The Maimed E-Book

Hermann Ungar

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 263

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002

Beschreibung

Grotesque and unsettling novel about the irrational fears of an obsessive bank clerk which end inmurder.

Das E-Book The Maimed wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

THE AUTHOR

Hermann Ungar (1893–1929) was a German-speaking Jew from Moravia who was active as a writer in Berlin and Prague in the 1920s. Critics spoke of him in the same breath as Kafka, and he was feted in France after the publication of the translation of The Maimed in 1928.

After the war he was forgotton in Germany, despite praise from individual writers, but the reissue of the French translation in 1987 was again greeted with enthusiastic reviews: “Hermann Ungar is a great writer, unique … No history of literature should ignore his works.”

THE TRANSLATOR

Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. His publications include The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy, Peter Hacks: Drama for a Socialist Society and Austria in the World Bibliographical Series.

Mike Mitchell’s translations include all the novels of Gustav Meyrink, three by Herbert Rosendorfer, The Great Bagarozy by Helmut Krausser and Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen; his latest is Poems and Plays by Oskar Kokoschka.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.

FOREWORD

After the publication of his second novel, Die Klasse (The Class), in 1927, the main Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, called Hermann Ungar ‘the most important writer of the decade’. And that in one of the most hectic decades in German literature when, among the younger generation, figures such as Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, Leo Perutz, Paul Kornfeld, Ernst Weiss, Egon Erwin Kisch were active. Unlike another German-speaking Jewish writer from the region that was to become Czechoslovakia, Franz Kafka, with whom his name is often linked, Ungar was almost completely forgotten in Germany after the Second World War. In France, however, the issue of translations of his two novels and a volume with two short stories in 1987–88 (the stories and The Maimed had already appeared in France in the 1920s) was greeted with enthusiastic reviews and the recognition not only of his importance in the context of German literature between the wars, but of the abiding power of his portrayal of a world in which all the figures seem to be cripples: physical, psychological, emotional and moral cripples.

One critic, Vincent Ostria, declared that the excesses of punk musicians such as Sid Vicious looked ‘small beer’ compared to the extremes possible in literature as demonstrated by Ungar’s novels. Both French and German critics have insisted on seeing in his characters, in which full humanity has been reduced to fear and hatred – often the hatred of their own selves – an adumbration of figures which in 1933 would ‘step out of literary fiction and into reality’.

Hermann Ungar was born in 1893 in the Moravian town of Boskovice, into a wealthy, cultured Jewish family. His father owned a distillery and was mayor of the Jewish community, whose presence in the town went back to the 11th century. Boskovice was entirely Czech-speaking, but the Jewish community – until the end of the First World War the two parts of the town were separate – spoke German. Ungar grew up speaking both languages, but his education at both high school and university was at German institutions.

The routine anti-semitism of some of his German fellow pupils in the high school in Brno awakened an interest in Judaism and the Jewish religion, to which he had been largely indifferent until then. He decided to study Hebrew and Arabic in Berlin and joined the Jewish student corporation modelled on the German duelling fraternities, acting as its president in 1914, although by then he had transferred from Semitic languages to Law.

As with many other artists and writers, the war was an experience which fundamentally changed his outlook. He volunteered in 1914 and served for three years in the artillery before being seriously wounded and invalided out. He resumed his studies, completing his law degree at the (German) University of Prague in 1918. But this was a different Ungar. He abandoned the student fraternities, with their duels and colours, and renounced Zionism, which seemed to him in danger of becoming a new kind of nationalism.

He also seems to have thrown away or destroyed all his early writings, plays full of passion, violence and intrigue. It had always been Ungar’s ambition to be a writer and for a short while he worked in the theatre in Eger/Egra, hoping it would be a milieu conducive to writing, but after a short time took a position in a bank. This led to work for the Czech Export Agency in Berlin and finally, in 1922, a post as commercial attaché at the Czech embassy there. Though the work was not particularly congenial to him, the Czech foreign ministry treated him generously, apparently pleased to encourage a man making a name for himself in German literature. (A press attaché at the embassy was another Czech-German writer, Camill Hoffmann.) In 1928 he was moved to the foreign ministry in Prague; on 10 October 1929 he resigned from his post; on 15 October his second son was born; on 28 October he died of peritonitis.

