''l'autre'' dans l'oeuvre romanesque de gertrud fussenegger

• Auteur / Autrice : Francine Rouby
• Direction : GONTHIER FINK
• Type : Thèse de doctorat
• Discipline(s) : Études germaniques
• Date : Soutenance en 1986
• Etablissement(s) : Université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg) (1971-2008)

Résumé

Sudete par sa mere, autrichienne par son pere, ayant longtemps vecu en boheme, gertrud fussenegger est prise entre deux mondes et toute son oeuvre est construite a partir de son vecu personnel, marque par la chute de la monarchie des habsbourg et deux guerres mondiales. Analysant l'irrationnel qui englobe des phenomenes aussi divers que le destin, la guerre, le sentiment religieux et l'attrait de la science, l'auteur classe les hommes en deux grandes categories, ceux qui appartiennent au ''droit chemin'', menent une existence paisible et sans histoires, et ceux qui sont victimes d'un monde etrange, dans lequel les regles habituelles de conduite n'ont plus cours. L'ideal a atteindre est l'interaction entre les deux mondes, le but etant pour les personnages de rejoindre, enrichis de leur experience, le ''droit chemin''. Les evenements qui bouleversent le monde font une irruption brutale dans la vie des hommes ou s'accomplissent a leur insu. L'humanite, atteinte de myopie, est incapable de les prevoir, de comprendre l'impact qu'ils auront sur l'avenir. N'ayant qu'une perspective tronquee des choses, l'humanite se fourvoie perpetuellement. Ces considerations generales qui concernent toutes les epoques et touchent tous les domaines, debouchent sur l'analyse du passe recent de l'allemagne qui est considere comme une fatalite inherente a la vie, un destin ineluctable dont personne n'est responsable. L'allemagne, victime de son destin, s'est trompee dans son choix a cause de l'imperfection inherente a la condition humaine. Cet objectif precis vers lequel tend toute la demarche de l'auteur, necessite un narrateur omnipresent qui mene fermement le raisonnement de son lecteur. L'auteur assouplit neanmoins son style et atteint dans ses derniers romans une harmonie entre la forme et le fond, ayant compris que le monde est irreductible a un principe conforme a la raison.

Gertrud fussenegger, who is sudeten on her mother's side as well as austrian on her father's side and lived a long time in bohemia, is caught between two worlds, and her whole work is based on her own experience of life, which was marked by the overthrow of the house of hapsburg and two world wars. As a writer she analyses the irrational characteristics attached to such various facts as fate, warfare, religiousness and the attractiveness of science, and she divides mankind into two major groups of men : those who abide by a ''virtuous way of life'', living a peaceful and uneventful life, and those who fall victim to a strange world in which the usual rules of conduct are no longer observed. To get the two worlds to interact is the ideal goal to be reached, meanwhile, the characters' aim is to get an ever greater experience so as to get to the ''virtuous way of life''. The events that the world is convulsed by burst into the lives of men suddenly or happen unknown to them. The latter have become short-sighted and are unable either to anticipate the former or to realize what their impact will be on the future. As men have but a distorted view of what lies ahead of them, they keep going astray. Through those general observations that apply to any period and any field of activity, she comes to analysing the recent past of germany, which is regarded as something inherent in life that was bound to happen, an inescapable doom as it were, that nobody is responsible for. A victim to its fate, germany made the wrong choice, which is accountable to shortcomings inherent in the human condition. This very target of the writer throughout all her approach requires a narrator to be omnipresent so as to direct her reader's reasoning in quite an unflagging way. Yet, the writer's style eventually gets less elaborate and in her latest novels she tries to attune the manner to the matter as she has realized that it is impossible to reduce the world to a principle wi