Where I live
The short story Where I live by Ilse Aichinger from 1963, published in the prose anthology of the same name , is about the nightmare-like intrusion of the extraordinary into the everyday life of the individual, to which he feels helplessly exposed. It remains unclear whether the narrated is intended as a 'real event' or as a purely subjective experience.
content
In terms of time, the text fits into post-war literature ( the elevator has not been in operation since the war ). The story is told by an anonymous self, whose gender remains unclear. This narrator is confronted with the fact that his entire apartment is gradually being moved from the fourth floor to the basement, although several intermediate stages are skipped narrative in a kind of time-lapse , so that the events are laconically summarized by the parallelism that structures the text : I live one floor lower since yesterday. - I live in the basement now. With the resigned final sentence Now it is too late. the ego confirms the “inevitability” of the strange happening - a topos in literary studies as recently as the 1960s - and one's own inability to act. The narrator conforms to his fate and, anticipating, soon sees himself underground in the canal.
Except for the incapacity to act ( I then wanted to go up the stairs to convince myself who was living next to the people who had previously lived next to me, [...] but suddenly felt so weak that I had to go to bed. ) and feeling at the mercy of oneself, the lack of social relationships is a characteristic of the ego's situation. Therefore there is a clarification resp. Clarification of the processes does not take place. Potential witnesses for the authenticity of what happened are named: a student who sublet lives with the narrator ( he has no idea what happened ), the cleaning lady, the caretaker, the coal men - but they do not have a say , and their actions are inconspicuous, as if nothing had happened. They greet the narrator in a friendly manner if they happen to meet him, but seem to find the narrator's strange circumstances normal. This irritates the reader: He has to ask himself whether the narrator is crazy or whether the other people are crazy. If what is happening is 'real' people should be amazed. If they do not do this, at least on the surface, it is either because they do not notice anything or because they are indifferent to what happens to other people and ultimately to themselves.
Formal features
The open beginning and the open ending as well as the topic - the unexpected break in into everyday life - characterize this text as a short story. Frequent z. Partly leitmotif-like repetitions and duplications (anaphor, gemination, parallelism, reduplication) as well as the structure in "two symmetrically designed parts connected by common motifs" apparently have the task of capturing the experience and countering the irritation with something to hold on to. In the frequent use of the subjunctive II as an unrealis, an expression of a presumption or an unfulfillable wish, the questionability of the reality content of the experience and the narrator's uncertainty about present and future events materialize.
The high point of the linear narrative is also the low point in the vertical topical: The individual disappears inexorably into oblivion, namely in the basement, and no longer reckons with a rescue. Other pairs of opposites that are constructed analogously to this vertical topical 'top' versus 'bottom': 'constancy' versus 'change', 'apartment content unchanged' versus 'apartment on a different level', 'completely calm' versus 'restlessness' / 'uncertainty' / 'Catastrophe'. The extraordinary of what happened contrasts with a “sober everyday language”, which is characterized by a nominal style in the choice of words, a paratactic sentence structure, yes, by a pathos of sobriety and lack of emotion.
For interpretation
In the handbook for contemporary German literature it says about Aichinger's prose:
“ The narrated reality is reduced to situations and processes that contain existential truths. "
What are these truths, what does this parable stand for ? A possible approach would be this: A lonely individual sees himself helplessly at the mercy of a strange event, helpless because he does not understand and sees no possibility of communication to gain knowledge, but also helpless because he experiences the event as unchangeable. - This is the experience of the anonymous individual in modern mass society, which is characterized by increasingly missing ties and slipping meaningful references. The story throws a spotlight on the downside of the economic miracle. This critical potential of the literature of the early Federal Republic is not only positively received by literary scholars: "While the economy of the Federal Republic is running at full speed, the old political and economic elites are doing the business of the young democracy, things seem to be 'up' without end, the aesthetic intellectuals enjoy the chimera of an allegedly inscrutable and senseless 'outer' world, immerse themselves in the metaphor of the darkly enigmatic, hopeless, absurd. ”The individual disappears nameless, genderless, defeatist and almost without a trace. The parable would also be a “complaint about the lack of relationship between people and about their alienation from one another” and from the objective events surrounding them.
The complete passivity of the protagonist irritates the reader even more than the curious events. Implicitly, this could be interpreted as an appeal to personal responsibility: People should take their fate into their own hands.
However, the I does not really “leave a trace”: after all, it leaves a narrative behind. Bookshelves are also mentioned. Literature addresses itself here in an auto-reflective twist. It evidently serves as compensation, also as a collective memory, where the individual disappears into the haphazard. Meaning is thus created in the ideal superstructure, where meaning can no longer be made out on the material basis. To what extent literature production and consumption serves more escapism - comparable to the narrator's Saturday concert visit - or rather the overcoming of alienation and the creation of autonomy, the narrative does not give a clear answer, but it does raise the question.
literature
- Ilse Aichinger, where I live. Stories, poems, dialogues . Frankfurt am Main 1963
- Jan Berg, Hartmut Böhme, Walter Fähnders ea, Social history of German literature from 1918 to the present , Frankfurt am Main 1981
- New manual of contemporary German literature since 1945 , founded by Hermann Kunisch , ed. v. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser with the participation of Petra Ernst, Thomas Kraft and Heidi Zimmer, (nymphenburger in the FA Herbig publishing house), Munich 1990
- International classification of mental disorders. ICD-10 Chapter V (F) . Trans. U. hg.v. H. Dilling ea, 2. corr. Ed., Bern, etc. 1993
Individual evidence
- ↑ In the teacher's manual for the reading book On the Road for the 9th grade, there is talk of a "depressive personality". As questionable as it is to apply psychiatric diagnoses to literary characters, one could at best speak of a psychosis-related disorder. According to the International Classification of Mental Disorders (ICD-10), “schizoid personality disorder” is defined by characteristics as shown by the first-person narrator, e. B. inaction, “emotional coolness”, flattening of affect, preference for “solitary occupations”, “excessive demands by imagination and introspection” (p. 228).
- ↑ Monique Boussart
- ↑ Boussart
- ↑ p. 13
- ↑ Berg ea, Sozialgeschichte , p. 606
- ↑ Boussart