Judith - Verloren in der Zeit Historisch fantastischer Roman (German Edition)

Of course, such older reworkings have become fully assimilated in their own right, even supplanting their sources. Perhaps more importantly, they may be less likely in academic eyes to be seen as theatrical works based on written originals, simply because in an academic context canonical playscripts are more likely to be read and discussed as written objects themselves than as works of theatre; in other words, they have themselves become "real things.

In sharp contrast to the long tradition of dramatic theory stretching back to Aristotle, there is very little theoretical literature about the adaptation of novels to the stage. This seems natural enough, considering the relatively recent development of the modern novel as a prevalent poetic genre—this is not the place to discuss the problems of the Hellenistic novel in antiquity.

However, it must also be remembered that historical texts such as, for example, Plutarch have been used as sources of dramatic adaptations since at least the Renaissance; and, considering both the tendency for premodern historians consciously to fictionalize history and biography, and the technique of most early novelists to configure their fictions as spurious histories or auto biographies, the actual 12 process of adaptation has possibly remained much the same since Shakespeare. At any rate, perhaps because of its early feigned similarity to a historical source, the modern novel was no sooner born than it was reborn on the stage.

This activity may have had a lasting effect on both genres: Voltaire probably intended no such beneficial side-effects, incidentally, since he was "very hard on novels generally," and "unwilling to make exceptions for even the enormously popular works of Richardson"; the novel seems to have had its revenge on Voltaire, however, for Nanine became a favourite at the Comedie between and , more popular than all but one of Voltaire's own tragedies Hynes As well-established as the activity of translating novels to the stage may be, then, it apparently has not yet generated enough theoretical writing to make it entirely respectable.

By comparison, curiously, the adaptation of novels to film has generated a considerable amount of theoretical consideration, especially in the last two decades. The dearth of corresponding theory on the theatre is puzzling; it may be that the cinema is so young a genre that it is not expected always to generate its own texts. Only recently, at any rate, as the number of such adaptations has apparently increased in the last century or perhaps because our sensibilities have become increasingly more finely tuned to issues of intellectual property, copyright, translation, adaptation and its near-relative, plagiarism , have theorists turned from the examination of particular adaptations to general statements about the art of adaptation itself.

Roger Mirza's analysis of a stage version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba Nobody Writes to the Colonel , produced in Montevideo in Mirza's article serves my purpose because it describes the movement from the original narrative text NT through the dramatic text DT—the playscript to the performance text PT—the production as mise en scene ; I have augmented Mirza's observations particular to El coronel with examples from other adaptations, which also serve to give an idea of how common adaptations have been, especially in the last century, and how many notable names are among both the original authors and the theatrical adapters.

From Narrative Text to Dramatic Text In the movement from narrative text to dramatic text, Mirza observes, the "mode of presentation" changes from diegesis to mimesis, the diegetic narrative rewritten as dialogue and stage directions. This phase of the process is no mechanical conversion, but rather: Sino fundamentalmente de una reescritura que implicara una transcodificacion, aunque siempre dentro de mismo sistema linguistico, capaz de generar las condiciones de una nueva production de sentido, de acuerdo a las reglas del genero dramatico, es decir, de crear lo que Fernando de Toro llama las 'matrices de representatividad o teatralidad, que 14 This "process of recodification" is thus shaped by the general conventions of theatre which conform to the expectations of the intended audience; however Mirza claims of El coronel , because the work originates in a narrative source, the conventions of narrative prose, while subsumed by adaptation, remain perceivable at moments as "traces of the previous narrative text.

Some adaptations try to show no sign of their source; many contemporary adapters, however, prefer to "maintain the narrative voice, substituting storytellers for characters," or even staging the action in a progression from left to right, mimicking the act of reading Miller ; the problem of the narrator in Kafka will be mentioned in the following section.

At the same time, this recodification is completely subservient to the particular requirements of the final mise en scene or PT which change with the specific sociopolitical context of the production Mirza To these elements Mirza also adds the following: La construction de esa matriz que tiene como linico objetivo en este caso, al texto espectacular, ofrece algunas particularidades la desaparicion del narrador, Dyiachin allowed 20th-century Moscow and first-century Jerusalem to occupy the same space, extending the theme of the novel by "introducing] the audience into an aesthetic universe concerned with permanent verities beyond time" Rzhevsky However, naturalistic productions have also been attempted, in which a single location or a small number of locations from the novel are reproduced and all action transposed to these locations or described as off-stage.

Thus, for example, Henry James's novella The Aspem Papers is set in and around a Venetian palazzo, with a strong thematic opposition between inside and outside; but in Michael Redgraves's adaptation, the entire action takes place in the palazzo's parlour, which "becomes itself the dynamic locus of the conflict, the only place in which the opposed semantic areas of inside and outside meet. This occurs by means of a continual tension between represented and implied space" Mochi Orson Welles cannily solved the seemingly insuperable problem of staging Melville's Moby-Dick by presenting it as a rehearsal of an adaptation by a turn-of-the-century actors' troupe, allowing him to set the play "naturalistically" in an old theatre, though the play itself, now called Moby Dick Rehearsed, was in blank verse and staged in pseudo-Brechtian style Maack Nel dramma invece, questa sorta di 'zona franca' che e il salone, diviene esso stesso il luogo dinamico del conflitto, la soglia su cui si scontrano le aree semantiche contrapposte del fuori e del dentro.

Cio awiene mediante una continua tensione tra spazio rappresentato e spazio alluso. Not only is it more logical aesthetically to reduce the number of minor characters and concentrate on those who are most important to the plot and theme, but it is also uneconomical to hire a large number of actors to play small parts—even if those parts are "doubled," that is, one actor playing two or more roles. Henry Bataille's and Michael Morton's version of Tolstoi's lengthy novel Resurrection reduced the book's named characters by two-thirds and its locations to six, in the process replacing Tolstoi's philosophy with stereotyped Russian local colour which drew audiences more effectively; Cutshall This is often a by-product of the necessary abridgement 8 "La concentration de la action en pocos personajes centrales.

Sheridan, adapting Robinson Crusoe as a pantomime in , added Pantaloon and Pierot the English spelling , and in the course of the action transformed Man Friday into Harlequin, who took over the second act to pursue his Colombine McVeagh In this century, D. The Destruction of Europe by Mikhail Podgaetsky et al. These may or may not have their inspiration in the original novel. Jacques Copeau's and Jean Croue's version of Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov takes the fourth of its five acts to "expand events which occupy only a dozen pages in the novel In adapting Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby for George Cukor's production, Owen Davis concocts a prologue with no counterpart in the novel, in which Gatsby romances Daisy 1 0 "La creation de escenas nuevas.

