The dog flower

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The dog flower is a story by the German writer Wolfgang Borchert . Dated January 24, 1946, it was published for the first time on April 30 and May 4, 1946 in the Hamburg Free Press and headed Borchert's first prose collection, Die Hundeblume. Tales from our day as the cover story.

The story is about a young prisoner who discovers a dog flower in the prison yard while walking daily . In his dreary everyday life, the flower becomes the object of his longing and desire. Throughout history, Borchert processed autobiographical memories of his own imprisonment in a military prison during the National Socialist era . Die Hundeblume Borchert's first extensive prose work was created during a hospital stay of the already seriously ill writer . It marks a decisive turning point in his work from the early poems to the short stories from the last two years of his life, which, along with the drama Outside the Door, laid the foundation for his popularity.

Common dandelion , also known colloquially as the dog flower

content

A 22-year-old prisoner, identified only by the number 432 on his cell door, reports on his everyday life in prison. In his solitary cell he is cut off from the outside world and thrown back to preoccupation with himself. The daily walk in the courtyard is the only break in solitude . There, the prisoner's anger at the given routine is discharged with subtle harassment at the man in front of him, of whom he sees nothing more than the back, and which he therefore simply calls a “wig”.

One day number 432 discovers a lonely blooming dog flower in the prison yard. This unusual intrusion of life and nature into the dreary, gray everyday prison life determines the prisoner's thinking from now on. While he initially tries to hide his discovery from others, the sight of the flower is soon no longer enough for him and he longs to own it. He persistently directs the prisoners' cycle closer to the flower round after round. Just when it is finally within reach for him, the man in front collapses in a comical pirouette and dies, which number 432 understands as the last triumph of the hated "wig" over his plans. Only when he looks the dying person in the face does his hatred of him dissolve.

As a result, the prisoner has a new man in front who takes his attention away from the flower over the next few weeks. The newcomer bows so submissively to each security guard that number 432 has to fight with all willpower not to be infected by his submissiveness himself. Only when he succeeds in changing the front man can number 432 put his plan into action. He bends down to straighten his stocking and picks the dog flower unnoticed. The sight of them then fills him in his cell with kindness and tenderness: He wants to leave all civilization behind and become like the flower. During the night he dreams that earth will be piled over him, that he himself will become earth and flowers will sprout from him.

Autobiographical background

During the Second World War , Borchert was commanded in Army Group Center for the German attack on the Soviet Union . On February 23, 1942 near Smolensk there was a gunshot wound in his left hand during a guard gang, as a result of which his middle finger had to be amputated. On his return, Borchert was arrested in the home hospital on suspicion of self-mutilation and transferred to the Nuremberg military prison. On July 31, the trial took place at which the prosecution asked for the death penalty , but the court ruled on acquittal. Due to the accumulated incriminating evidence from Borchert's critical statements about the Third Reich , a second trial followed for a violation of the Treachery Act , which ended with a sentence of six weeks of intensified arrest with subsequent so-called " frontline probation ". Borchert was released on October 8, 1942, but in 1944, after a Goebbels parody denounced by an observer , he was sentenced again to nine months in prison for undermining military strength .

Borchert pointed out the influence of his time in the Nuremberg military prison on the story The Dog Flower . As he wrote in May 1946 to a friend, "if I had not gone to prison, I had no Hundeblume . Wrote" Elsewhere, he stressed that that work "more a priva famous as a poetic is". Shortly before his death, Borchert declared, “that there is this dog-flower man, that he was 21 years old and sat for 100 days in a solitary cell with the prosecution's motion to be shot dead! 100 days. 21 years. He really stole a dog's flower and was not allowed to go in circles for a week as a punishment! [...] And then these 100 days ran after him for four years through all the nights until he suddenly managed to literally puke them up! So there they were! You got rid of them. And so Wolfgang Borchert wrote his first story. "

History of origin

After returning from World War II, Borchert was active in the Hamburg theater scene for the first few months. He wrote texts for cabaret, appeared as an actor himself, founded a backyard theater with friends and worked as an assistant director at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus . However, his health, which had deteriorated as a result of the war and multiple imprisonments, visibly deteriorated towards the end of 1945. Borchert was admitted to Hamburg's Elisabeth Hospital at the beginning of December, suffering from liver disease, weakened by attacks of fever and bedridden. In a letter dated January 6th, Borchert stated that a quick recovery was not to be expected and confessed resigned: "At the moment, however, I am completely without courage for myself."

