The three dark kings

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The three dark kings is a short story by the German writer Wolfgang Borchert . It was created in 1946 and was published for the first time on December 24 of the same year in the Hamburg Free Press . Borchert included it in his second prose collection On This Tuesday , which appeared in November 1947, the same month the author died at the age of 26.

The short story transfers motifs from the Christmas story to the post-war period . A child is born on a cold Christmas Eve in the rubble of a post- WWII city . Three returning soldiers from the war give the family presents like the three wise men . For them, as for their parents, the newborn becomes a bearer of hope in an apparently hopeless time. The short story is a typical example of the so-called rubble literature and is often dealt with in German lessons in schools.

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Men procuring fuel in the winter of 1946/47

A man searches for wood in the ruins of a city devastated by World War II bombing. He returns to his wife, who gave birth an hour ago. While the mother is relieved that her child is alive and sees the sleeping newborn in the glow of the wood stove surrounded by a halo , the father is filled with deep anger at the cold and the miserable circumstances under which the birth had to take place. He looks in vain for someone to blame and on whom he can vent his anger.

Three men in old soldier uniforms are attracted by the firelight and step into the house to warm up. The first soldier only has stumps of his arm because his hands are frozen to death. He gives his father tobacco. The second soldier has edema on his bandaged feet. He gives the child a wooden donkey that he carved for seven months. The third soldier has a nervous problem and is trembling all the time. His comrades explain that he was too scared during the war. He gives the mother two sweets.

When the three soldiers bend over the child, it screams with all its might. Then they leave again. The man muses that they were strange saints, but the woman points to the child, who is now quite alive, so it screams. She reminds that it is Christmas. In the end, the sleeping child is illuminated by the glow of the fire.

shape

Kåre Eirek Gullvåg called The Three Dark Kings a “true” short story with a length of barely 700 words. The individual sentences are also short, the language simple: subject , predicate and simple adverbial determinations . Subordinate clauses and adjectives are used sparingly. The nouns are in the basic shapes are hardly ever to composites contracted. The style does without ornaments and decorations, the sentences are arranged paratactically . Characteristic for the paratax are frequent sentence connections with "da" or "then", as well as the article placed at the beginning of the sentence . Albrecht Weber saw the language of history broken down into its basic components. Structurally, The Three Dark Kings are built like a drama in three acts , whereby the middle act, the appearance of the three dark ones, is again divided into three scenes with the handover of the respective gifts. In the middle of the story is the gift for the child, the wooden donkey, which stands for patience, both symbolically and in the process of its creation.

The characters in the story are types without names and without individuality. They speak everyday language , remain reduced to their function and could be anyone. The child is only addressed through his "face", which is always accompanied by adjectives, his reactions remain limited to sleeping and screaming. In contrast, things are personified : the pavement is frightened, the plank sighs, the door weeps. Man, woman and child appear one after the other and the family is introduced into the story. In the first section in particular, the actions described remain isolated, underscoring the ruins of the city through their fragmentation. The reader first has to put together the storyline himself. Opposites are set again and again: the dark and the cold of the night city against the brightness and warmth of the fire, the crying of the door against the laughing of the man, the destroyed houses against the face of the child who has “already everything”, “what belongs to it ". The frequent use of auxiliary verbs is noticeable , but in the post-war period "sein" and "haben" stand for more than just their grammatical function. The characters encounter the hopeless situation with their will to live, which is echoed in the text in the repeated “but”.

interpretation

According to Albrecht Weber, the first sentence already creates a situation: “He was groping through the dark suburb.” In the dark night, the gray suburb becomes a double sign of sadness and desolation. Their destruction is reflected in the reactions of the objects that sigh and weep. They feel the pain more than the people responsible for the destruction. Even the moon and the stars, whose absence is pointed out, symbolize deprivation. The man who climbs through the rubble in this situation is bitter. He is looking for an opponent whom he can hold responsible for his misery. "But he had no one to hit his fists in the face for." He only had to direct his fight to survival. While he secures his existence through the collected wood, the woman waits in a classic role distribution for his return and looks after the child. In contrast to her husband, she has a keen sense of the life that has come into being and recognizes its higher meaning early on by perceiving a halo around the newborn's head.

The child becomes hope, indicated by the light in which it lies. The “three dark ones”, on the other hand, come from the night. In their striving for the light, they do not allow the Father to repel them. But they have no excuse to break into the room and are silent. The gifts with which they thank you for the hospitality do not get their special value from their material preciousness, but from the fact that they are sacrifices for the donors. The donkey, the child's gift, has the highest ideal value. During its creation, happy and desperate moods were processed for months. Now it will be exchanged for a brief moment in the light and the hope that the child radiates. The encounter with the three dark ones leaves the parents gifted, not just materially, but by understanding the ideal wealth that they have in each other and in their child despite all material need. The man's anger vanishes and the sacred encounter becomes apparent to him: first he calls the three dark ones “strange saints”, then “beautiful saints”. The woman draws the connection to Christmas. The cold and the hopelessness have been overcome, the family has found faith and security.