L'importance donnee a cet episode, dans la piece, peut s'expliquer par l'intention de Copeau de souligner le caractere tragique de la situation de [Dmitri et Grouchenka] " 18 in , thus bringing Gatsby on as soon as possible; Davis also extensively simplifies the novel's chronology, combining all of Gatsby's parties into one, for example, and giving Nick, diminished from narrative voice of the novel to a "minor player," scenes of pure exposition in conversation with his "elderly housekeeper, Mrs.

Morton"—herself Davis's creation Morsberger , It is also true, however, that even supposedly "naturalistic" theatre routinely telescopes and foreshadows events far beyond the possibility of the real world or of the novel, and can juxtapose parallel scenes quite easily by stationing two groups of speakers at opposite ends of a comfortably-appointed drawing room. The reduction of time in general is usually necessary in both naturalistic and non-naturalistic adaptations: Y la reduction del tiempo ficticio a periodos mas breves, como el final de la obra que lleva dos dias en la novela y que en el TD se resuelve en los minutos que demoran en leerse pronunciarse en el TE las frases de la ultima escena.

Thus in Copeau's and Croue's Brothers Karamazov, "while the novel's narrator [in two pages] describes Ivan's mixed feelings toward Smerdiakov, the scenic adaptation manages to express the same feelings [in two lines] with a few indications of movement and gesture: From Dramatic Text to Performance Text The second phase of the adaptation process is not so easily described in detail. The mise en scene itself involves, as its name implies, putting the work composed thus far into a real physical space, breaking the DT which is still a purely linguistic construct into the many codes of the PT.

Because these individuals move and interact in "concrete situations," constantly making interdependent decisions, the PT can change enormously through the rehearsal process and continues to change in smaller ways during the production run Mirza mentions only changes up to the actual production, but any production of more than one performance undergoes continual change until closing.

Many often I would say: Thus the Regiebuch "does not constitute a 'text' at the same level as the DT or the PT" Mirza ; in addition, it is usually the DT, and not the Regiebuch, which is handed on for subsequent productions, with notable exceptions, such as the Berliner Ensemble. Obviously, the complexity of the performance text, with its multiplicity of codes and essentially collaborative nature, forces Mirza and me to fall back on semiotic generalities if there is no specific text under discussion.

Beyond these generalities, then, examples will have to wait for the individual chapters of the body of the dissertation. Before moving on to the adaptations, however, I will briefly deal with their source. Translation by Edwin and Willa Muir; the shortcomings of the Muirs' translation have often been enumerated, but their version remains the one most likely to be recognized by an English speaker.

Once we accept these two statements, however unlikely they may be, as true, the events of their respective stories follow as inevitable—or at least, so Kafka convinces us. For many text-oriented readers and critics, then, these words naturally become more than a token of Kafka's narrative presence: The existence of the word kafkaesque is itself an indicator of the degree of recognition which is afforded Kafka, or rather, a well-established image of Kafka.

The validity of this image is now contested: Milan Kundera, for one, has eloquently argued that Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, constructed a posthumous Kafka, a saintly, almost messianic religious thinker whose works, letters and life are to be interpreted spiritually and outside of all historical or literary context.

This pseudo-Kafka, Kundera argues, and the self-propagating system of exegesis of his image which Kundera condemns as "Kafkology," serve as a "castrating shadow" obscuring the real novelist, Franz Kafka of Prague, and his achievements Kundera 5. Though Kundera and Mairowitz exaggerate their case somewhat for polemic purposes, they do accurately describe the success of Brod and the first generations of Kafka criticism in creating and disseminating a popular image of Kafka as a largely esoteric writer whose works are difficult 22 and depressing, and can only be decoded by the expert.

Befitting the view of Kafka's work as a form of spiritual dispensation, "Kafkology" is both personal—seeing Kafka's novels as allegories, whether religious or "atheistic, psychoanalytic, existentialist, Marxist[,] Despite this multiplicity of competing interpretations, which Steiner decries as "cancerous" Steiner vii , the adjective kqfkaesque has filtered down to general usage, "irrevocably tied to fantasies of doom and gloom, ignoring the intricate Jewish joke that weaves itself through the bulk of Kafka's work" Mairowitz and Crumb 5.

Theatrical critic Martin Esslin defines the kafkaesque atmosphere thus: Modern theatre's interest in portraying this atmosphere is understandable; and since the some say unnatural grammatical rigour of Kafka's writing and the minuteness of his description contribute to assemble clear and striking verbal pictures, as Esslin writes, "the directness of his narrative prose, the concrete clarity of its images and its mystery and tension, have proved a constant temptation to adapters who felt that it was ideal material for the stage" Critics have certainly often agreed with these adapters: Jan Kott, for example, was inspired by the Barrault-Gide version of to write, "I was immediately struck by its 'theatricality.

Even Kafka's friend and posthumous editor Max Brod recognized—here apropos of The Castle, which Brod himself adapted for the stage in —that 23 "Kafka's genius as a dramatist appears in the tight and sharply drawn structure of each scene. Every word in the dialogue 'comes off" from the programme for the Berlin production of The Castle; quoted in Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox We have already seen Adorno's statement that "for works of art which deserve the name, the medium is not a matter of indifference.

Nonetheless, as we have also seen, Adorno found the dramatic form unsuitable for Kafka's works because he believed that "[d]rama is possible only in so far as freedom—even in its painful birth-pangs—is visible; all other action is futile. Die Figuren Kafkas sind von einer Fliegenklatsche getroffen, ehe sie nur sich regen; wer sie als Helden auf die tragische Biihne schleppt, verhohnt sie blofi" 24 that Adorno refers to the tragic stage, as if no other dramatic form were even conceivable; the fact that the adaptations described here often emphasize the comic aspects of Kafka's narrative text also antagonizes critics who consider comedy, in the words of Yvor Winters, "a minor form" quoted in Barish, In Politzer's view, this sentence alone should have been enough to dissuade Brod from attempting theatrical adaptation: If content and structure are inseparable in Kafka's novels and if the structure he chose for them is epical, then this structure cannot be dramatic at the same time.

If Kafka's epical language is unique in its transparency, then it will not simultaneously "come off as dialogue on the stage, since the law of genuine dramatic speech requires first and foremost unequivocal precision. That Brod condoned the dramatization of Kafka's works and actively participated in this enterprise cannot be called a misreading. It is a falsification. Parable and Paradox 19 Politzer's attack here, however, is based firmly in an idea of a "law of genuine dramatic speech" which might well reduce to silence many contemporary playwrights—among them, for example, Harold Pinter—and in an obstinate, almost petulant, refusal to grant that adaptation can ever Adorno, Prismen Wenn Kafkas Sprache 'ins Transzendente weist', dann kann sie nicht zu gleicher Zeit als Buhnendialog 'sitzen', denn auf der Buhne sitzt nur, was im Sinn des Dramatischen eindeutig oder, mit Brods Worten, 'knapp und scharf ist.