From a literary point of view, Borchert was particularly fond of poetry since his youth . He had already published a few poems in magazines and wrote a self-deprecating poem in the hospital with the title Great adventures of a boy with liver disease, which almost shattered him , which was written between January 21 and 27. In complete contrast to this frivolous ballad was the prose text of the dog flower , which Borchert wrote down on January 24th, the content of which he described to his mother as "fear, loneliness and abandonment of a death row inmate". In addition to memories of his own prison time, Borchert was also inspired by the hospital stay. A fellow patient, of whom Borchert saw nothing but the fringe of hair all day, served as a template for the “wig”. A forerunner of the dog flower can be found in Borchert's early prose sketch Die Blume in 1941 . This also leads to the adoration of a flower as a symbol for life, but the subject of imprisonment is still missing. Peter Rühmkorf called Die Blume "a sentimental piece of reflection" that offers "the most general lamentations and sentimentalities" without concrete material.

The change from poetry to prose was initially difficult for Borchert, and he confessed in a letter from the hospital: "I have to get used to prose first - prose is too slow for me, I'm too used to speed." In another letter emphasized he that his way of writing "is not work - but at most a short intoxication". The texts are not fought for, but written down as soon as an idea is available and hardly changed afterwards. The original manuscript of Die Hundeblume also shows only minor changes. In the complete edition of Borchert's work published by Michael Töteberg in 2007 , stylistic and grammatical corrections have been revised by the publisher, and three deleted passages are listed in the editorial appendix. Originally a later removed ending was attached to the manuscript: “When they picked him up the next morning at 4 o'clock and he knew he would not return, he looked at the last pale stars without fear in the face. / He was ready to say yes to any adventure that awaited the soul . ”In an early version, Borchert gave the story the title Aline - after the actress Aline Bußmann , with whom the young writer was in close correspondence.

Wolfgang Borchert sent the story on February 18, 1946 to Hugo Sieker , head of the feature pages of the Hamburger Freie Presse and long-time friend of the Borchert family, with the words: “I have to do something - simply because I have to earn money to mine To be able to pay hospital stay. "Sieker published the story in an abridged version and divided into two editions in the Hamburger Freie Presse on April 30 and May 4, 1946. Borchert himself commented critically about the processing:" Two delightful linocuts made the cut Not even half good again. ”However, the publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt became aware of Borchert through the publication and promised him an anthology if he had more“ dog flowers ”to offer. Erich Kästner published the story in his youth magazine Pinguin .

Only after the success of the radio play Outside in front of the door in February 1947 was the dog flower actually published . In June 1947, Borchert's first prose collection, Die Hundeblume, was published. Stories from our day in the Hamburgische Bücherei publishing house by Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz , who had previously published a collection of Borchert's poems. The first edition was 5000 copies. In 1949 there was a new edition of another 2,000 copies on better paper that was “equipped for peace”. In the same year the Rowohlt Verlag published the story as part of Borchert's complete works .

Analysis and interpretation

genus

The question of which literary genre the dog flower should be assigned to is controversial. Theo Elm counts them, along with Die Kirschen , Die Küchenuhr and Schischyphusch, among “Borchert's best short stories ”, which are characterized by typical characters, set-like scenes and a concise, laconic style. Wulf Köpke, on the other hand, questions whether the text “can be addressed as a short story [...] without further ado”. Rolf Schulmeister uses the term “short story” for him, Lubomír Doležel the term “ poetic story”. Helmut Gumtau, on the other hand, recognizes “despite the brevity of fourteen and a half pages in the work edition, a novella ” whose coherence was no longer achieved by Borchert's later works. Konrad Freydank, too, sees a “fully valid” novella due to the “mature and well-designed structure”, which has a narrative framework as well as a central thing symbol in the form of the dog flower. It "occupies a special position in Borchert's work in almost every respect".

