Weitlings summer retreat

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Weitlings Sommerfrische is a novel by the German writer Sten Nadolny that was published in May 2012. He links the question of a person's identity with the subject of time travel . Nadolny used many details of his own life for the biography of his protagonist, the retired judge Wilhelm Weitling, who was transported back to his youth by a sailing accident. The novel was positively discussed in the feature pages and reached number 1 on the SWR best list in July / August 2012 .

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Chiemseeplatte on the Chiemsee

Wilhelm Weitling - after the early socialists Wilhelm Weitling named - is a 68 years old retired judge from Berlin, who not least because struck the right track, because his father, a successful writer, qualified lawyers despised that. He spends the summer of 2010 in his holiday home in Chieming , the house where he grew up as a boy. He directs his Chiemseeplätte ago, with whom he now and then sailing on Lake Chiemsee breaks, and wrote to his legal-religious age of wisdom under the title Spes Divina (Divine Hope).

During a sailing trip, Weitling was surprised by a storm in the middle of the lake. Knowing that he will not make it ashore in time, he alerts the sea watch and recalls an experience in his youth, when at the age of 16 he got into a comparable emergency that he only barely survived. When lightning strikes in the immediate vicinity, Weitling's consciousness is thrown back in time, and he relives the boy's accident and his rescue. In the days and weeks that followed, Weitling remained trapped in 1958 and in the life of 16-year-old Willy. He meets his parents again, goes to school with the boy, experiences his crush on his classmate Roswitha, while his own interest is rather the trainee lawyer Dr. Fafner is true. But his role does not go beyond that of a secret observer. He cannot make himself understood to anyone, not even his former self, whose actions he follows with skepticism and distance. Only when Willy is asleep does Weitling enjoy the freedom as a kind of spirit to move through Willy's time independently of Willy's body. The return to his own presence is of course denied him.

Weitling only gradually succeeds in reconciling himself with the boy he once was and in recognizing and accepting himself in his strengths and mistakes, in the weak personality that vacillates between cowardice, overconfidence and a lack of commitment. At the same time he observes with growing discomfort how the boy's experiences differ again and again in details from his own memories. In Willy's presence, it is not the father whose books are commercially successful, but Willy's mother who writes down her memories and thus lands a bestseller. Weitling fears the effects of the deviations on his own biography, and he looks for a wormhole that will bring him back to his present. At least he has now managed to get in touch with drunk people and old people, like his grandfather with dementia . Through Fedor Baron von Traumleben, he learns that the state in which he finds himself is not unique, and he learns to name it with a term used by his grandfather: a “ summer break ”.

A cartridge from George S. Patton , which he thinks he recognizes in the Chiemsee, and the tremendous laugh that triggers his imagination of the general while urinating in the lake, ultimately becomes the catalyst that hurls Weitling back into his presence. He survived the distress on the Chiemsee, but discovered that the deviations in the biography resulted in a different vita. Although he still lives by the side of his beloved wife Astrid, the childless man has suddenly become a father and grandfather. Weitling first has to learn his new life with great effort, and so his wife, who accepts his revelation of a second existence with unshakable love, tells him about the unknown biography in "history lessons". In this one it is his father who died early, and not the mother. And Weitling is no longer a lawyer, but a writer, a profession with which the retired judge initially does not want to make friends.

Two years after his return, Weitling's granddaughter Nike appears to her grandfather as a ghost one night. It is now she who, as a 68-year-old woman, will experience her “summer vacation” in 2072 and return to the present of 2012. Weitling refuses to ask about the future. His wish to meet his former self, the lawyer, again remains unfulfilled. Years later, on his deathbed, Weitling's changed life passes him by. An early memory of four-year-old Willy in the children's home shows him why he became a writer in his new life: He had learned to survive with invented stories among strange and scary children. Although his belief in the second life has waned, at the end of the day he is certain of God's existence , by which alone he can explain his two lives.