Despite such outcries as Politzer's, however, there is really no physical or formal barrier to the adaptation of Kafka's text to the stage; in the balance against such critics as Adorno and Politzer are more than fifty recorded theatrical versions of The Trial Klinger counted "a round half-hundred" up to ; It is true that there are gaps in The Trial where chapters remain unfinished; many extant fragments were never incorporated into the novel; and the order of the chapters, except for the obvious beginning and end, has been disputed—as we shall see shortly.

Even in this form, however, the novel seems to lack very little. The critical consensus, indeed, is that the plot could be almost infinitely extended, since each episode ends with K. The book's lacunae cease to be a deficiency; it is, in a way, not only unfinished but unfinishable. Yet there is a definite beginning, middle and end: Nor do the play's events of themselves defy theatrical representation.

In fact, Evelyn Torton Beck, in her book Kafka and the Yiddish Theatre, claims that several major plot elements of The Trial—the unexpected arrest, for example—can be traced to Yiddish melodramas Beck As for the inevitable abridgement that takes place when a novel is translated into a play: Structurally an adapter's dream; practically, an 26 adapter's nightmare. Because if the essence of Kafka lies in his words alone, the theatre has a problem: This narrative presence, central to fiction, is one of those "advantages" of the novel described by Jager in his review of Berkoff s Trial.

As Mirza points out, no such presence exists in the theatre; though its form may be aped by a chorus or interlocutor, we in the audience remain outside that figure, as we are outside all the characters on stage. The prospective adapter for the stage has to decide, at the very beginning of his or her labour, whether or not these words can be dispensed with. As it happens, of the adaptations dealt with in this dissertation, only one ironically, Berkoff s retains these words, in the mouth of a chorus; and they are postponed to the end of a lengthy introductory section Berkoff, Trial Sally Clark's version reduces them to the first stage direction: The critic who equates this narrative presence with the kafkaesque is quite simply unable to grant the validity of theatrical adaptation.

The element lost onstage, in this view, is Kafka himself; or at least, the intensive yet problematic subjective viewpoint from which Kafka writes in all his work. In The Trial, for example, it seems that we share Joseph K. It is virtually impossible to tell when an outside narrator might be speaking O'Neill Thus Kafka's grammatical clarity is offset by an atmosphere of disorientation, produced primarily through specific syntactic strategies, as Leigh Hafrey explains: Whereas in his texts it is usually difficult to say clearly to what extent the description reflects the attitude, feelings and thoughts of the protagonist or is an authorial narration though the former usually prevails , a Japanese translator can normally only express one or the other, and not the combination of both that is so characteristic of many of Kafka's texts.

I would suggest, however, that in this regard, the theatrical adapter may well have the advantage over the hapless Japanese translator, since the theatre has the option of using non-verbal means to convey this very difficulty—if, in theatrical terms, it is a difficulty. In general, it is often not the absence, but rather the presence of a authoritative voice which causes problems for adapters: In fact, the external yet limited narrative sensibility so common in Kafka may be perfectly served by the theatre, where a "privileged point of view cannot exist, other than that of the spectator determined, obviously, by 28 the theatrical text in the broad sense , and this is circumscribed by the scenic space" Mochi Beck, in her study Kafka and the Yiddish Theatre, further argues that exposure to theatrical rhetorical strategies and structures marked Kafka's mature work indelibly ; although she concentrates on the inspiration of the Yiddish theatre, Kafka was a theatregoer and a reader of wide interests, who also admired Goethe and Schiller, Strindberg, and Hofmannsthal.

Walter Benjamin asserts that, like Hofmannsthal and before Hofmannsthal, Calderon , Kafka uses the idea of the theatrum mundi; only in Kafka this idea is all-pervasive: Die immense Wichtigkeit des 'Zuschauens' in Kafkas Texten, sowohl die spezifische Schreibweise als Zuschauender, wodurch auch der Leser in die Zuschauerrolle versetzt wird, als auch die zahlreichen Personen, die im Text als Beobachter und Zuschauer charakterisiert sind, konnte in dem Interesse Kafkas an der 'theatralen Situation' ihre Erklarung finden.

And it is from the very beginnings of theatre that critics have found influences in Kafka's writings. Lewis Leadbeater, for example, sees in Kafka's 'breakthrough' story "The Judgement" "Das Urteil" traces not of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, as might be expected, but rather of Euripides' Hippolytus, and he analyzes the story in the dramatic terms of hamartia and ate that is, ordinary "sin" and "sin caused by divinely-sent recklessness"; Meanwhile, the Renaissance Italian commedia dell'arte is seen as a powerful influence on modernity in general by Martin Green and John Swan, but they see concrete "commedic" signs, as they call them, in the author Kafka's very physical appearance, as well as in the conclusion of The Trial, "one of the most brilliant and moving pieces of commedia fiction we have" In fact, Gerd Jager's opinion notwithstanding, critics have found The Trial to be a hotbed of theatrical elements.

The novel is, itself, "Joseph K.

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If the accused is blind, the public is clairvoyant" Ramos Mark Anderson, in 2 2 "Como en la tragedia clasica, el coro sabe mas que el heroe. Si el acusado es ciego, el publico es clarividente. Kafka reacts against these theories by creating the equally externalized idea of "the attractiveness of the accused" In the text, however, this grotesque theatricality results in dilution on the one hand and, paradoxically, in cruelty on the other" Even the hand gestures used by the characters are of thematic importance; Philip Grundlehner has found over a hundred examples in the book to demonstrate that hands "function insidiously to provoke, seduce and deceive Kafka's Josef K.

Grundlehner explicitly designates this use of gesture as "theater in its most elementary of forms, for it is inarticulate and presented mimetically to suggest its universal significance" , and proposes that it "enhance[s] 2 3 "Lo grotesco se intercambia con el horror en toda la novela. El acuchillamiento produce un efecto teatral: En el texto, sin embargo, esta teatralidad grotesca logra un resultado de atenuacion, por un lado, y paradojicamente de crueldad, por el otro.

When The Trial is read in this manner, then Gerd Jager's complaint immediately loses its validity, for to the claim that you "can throw Kafka's Trial open anywhere you like to prove that it isn't suited to be the basis for a theatrical event," the most fitting reply is, in the words of Jorg W. Gronius, "The thrown-open book is, as it were, the opened stage" quoted in Kiefer, Indeed, as Elisabeth Kiefer writes, those adaptations "which translate Kafka's radical use of language into a radical theatrical or cinematic experiment are preferable to those which collapse into cliches such as 'kafkaesque' or 'expressionistic'" From that time to the present, Kafka's general influence has been both evident and acknowledged in the work of playwrights such as Gide, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and Vaclav Havel 23; ; My limited ambition, however, is to deal only with a specific manifestation of Kafka's influence on the theatre: These adaptations have been chosen according to three main criteria: I will examine, in the following chapters, why and how the adapters I have chosen use Kafka, under the guise of understanding him, to their own ideological and artistic ends.