Narrative perspective

The narrative is written in the first person form . Hans-Gerd Winter differentiates between an “observing self” and a “reflective” and later “acting self”, which indicate a split in the ego of the detainee. The prisoner creates an imaginary audience that is addressed with "you" and to which the experiences of the "I" are presented. The whole story sets up a theater situation for winter with a stage set consisting of only a few props (the cell with cot, door and window, the prison yard and the flower), with the courtyard aisles reminiscent of circus performances. Again and again, the "you" is identified with what is happening. When a "we" is mentioned, it is invited to take part in the game.

At the end, just before the dog flower tears off, there is an abrupt change from the narrative perspective to the Er form. Winter interprets this as a change of location from the stage to the audience. However, the narrator is still able to describe the inner life of the prisoner. The change of perspective makes it possible to keep a distance to the intense experiences of the prisoner and thereby make them narrative in the first place. According to Winter, Borchert uses the possibilities of theater and role play with deliberately exaggerated sensations from sentimental to comedy in order to devalue the experience of reality and to cover it with self-irony. The prose theater in The Dog Flower points ahead to the upcoming play Outside in front of the door .

language

The dog flower contains numerous stylistic features that, according to János Kohn, are typical of Borchert's oeuvre, such as the frequent use of metaphors and the questions that recur as a leitmotif, as well as the character of an appeal caused by addressing a counterpart . However, compared to the later short stories, the early narrative is not only unusually extensive, it also contains a wide range of linguistic means that are hardly used later. So prevail in the Hundeblume nor the "narrative tenses " past tense and past perfect before. Despite a general tendency towards co-ordinating, ego-related parataxes - the most common words are the conjunction “and”, also at the beginning of a sentence, as well as pronouns of the 1st person singular - the reflective basic structure also leads to hypotactic sentence structures with numerous conjunctives .

The linguistic means serve to support the content of the story. The feeling of isolation and defenselessness is not only conveyed by the leitmotif of the slamming door, but also by the grammatical forms of the patient , the passive and “man” constructions. The color symbolism of “yellow” and “gray” stands for the contrast between light and warmth and the cold of the prison. The prisoner's uncertainty and doubts are expressed in the use of the term “ God ”, which is mostly used in questions, in the vicinity of a “maybe” and with the indefinite article instead of a definite one . Two other dominant terms, "man in front" and "man behind", characterize the bipolar social order of the prisoners. The emotions and longings of the narrator can be seen, among other things, in the unusual prefixes with “um” (“circling”, “surrounding”, “encompassing”, “encompassing”).

structure

According to Károly Csúri, Borchert operates in Die Hundeblume with circulatory movements on different levels. On the one hand, the prisoner is in the center of a system of closed circles: in the walls of his cell, in the courtyard in the middle of the “picket fence” of his fellow prisoners and surrounded by the guards. This “cycle of lifelessness” is contrasted with the “cycle of life”, from the sprouting of the flower to the burial, through which the prisoner ultimately overcomes time and space and escapes from reality into myth , the dreamlike unification of man and nature.

The narrative follows a basic structure that defines Csúri in numerous works by Borchert: From an initial state - here loneliness and fear in the prison cell - the Borchert hero reaches a transitional state - what is happening in the prison yard - into the final state, a "virtual stage" timeless security ”, in which the prisoner turns into a savage connected with nature and in the end even becomes one with it. For Csúri it is about a change in the relationship of the ego to life: from the lifelessness of the prison, man ultimately returns to life. At the same time, the return to " mother earth " also means death.

Grotesque and romantic

For Peter Rühmkorf, the story bears characteristics of a grotesque . Life behind the prison walls is absurd , diabolical and twisted. Things and people swap their roles, which makes the first bad, the second into pure blunt objects that are deprived of any freedom of action. However, there is no sympathy or solidarity among the prisoners, but "an abysmal, a black merriment", in which suffering and even death only seem strange and ridiculous. It is typical for Borchert, however, that he never sticks to the pure grotesque, but always contrasts it with messages of feeling up to and including sentimentality.

