Between nine and nine
Between nine and nine is a fantastic novel by Leo Perutz from 1918.
construction
The novel is made up of twenty episodes, each forming a chapter. This can be explained by the first publication as a serial novel in a German daily newspaper. The chapters not only describe the actions of the protagonist, but also the milieus of the metropolis of Vienna, which was shaped by the Habsburg monarchy around 1900 .
content
The quite successful student Stanislaus Demba disturbs his surroundings with his strange behavior, which is incomprehensible to others, especially because he hides his hands under a paletot from the beginning of the story . This initially puzzles the reader, but also the people he meets in the novel, across chapters, as he behaves accordingly clumsily. Once he even aroused the suspicion that he was concealing a pistol. Demba desperately needs money.
Only after seven chapters does the reader find out the reasons for the strange behavior: Demba tells his young acquaintance Steffi that he needs 200 crowns by eight o'clock in the evening , otherwise his girlfriend Sonja will take his rival to Venice. In order to raise this sum, the desperate Demba wanted to sell a valuable book stolen from the library a year ago. The police had already tracked him down and handcuffed him. He was able to escape the police by jumping out of a skylight - saved by the treetop and piles of sand. At the same moment it struck nine in the morning. Since then, Demba has been wandering through Vienna, tied up.
The futile effort to raise money from friends and debtors also turns into an odyssey of Dembas in the following chapters , in a sometimes self-challenged tightrope walk between being freed from the handcuffs and trying to reach the goal despite this burden. Often he is on the verge of receiving the money he needs, but fails because of his hidden handcuffs. After all, it's half past seven in the evening. The last hope evaporates after a key does not fit, which Steffi has since gotten and tried on the shackles in his apartment. Demba surrenders. He realizes that even the briefest imprisonment sentence will not be able to strip him of the "handcuffs" later, that as a criminal in a bourgeois society, he would be labeled a criminal for life. He recognizes Steffi's love too late. Confused, he suddenly finds himself back in the attic when the tower clock strikes nine times: A tower clock strikes. Nine o'clock! In the morning? In the evening? Where am I? Where was I?
While the bells are still ringing, police officers bend over the dying man in the courtyard. It is not evening, but nine in the morning. While Demba is dying, he seems to experience all the adventures described above in his mind: His eyes were alive. His eyes wandered restlessly through the streets of the city, wandered over gardens and squares, plunged into the roaring confusion of existence ... In his fatal fall, the handcuffs opened and he is dying free.
It remains unclear whether Demba had a fatal accident on the run from the police in the morning and whether the entire novel merely depicts the vision of a dying man. This indifference was consciously constructed by Perutz by building an inextricable tension between the narrative and the narrated: If Demba actually experienced the day described, why is it still nine o'clock in the morning when he dies? If Demba was only hallucinating the day, why is the event being portrayed partly from the perspective of other people?
Others
Perutz devotes the 15th chapter to the description of a game of Bukidomino , a game of chance that was widespread in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century .
The novel was a huge success, was translated into several languages and marked Perutz's breakthrough as a writer. In 1922, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio acquired the film rights; however, it has not been made into a film to this day.
However, the material was implemented several times for the stage, for example in the 1920s by Hans Sturm , in 2010 by the directors Viktorie Knotková and Anna Maria Krassnigg in the Vienna Salon5 or in 2013 by Philip C. Montasser in the House of Small Arts in Munich.
Secondary literature
- Uwe Durst: The perspective-action conflict in Perutz 'novel' Between nine and nine '. In: Sprachkunst. XLII, 2/2011, pp. 301-320.
- Katrin Stepath: Contemporary Concepts . Würzburg 2006, pp. 221-234, ISBN 3-8260-3292-6 (Stepath treats Between Nine and Nine from a narrative-theoretical point of view)