In so doing, they simultaneously mediate Kafka and use him as a medium for their own messages about their contemporary historical, cultural and geographical situations. Oddly, the arrest does not prevent K. He visits his neighbour Fraulein Biirstner, both to solicit her help and to initiate a relationship with her, but her response is diffident. He returns a week later to find that there is no session. In the meantime, K. In a storage room at the bank, K. Afraid that his superiors will discover that he is accused, he leaves the warders to their fate.

At last, one of his clients gives him the name of the court painter, Titorelli. However, at the painter's stuffy loft, K. Arriving at the local cathedral to show an Italian client around, K. Finally, a year after his arrest, K. He goes with them to a deserted spot where they lay him down and kill him with a kitchen knife. The novel unfolds in ten chapters, some of which are further divided into titled sections. The novel's German title, Der Prozefi, is a pun: The processual aspect of the narrative is reflected in the episodic form of the plot: This structure constitutes the text which is the object of the adaptations in question here, and which has often been so hotly defended from the encroachment of the theatre.

Ironically, however, this text is itself contested as a site of meaning. Kafka left his novel unfinished and disordered and moved on to other work; only a decade later, after his death, were the notebooks containing his manuscript gathered together and edited into publishable form by Max Brod. The chapters were not composed by Kafka in chronological order, nor did he necessarily finish one before commencing work on another, leaving completed and uncompleted chapters scattered over several notebooks. Brod ordered the finished sections as he thought fit for the first edition of ; in later editions he added as an appendix the unfinished chapters and variants of sections from the finished work.

• !
• !
• .
• ;
• .
• ?
• .

Table 1 shows the structure given by Brod to The Trial, as solidified in the third edition , with numbered chapters, titled sections, and unfinished chapters in the appendix. The relative sizes of sections are also given in the form of number of pages per section. Here, for example, upper-case letters represent the finished chapters and lower-case letters represent the fragments as arranged in Brod'sappendix: Considering the tendency of adapters to rearrange the sequence of events when moving from narrative text to dramatic text, it is important to draw attention to the fact that Brod's arrangement of the chapters has become increasingly controversial.

As early as , Dutch scholar Hermann Uyttersprot drew attention to the fact that in Brod's edition, the seasons of the year occur in the wrong order. Brod's counterargument was that in his novel, Kafka simply had no interest in the natural progression of seasons. Other critics took Brod's part with variations of this argument see for example Gunvaldsen ; but the controversy was not stilled, and Uyttersprot's suggestions for re-ordering the chapters have been taken up and elaborated by successors. Most recently, Christian Eschweiler has put forward a division of the novel into nineteen chapters, integrating not only the fragments in Brod's appendix but also the separately published story " A Dream" "Ein Traum"; long recognized as part of The Trial but never integrated into it, and represented here by an asterisk as follows: Eschweiler's interpretation of the novel depends, of course, on the presumption that all the surviving chapters and fragments would have been used in Kafka's final version—as debatable a presumption as the claim that Kafka took no interest in the seasons.

Eschweiler's ordering, however, has been considered viable enough that at least one introduction to the primary and secondary literature concerning Kafka recommends it as an improvement on Brod's edition Dietz The preparation of a full critical edition of The Trial by Malcolm Pasley was expected, i f not to confirm Eschweiler's hypothesis, at least to place Brod's edition in serious question Disappointment with Pasley's edition ran high enough that a rival edition, reproducing the original manuscript as left by Kafka, has been launched by K.

Wolff and Stroemfeld Verlag Whitney The question therefore remains very much open whether the most widely disseminated version of The Trial conforms to Kafka's vision of the text, or whether it has been corrupted—perhaps irretrievably—by Brod and his successors. This controversy has had virtually no effect on a general readership, especially the wide audience who can read Kafka only in translation. In , for example, two years after Pasley's edition, the Schocken republication of the Muirs' English translation from Brod's original still proudly bears the subtitle "The Definitive Edition"—despite its own introduction, in which George Steiner acknowledges that the ordering of chapters is disputed, dismisses Brod's recension as "amateurish and The competing translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller Picador, , makes up for not being "Definitive" by announcing on its back cover that it "adheres with scrupulous fidelity to the tone and the style of the original German.

Stern proclaims off-handedly 38 that although disputed, "the order hardly matters" The fact that these disputes have taken place mainly in the rarified reaches of Germanic literary scholarship, and are otherwise relegated to cursory mention at most, does not lessen the irony of their implications for critical approaches which seek to defend Kafka's text from theatrical adaptation on the grounds of a sacrosanct original text.

Finally, two brief comments about nomenclature and translation: I have referred to the novel by its English title, The Trial, in this introduction. However, I want to minimize the confusion that would result from continually referring to Kafka's Trial, Gide's and Barrault's Trial, Weiss's Trial, and so on. Therefore, in the succeeding pages each work will be referred to by the title it bears in its original language; the characters' names will also vary slightly accordingly.

Steven Berkoffs adaptation is The Trial Kafka's original novel will consistently be Der Procefi, in order to prevent confusion with Weiss's adaptation, Der Prozefi—although my references are not to Pasley's recent edition, since the adapters under discussion had no access to it. Unless otherwise specified, all references to "Kafka" 39 refer to Max Brod's third edition: In this introduction, the original texts for all translated citations have been provided as footnotes, because much of the material has been unfamiliar to English readers but important to my theoretical position.

In subsequent chapters, however, footnoted original text will only be provided for my translations of citations from works not available in English, or when an available published translation is imprecise or at variance with the original. While in a social context it both fed off and spoke to experiences which seemed to many people to have been foretold by Kafka himself, in terms of theatre history it is considered a major influence on what became known as the Theatre of the Absurd. It is also the product of not one, but two major talents, one a prominent litterateur, the other a great theatrical figure.

As a result, the Barrault-Gide adaptation has attracted a great deal of critical attention, increased by the relatively long time period since Le Proces was produced. I attempt here to synthesize this huge amount of documentation into a coherent interpretation of several aspects of the production in its social and historical context, in the process often taking issue with the conclusions of previous critics. It was Gide's first full-length play not based on mythical or biblical sources—his most prolific period as a playwright had fallen long before, between and —and Jouvet had found Robert an unfortunate mixture of two plays, one well-written in the grand style, the other socially conscious and botched Barrault also rejected Gide's play, telling him forthrightly that it was "pretty weak, not worthy of him.

His answer was a phrase which has been a lesson to me: While Jouvet's rejection of Robert seems to have soured his friendship with Gide Claude , Barrault's had the opposite effect: This awkward beginning eventually led to the adaptation of Kafka's Procefi. Although Gide had read Der Procefi, and been impressed by it, in Claude , the idea of adapting the novel for the stage first occurred to Barrault, who recalls that in , he and Andre Masson had agreed that if war came, "everything would be bound to change, and that in any case, whatever the camps might be, we would be recognized by none of them.