style

According to Gabriele von Arnim , Weitling's Sommerfrische has an "unpretentious, even modest tone, [...] leisurely and calmly". Nadolny "apparently deliberately put his complex scenario into often simple sentences." For Martin Halter, too, the novel is sometimes "a little bit delicately told", and he also finds "one or the other truism ." Gerrit Bartels poses at the narrative deliberation even the question of whether Nadolny, based on his most famous book, wants to rediscover slowness. Oliver Junge's style is reminiscent of a bourgeois realism of the 19th century, and he only sees "in the last fifth of turns and punch lines accelerate history enormously". Martin Lüdke, on the other hand, always recognizes surrealist sprinkles in Nadolny's realism . He is "a traditional narrator" and tells "confidently, self-critical, self-deprecating and equipped with that sense of humor that does not shy away from its own costs."

subjects

Autobiographical background

Sten Nadolny (left) and Jens Sparschuh , 2009

Sten Nadolny had been planning to write about himself for some time, albeit not an autobiography that he would have found boring, but something more mysterious and mirrored with the intention of setting monuments to people he met on his life path. Weitling's parents correspond with Nadolny's parents Burkhard and Isabella Nadolny . As in the second version of his life, his father's books had little success, while his mother's family stories became bestsellers. For Sten Nadolny, the starting point of the novel was the question of whether and how his biography would have been different if it had been his father instead of his mother who had developed into a successful writer. The question of why Nadolny himself became a writer, although he had experienced the negative aspects of the job with his parents, he wanted to use the method of "looking over your shoulder as a young man".

Details that Nadolny took from his own biography are Weitling's year and place of birth, school attendance in Traunstein and the shared retirement home in Berlin and on the Chiemsee, where Nadolny also sails. Weitling's literary career, which after a great success "lost contact with the large audience", shows parallels to Nadolny's own writing career with his bestseller The Discovery of Slowness , which was no longer followed by any comparable popular success. Like Weitling, Nadolny originally distanced himself from his writing parents and deliberately chose a different path. However, he did not become a lawyer, but took up a history degree. And like Weitling in his first life, Nadolny remained childless. Only in the fiction of Weitling's second life did he then “prescribe” his daughter and grandchild. Richard Kämmerlings also sees the novel as a “declaration of love” from the author to the woman whom he has given the name “Astrid” and with whom, according to Andreas Isenschmid, even the reader of the book falls a little in love.

Time travel, identity and God

According to his own statements, Nadolny has always been interested in the subject of time travel , a common motif in science fiction literature. He named HG Wells ' novel The Time Machine and the films Back to the Future , Ghost - Message from Sam and Terminator 2 as role models . Kristina Maidt-Zinke sees the construction as a pretext to sprinkle numerous particles of reality from the author's own biography without this "tearing the reader out of his usual path of thought like the protagonist from the stream of time." For Christoph Schröder, behind the construction is The journey through time is ultimately a novel about “Identifying and becoming an artist”. According to Martin Lüdke, the journey through time fulfilled its purpose at the moment when Weitling is reconciled with his young self, and consequently he also returns to his present. Nadolny described the novel as an "experimental arrangement" on the topic of the security of one's own identity , in which he investigates questions about reality and possibility. An influence of Max Frisch's works Stiller or biography: however, he rejects a game that was noticed by some performers.

For Weitling, who loses his original piety in his second life, God himself becomes an indecisive attempter: “He tries around, makes mistakes, thinks, has a better idea and corrects himself!” This reminds Oliver Junge of the approach taken by the author Nadolny . For Harald Klauhs started playing in Weitling summer God with the biography of his protagonist. He thinks of Nadolny's novel A God of Cheekiness from 1994, in which Hermes was already able to walk between the future and the past. The principle of placing a cool observer at the side of an experiencer reminds Knut Cordsen of another work by Nadolny: Me and He . According to Nadolny, the last sentence that Weitling derives God's existence from his two lives is taken from Dostoyevsky's novel The Demons , which also plays a role as a reading by young Willy and in which a sergeant in charge derives the existence of God from his profession.

