Ursula Krechel
Teoksen Landgericht tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Image credit: Ursula Krechel, Frankfurt Book Fair 2012/Lesekreis
Tekijän teokset
Associated Works
Als de dagen van het jaar verhalen uit de Westduitse werkelijkheid 1970-heden (1985) — Tekijä — 3 kappaletta
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Kanoninen nimi
- Krechel, Ursula
- Syntymäaika
- 1947-12-04
- Sukupuoli
- female
- Kansalaisuus
- Duitsland
- Syntymäpaikka
- Trier, Rheinland-Pfalz, Duitsland
- Asuinpaikat
- Trier, Germany (birth)
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Berlin, Germany - Ammatit
- auteur
- Organisaatiot
- Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung
- Palkinnot ja kunnianosoitukset
- Jean-Paul-Preis (2019)
Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis (2009)
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Palkinnot
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Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 14
- Also by
- 2
- Jäseniä
- 135
- Suosituimmuussija
- #150,831
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.5
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 6
- ISBN:t
- 31
- Kielet
- 2
He finds Claire, who had been a successful businesswoman in her own right in Weimar days, with her own firm and a splendid modernist apartment in Berlin, now sick and struggling through menial office and factory jobs in the rural south-west. Their children, sent to safety in England on a Kindertransport, are now nearly grown up and perfectly happy with their foster-parents in Suffolk, in no hurry to have their lives shaken up by parents they had long-since given up for dead, and whose language they can barely remember.
Krechel presents a detailed and very thoughtful and convincing study of the problem of reintegration for returning exiles, their unrealistic hopes, the jealousy felt by "ordinary" people who thought of themselves every bit as much "victims of fascism" as exiles who — as they must have seen it — were sitting on tropical beaches sipping rum cocktails whilst Germans were cowering in cellars listening to their houses being bombed. Not to mention the obvious reactions of self-protection, resentment and closing of ranks by those Germans whose political antecedents were not above criticism (the majority, after all) and the continuing echoes of years of antisemitic propaganda.
The later part of the book is also very interesting, as it describes the way Kornitzer's life is taken over by his fight for proper compensation for the wrongs he has suffered both in his professional career and in his private property at the hands of the German state, which of course is still his employer. Even out of the specific context it's a very recognisable description of the effects that sort of campaign can have on someone's health and career — I've seen that happen to colleagues a few times in real life, and it's always a frustrating and depressing experience.
I was slightly disappointed that the book didn't go very much into the specific problems of the Nazi legacy in the justice system, which is a big and fascinating topic in itself. Krechel clearly isn't a lawyer, and the few times she does venture into legal territory she gets rather tangled up (like most outsiders, she hasn't got a clue about patent law and how it works, for instance, but that's not all that important for the story). So she mostly treats Kornitzer's situation as a judge as a straightforward civil service job, spending far more time on career progression and personnel files than on court cases.
The other problem I had with the book is that, while it fictionalises the life of its central character, based loosely on the real Judge Robert Michaelis, it doesn't actually do much to exploit the fact that it is a novel and not a biography. Very few scenes are dramatised, and hardly anyone uses direct speech: most of what happens in the book is told in hindsight through excerpts from letters, files and official reports. I couldn't really work out why Krechel had bothered to change the names and call it a novel, except perhaps to allow her to move Kornitzer's exile from Shanghai (which Krechel had written about in her previous book) to Cuba.… (lisätietoja)