Ship of Fools (Porter novel)

The Ship of Fools (Original Title: Ship of Fools ) is a novel by Katherine Anne Porter, which was published in 1962. The author was inspired by a boat trip to Europe, which they undertook in 1931, as well as through reading Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools ( 1494). From Brant took over both the title and the archetypal image of the ship's journey as a life journey. In an interview with the Paris Review, she said:. . " Human life itself is a mess Everyone claims his place, insists on its rights and feelings, the motives of others and his own No one knows misunderstands before, like life, the he leads, ends, and I do not - do not forget that I am a passenger on this ship are not only the others who leave the fools lack of understanding and isolation are the natural conditions of human life, we all are.! . passengers on this ship, but when it comes down to is everyone alone. "

Katherine Anne Porter, who already was a renowned and beloved author after the publication of her short stories, began in 1941 with the writing of her first and only novel, and worked for twenty years on it. Again and again, the highly anticipated book has been announced by the publisher, the release date was postponed again and again. When the Ship of Fools was published in 1962, called it the New York Times the "novel, on which a whole generation has been waiting for thirty years ." The book was immediately a huge success in the U.S.: Three days after the release it was No. 1 on the bestseller list and became the best-selling book of the 1960s in the United States. Also contributed to Stanley Kramer's film version of 1965, as an international cast to Vivien Leigh, Heinz Rühmann, Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer and Oskar Werner acted.

Content

The novel tells the story of the voyage of the steamboat "Vera" by Vera Cruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, from 22 August to 17 September 1931. A central theme of the novel is the rise of Nazism. During the trip, the fates of numerous passengers of different nationalities intersect. In addition to the staff on the ship, especially the captain and the ship's doctor, Dr. Schumann are also many of the travelers German: About Siegfried Rieber, editor of a journal for women's clothing, which openly espouses Nazi ideas, and Wilhelm Freytag, who with an oil company in Mexico " to do " has and continues to Germany to bring his wife and his mother. The wife of Mr. Freytag is Jewish, which is why it is impossible for him to eat at the captain's table; he is forced to sit with the Jewish manufacturer Julius Lowenthal at a separate table. Professor Hutten, the former head of a German school in Mexico, traveling with his wife and the white bulldog Bébé that is encountered by children overboard and rescued by a Basque from the steerage, which drowns it. The ship's doctor, Dr. Schumann fell in love over the crossing in a drug- addicted Spanish aristocrat, called La Condesa, who has lived many years in Cuba and deported as political exiles to Tenerife.

More passengers are, inter alia, the American Mary Treadwell, a forty-five- divorced woman who returns to Paris and for their male companions and their overtures has nothing but contempt; two young American painter, David Scott and Jenny Brown, who are no longer a couple at the end of the 27 - day trip; and a Spanish zarzuela troupe, a group of singers and dancers who return to Spain after they have failed in Mexico. Traveling on the steerage crammed over eight hundred Spanish workers from the sugar plantations in Cuba, which were reported as a result of the crisis in the sugar market. They are treated by the other passengers with condescension and arrogance.

Reception in Germany

In Germany the book was, mainly because of the representation of German passengers, received critical. As " a document of hate " it called Herbert von Borch 1962 in the world.

Der Spiegel wrote in 1962: "In fact illustrates the novel whose staff recruited to a large part of Germans, quite dramatically, the antipathy of the author against Teutonic mentality, in which it holds to be as weighty traits fanaticism and cruelty ... and in the spirit such lump - judgment is also their success book created: the " ship of Fools " parabola draws the Germans as a specter, as the black man in the world history ... have the extraordinary success that Porter and ship of Fools American audiences, likely only by the reputation of the author not be explained. rather He confirmed once again the present good business successes with anti-German resentment. "

Two years later, Ulrich sun man expressed more negative in further criticism in the mirror: " Completely wrong, the German - Jewish relationship in 1931 is seen the one hand, distorted, on the other hand played down. Thus acting as a retrospective prophetess, neither knows something of the extent of biological and social merger that had already been achieved and especially in Germany at that time, in fact, yet she understands where, in the German consciousness of time, in contrast to the impulsive Negro hatred of their südstaatlichen compatriots, anti-Semitism actually sat, the purely theoretical, in a theorist people for that very reason then was practically much more dangerous ... "

Expenditure

• The Ship of Fools. Translated by Susanna Rademacher. Random House, Reinbek 1963.
• The Ship of Fools. Translated by Susanna Rademacher. Revised and annotated edition. With an afterword by Elke Schmitter. Manesseplatz Verlag, Zurich, 2010. ISBN 978-3-7175-2220-1.