Novel
Flight to Afar
Sansibar oder der letzte Grund
Alfred Andersch · 1957
Synopsis
In Rerik, a small Baltic port, in an autumn at the end of the thirties, Gregor, a young Communist on a clandestine mission, and Judith, a young Jewish woman on the run, cross paths. Their fate becomes entwined with that of the fisherman Knudsen, of his fifteen-year-old ship's boy, who dreams of leaving, and of Pastor Helander, who wants to remove from the regime a wooden statue of a young monk reading, set aside among the degenerate art. It would take Knudsen agreeing to ferry the statue and the young woman across to Sweden.
Context
The novel appeared in 1957. The statue the pastor wants to save is based on a sculpture by Ernst Barlach, and the port of Rerik borrows from the town of that name and from Wismar. The narrative, in thirty-seven chapters that pass from one character to another, covers twenty-seven hours; the persecutors are never named, except as “the Others”. The title comes from a daydream of the boy, for whom Zanzibar is the place of a better future. Far better received than the 1952 narrative, the book became a school reading. It was adapted for the screen in 1961, then by Bernhard Wicki in 1987.
Who it is for
A short novel, each chapter of which is titled with the names of the characters it follows; the boy's thoughts are rendered through association.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English as early as 1958 by Michael Bullock and into French in 1960; adapted for opera by Eckehard Mayer in 1994.