Neither by the right nor by the left: Only a year later, however, Barrault—now a pensionnaire associate member at the Comedie-Francaise—realized that "there was no question now of going on working at Kafka's The Trial" France was occupied, and the German Propaganda Office was "purifying" French publishers in accordance with the Nazi German model. In September , one day after French Jews were ordered to carry identity cards, the first "Otto list" was published, banning Jewish and "anti-German" authors and more than 2, titles.

A blanket ban was also imposed on all Jewish authors, excluding scientific works, but including biographies of Jews by "Aryan" writers Scheler Kafka and his works were thus proscribed. This "purification" escalated, and in January of , Barrault saw the number of his 42 colleagues diminished: Members of ambiguous background, like the Rumanian Marie Ventura, had to defend themselves Ventura did so by pointing to her homeland's proud tradition of "virulent anti-Semitism"; Brown It was also in the spring of that Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud met up with Gide in Marseille.

When Paris was declared an open city Gide, like many others, had fled to the unoccupied zone, where, in May of , he records reading Der Procefi again: I reread Kafka's Trial with even greater admiration, if possible, than when I discovered this famous book. His book defies all rational explanation; the realism of his images ceaselessly overlaps the imaginary, and I could not say which I admire more: There is much to learn here. The anguish which this book breathes is at times almost intolerable, so that one ceaselessly tells oneself: Son livre echappe a toute explication rationnelle; le realisme de ses peintures empiete sans cesse sur l'imaginaire, et je ne saurais dire ce que j' y admire le plus: II y a la beaucoup a apprendre.

The openly expressed homophobia of the Nazis and the collaborators was a strong reminder of Gide's vulnerability. The unoccupied zone was no more convivial, and when Barrault and Renaud met him in Marseille, Gide was dealing with the Vichy bureaucracy, getting the necessary visas to leave for Tunisia. At this meeting, Barrault apparently proposed not only that Gide help him adapt Kafka, but also that Gide complete a translation of Hamlet he had started twenty years before.

The mere presence of Barrault and Renaud encouraged Gide, who was willing to start on Hamlet almost immediately. By 5 May, however, when he left Marseille, the endless paperwork had returned Gide's thoughts to Kafka: Without letup, I dream of The Trial. Feeling of not yet being 'in order. That would make an admirable story. Gide finished his translation on 1 September In the meantime, the second "Otto List" of July had proscribed his books on the Soviet Union, for obvious reasons Loiseaux Under these circumstances, Gide felt safer in Tunis, despite being much nearer the actual combat of the North African campaign.

At their meeting, Barrault had also spoken of his desire to work with Jean-Paul Sartre. Gide, who admired Sartre, later suggested that Barrault and Sartre adapt Der Procefi, modestly adding that he himself was still willing: Je songe sans cesse au Proces. Sentiment de ne pas encore 'etre en regie. De quoi construire un conte admirable.

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By the end of the war, Barrault was a full societaire at the Comedie, with the leverage to pick his projects. As a sign of good faith, he staged Gide's translation of Antony and Cleopatra, revised and completed in Gide happily authorized this production from his self-imposed exile; he wrote to Dorothy Bussy that he would have liked to attend rehearsals, but preferred not to be in Paris even post-liberation: Gide's translation received many good reviews, but Louis Jouvet called it "hardly dramatic" and said, "His text reads well but it can't be spoken" This production nonetheless established Barrault and Gide as a collaborative team, and in the summer of Barrault wrote to Gide, "I would like.

Quel role pour vous! Un mot de vous a ce sujet et je me mettrais au travail. Son texte se lit admirablement, mais ne se peut pas parler. This work occupied the whole of the winter of , interrupted only when Gide was absent from Paris. Meanwhile, in September , de Gaulle had set up a commission to revise the Napoleonic statutes governing the Comedie-Francaise. Barrault and Madeleine Renaud took this opportunity to leave and found their own company, the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. Thus, Barrault chose Gide's Hamlet to open his first independent season at the Theatre Marigny on the Champs-Elysees, combining the role in which he had first had success at the Comedie in with the novelty of a new translation.

When Barrault now raised the issue of adapting Der Procefi again, however, Gide balked: Gide remained doubtful, and Barrault offered to prepare a scenario on his own, which Gide agreed to hear before rejecting the proposal. In preparing his first draft, Barrault simply transposed dialogue wholesale from the novel. This omen fired Gide with enthusiasm beyond Barrault's wildest dreams; and they took up Le Proces in the spring of , while still going through Gide's Hamlet, working together just as closely on the new script The two projects together meant Gide was devoting practically all his time to Barrault Claude It was fortunate for Barrault that Gide was now so enthusiastic, since the members of Barrault's and Gide's circle were not encouraging: It seemed to her a crashing bore.

Roger Martin du Gard, who was Gide's literary 'confessor,' kept ministering friendly discouragement. He thought the Marigny a poor space, Hamlet dull and no good for a French audience because "Parisians don't like ghosts" , Gide unsuited for the theatre, and any play referring to the occupation doomed—this last in reference to Salacrou's Nights of Anger Les Nuits de la Colere , which Barrault was planning to produce; though Barrault, as we shall see, would also use Le Proces to this same end.

When Barrault described his planned adaptation, Jouvet who had never heard of Kafka grew even gloomier: If one day you need help, you've always got your old brother. One last bit of advice: Surrounded by nay-sayers, Barrault saw himself and Gide as co-conspirators: Beforehand, his plans must have looked foolhardy indeed, but this thankless work paid off. Despite Jouvet's forebodings the Hamlet, the Salacrou, and Le Proces were all to be considerable successes for Barrault, contributing greatly 47 to his company's early financial independence The press was uniformly generous in its praise for the translation of Hamlet; the close collaboration with Barrault refined Gide's draft into a simple text which lent itself well to performance, and exposed Gide for the first time to a real sense of theatrical writing Claude The success of this production was not only an auspicious beginning for Barrault's company.

It was on this foundation that Barrault and Gide now devoted themselves full-time to their adaptation of Kafka, proceeding as they had with the Hamlet, going through the text together word by word. The Problem of Authorship Despite this history, since the play first appeared, critics have tended to refer to the playscript of Le Proces as the work of Gide alone.

It is the dissimilarity, the difference that attracts him. Thus, by the time he finally completed his translation of Hamlet in , he was further distant than ever from the Danish prince's manner of feeling. Likewise, his dramatic adaptation of Kafka's Trial in is, even more than testimony to literary admiration, the 48 contribution of an ethic diametrically opposed to his own.

Kuhn, "Metamorphosis" as having a decisive effect on the dramatic text. Armgard Gerbitz occasionally mentions Barrault's contribution for example, 15; ; , but more often falls into the habit of using Gide's name alone. One of the few critics who gives Barrault precedence as adapter is Heinz Politzer, who is also among the most negative critics: Kafka's ever increasing fame produced imitators rather than genuine disciples. The most popular and the most misleading corruption of a Kafka hero was achieved by the French actor Jean-Louis Barrault when, aided by Andre Gide, he dramatized The Trial as a melodrama.

