Längeres Gedankenspiel und Dystopie: Die Mondfiktion in Arno Schmidts Roman ‘Kaff auch Mare Crisium’ by Roswitha M. Jauk

Abstract

516 Reviews achieved considerable success as a writer of novels in English, his novel By the Waters of Babylon (1939) being chosen as Book ofthe Month by the Evening Standard. What Dove investigates most successfully is the inexorable impact of exile in an insular and culturally alien Britain on these writers fromthe German-speaking world. This emerges clearly in his sensitive account of the failure of Alfred Kerr, a critic of immense stature in Germany, to achieve even a modicum of recognition in Britain and thus to rise above the genteel poverty that enveloped his exile years. Even Zweig, whose biography of Mary Queen of Scots brought him renewed success, could not escape the corrosive effects of losing contact with his native language, losing status and stability in his working life,and losing the delicate cultural equilibriumnecessary to continued literary production. There was to be no literary assimilation for these writers. Neumann's integration into the British literary scene was badly jolted by his sufferings in internment on the Isle of Man in 1940, and though the success of his post-war novel Children of Vienna (1946) seemed to secure his place in his adopted country, he decided to leave for Switzerland in 1958. Zweig left for Brazil, and died in despair in 1942. Perhaps significantly,Herrmann-Neisse was the only one to die in England, a foreigner there in death as in life. Dove makes much of Herrmann-Neisse's happiness during his brief escapes from London to Zurich, but in wartime neutral Switzerland was to prove far less congenial than Britain: refugees were interned in work camps, or even turned back at the German border, while the more fortunate, like the dramatist Georg Kaiser, had to endure the tribulations of a makeshift life on a succession of temporary permits. The refugees' perception, during the era of appeasement, of the urgent need to awaken the British to the threatposed by Nazi Germany gave rise to works like Otten's Die Reise nach Deutschland, written in 1938 but published only in 2000. Richard Dove has rescued from oblivion this vivid account of a young Englishman's journey to the Third Reich, where he comes face to face with the militarization of German society and the indoctrinationof its youth with an ideology of violence and aggression. Thus he learns that he and his countrymen will have to take an active stand against Nazi barbarism. The novel is a historical document of considerable interest, and it forms an apt complement to the broader picture of literary exile in Journey of No Return. London Anthony Grenville Langer es Gedankenspielund Dystopie: Die Mondfiktion in Arno Schmidts Roman 'Kajf auch Mare Crisium'. By Roswitha M. Jauk. (Erlanger Studien, 122) Erlangen und Jena: Palm & Enke. 2000. 126 pp. ?14. ISBN 3-7896-0822-x (pbk). The focus of this study, a Graz University Diplomarbeit, is the fictional and metafictional role played by the 'Mondfiktion', a so-called 'Langeres Gedankenspiel' (extended mind-game) embedded in Kajf auch Mare Crisium, a novel published in 1960. Notable forits dual narrative structure, the novel presents on its main level the storyof Karl Richter and his female companion, who are visiting a relative in the country side of Lower Saxony. On the second and subsidiary level, the protagonist Richter turns narrator and recounts the satirically utopian yarn of the last surviving human beings in two moon colonies following a devastating Third World War. With its tightly interwoven levels, the novel Kajf was expressly intended as a manifestation of the 'Langeres Gedankenspiel' (LG), the third of four prose models that Schmidt devised in his 'Berechnungen' in the mid-1950s. As Schmidt, and in his wake Jauk, contends, any depiction, and hence any analysis, of an LG must differentiatebetween El ('ob? jective reality) and EII (subjective reality). The daydreamer's subjective fantasy (EII) is always predicated on the real world from which he or she is trying to escape (El). MLR, 98.2, 2003 517 Like many Schmidt scholars before her, Jauk takes Schmidt too much at his word; in leaving the premisses of his theory unquestioned she succumbs to the metho? dological vicious circle that one recent scholar, Stefan Voigt, has termed Schmidt...