Man talks so lightly about having the rug pulled out from under you, but what Peter Bender believed to be true went much further in its consequences. As a supporter of the hollow earth theory founded by the American John Cleves Symmes in the early nineteenth century, Bender, who was born in Bechtheim in Rheinhessen in 1893, not only wanted to convince people that they didn’t actually live on the outside of the globe, but on the inside.
He also wanted to take away their idea of heaven. Since you are not on but in a sphere, you are not surrounded by the sky, but its perception is due to a kind of miasma floating in the hollow sphere, which also contains the sun, moon and stars. And if it weren’t in the way – that’s consistent lateral thinking! – then from Germany we could look straight across to America on the opposite segment of the earth’s shell.
Apparently people can make up something like that, but can you make up such people? Clemens J. Setz does it in his new novel “Monde vor der Landing”, which is published today, the first since the Austrian writer, who was just forty years old, was awarded the Büchner Prize. Although there was this Peter Bender as well as John Cleves Symmes, but little is known about them because only a few dozen people took them seriously. After all, they made sure that testimonies of the work and impact of the Hohlerde propagandists were kept, and so there is the archive of the former Koresh community in Florida (“Koresh” was the name of another Hollow Earth believer), which also contains archival materials by and about Peter Bender have survived. Who became a victim of the National Socialists and died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. For delusion and delusion do not like to go together.
Clemens J. Setz:_”Moons before landing”. Novel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2023. 525 p., ill., hardcover, €26.
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Image: Suhrkamp Verlag
Except in the books by Setz, who has a big heart for fantasists, a clever brain when thinking about the fantastic and a sure hand when it comes to the elaboration of fantasies. The Peter Bender of the novel is closely based on the sources (Setz includes some documents in the book as illustrations) and yet is the author’s very own creation.
We accompany Bender’s life in three book parts with a total of more than fifty mostly very short chapters from 1920, when the convinced hollow earthling in the French occupation zone first came into conflict with the law. And with his compatriots, because in a Germany robbed of all worldly security after the First World War, how would it have been acceptable for a former fighter pilot to believe that the sky as we know it exists and he flew through it himself? questions? Bender has to go to jail for the first time.
A couple of priests without parental fidelity
For fourteen chapters, Sitz alternates back and forth between the narrated present of his Peter Bender and his past. The trauma of the war (and a crash) explains the search for a new self-understanding, and with the Jewish nurse Charlotte Asch, who nurses him back to health in the hospital, a woman enters Bender’s life who even follows him into his Hohlerden world of thoughts . Bender does not thank her for this trust with marital fidelity.
Although he declares himself and Charlotte to be the “priest couple” of the view of life he proclaims to be a religion of reason, he allows himself to be ministers of love. This man is often overqualified: “World War. Pilot. Iron Cross. Chairman of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Writer. League of Rhenish poets. monetary theory. Mathematics. worldview studies. couple of priests. Founder of the Worms religion of humanity.” The women can only marvel: “It was almost a poem.” In Bender’s correspondence with American like-minded people, those who were won over to conviction and bed in this way are then pimped up to become freshly recruited members of the community, so that the envy of the original representatives of the hollow earth theory is large.
If the story of the true Peter Bender and the presence of a self-convinced lateral thinker weren’t so sad, the material would be good for a great picaresque novel. But that’s not Moons Before Landing. It is – in this respect similar to Raphaela Edelbauer’s recently published “Die Incommensurables” – an attempt to visualize the historical novel by transferring it to a psychology of the fantastic.
What Edelbauer tries to make interesting for us stylistically and formally, Setz tackles on the level of content. The narrative focus on Peter Bender corresponds to a narrative perspective from within Bender (albeit broken a few times for motivations external to the character – this is a weakening of the novel), and thus doubting his worldview is not the concern of Monde vor the landing”. The book takes its protagonist seriously, while in Edelbauer’s novel there is a corrective to the main character thanks to its three-person constellation.
What is lacking is irony
One might suspect Clemens J. Setz’s critical comment in the refusal to take an ironic stance towards Peter Bender: Whoever reports madness without irony has a chance of defeating its proponents with their own weapons – as long as one finds the claim of a “religion of reason” credible . But Setz’s book persists in an astonished pointing gesture: What a character this Peter Bender is, what madness!
Since Daniel Kehlmann’s “Measuring the World” we have read many historical novels. The good ones were the ironic and communicative ones: Kehlmann’s, Christine Wunnicke’s, Raphaela Edelbauer’s too. “Moons Before Landing” is too seriously-compassionate to be good.
Clemens J. Setz: “Moons before landing”. Novel.
Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2023. 525 p., ill., hardcover, €26.