With Barrault the Kafka hero became a withered dancer on the avenues of our sorrow, the charmingly evasive Hamlet of French existentialism after the Second World War. Parable and Paradox Interestingly, Politzer's own German version of this section, published three years later, is more expansive, but pushes Le Proces even further into the background the following translation is deliberately quite literal and therefore clumsy: Certainly, that which grew, as the Kafka hero, into a striking equivalence of existential alienation and metaphysical hope, owes its effect to the attempts at popularization made by those Kafka interpreters who translated the essentially ungraspable nature of his works into the language of reason or its more or less tangible categories.

What nowadays passes as "kafkaesque" or as the Kafka hero is little more than the slippery and slick reflection of a fragmentary legacy condemned by its own author to annihilation—a ghost bent over a misunderstanding. The Kafka 3 3 "D'ailleurs Gide, dans sa maturite surtout, est souvent seduit par des formes d'esprit contraires a la sienne. C'est la dissemblance, la difference qui l'aiguillonne. Ainsi, lorsqu'en il acheve sa traduction de Hamlet, il est plus eloigne que jamais de la maniere de sentir du prince danois.

De meme son adaptation a la scene du Proces de Kafka, en , est, plus encore que le temoignage d'une admiration litteraire, l'apport d'une ethique diametralement opposee a la sienne. Mouton le disait l'autre jour, je crois, Gide n'avait guere le sens de l'absurde. Alberes and Pierre De Boisdeffre, who find abundant evidence of existentialism in Kafka, presumably without being duped by Barrault's adaptation.

Nor does Politzer make clear exactly what Barrault's Hamlet and his K. It is clear, however, that as Adorno did, Politzer objects to the attempt to give physical form to Kafka's "essentially ungraspable" unfafibar work. The two prevalent strategies at work among these critics would seem to be: Was heute als 'kafkaesk' oder als Kafkascher Held gilt, ist wenig mehr als der gleiBende und glatte Reflex eines fragmentarischen und von seinem Autor selbst zur Vernichtung bestimmten Nachlasses—ein Gespenst, das sich iiber ein MiCverstandnis neigt.

The fact is, however, that neither of these strategies of oversimplification is completely tenable. Barrault described the collaboration with Gide as "dovetailing our respective contributions closely," and acknowledged that Gide helped cut Barrault's original lengthy draft which Barrault calls "le monstre" down to manageable size: His was an extreme strictness, dryness even.

Gide's hand is also presumably evident insofar as the dialogue of the dramatic text is no longer Barrault's simple copying of the novel's dialogue; though the lack of Gide's usual formal and stylized syntax implies that he bowed to Barrault's experience in order to produce a text easily spoken onstage. Likewise, to place all the responsibility for the script on Gide is to ignore the fact that Barrault had intended to adapt Der Procefi since at least It was Barrault who went to great effort to convince Gide to collaborate on the adaptation; and Gide, for his part, was scrupulous in giving credit to Barrault in a preliminary note to the published text although Ira Kuhn claims Gide's motivation was neither fair nor generous; I.

The great advantage of the second strategy, however, is that it allows the critics to maintain 51 that much of the compression and simplification of the narrative text in Le Proces is due to Gide's deep-seated rationalism, completely at odds with Kafka's sensibility Politzer lays a similar charge, though he downplays Gide's role in the collaboration.

As we have seen, however, Gide not only recognized that Der Procefi "defies all rational explanation," but found this admirable Journal , Thus it seems unlikely that Gide would seek systematically to destroy this quality. Ira Kuhn acknowledges that Gide recognized Kafka's irrationality but claims that he could not help himself: In fact, I propose that this compression and simplification is no more than is necessary to the process of adaptation according to Mirza's model, and is as likely to stem from Barrault's dramaturgical instincts as it is from Gide's rationalism.

Politzer's related contention—that Le Proces reflects the influence of French existentialism—is harder to dismiss: Although Gide is not generally considered an existentialist despite the mutual respect between Gide and Sartre , and Barrault's philosophy was always a provisional mixture of superficial influences with a good deal of pragmatism, it is arguably true that by , Kafka's reputation in France was highest among the existentialists and the absurdists, two related intellectual groups in the ascendant during and after the Second World War.

Since , however, when Kafka was first published in France, the author had passed from the hands of the surrealists led by Andre Breton, through those of psychological critics like Denis Saurat and Wladimir Weidle and then to such religiously-oriented commentators following Max 3 6 "Josef K. Kafka so easily became a philosophical football because there was little biographical information about him—Brod's biography did not appear in French translation until Robert —and he seemed to have come literally from nowhere "as a citizen of some 'no-man's-land,' as a lonely man without antecedents, and about whom no one knew for sure in which language he had produced his works.

It is true that existentialists like Sartre at least emphasized Kafka's historically demonstrable religious aspirations—perhaps even overly so, Robert claims—whereas Camus saw Kafka as beyond any faith, "the pure hero of the absurd" Rightly or wrongly, these two groups became the main streams of thought with which Kafka was associated during the Second World War and into the fifties Schmeling Certainly, Le Proces was perceived as an existentialist play by many contemporaries, as for example by Robert 3 7 "Kafka trat als Angehoriger irgendeines "Niemandlandes' hervor, als Einsamer, dem nichts voranging und von dem man nicht einmal genau wufite, in welcher Sprache er sein Werk verfaBt hatte.

Da er scheinbar frei von jeglichen historischen und geographischen Bindungen dastand, wurde er ohne Bedenken adoptiert, ja man mochte fast sagen 'naturalisiert,' derm es war wirklich etwas wie ein Naturalisierungsprozerj, bei dem ein neuer, franzosischer, dem wahren allerdings weit genug entfernter Kafka entstand. It is difficult to see either how Gide and Barrault could have worked altogether outside this interpretation or how they can be blamed for working within it; particularly when the foundation of such an interpretation predates Le Proces—despite Politzer's implication that Barrault and Gide are greatly to blame for it.

The direct influences on Barrault and Gide's adaptation are further complicated, however, by their source. Barrault spoke little German, while Gide's, though fluent when he was a young man, was no longer trustworthy: At this early stage Kafka's champions among the French were the Surrealists, who fastened on the dreamlike quality of Kafka's works Goth Because Kafka's first translators, including Vialatte, came from this group—and because they were poets rather than Germanists—Marthe Robert claims not only that their translations are exotic and heavily flavoured by the stereotyping of Kafka as a fellow surrealist, but also that they are extremely unreliable: Given this possibility, it might seem strange that an adaptation based on Vialatte's translation should be accused of being overly rational.

