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Ota Filip's Wallenstein Und Lukretia

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Ota Filip's Wallenstein Und Lukretia James Jordan “Die Geschichte ist die Geschichte ihrer zahlreichen Interpretationen” Ota Filip’s Wallenstein und Lukretia In Wallenstein und Lukretia (1978), Ota Filip expounds his personal theory regar- ding Wallenstein’s first marriage. Kepler’s horoscope had predicted that Wallen- stein’s first wife would die early, and that he would return to military life and great deeds but also to a pitiful death. Wallenstein seeks to prolong the life of his wife and confound the predictions. He is drawn into a personal moral dilemma and into the conflicts of the Counter-Reformation. Filip uses the historical setting to draw parallels with Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, in terms both of public versus private morality and the tension between conservative power-driven cliques and more progressive forces. He uses a descendant of Wallenstein’s ser- vant as a framework narrator, a professional historian in Czechoslovakia whose personal search for truth brings him into conflict with the orthodoxies of Marxist historical reconstruction. This self-reflexive element enables Filip both to use the historical novel as a tool of social and political criticism and to comment on the process of historical reinterpretation in the service of a dominant ideology. The figure of General Wallenstein presents an enigma which has fascinated writers and historians, including Friedrich Schiller, Alfred Döblin, and Golo Mann, since his death in 1634. The unreliability and inconsistency of much of the evidence surrounding his life, and in particular his character and motivation, have brought historians to the borders of fiction and crea- tive writers into engagement with historical facts and the limits of their in- terpretation. The present investigation aims to consider a novel about this ‘German’ hero – the description is used cautiously – which deals with one of the least well documented periods of Wallenstein’s life, when he was lord of the Moravian district of Wsetin from 1609 to 1614. It is a novel written by a Moravian in his native Czech although he was living in Ger- many at the time and beginning to compose in the language of his adopted country. Ota Filip had been exiled to West Germany – across the fault line of the Cold War – by a regime whose social aims he generally supported but whose political methods inevitably brought him into conflict with it. His Wallenstein und Lukretia was published in German in the Federal Re- 50 public in 1978. 1 The focus of the novel is less its historical subject than the question of whether history may be written at all, and whether ultimately all history is not in some sense also fiction. Some biographical information on Ota Filip will help to put the novel in context. He was born in Ostrava, an industrial town in northern Czechoslo- vakia, in 1930. The town itself consisted of a Moravian and a Silesian part, and the population comprised Czech Moravians, Poles, ethnic Germans and Jews, all living in a state of mutual suspicion but nonetheless mana- ging to work together. This balance was brought to an end by the Nazi Oc- cupation, and Filip described his own experiences and the reactions of the various ethnic groups in the first of his nine novels, Das Café an der Straße zum Friedhof .2 He worked in a publishing house and as a journalist until his oppositional activities following the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968 led to conflict with the Communist authorities: he was imprisoned for fifteen months in 1970 and reduced to menial labour thereafter. His differences with the regime persisted and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked, obliging him to leave Czechoslovakia with his family and settle in Munich where he worked as a reader for the Fischer Verlag. After the pub- lication of Wallenstein und Lukretia , he wrote three novels in German, re- ceiving in 1986 the Adelbert von Chamisso-Preis for non-German authors writing in German. Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989 he has concen- trated on chronicles and journalism on German-Czech reconciliation and the resolution of the Sudeten question. 3 In January 1998, there were allega- tions of conspiracy with the security services of the Communist regime which were given sensational treatment by Der Spiegel .4 We shall return to these when concluding, because the issues they raise are directly related to the novel about to be discussed. Wallenstein und Lukretia represents a new departure in Filip’s work. Das Café an der Straße zum Friedhof and Die Himmelfahrt des Lojzek Lapá ek aus Schlesisch Ostrau dealt with life under the German Occu- pation, while Ein Narr für jede Stadt , Zweikämpfe and Maiandacht de- 1 Ota Filip: Wallenstein und Lukretia . Transl. Marianne Pasetti-Swoboda. Frank- furt/M. 1978. Henceforth: WuL. 2 Ota Filip: Cesta ke hrbitovu . Ostrava 1968. Transl. Josefine Spitzer: Das Café an der Straße zum Friedhof . Frankfurt/M. 1968. 3 His most notable book publications in this area have been: Die stillen Toten unterm Klee. Wiedersehen mit Böhmen . Munich 1992, and: ...doch die Märchen sprechen deutsch. Geschichten aus Böhmen . Munich 1996. 4 Die Plage Vergangenheit; Man widersteht dem Druck nicht. In: Der Spiegel (3/1998). Pp. 160f. and 161-163. .
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