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6 - (Un)safe Houses: Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse and Ian McEwan's Saturday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Monika Shafi
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Summary

In Bertolt Brecht'sDie Dreigroschenoper (1928), Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, owner of the firm “Beggar's Friend,” tells the beggars who have to work for him that he has figured out how to profit from their poverty. Contrasting their meekness and suffering to his entrepreneurial skills, he boasts:

Aber ich habe herausgebracht, daß die Besitzenden der Erde das Elend zwar anstiften können, aber sehen können sie das Elend nicht. Denn es sind Schwächlinge und Dummköpfe, genau wie ihr. Wenn sie gleich zu fressen haben bis zum Ende ihrer Tage und ihren Fußboden mit Butter einschmieren können, daß auch die Brosamen, die von den Tischen fallen, noch fett werden, so können sie doch nicht mit Gleichmut einen Mann sehen, der vor Hunger umfällt, freilich muß es vor ihrem Haus sein, daß er umfällt.

[And I did work out something: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from their tables grow fat, they can't look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger — although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.]

Type
Chapter
Information
Housebound
Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fiction
, pp. 169 - 194
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2012

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