Nonetheless, the use of Vialatte's translation was fortuitous for the two adapters not that there was as yet another French translation to choose , since it may have been—for their specific 3 9 ". In the course of translation, Vialatte had introduced what Gerbitz calls "visual clarification," changing the punctuation of the original to divide up the "long, rambling sentences used by Kafka," and altering the paragraphs to "visually set Vialatte also inserted speech attributions which were lacking—because unnecessary—in Kafka's text: In its place Vialatte used the French preterite and frequent reiteration of phrases like "the lawyer added" and "said Doctor Huld" Schmeling Kafka hingegen hat diese Kongruenz zwischen der Ausdrucksebene und der Inhaltszene bewufit forciert.

These charges are confusing but not contradictory. The last word on Vialatte's translation is perhaps best left to one of Vialatte's successors, Bernard Lortholary, who retranslated Der Procefi in Alexandre Vialatte's translation not only includes local errors. It is characterized by a global inexactitude due to Vialatte's own talent and to his sensibilities as a writer.

His original works show him in fact as a delicate humorist, always combining a light melancholy with the eccentric, or even a discreet pathos, haloed with disillusioned reverie Nothing is further from the black humour of Kafka, and from his limpid, severe phrasing, than this dreamy humour. Vialatte thus rendered the black with greys, the comical with the bizarre, the theatrical with the psychological. Vialatte himself, incidentally, asked that his name be removed from the adaptation after reading it, because he disagreed with its interpretation of the novel: Elle est characterisee par une inexactitude globale qui tient au talent meme de Vialatte et a sa sensibilite d'ecrivain.

Ses oeuvres originales nous le montrent en effet comme un humoriste delicat, melant toujours au farfelu une melancolie legere, voire un pathetique discret, nimbes de reverie desabusee. Rien de plus etranger que cette humeur songeuse a l'humour noir de Kafka, et a son phrase limpide et dur.

Traduisant Kafka, Vialatte a done rendu le noir par des gris, le cocasse par le bizarre, le theatral par du psychologique. It is also unnecessary to lay the blame if blame it must be for the perceived increase in rationalism and lack of the mysterious in the Barrault-Gide adaptation at the feet either of Alexandre Vialatte's translation or of Gide's failure to appreciate absurdity. Rather, I maintain, the source of most of the changes from the narrative text is Barrault's sense of dramaturgy, coupled with a historical and social background in which there was no need to see the events of Kafka's story as mysterious.

In the next section, I explore that historical background and its possible effect on the adaptation, before moving on to problems of dramatic construction which might also have motivated or necessitated changes. When they lose their apartment in Vancouver, they move into a camper van, just for August, till Astrid finds a job.

When he gets to compete on a national quiz show, Felix is determined to win: The cash prize will bring them a home. Her only friend is a boy in a coma, to whom she tells stories.

Our fight for disability rights -- and why we're not done yet - Judith Heumann

They meet at the post office. Their obsession threatens to tear their lives apart. In the shade of the grocery store, my three mothers shake their heads in unison. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives—but not everyone regularly sees themselves on the pages of a book. What is bothering them? When the six are together, they can express the feelings and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world.

Strangers are always commenting: A cell phone is mistaken for a gun. And shots are fired. After her little sister is taken away, her younger brother disappears. Using forged papers and her fair features, Chaya becomes a courier and travels between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people. Magdalys Roca and her friends from the Colored Orphan Asylum are on a field trip when the Draft Riots break out, and a number of their fellow orphans are kidnapped by an evil magistrate, Richard Riker.

Edmund has fae powers, but lives in secret as a changeling in the World Above. The Childe lives among the fae in the World Below, where being human makes him an oddity at the royal palace, and where his only friend is a wax golem named Whick. When the cruel sorceress Hawthorne takes the throne, the Childe and Edmund need to act. Mikayla is a wrestler. Some people object to having a girl on the team.

Lev is determined to make it to the state championships. Mikayla and Lev work hard together and become friends. But when they face each other, only one of them can win. The word itself means different things—wild? Thirty-three writers, athletes, and artists offer essays, lists, comics, and illustrations that explore their personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and do not talk about mental health. Set in rural Mississippi during the Civil Rights era. A white girl coming of age in a repressive society: Tena was born in in a tiny Mississippi town where the legacy of slavery and racial injustice still permeated every aspect of life.

Her father was one of the richest men in the state; her mother was a regal beauty. The family lived on a sprawling farm and had the only swimming pool in town; Tena was given her first car—a royal blue Camaro—at twelve. Nadine has suddenly skipped a grade and gone to high school without Sara. Sara can feel their friendship slipping away. The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders. Jilly has to learn to be an ally, a sister, and a friend, understanding that life works in different ways for different people, and that being open to change can make you change in the best possible ways.

Promising people, who could have contributed much, dying young and dying unnecessarily. Die Menschen, die damals starben, forschten, aktivistisch arbeiteten, waren oft Mitte Bis dahin soll die Krankheit bei niemandem mehr ausbrechen. Tausend oft interessante Details. Wie wurde vor 35 Jahren in Manhattan gesprochen, getanzt, gestritten?

Ikonografie, die oft aufs Fremde und Vergangene setzt. Das war eine ganz eigene Welt, zu einer ganz anderen Zeit. Das ist weit weg. Zeitlicher Abstand hilft beim Analysieren. Ein deutsches Pendant fehlt schmerzlich. Erst, als das Buch in Druck ging, sah er sich bereit, den eigenen Status zu erfragen. Aids — da war ich so jung und lebenshungrig — so von wegen: Aber eigentlich ging es eben nur darum, dass die Seuche nicht von der Randgruppe in die Mehrheitsgesellschaft dringt.

Es ist die Natur, die sich wehrt. Kramer ist auch in B und D eine wichtige Figur. Baths posted signs reading: The mean period was 5. It appeared that some cases would take more than 11 years to incubate; although some people would come down with AIDS in as little as six months.

Could AIDS be spread through coughing? Da wurde Musik gemacht und gelacht — das war eine neue Kultur.

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Vorher gab es nur streng geregelte Besuchszeiten und Blumenvasen. Dieser Druck, dieses Schweigen. All diese deformierten, traumatisierten Menschen. Ich denke, Aids hat mich rund zehn Jahre meines Lebens gekostet. This assured that not only would few gay leaders support moving against the baths, but that the gay papers would unanimously support their advertisers. Potential bathhouse closure was not even to be discussed.

Man konnte sie nicht einfach im Drogeriemarkt kaufen. Auch kein Gleitgel, das machten die Leute damals selbst. Das war einfach ein Teil der Libertinage, die Geschlechtskrankheiten. Ob man Feigwarzen hatte oder Syphilis, das wurde immer ganz offen kommuniziert. Das war in meiner Erinnerung ein verantwortungsbewusster Hedonismus. Ist halt Rosa von Praunheim. Eine ferne Zeit, deren Mechanismen ich nicht mehr verstehe. Geht es um eine Pille?

Geht es darum, dass die BRD wie eine Kapsel funktionierte?