Retirement work

Many reviewers refer to Weitling's Sommerfrische as the author's older work, for example Richard Kämmerlings, for whom the novel is a “classic old-age work”, but at the same time a “positive, life-friendly book”. Martin Halter speculates that it could even be “Nadolny's perhaps last novel”, carried by “his irony and philanthropic wisdom of old age”. The author contrasts “without resentment or complacency”, instead “with almost Olympic serenity, subjunctive and indicative, childhood dream and reality of his life”. Gabriele von Arnim sees old Weitling at the end of his life between dementia and old age peace, and suspects that this is how the author wanted to "banish his own fear of getting old". In the end, he "has been sufficiently reconciled with all of his selves to be relieved and relaxed and venture into further life."

reception

Weitlings Sommerfrische proved to be successful with both critics and the public. He was ranked 13 on the bestseller list of the mirror , place one on the SWR Best List July / August 2012 and the long list of the German Book Prize 2012. In the same year Nadolny was with the Rheingau Literature Prize awarded in whose eulogy reads: "A game with changing self-images and different voices. With humane wit and self-deprecating humor, the narrator leads back to the strangeness and adventures of an ego who disappeared in the 1950s. ”The Ravensburger Verlag Foundation Book Prize 2012 also went to the“ original family novel ”, which shows“ how different a life can be, when someone grows up under a different family constellation. "

Martin Halter sees Weitling's summer retreat as “not an awe-inspiring masterpiece”, but he still likes to be “drifted into the fifties in the nutshell of his childhood memories”. According to Christoph Schröder, one has to “first agree to this scenario”, then “it immediately unfolds its charm”. Knut Cordsen finds “in this short book […] those clever insights for which this fine ironic is so valued.” For Andreas Isenschmid the novel is “very cleverly made” and “a pleasure in the linguistic design”, for Martin Lüdke it is simple "Beautifully told."

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Reviews

Web links

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  1. ↑ a b Gabriele von Arnim: Flashes of memory . In: Die Welt from May 12, 2012.
  2. ↑ a b c Martin Halter: The inner twin . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of June 29, 2012.
  3. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: The future only came until yesterday . In: Der Tagesspiegel from May 23, 2012.
  4. ↑ a b Oliver Jungs: Life takes place in the unfinished . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 14, 2012.
  5. ↑ a b c Martin Lüdke: Do it again, Sten . In: Die Zeit of June 21, 2012.
  6. ^ Weitlings Sommerfrische on Hörbar , Schweizer Radio DRS from June 20, 2012.
  7. ↑ "The trash can set me free" . Interview with Uwe Wittstock in Focus No. 20/2012.
  8. ↑ a b Time for Time Machines . Sten Nadolny in conversation with Joachim Scholl on Deutschlandradio Kultur on June 4, 2012.
  9. ↑ a b c d Sten Nadolny sets sail in the direction of the spirit realm . Conversation with Richard Kämmerlings in: Die Welt on May 14, 2012.
  10. ↑ a b parallel worlds . Interview with Andreas Isenschmid in Kulturzeit on 3sat from June 19, 2012.
  11. ↑ Kristina Maidt-Zinke: Oh, if I were different and yet the same. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 9, 2012.
  12. ↑ a b Christoph Schröder: Message from Wilhelm . In: the daily newspaper of May 19, 2012.
  13. ↑ Harald Klauhs: I am someone else . In: Die Presse of June 9, 2012.
  14. ↑ a b Knut Cordsen: Time travel into the alter ego . On: Deutschlandradio Kultur on May 24, 2012.
  15. ↑ For a long time means longing . Interview with Clemens Meyer in the Friday of May 25, 2012.
  16. ↑ Sten Nadolny: Weitlings Sommerfrische auf Perlentaucher .
  17. ↑ Weitlings Sommerfrische ( Memento from February 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) at buchreport .
  18. ↑ Sten Nadolny: Weitlings Sommerfrische on the SWR best list .
  19. ↑ The longlist 2012 ( memento of 23 August 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on the German Book Prize website .
  20. ↑ Rheingau Literature Prize 2012 to Sten Nadolny ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) on the Rheingau Music Festival website .
  21. ↑ Book Prize Ravensburger Verlag Foundation 2012 goes to Sten Nadolny for his family novel "Weitlings Sommerfrische" on the Ravensburger website .