Edward's dream

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Edward's dream is a prose text by Wilhelm Busch, who is known today primarily as a humorous draftsman and poet. The text was published in a small edition by Bassermann Verlag in 1891and is one of Busch's late works. Unlike the later prose text Der Schmetterling ( The Butterfly) , Edward's dream (apart from the cover picture) has no drawings.

content

The text has no actual storyline, but consists of many small nested episodes. These are dream notes that show no parallels to the realistic or naturalistic discourse on time of the late 19th century. The dream is embedded in a framework story.

The story begins after Eduard has extinguished the candlelight. Edward's physical person is doubled. As a shrunken point, the dream figure Eduard floats out of the sleeping Eduard's nose and travels through the narrative in the form of a thinking point . The story addresses, among other things, the industrial prosperity of the Wilhelminian era, which leaves the weak behind. This is sometimes described in a grotesque way.

Several people were standing on the embankment. An old man without hope, a woman without a hat, a gambler without money, two lovers with no prospects and two little girls with bad reports. When the train was over, the station attendant came and gathered their heads. He already had a nice basket full in his little house.

The humor of the story is heightened in many places by biting into the grotesque. Wilhelm Busch calls the murder plans of a fiancé a minor operational disruption . There is also an alienation and new formation of idioms. This is how Busch speaks of the apron of the future and the tragic hat of fate .

evaluation

The judgments about this story differ widely. Joseph Kraus sees this story as the real highlight of Wilhelm Busch's life's work, the Busch nephews considered it a pearl of world literature and the editors of the Critical Complete Edition state a narrative style that had no equivalent in the literature of his time. Eva Weissweiler, on the other hand, sees Wilhelm Busch's unsuccessful attempt to prove himself in the genre of the novella in the story , and believes that the polemical swipes at everything that annoyed and offended him expose emotional abysses that his picture stories can only guess at . The story The Butterfly , published in 1895, is more stringent in its narrative style than Eduard's dream , but like the latter hardly found a readership because it seemed to fit so little with Busch's oeuvre.

expenditure

  • Picture stories. Historical - critical complete edition. Volume I - III, ed. by Herwig Guratzsch and Hans-Joachim Neyer, 2nd, revised edition, Hanover 2007, ISBN 978-3-89993-806-7
  • Collected Works. Directmedia Publishing, 2002 (Digital Library Vol. 74), ISBN 3-89853-174-0 (CD-ROM)
  • Edward's dream and other stories . Eulenspiegel Verlag Berlin, 1970, 1st edition, ed. by Wolfgang Teichmann
  • Wilhelm Busch: Edward's dream. In: Rolf Hochhuth (Ed.): Wilhelm Busch, Complete Works and a selection of the sketches and paintings in two volumes. Volume 2: What is popular is also allowed. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1959, pp. 402-441.

supporting documents

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kraus, p. 130
  2. ↑ Weissweiler, pp. 316-317
  3. ↑ Weissweiler, pp. 320–322.
  4. ↑ Weissweiler, pp. 330–331

Web links

Wikiquote: Edward's Dream  Quotes

Wilhelm Busch, Edward's dream at www.zeno.org