UBC Theses and Dissertations

Das beantwortet das Buch nicht im Detail. Ich kann damit leben. Die wenigen Patienten waren einer diskriminierenden Behandlung ausgesetzt, zum Teil wurden sie regelrecht als Versuchskaninchen benutzt. Georg Zipp empfahl mir im Juni via Twitter:. Ihre Zeichnungen sind oft unterkomplex, ZU schlicht. Die Figuren wirken durch ihre Playmobil-artigen Gesichter z. Ich mag, in zwei Stunden, sehr konzentriert, diese Texturen vermittelt zu kriegen. Ein kleineres Problem nur, wie gesagt: From the start, it had made people uncomfortable, whether they were in government or media, in public health or prominent universities.

AIDS was about homosexuals and anal intercourse, and all kinds of things that were just plain embarrassing. It was science as usual, and the Journal of the American Medical Association would just have to wait until the research was published in six months. Most other stars, including many who had built their careers on their gay followings, were not inclined to get involved with a disease that was not… fashionable.

Und dass er an Krebs gestorben sei. Das Risiko, dass einer quatscht, ist ihnen zu hoch. Another 22 percent were men in their twenties. In the same period, The New York Times ran stories, only 7 of which were on page one. From mid on, the coverage of the Chronice focused on public policy aspects of the epidemic, while the Times covered AIDS almost exclusively as a medical event, with little emphasis on social impact or policy.

Es ging nun vor allem darum, Gesundheit darzustellen. Strafbar ist bereits der Versuch. Zwei abgeschlossene Geschichten mit je ca. Gallimard, und Deutsch bei Reprodukt, und Das Paar stellt Mildreds Leben auf den Kopf. Nicht nur ist man dem Alkohol zugeneigt, es werden Dinge beim Namen genannt, die eine Lady lieber verschweigt. Vor allem aber wird Mildred wiederholt in Ehezwiste hineingezogen. Zwei Teenager sehnen sich nach Abenteuern. Ich las und mochte Band 1.

So nannte das Heinrich, der Mann, mit dem Martha fast vierzig Jahre lang zusammenlebte. Oder ist es vielmehr Martha, die sich Martina ausgesucht hat? Bis das Sterben auch Franks Familie heimsucht. Jahrelang versuchen sie, mit dem, was geschehen ist, zurechtzukommen. Jetzt haben die Frauen einer abgeschieden lebenden [Mennoniten-]Gemeinschaft die Gelegenheit, alles anders zu machen.

Und so ergreifen sie das Wort. Sollen sie bleiben oder gehen? Eine kluge Aktualisierung der Gedanken Simone de Beauvoirs. Sie lassen sich gegen den Willen ihrer Eltern trauen. Doch das Leben meint es gut mit ihnen, Annie findet neue Freunde, Carl bessere Nebenjobs, Annie besucht heimlich Literaturseminare und hat erste kleine Erfolge als Schriftstellerin.

College in North Dakota: Abseits der Matte gelingt ihm nichts: Sein einziger Freund ist auf dem Sprung, seine Freundin eine Ablenkung, die er sich nicht erlauben kann. Als eine Verletzung ihn zu einer Winterpause zwingt, ringt er alleine mit sich und seinen Traumata. Jaxie Clackton, 15, hat Angst, nach Hause zu gehen, seit seine Mutter gestorben ist. Tim Winton schrieb mein Lieblingsbuch Mike will mit seinem Besuch endlich die japanische Verwandschaft kennenlernen und seine Trauer teilen.

Band 1 ist holprig und wirkt konstruiert. Erst nach Band 2 wusste ich: Ich will das weiter lesen. Friedrich, ein stiller junger Mann vom Genfer See, kommt nach Berlin. In einer Kunstschule trifft er Kristin. Sie nimmt ihn mit in die geheimen Jazzclubs, trinkt Kognak mit ihm und gibt ihm seinen ersten Kuss.

Die Gestapo hat sie enttarnt und zwingt sie zu einem unmenschlichen Pakt: Wird sie, um ihre Familie zu retten, untergetauchte Juden denunzieren? Und bei alldem die wiederkehrende Erfahrung: Almuts Welt bricht verliert ihr Oben und Unten. Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen lagern sich wie Sedimente ab. Weggehen, Ankommen oder Bleiben? Jener Stadt entgegen, in der er aufgewachsen ist. Eine traumatisierte Generation, zwanzig Jahre nach dem Bombardement von Belgrad.

Kraus begleitet Schwerkranke in den letzten Tagen ihres Lebens. Als Sudetendeutscher wurde er nach dem Krieg aus der Tschechoslowakei vertrieben. Denn nicht nur Kraus, auch Winterberg verbirgt ein Geheimnis. Kreuzfahrtschiffe rosten im Sand vor Miami, die Hotels bleiben leer, der Hafenbetrieb ist eingestellt und selbst die Dauerwerbesendungsindustrie liegt am Boden. Taso verliebt sich, gerade als der Widerstand ihn rekrutieren will. Dann verschlechtern sich die Nierenwerte, sodass sie dreimal pro Woche zur Dialyse muss. Ein neues Organ muss her. Bei der Mutter aufgewachsen hat sie zum Vater erst seit Kurzem vorsichtigen Kontakt.

Im Krankenhaus treffen alle erstmals wieder aufeinander. Sie hat einen Job, der okay ist. Jedes Jahr verbringen sie einen netten Urlaub in Jesolo. Nach dem Urlaub ist Andrea schwanger. Sie nimmt einen Kredit auf, obwohl sie nie einen Kredit aufnehmen wollte; zieht ins Haus ihrer Schwiegereltern, obwohl sie nie mit ihnen unter einem Dach leben wollte.

Diesen Frauen war es vorbehalten, schweigend unsichtbar zu bleiben oder dekorativ im Bild zu stehen. Doch nun sprechen sie — klar und laut, wie eine abgefeuerte Kugel. Folgende Frauen kommen zu Wort: Dinge des Alltags, die er preist und in denen er die Vielfalt und den Reichtum der Welt entdeckt. Tilman will das auf keinen Fall. Einem ganzen Kurt und einem Halbtagskurt. Jana und Kurt haben sich entschieden, dass sie ihr Sorgerecht teilen.

Das Kind pendelt nun wochenweise hin und her. Gedichte, Essays und Kurzprosa aus mehr als zwanzig Jahren. Doch es geht auch ums eigene Schreiben und Lesen, Einsamkeit und Scham. Liss bewirtschaftet allein einen Hof zwischen Weinbergen und Feldern. Kein heimliches Mustern, kein voreiliges Urteilen, keine misstrauischen Fragen.

Aus einer Nacht werden Wochen. Und was danach kommt. Den Sommer, als ich fast ertrank. Ein Wehrmachtssoldat, der Milch mag. Hat Benno etwas mit dem Verschwinden der Eltern zu tun gehabt?