War er seiner Familie, seinen Schülern nicht immer ein leuchtendes Vorbild? Und nun muss Deutschlehrer Joachim Linde »peinlichstes Privatleben« vor seinen Kollegen ausbreiten, um seine Haut zu retten. Denn alles in seinem Leben scheint die schlimmstmögliche Wendung genommen zu haben.
Jakob Arjouni (alias of Jakob Bothe) published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! (1985) at the age of 20.Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages.
In 1987, he received the Baden-Württembergischen Autorenpreis für das deutschsprachige Jugendtheater for his play Nazim schiebt ab. In 1992, he received the German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. He died, aged 48, in Berlin, after a long fight against pancreatic cancer.
Relativ kurze Geschichte, aber mit einer tiefgründigen Story. Irgendwie war ich mir nie sicher, ob ich jetzt auf der Seite des Protagonisten sein sollte oder nicht. Am Ende mit einer Tendenz zu 'nicht'. Vielleicht ist das auch der Punkt: es gibt nicht schwarz oder weiß, sondern viele Schattierungen von grau.
Zaskoczyła mnie ta bardzo szczupła objętościowo powieść, zaskoczyła na plus dodam. Nigdy nie czytałam prozy Arjouniego i to jest zdecydowanie błąd, bo ta książka jest świetna.
Joachim Linde uczy niemieckiego w liceum. Ostatnią lekcją przed przedłużonym weekendem, który ma zamiar spędzić na przesuwanej już kilka razy wędrówce po Brandenburgii, jest kurs o literaturze powojennej Niemiec. Nauczyciel prosi klasę o krótką notkę o wpływie Trzeciej Rzeszy na Niemców sześćdziesiąt lat po wojnie. Uczniowie zaczynają się buntować, jeden z nich nie chce się zajmować tym tematem, między innymi wywiązuje się dyskusja, która zahacza o konflikt między Izraelem i Palestyną. Rozmowa kończy się pyskówką, w której jeden z uczniów twierdzi, że żałuje, iż dziadkowie koleżanki nie zostali zgazowani. Taka lekcja nie jest najlepszym wstępem do weekendu, na który Linde cieszy się od dawna.
W domu postanawia się wyciszyć, pakuje walizkę, słucha muzyki i szykuje się na pociąg. Dzięki jego wspomnieniom i myślom dowiadujemy się, że żonę poznał w liceum, gdy odbywała praktyki studenckie. Początkowo szczęśliwe małżeństwo, zamienia się w piekło. Żona zapada na depresję, ma psychozy - aktualnie znowu przebywa w szpitalu. Gdy Linde właśnie opuszcza mieszkanie, natyka się na mężczyznę, przedstawiającego się jako partnera córki - Mariny. Okazuje się, że córka po próbie samobójczej uciekła z domu, oskarżając ojca o swobodę seksualną. Ułożony i pewny świat Lindego zaczyna drżeć w posadach. Sytuacja się jeszcze bardziej zaostrza, gdy syn Pablo dowiaduje się od chłopaka siostry o zarzutach.
Ein grandioses Buch, wo der Autor die Leser geschickt auf falsche Fährten schickt, um sie dann mit der Wahrheit zu überraschen und sie wieder durch die intelligente Manipulation der Hauptfigur (durch die wir übrigens 'alles' erfahren) in Unsicherheit bringt. Es zeigt wieder dass nicht Worte sondern Taten zählen, aber wir regelrecht von Worten beherrscht werden können. Umbedingt lesen!!!
Arjouni hat für meinen Geschmack zu dick aufgetragen - zu viele menschliche Abgründe, zu viele Schicksalsschläge. Während des Lesens wünschte ich mir eine subtilere Herangehensweise. Dann hätte ich den Protagonisten vielleicht ernst nehmen können...