In the “evocation of the flower spirit” at the end of the story, not only a “sensual pleasure in transient beauty” manifests itself, but the flower symbolizes “love, the earth, the utterly feminine”. For Rühmkorf, this is where the young Borchert's attitude towards life was deeply romantic and linked to literary expressionism . Borchert reacts to a dehumanized world with regression into a world before civilization , into wistful worship of nature, magical evocation and finally with retreat into death.

Hope and freedom

The eponymous dog flower becomes a symbol of hope for Claus B. Schröder: Actually a weed that disturbs and spoils the order of the lawn, but also the dandelion in the carefree play of the children, in Borchert's story it becomes a symbol of humanity and survival par excellence, and that on the already mapped out path to execution. For Marianne Schmidt , the dog flower embodies the “simple, low, everyday and little noticed”, although its color and rays are reminiscent of a sun. She resembles an enchanted princess from a fairy tale, behind whose inconspicuousness lies the power to redeem the prisoner in the end. According to Harro Gehse, for the first-person narrator it means everything that is missing in his everyday imprisonment: "Love, life, beauty." It shows how a feeling of happiness can arise in extreme situations from the slightest occasion.

The contact between man and flower takes place initially through the prisoner's senses , especially his olfactory sense . The images emerging in his head detach themselves from space and time and allow general memories of youth and longings for femininity to arise, in which the flower becomes a lover. It also stands generally for nature, which remains locked out of the prisoner's cell, for the exoticism of distant lands and the world of primeval times . In the end, the longed-for freedom of the prisoner is realized in an imagined death, at the same time there is also a strong will to survive and an individual form of resistance in taking possession of the flower, which allows the prisoner to break out of his cell reality, at least mentally.

reception

In his biography about Wolfgang Borchert, Peter Rühmkorf rated the story The Dog Flower as a sudden outbreak of literary genius, after all of Borchert's previous work had hardly been promising and none of his poems had any real status. For him, the dog flower was "a fundamentally peculiar, instantly modern, masterful narrative without any further ado and without further correction", which was not preceded by a gradual development of a literary talent, "but the sudden birth of fortune, contrary to all reason and attempts at explanation", As a result, Borchert “has all means at hand at one stroke, has mastered all methods, does not think about style and does not reflect on the syntax”.

According to Claus B. Schröder, the “highly unusual prison story” was “much praised, loved and yet read less self-shockingly than it was written.” Rather, The Dog Flower “was read like a symbol of human hope, like the song of praise , a human sign in inhuman times The psychologist Siegfried Preiser, according to his own statement, learned from Borchert's story “in school the indomitable sensitivity of a vulnerable person who brought issues of his time to the point.”

The dog flower was filmed by Michael Blume and adapted for the stage by various theaters. Kenny Berger assembled passages from Die Hundeblume into his story Milchgesicht , which was awarded in 1995 as part of the Ingeborg Drewitz Literature Prize for Prisoners . In this takeover by a contemporary author, Stefan Straub identifies a "tradition of prisoner literature" , the subject matter of which "has remained unchanged for half a century: the prison in its inhumanity".

literature

Text output

  • Wolfgang Borchert: The dog flower. Tales from our day . Hamburgische Bücherei, Hamburg 1947, pp. 11–33.
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The dog flower. The rats sleep at night . Facsimile print of the manuscript. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986.
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-00652-5 , pp. 27-43.