Christmas postage stamp 1972 of the German Federal Post Office

Wilhelm Große saw the halo, which the mother recognizes in the light around her child, as the first climax and turning point of the story. Here the motif of the birth in Bethlehem is revealed for the first time , in which mother and father become Mary and Joseph , the child the savior who saves a world that is doomed to death. Death and redemption in history are symbolized by the contrasts of dark and light. Full unkingly drawn and the war come the Magi , which had followed the light as the Star of Bethlehem . In contrast to their dark and ragged appearance, through their actions they turn out to be kings. In the end they are released by the child themselves, after whose screams they "picked up their feet and crept to the door". Life lies in the child's scream. Große concluded with the verdict: "The short story is a secularized , modern Christmas story relocated to the post-war period."

For Kåre Eirek Gullvåg, too, the structure of the story was deciphered from its end. With the mention that the birth took place on Christmas , light is thrown on the previous process, the similarities and differences to the biblical Christmas story come to light. The function of light marks the central points of the story. From these, Gullvåg determined a division of the plot:

  1. Introduction; the man gropes in the dark.
  2. The child appears when light falls on his face for the first time.
  3. The woman sees a halo in the light around the child, whereby the opposition between existence and appearance is built up.
  4. Let the light fall on the three dark ones. Though they come from nowhere, they have gifts to give.
  5. Let the light fall on the child one last time; previously just "warm", it has now become "light".

In the end, the child's light enlightened people, this enlightenment being understood internally. Man find hope in charity, become fellow man. Even the father's anger no longer wants to break out in violence. The father has changed his relationship to life.

Manfred Durzak compared The Three Dark Kings with the famous template The Gift of the Magi , a short story by O. Henry . In both stories, the material emergency of a couple is dealt with against the historical background - with O. Henry the Great Depression - on a Christmas Eve. Borchert's story is told much more tightly, soberly and pointedly than that of O. Henry. At the same time, she is more cautious in conveying the ethos . Both stories were aimed at a different audience: O. Henry writes for magazines and the consumption of a broad readership, while for Borchert the addressee of his texts is not someone who seeks entertainment, but the person affected, the fellow destiny.

reception

The short story The Three Dark Kings was first published in the Hamburg Free Press on December 24, 1946, in the middle of the hunger winter of 1946/47 . The following year it was included in Wolfgang Borchert's second collection of prose, On This Tuesday , published in November 1947 by Rowohlt Verlag . The three dark kings is one of the author's best-known short stories, is a typical example of the rubble literature after the Second World War and was often printed in reading books and dealt with in school lessons.

Kåre Eirek Gullvåg called The Three Dark Kings “perhaps the most beautiful story of Borchert”. Anna-Maria Darboven spoke of a "strangely moving Christmas story". Hermann Wiegmann emphasized "the carefully applied symbolism" at the end of the short story, in which a "handful of light [...] can convey something like hope in absolute desolation".

literature

Text output

  • Wolfgang Borchert: This Tuesday. Nineteen stories . Rowohlt, Hamburg / Stuttgart 1947, pp. 31–33. (First edition)
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-00652-5 , pp. 217-219.

Secondary literature

  • Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short stories . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-637-88629-2 , pp. 49-52.
  • Kåre Eirek Gullvåg: The man from the rubble. Wolfgang Borchert and his poetry . K. Fischer, Aachen 1997, ISBN 3-89514-103-8 , pp. 88-90.
  • Albrecht Weber: The rats sleep at night . In: Rupert Hirschenauer, Albrecht Weber (ed.): Interpretations of Wolfgang Borchert . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-01909-0 , pp. 97-108.
  • Manfred Durzak: The German short story of the present. Author portraits, workshop discussions, interpretations . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2074-X , pp. 122–124.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Gullvåg: The Man from the Ruins , p. 88.
  2. ↑ Weber: The rats sleep at night , pp. 101-105.
  3. ^ Weber: The rats sleep at night , pp. 98, 102.
  4. ↑ a b c Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 217.
  5. ↑ Large: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , pp. 50–51.
  6. ^ Weber: The rats sleep at night , p. 101, 104.
  7. ↑ Weber: The rats sleep at night , pp. 97-99.
  8. ↑ a b Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 219.
  9. ↑ Weber: The rats sleep at night , pp. 105-108.
  10. ↑ Large: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , pp. 51–52.
  11. ↑ Gullvåg: The Man from the Ruins , pp. 89–90.
  12. ^ O. Henry: The Gift of the Magi . ( Wikisource )
  13. ↑ Durzak: The German short story of the present . Pp. 123-124.
  14. ↑ Gordon JA Burgess (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert . Christians, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-7672-0868-7 , p. 140
  15. ^ Anna-Maria Darboven: Wolfgang Borchert. The caller in a time of need . Goedel, Hannover 1957, p. 16.
  16. ^ Hermann Wiegmann: The German literature of the 20th century . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2972-0 , p. 271.