The works he wrote around the end of the war did not reach the public: a novel has disappeared and a play called Krieg (War) was not published until 1990. Two stories, gathered together under the title Knaben und Mörder (Boys and Murderers) appeared in 1920. The Maimed was published in 1923, to a reaction of horrified admiration, and his second novel, Die Klasse, in 1927. In 1928 his play Der rote General (The Red General) was performed with great success in Berlin. The central figure is a Jewish general who is abandoned by the Communists, once he is no longer needed, and executed by the White Russians. Some saw it as a portrait of Trotsky, which Ungar denied. A second play, a comedy called Die Gartenlaube (The Arbour), had its premiere six weeks after his death.

There is something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde about Ungar. He was known as an elegant, charming, witty and sociable diplomat while his writings display the opposite qualities, showing the world as a bleak place where love is at best lust and mostly turns to hatred, often ending in bloody violence. The heroes of his two novels try to avoid this by doing as little as possible, fearing the slightest self-assertion might set the chaos in motion that they feel is constantly threatening. They try, unsuccessfully, to cocoon themselves in arid routine, so that even before they are dragged down to destruction their lives are empty of any real fulfilment.

The powerful impact of Ungar’s two novels is in part due to the extreme economy of his style. Everything is narrated in a plain, sober, detached manner, without authorial comment, or even evidence of an authorial attitude. His themes recall those of Expressionism, his style is closer to that of the ‘New Objectivity’ of the mid-to-late 1920s.

Ungar makes use of psychological and social factors. In The Maimed, Polzer’s feelings of guilt and revulsion towards women are ‘explained’ by incidents during his childhood (the one point where an authorial voice speaks directly to the reader), and his insecurity and inhibitions by the shame he feels at his humble social origins. But the purpose of the novel is not the illustration of social themes or psychological types. Ungar uses these factors to set up the central characters, but, despite the sobriety of the narration, the aim is not realism.

As in Kafka’s stories, the reader experiences Ungar’s fiction at an existential level. They give us a feeling of the way life is, not of what a particular society is like, or how a particular type of person behaves. What makes them more pessimistic than Kafka is the lack of any transcendental dimension, even an empty or unattainable one. There is no sense that these fictions are parables. To use a current phrase, ‘what you see is what you get’.

This can be confirmed by looking at the religious motifs in The Maimed. Polzer has a picture of St. Francis over his bed, which gives him a sense of security. But it is not the thought of the saint the picture represents that comforts him, but the familiar object. His attachment to the picture of St. Francis is an object-oriented fetichism, similar to his mania for counting his possessions.

What makes Ungar’s world so irredeemably bleak is ultimately this lack of any spiritual dimension. It is a powerful, almost mesmerising portrayal; there appears to be no way out once you are inside it. This, too, distinguishes it from Kafka and is perhaps one reason why Ungar has not enjoyed even a modicum of the same kind of posthumous success. One cannot imagine his novels spawning the multitudinous interpretations of, for example, The Trial. It is precisely the uncompromising nature of the vision they present which makes them stand out from the writings of his contemporaries and which, if there were justice in such matters, would guarantee them a lasting place in the history of 20th-century literature.

Contents

Title

The Author and The Translator

Foreword

Appendix

Copyright

From the age of twenty-four onward Franz Polzer was employed in a bank. Every morning he set off for his office at a quarter to eight, never a minute earlier or later. When he came out of the side-street in which he lived, the tower clock struck three times.

During all the time he worked for the bank Franz Polzer had changed neither his position there, nor his lodgings. He had moved into them when he abandoned his course at university and started work. His landlady was a widow of roughly his own age. At the time he took the room with her, she was still in mourning for her late husband.

In all the years he was employed by the bank, Franz Polzer was never out in the streets during the morning, apart from on Sundays. The mornings of working-days, when the shops were open and people in a hurry jostled each other in the streets, were unknown to him. He had never been absent from the bank for a single day.

The streets through which he passed presented the same scene every morning. The blinds of the shops were being raised. Clerks were standing by the doors, waiting for their bosses. Every day he met the same people, schoolboys and schoolgirls, faded secretaries and sullen men hurrying to their offices. He made his way among these people who shared his morning hour, was one of them, hurrying, unnoticing and unnoticed.

Franz Polzer had been told that, given his abilities, he could, with industry and application, rise to a senior position in his profession. Through all the years he had never reflected on the fact that the hopes he pinned on his career had not been fulfilled. He had forgotten them. He forgot them in all the little activities into which, from the very beginning, his time had been divided up. He got out of bed in the morning, washed, dressed, glanced at the newspaper while he was having his breakfast, and went to the bank. He sat down at his desk, on which were piles of papers which he had to compare with entries in the ledgers on the shelves all round him. He signed each sheet, when he had checked it, with the initials of his name and placed it in a file. All around the office, and in the other rooms, there were many other men and women sitting, like him, at desks that looked just the same as his. The whole building was filled with the smell of these men and women, with the noise of their monotonous activity and conversations. Franz Polzer was equal to the demands his work made on him. It offered no opportunity of distinguishing himself and therefore no chance of attracting the attention of his superiors.

