consideration of writing, but also of the possible failure of this means of communication.

translation

German editions are available in translations of:

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Liam Connell, in: Peter Boxall (Ed.): 1001 BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE LIFE IS OVER. Olms, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-283-00529-0 , p. 714.
  2. ↑ Cf. Liam Connell, in: Peter Boxall (Ed.): 1001 BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE LIFE IS OVER. Olms, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-283-00529-0 , p. 714.