Secondary literature

  • Károly Csúri: Semantic fine structures: literary aesthetic aspects of the form of composition with Wolfgang Borchert . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective . Dölling and Gallitz, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930802-33-3 , pp. 157-159.
  • Harro Gehse: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door, The Dog Flower, and other stories. Analyzes and reflections. Joachim Beyer, Hollfeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-88805-134-0 , pp. 55-65
  • Reiner Poppe: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door . The dog flower. The three dark kings . This Tuesday . The kitchen clock . The rats sleep at night . Schischyphusch. King's Explanations , 299. C. Bange, Hollfeld 11th Erw. Edition 1985 ISBN 380440233X
  • János Kohn: Forms of expression of inner reality in Wolfgang Borchert: The multivalence of and in the story "The Dog Flower" . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 140–153
  • Peter Rühmkorf : Wolfgang Borchert . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1961, ISBN 3-499-50058-2 , pp. 67-75.
  • Hans-Gerd Winter: "I hardly care ... to be printed - I feel that my day is coming." Wolfgang Borchert's entry into the literary field 1940–1946 . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 102–107.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck. Structure, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7466-2385-6 , pp. 112-119, 148.
  2. ↑ a b Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 180–181.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, poems and documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-13983-9 , p. 174.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, Poems and Documents , p. 171.
  5. ↑ a b Peter Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 67.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, Poems and Documents , p. 161.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: The flower . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 511–512.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, Poems and Documents , pp. 167–169.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), pp. 532-533.
  10. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 29.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, Poems and Documents , p. 165.
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Alone with my shadow and the moon. Letters, Poems and Documents , p. 181.
  13. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 182-183.
  14. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , p. 214.
  15. ^ Theo Elm : "Outside the door": Historicity and topicality Wolfgang Borchert . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 267–268.
  16. ↑ Wulf Köpke: In the matter of Wolfgang Borchert . In: Rudolf Wolff (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Work and effect . Bouvier, Bonn 1984, ISBN 3-416-01729-3 , p. 106.
  17. ^ Rolf Schulmeister : Wolfgang Borchert . In: Dietrich Weber (Hrsg.): German literature of the present in single representations . Volume 1. Kröner, Stuttgart 1976, p. 190.
  18. ↑ Lubomír Doležel: "The Dog Flower" (W. Borchert) or: the poetic story . In: Wolfgang Haubrichs (Ed.): Narrative research 3. Theories, models and methods of narratives. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1978, pp. 256-273.
  19. ^ Helmut Gumtau: Wolfgang Borchert. Heads of the XX. Century . Colloquium, Berlin 1969, p. 45.
  20. ↑ Konrad Freydank: The prose work Borchert. On the problem of short stories in Germany . Dissertation, Marburg 1964, p. 59.
  21. ↑ Hans-Gerd Winter: "I hardly care ... to be printed - I feel that my day is coming." Wolfgang Borchert's entry into the literary field 1940–1946 , pp. 102–107.
  22. ↑ János Kohn: Forms of Expression of Inner Reality in Wolfgang Borchert: The multivalence of and in the story "Die Hundeblume" , pp. 140–153.
  23. ↑ Károly Csúri: Semantic fine structures: literary aesthetic aspects of the compositional form in Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 156–159.
  24. ↑ Peter Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 67–75.
  25. ↑ a b Claus B. Schröder: With a sober view of passions. This name with its peculiar sound . In: Rudolf Wolff (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert. Work and effect . Bouvier, Bonn 1984, ISBN 3-416-01729-3 , p. 67.
  26. ^ Marianne Schmidt : Wolfgang Borchert. Analysis and Aspects . Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 1970, pp. 36–37.
  27. ↑ Harro Gehse: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. The Dog Flower and Other Stories , pp. 64–65.
  28. ↑ Hans-Gerd Winter: "I hardly care ... to be printed - I feel that my day is coming." Wolfgang Borchert's entry into the literary field 1940–1946 , pp. 105–106.
  29. ↑ Peter Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , pp. 117–118.
  30. ^ Claus B. Schröder: Wolfgang Borchert. The most important voice in post-war German literature . Heyne, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-453-02849-X , p. 282.
  31. ^ Siegfried Preiser: Flowers on the wayside . In: Annette Kämmerer (Ed.): Soul landscapes. Forays into psychology . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-46206-9 , pp. 92-93.
  32. ↑ Die Hundeblume - The Dandelion at the German Education Server .
  33. ↑ Die Hundeblume ( Memento of the original from February 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.theater-p.ch archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the theater pudels-kern .
  34. ↑ The dog flower in Eigenreich .
  35. ↑ Die Hundeblume ( Memento of the original dated November 30, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Volksbühne spinning wheel .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spinnrad-volksbuehne.de
  36. ↑ Stefan Straub: When words break through ... Creative writing and storytelling opportunities in therapy and personal development . Edition am Rand, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8311-3619-X , p. Vii.
  37. ↑ 13th to 15th ed., Series No. 299 / 299a, around 1990, without Schischyphusch. - Later edition without the little stories, only "Outside ..."