He took his midday meal in a small inn close to the bank. The afternoons passed in the same way as the mornings. At six o’clock he tidied up the papers and pencils on his desk, locked his drawer and went home. The widow brought a simple supper to his room. He took off his shoes, jacket and shirt-collar. After his supper he spent an hour reading the newspaper from end to end. Then he went to bed. His sleep was restless, but he seldom had dreams. When he did dream, he dreamed that he had forgotten his initials, which he had to write hundreds of times a day, that his hand was paralysed or that his pencil wouldn’t write.

In the morning Franz Polzer got up as on every other morning before and began his day, which passed like all the other days. He was sullen and morose, but he never became conscious of the fact that there could be something other than spending every day sitting at his desk in the bank, that you could get up later, stroll round the streets, eat two soft-boiled eggs for breakfast in a café and take lunch in a good restaurant.

There was one interruption to this monotonous routine which Franz Polzer remembered particularly. The death of his father.

Franz Polzer had never been close to his father. Part of the reason was probably the fact that his mother had died when he was very young. Perhaps she would have been able to reduce the friction between them. His father was a small shopkeeper in a little country town. Polzer’s room was next to his father’s shop. His father was a harsh, hard-working and unapproachable man. From his earliest childhood Franz Polzer had to help out in his father’s shop, so that he had hardly enough time left to do his homework. Despite that, his father demanded good school reports from his son. Once, when Polzer had a poor mark, his father made him go without his supper for four weeks. Polzer was seventeen at the time.

A sister of his father’s lived with them, a widow without children who had moved in after the death of Polzer’s mother to keep house for his father. Polzer had the vague notion that his father’s sister had forced his dead mother out of the house and from the very first made no attempt to conceal his dislike of her. His aunt made no secret of her feelings either. She called him a bad boy who would never get anywhere in life, called him greedy and lazy. She gave him so little to eat, he was forced to make himself a copy of the key to her cupboard and steal things secretly at night in his father’s house.

On top of all this came an incident which can only be described with the strongest reservations. At the time Polzer was fourteen and had the easily aroused imagination of adolescent boys, stimulated, moreover, by hatred. He could only imagine the relationship between the sexes as something horrible, something fundamentally disgusting. The very idea of the body of a naked woman filled him with loathing. He had once gone into his aunt’s room while she was washing, stripped to the waist. The sight of her withered body, of her tired, drooping flesh etched itself on his mind and remained lodged in his memory. Once, during the night, he was standing by the open bread cupboard in the darkened hall behind the shop when the door of his aunt’s room opened. He pressed himself against the wall. Out of the bright doorway came his father in his nightshirt. For a brief moment, like a shadow, the image of his sister appeared behind him. His aunt bolted the door from inside.

His father passed close by him. His nightshirt was open and Polzer thought he could see his hairy chest, despite the darkness. For a moment he caught the smell of fresh rolls that always hung about his father, presumably from the shop. Polzer held his breath and was still frozen to the spot long after the bedroom door had closed behind his father.

This experience made an impression on Franz Polzer which was to have the most lasting effect on his later life. Despite the fact that he had only seen his aunt’s shadow, he firmly believed that at that moment his aunt had been naked. From that point on he was tormented by images of the wild scenes that must be taking place at night between his father and his father’s sister. Polzer had no other evidence, apart from that one nocturnal episode. Nor did anything happen subsequently to give substance to his belief.

Now Polzer’s nights were sleepless until day began to break. He listened. He thought he could hear doors creaking and cautious, hesitant footsteps on the rotten floorboards of the old house. He would start out of a light sleep, sure he had heard a suppressed cry. He was filled with bitter disgust. At the same time his curiosity impelled him to creep up to his aunt’s door at night. He never heard anything other than the sound of her breathing.

His father often beat Franz Polzer while his aunt held him, and he dreamed of his father, horrified beyond measure in his dream at the way he looked, at his dirty clothes, his dull, red dream-face, with his aunt standing behind, encouraging his father to beat and torment him. After such nights, during the day when he was bound to cross his father’s path, he wanted to be beaten by him again. It was as if he were compelled to make everything reality, including his hatred of his father, by having the latter hit him on the back with his heavy fists. Yet he felt he was grown up, was conscious of the fact, only he was weaker, much weaker than his father.