3-4* Man sympathisiert null mit dem Protagonisten, was es aber iwie wieder spannend macht… Interessantes Buch, welches überraschender Weise extrem aktuell ist, vor allem im Bereich der Israel-Gaza Thematik:)
DNF (57%) Truly a horrid main character. I didnt care about his story since he was so insufferable. I believe thats the point of the book, but in that case, its not for me.
crazy unerwartete wendung, extreme wut auf maincharakter - was dazu führt, dass man unbedingt wissen will was noch alles passiert bzw zum vorschein kommt. ende lässt platz zum reflektieren.
Arjouni, Jakob, Hausaufgaben, Diogenes: Zürich 2004, 188 pp. Joachim Linde teaches German at a grammar school near Frankfurt. One of his cur¬rent courses is entitled «German post-war authors and their discussion of the Third Reich». After twenty years of teaching Linde’s commitment to the job is not as big as his need to draw satisfaction from the way he is perceived by students and col¬leagues. The lack of understanding and appreciation he suffers at home is clearly an issue here. His wife Ingrid is a manic depressive, currently in a clinic. His daugh¬ter Martina has run away to Milan six months after an apparently serious suicide-attempt. This issue here seems to be that Martina feels she was ap¬proached/abused by her father on a camping trip to southern France several years before. Linde’s son Pablo is an Amnesty International activist and an unlikeable moralist with very clear and undifferentiated views on Israel. All the Linde’s are clearly pro-Palestinian and completely anti-Israel and this of course is where the two strands – Linde’s teaching and Linde’s family – tie into each other. This link is never belaboured and yet Arjouni’s book – intelligent, well-written and thrilling at the same time – makes it quite clear that what needs to be done in both cases, and probably in any case of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, is the «homework» of the cleverly chosen title. None of the Linde family are in a fit state to do this homework: Martina sends her Milan boyfriend north to fetch her things, Ingrid is in an institution, Pablo is a bigot weakling (who lectures on morally very high ground on political correctness, yet goes to porn-shops in Darmstadt) and Linde himself is in the very process of running away, of going on a three-day hike around Branden¬burg as the story opens. The protagonist is not likeable and there are clearly reasons why he has estranged himself from just about everyone during the course of his failed adult life. At one point he states that only the school director, a former close friend, is any form of close relation. Martina refuses to see him, Ingrid has nothing but snide remarks for him and in the end, Pablo attacks him physically. In the very first scene of the no¬vel, describing a class-room discussion on German guilt and whether all Germans are still held responsible by the outside world, we are shown what it is that makes it hard to like this man. First of all, there is his constant need to prove his intel¬lec¬tual worth by pseudo-cleverly changing the meaning of words, by producing com¬plicated word-play (at a later stage he coins the term «Verisraelendung» - linking Israel and «Verelendung» [impoverishment:]). It be¬comes even less possible to name things properly, to call a spade a spade, if one chooses to shape words to ones own whims. But then, this is the Linde modus oper¬andi: shaping words, his children, his students, the world – and history to his own tastes and to his own sense of what’s what. Hausaufgaben is that rare find: An intelligent and important book which is also a page-turner. The flaws are few and far between. The descriptions of the grammar school from the inside seem to be those of an insider, even if the reactions of some of the students seem to be overly mature. (Alex’s cutting down of his teacher in front of the class, for example, is clearly Arjouni’s, not that of a mediocre stu¬dent.) (Spoiler-alert) Finally, the sins of the father are visited upon the son with a venge¬ance and the sins of that first lecture we observed are visited on the teacher, when he, the old 60s leftie, is accused of anti-semitism by one of his students’ mother. Also, Ingrid finds access to a computer in the clinic and sends an e-mail to all his colleagues to say that Linde has abused his daughter. In a final conference where Linde explains himself in front of his colleagues and regains their respect by twist¬ing more than mere words we see all the skills this one German post-war man ap¬plies to avoid doing his homework. When an innocent sports teacher justly points out that Linde’s carefully crafted and emotionally delivered speech has not actu¬ally dealt with one of the issues at hand, he is silenced by the outraged colleagues who clearly feel that the man Linde has suffered enough…