Atta troll

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Title page of the first book edition in 1847

“Atta Troll. A Midsummer Night's Dream ” is an epic verse by Heinrich Heine that was written in 1841 and appeared in the newspaper for the elegant world in 1843 - incomplete and never completed, as Heine remarked in the foreword to a book edition dated 1847 in 1846:“ I had the intention to be in to publish the whole thing later, but it always remained with the praiseworthy resolution, and like all great works by the Germans, such as the Cologne Dome, Schelling's God, the Prussian Constitution, etc., the "Atta Troll" did too - he did not become finished. ”In the last chapter (Caput XXVII) Heine writes:“ Oh, it is perhaps the last / free forest song of Romanticism ”, ending romantic poetry as an epoch.

Atta Troll, like Franz Kafka's A report for an academy, uses the life of a dancing bear to address the human urge for freedom and contrasts lazy people with an untamed bear hero. However, a specific teaching of the work cannot be made out and should not come out, as the author notes in the third chapter, among other things. Heine speaks out particularly against the politicized literature of his time and writes in front of the hand only “for the sake of art”.

poetics

Atta Troll is one of Heine's most virtuoso works, the microstructure of which he has worked particularly hard on. The lightness of the inconsistent four-part troche , the linguistic density and the wit are, as the numerous manuscripts show, due to hard work.

content

In the French spa town of Cauterets (today the Midi-Pyrénées region - Heine knew the region from Badereisen in 1841 and 1846), an adventurer with a turbulent past, who became a bear guide , lets two bears dance on a summer afternoon in the market square . It's Atta Troll and his wife, the bear Mumma. Atta breaks free from his chain and escapes. Mumma remains trapped.

Atta's cave is located in the historic Roncesvalles valley . There he sorely misses his mum, but is back with his six bear children. Before them he ponders and preaches about the conceit and wickedness of people who have subjugated the animal world and profaned, even frivolous, the originally pious, cultic dance. Atta's subversive vision is to abolish “the regiment of disdainful monopoly” and to create a “just animal kingdom”.

The narrative situation changes, and the narrator himself goes on bear hunting in the Pyrenees. The hunter Laskaro leads him, as silent as a walking dead man. You cross the Spanish border and come to Laskaro's mother, the witch Uraka. In her hut pour mother and son during the Midsummer Eve the "Fortune Ball", which is intended for Atta Troll. The narrator seeks the outdoors and sees a wild hunt , a ghost train in a ravine, lit by the full moon . In the varied series he also discovers two poets named Wolfgang and William. The colorful midnight parade is led by three beautiful riders, whose clothes, which are already short, are fluttering shortened by the wind. They are Diana , the fairy Abunde and Herodias . This Jewess, the “lovely ghost”, impresses him the most.

One night later, in the hut of the Uraka, the narrator watches as she revives her son, the walking dead, with witch's ointment . The next day, to his amazement, he starts talking to the Uraka pug . Originally he was a Swabian poet who escaped his schoolmates into art. In his poems he had praised virtue above all else. The witch had "plugged" him because he did not want to allow her to "abuse" his virtue. For him, virtue is, as it were, in “leather underpants”. As a punishment, he now has to stir the kettle as a pug in the witch's kitchen. He can only be redeemed by a pure virgin if she reads all of Gustav Pfizer 's poems on New Year's Eve without falling asleep. The narrator regrets that he lacks both qualities, especially the second.

Atta Troll has a premonition of death when he talks to his boys. Immediately afterwards he hears the voice of his bear Mumma, whom he sorely misses. But it is not Mumma who calls, but the witch Uraka who imitates Mumma's voice. Atta Troll runs out of the protective cave Laskaro in front of the rifle. The bear killer is celebrated as a hero in the Basque villages, for which he stutters thanks - to his surprise and that of the bystanders, since he is speaking for the first time. Atta Troll is skinned. After his fur has passed through several hands, he arrives in Paris and becomes a bedside rug for Juliette, the friend of the narrator.

During a walk with Juliette in the Paris Botanical Garden , the narrator meets Mumma, Atta's widow. She lives here in the bear pit and has found new love happiness with a Siberian bear.

“Atta Troll” contains allusions to public figures of the time. In addition to Gustav Pfizer, Hans Ferdinand Maßmann and Ludwig Uhland , for example, are also targeted here . The reader has to find out for himself which Swabian poet became a pug as a punishment for his “virtue”.

Mockery and poet rivalry are also behind the frequent mention of Freiligrath's contemporary poem “Der Mohrenfürst”, whose fate (it ends in slavery ) is similar to Attas. The narrator meets the “Moorish Prince” in front of Mumma's pit in the botanical garden. In continuation of the action at Freiligrath, Heine makes him a bear keeper, liberated citizen and husband, who is well cooked.

The animal pos is dedicated to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense .

Web links

Wikisource: Proof of digital copies in 1843 and 1847  - sources and full texts

literature

  • Stefan Heym : Atta Troll. Attempt an analysis. C. Bertelsmann, Munich 1983.
  • Gerhard Höhn (Ed.): Heine manual. Time, person, work. 3rd revised and expanded edition, Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 81–95. With references.
  • Atta troll. A midsummer night's dream . Critically through. Edition with documentation, commentary and epilogue by Winfried Woesler. Reclam, Stuttgart, bibl. supplemented edition 1995, reprint 2009 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Winfried Woesler: Afterword, in Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll. A midsummer night's dream . Bibl. Supplementary edition 1995, ND 2009 edition. Reclam, Stuttgart, ISBN 978-3-15-002261-0 , pp. 196 .
  2. ↑

    ... firstly,
    I am not a pure virgin,
    and secondly, I would be
    much less capable of
    ever reading the poems of Gustav Pfizer
    without falling asleep.

    Caput 22 at the end.