Some people who lived on the first floor had a maid called Milka. She wore a loose blouse and often came into the shop. Once Polzer saw his father feel her breasts. That evening Polzer dropped a plate on the floor. His father beat him and his aunt dug her fingers into his skinny flesh. He didn’t cry, which made his father beat him all the more furiously, and that was what Franz Polzer wanted.

Whenever he could, he escaped from the shop and hung around the streets of the little town, simply so as not to have to be at home. He often spent the whole day in the house of a rich man called Fanta, whose son went to the high school with him. There was a close friendship between Polzer and Karl Fanta. At first Polzer had only entered the Fantas’ house with the greatest reluctance. He knew that the Jews had murdered the Saviour and that they served their God with dark and cruel rites. He was convinced that it would not only be a grave sin for a Roman Catholic, but also a great danger to visit a Jew’s house regularly. Milka had worked for a Jewish family. She told his aunt in the shop about it. She had run away before Easter. She had been afraid. It was only gradually that Polzer overcame his qualms through his love for Karl Fanta. Karl Fanta saw that Polzer felt unhappy and the two boys often embraced and kissed amid tears.

Polzer did not dare pour out his heart to Karl Fanta. He had grown up in the small, cramped house, in the grubby shop where he spent his free time among sacks of flour and pepper, barrels of pickled gherkins and tins of sweets, asking humble folk what they wanted or sweeping the floor. He was ashamed of the shop. He was ashamed of his father, whose jacket always had a dusting of flour, who stepped respectfully to one side whenever a rich inhabitant walked past, of his aunt, who went out without a hat and whose hair was greying at the temples and tousled by the wind. She did not tie it up in a headscarf, the white line of her parting was always visible between the black hair on either side. His friend’s mother was a tall, elegant lady who wore jewellery and dark clothes. She had pale, finely chiselled features like her son, who resembled her very closely. She too had black hair like his aunt, but hers was combed into a chignon. Both she and her son had a shimmer of tiny bluish veins at the temples. The most beautiful thing about both her and her son were their slim, white hands. Karl’s father was a stout gentleman who spoke in calm, measured tones, self-assured and dignified. In this milieu, in the presence of his handsome friend, Polzer found it impossible to talk about his father’s little corner grocery store.

Polzer brushed his suit and used books to press his trousers. He wanted to look like a schoolboy from a good middle-class home and not like the son of a small shopkeeper. He kept his hands, which were rough and red from working in the shop, hidden from people, a habit which made him seem very awkward and unsure of himself and which he never overcame, even later in life. If a stranger was visiting Karl’s parents and quietly asked his host about Franz Polzer, the latter felt himself flush with embarrassment. Even if the question was put so quietly, so unobtrusively that Franz Polzer did not hear it, he still sensed it with his immensely acute inward ear.

All he wanted was to come from a ‘good’ family. Years later he still blushed when questioned about his background and gave evasive answers. Sometimes he would lie and say his father had been a high-school teacher or a judge. Once he even claimed to be the son of a factory owner. Immediately he felt his questioner run an appraising eye over his suit and was painfully aware of the shabbiness of his appearance.

It was Karl Fanta’s father who made it possible for him to go to the university in the capital. Polzer started together with Karl. He studied medicine, Karl law. Polzer was glad to get away from home, no longer to be constantly confronted with the shame of the shop, no longer to have to submit to his father’s strict discipline, to see the parting in his aunt’s hair and endure her scolding. There was only one memory he took with him from home, one that had been dear above all things to him. The memory of his mother. He had scarcely known her. He believed he remembered her having him brought to her death-bed, where she lay with her hair spread over the pillow. She pressed him to her and his hair was damp with her tears. This memory always warmed his heart. His love for his mother was a refuge from his hatred of his aunt. The stronger his dislike of her became, the more that love had grown.

Polzer’s relationship with Karl was as close as possible between young people of the same age. Polzer was happy for the opportunity to live his life at the side of this handsome young man whose impervious self-assurance he admired no less than the classical proportions of his physique. Karl always behaved in a friendly way towards him and it was Polzer’s desire to anticipate Karl’s every wish and to perform little services for him. He laid out his underlinen and made sure Karl’s clothes were spotless. Karl had black hair that felt like silk. Despite his open and friendly manner, Polzer often felt that inwardly Karl was ignoring him. He longed for some small token of affection, a repetition of those boyhood kisses. It was a yearning that remained unfulfilled.

