Wolpertinger or Das Blau

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Wolpertinger or Das Blau is a novel by Alban Nikolai Herbst that was published in 1993 by Axel Dielmann-Verlag . In 1995, Herbst received the Grimmelshausen Prize for the novel . The approximately 1000-page work is considered the only great novel to be set in Hannoversch Münden in Lower Saxony .

content

The action location Hotel Wolpertinger alias Hotel Andree's Berg (1988 before the demolition)

The novel Wolpertinger or Das Blau takes place in different time and action levels. The primary event is repeatedly blurred and broken up in the levels. The first narrative level treats a seven-day period in 1981 as a review. From the present level in 1985 there is a look ahead to 1989 and a view to 1976, when the author Alban Nikolai Herbst sketched the original version of the novel. The fictional characters reflect an educated crowd of writers, private scholars and cultural functionaries, an intellectual inner climate of Frankfurt known to the author . The action takes place mainly in the Hotel Wolpertinger in Hann. Münden . The traditional Hotel Andree's Berg , which was built around 1826 in a garden restaurant, served as a real model . The hotel, restaurant and excursion bar was on the slope of the Questenberg above the city and was demolished after landslides in the 1980s due to the risk of collapse . The author describes the population of Hannoversch Münden in his own little stories, which represent a panorama of the 1970s and 1980s. The characters include petty bourgeoisie , artists, sales managers, post- 1968ers , unionized teachers, and a terrorist.

action

The Heede hunting lodge as the venue for the third narrative level

At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist and first-person narrator Hans Erich Deters is on a train ride from Bremen to Frankfurt am Main . Already at the departure station he noticed a woman whom he observed more closely during the journey. Because of her, he changed trains in Göttingen and followed her on the train to Hannoversch Münden. The woman who bears the name Anna is accompanied by a writer. The two travelers turn out to be members of the Andree'schen Tischgesellschaft who take part in the annual meeting of the association in the Hotel Wolpertinger . While still on the train, Deters receives an espionage order from a MAD agent to make Anna's acquaintance and to observe the annual meeting. Later it becomes clear that the participants in the meeting are ghost beings or elves from Celtic and Norse mythology who are holding a thing . The owner of the Hotel Wolpertinger , a Frankfurt stock exchange broker , finances the annual meeting and runs a biocomputer in the basement that generates events and ghosts electronically.

Wolpertinger or Das Blau
The blue as a novel motif and subtitle

The second narrative level is the present level and takes place in 1985. The protagonist first spends one night in Göttingen with the woman he met on the train ride. Then they travel together to Hannoversch Münden, where they both stay at Hotel Andree's Berg instead of Hotel Wolpertinger , which suggests that both hotels have a spatial identity. Here it turns out that Hans Erich Deters came up with the first narrative level from 1981. Therefore the protagonist in this narrative level is referred to as Deters II.

On the third narrative level, the protagonist found accommodation in the Heede hunting lodge after the train ride near Hannoversch Münden in 1989 , for which there is a real model in the Bramwald . The Hotel Wolpertinger and the Hotel Andree's Berg are already in ruins at this time. In this part of the novel, the plot is told in complex loops. The protagonist associated with Deters and Deters II is called the overauthor or the third .

Towards the end of the novel, a festival of the ghosts creates connections between the narrative levels, which ends in a brutal showdown . Different possible starting points for the novel are presented in three epilogues . In one case the protagonist was killed at the party, in the other case he was the third person to save the virtual ghosts on a floppy disk from the Wolpertinger Hotel . In another possibility, the protagonist has turned into an animal, which could be the mythical creature of Wolpertinger . In the final scene, the protagonist, transformed into an animal, goes outside after dark to relieve himself and hunt. He feels like an energetic bundle that dances in the "scent of the moon", "anointed by the warm, moist, modern foliage".

reception

The 1000-page work, created between 1982 and 1994, is described by literary critics as "an overflowing moral picture of the intellectual scene before 1989". It represents a mentality-historical diagnosis of the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The Wolpertinger named in the title is the symbolic figure of the novel. It stands for an art whole composed of heterogeneous parts, at the same time it represents an ironic expression of so-called postmodernism .

The Killy literary lexicon rates the great novel as a masterpiece. It is a fantastic panorama of epochs, built according to musical principles, based on Jean Paul and Thomas Mann's Zauberberg . In the novel, the filigree work of dialogue voices is interwoven into a polyphonic , sometimes comical or humorous structure. In it, the world appears in the reflection of what has been read and thought with reference to Shakespeare , Gottfried Benn , Alfred Döblin , Arno Schmidt , Adorno , Nietzsche and Wolf Biermann .

The Critical Lexicon for contemporary German literature sees the work as a “monstrous literary discourse on the reality of fantasy and the fantasy of reality”.

Autumn's 1983 novel The Confusion of Mind, from 1983, is to be seen as the prehistory of the novel Wolpertinger or Das Blau . There Anna emerged as the central figure and the blue motif , the subtitle in “Wolpertinger”. In the 1983 work, the narrator sees the union with Anna in the blue dress as the greatest fulfillment in the realization of inventions. He follows her in search of the blue flower , the "not findable, never found" one. The plot ends with the narrator's train ride along tracks that shimmer “in an incomparable blue”.

Reviews

Awards

literature

  • Wolpertinger, or, The Blue . A. Dielmann, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-929232-12-X .
  • Corinna Rindlisbacher: 2.1.3 Alban Nikolai Herbst: Wolpertinger or Das Blau . In: Postmodern storytelling: Italo Calvinos “When a traveler on a winter night”, Patrick Süskind's “Perfume” and Alban Nikolai Herbst's “Wolpertinger or Das Blau” . GRIN Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-640-74073-4 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201011192105 .
  • Henning Bobzin: From Bremen to the Otherworld about identity and reality in the main prose work, poetics and weblog by Alban Nikolai Herbst . Dissertation. Goettingen State and University Library, Goettingen 2015, OCLC 931935467 , p. 117–228 ( d-nb.info [PDF; accessed June 8, 2016]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hajo Steinert: The blue of the sky. on FOCUS Online from July 21, 1997.
  2. ^ Wilhelm Kühlmann : Postmodern Fantasies. On the mythological writing in the work of Alban Nikolai Herbst (born 1955). With a catalog raisonné . (pdf)
  3. ↑ Review: Fiction: Der Sonntagsdenker . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 1, 1997, p. 32 ( faz.net ).