At the university Polzer was praised for his industry and his intelligence. He passed his preliminary examinations with distinction. Then Karl fell ill and the doctors sent him to the south, where he was to remain for a year. No longer a paid companion to his rich friend, it was impossible for Polzer to continue at the university and he had to be thankful that Karl’s father found him a position in the bank.

After a short time at the bank he was a changed man. In the face of his work, everything else melted away. Punctuality, routine, the inescapable certainty of what the next day would bring all destroyed him. His life was completely absorbed by activities that divided up his time. During those seventeen years he hardly ever went out and met people. Thus he became unsure of himself whenever he had to do something different from what he was in the habit of doing. If he had to talk to a stranger, he suddenly couldn’t find the words he needed. He always had the feeling that his clothes were inappropriate, didn’t fit him and made him look ridiculous. The least departure from routine confused him. He insisted everything be kept meticulously in its habitual place. Every day the newspaper had to be placed on exactly the same spot on the table, parallel to the edge. His pedantry went so far that it irritated him if the cords of the blinds did not hang straight and did not form a right angle where they met the window-ledge. Annoyed, he would go and adjust them.

Franz Polzer had been at the bank for about ten years when his father died. The funeral fell on a Sunday, so that he did not have to miss a day’s work. On the Saturday afternoon he left the city by train.

Polzer retained lasting and most unpleasant memories of the day of the funeral. On the journey there he could not find a seat on the crowded train and so had to stand all the way. His feet, unused to such exertion, were sore for days afterwards. He arrived in a bad mood to a sullen welcome from his aunt, who probably thought he had come to claim his father’s shop. Despite the bitter winter cold, the bedroom waiting for him was unheated, and his sleep in his old bed was tormented by bad dreams. In the morning he found no breakfast had been prepared for him. He felt it would be wrong to go to an inn and so had to attend the funeral on an empty stomach. People whom he scarcely knew came up and shook his hand. His aunt stood beside his father’s laid-out corpse in the middle of the room, Polzer in a dark corner, like a stranger.

When the priest began the benediction, Polzer had to go and stand beside his aunt. Only now did he see his father. He was wearing a black jacket that had creases across the chest. His hair had gone quite grey. His face looked small and hollow-cheeked. The sight of the corpse had no effect whatsoever on Polzer. His response to it was no different than to any extraneous object. He did not feel reminded of his father. At the cemetery his aunt took his arm and wept noisily. Polzer stood in the slushy snow and felt the damp seeping in through his shoes. He knew how susceptible to colds he was and restlessly kept changing feet.

Everyone’s eyes were on Franz Polzer, observing and scrutinising him. The attention he attracted disconcerted him. In his discomfiture he several times felt the buttons of his flies, repeatedly assuring himself that they were fastened. This conspicuous gesture caused him great embarrassment but still did not stop the feeling of nakedness forcing him to repeat it a few minutes later.

After the funeral was over Franz Polzer told his aunt that he did not want to inherit anything from his father’s estate. His father had not left any money. The mortgage on the house had not been paid off. Polzer did not want any clothes or pieces of furniture. He wanted no memento.

The widow was pale and thin when Polzer moved into her house as her lodger after Karl Fanta had left for the south. The mourning dress hung loosely about her body. It was in the first months after her husband’s death. Her skin was yellowish, like old paper. Only later did her figure fill out, her hips broaden.

She was called Klara Porges. Afterwards it seemed to Polzer as if her name had been the cause of everything. From the very first the name had annoyed him. The combination appeared both incredibly ridiculous and irritating at the same time.

Polzer lived alone with Frau Porges. One of the rooms was empty. The chairs in that room were draped in linen dust-covers. Frau Porges had to do all the housework herself, for there was no maid. But Polzer cleaned his own shoes. The widow wanted to take on that chore as well, but he would not let her. He had always attached great importance to polishing his shoes himself and he had never come across anyone whose shoes shone like his. To a brief glance they looked like patent-leather shoes. At home he had had to polish his father’s and his aunt’s shoes, but he had not taken great pains with them. He devoted half an hour every morning to cleaning his shoes. He used several brushes and cloths of varying fineness one after the other. Frau Porges expressed the opinion that it was a task unsuited to a man. Polzer, however, knew how pleasant, how refreshing it was to go out in the morning with properly polished shoes on your feet. He pointed out that there was nothing unmanly at all about this occupation, reminding Frau Porges that everywhere where they had manservants, in hotels or rich people’s houses for example, the task was performed by men.