Körner's morning

Title page of: I had myself shaved (1862)

Körner's morning is the title of the only comedy by Friedrich Schiller that he wrote for the 31st birthday of his friend Christian Gottfried Körner . The work was probably written between June 5 and July 2, 1787. During Schiller's lifetime, the initially untitled text was not published and was only published in 1862 by Carl Künzel under the title I let myself shave .

The comic poetry intended for domestic use parodies the Dresden circle around Körner and its tendency not to finish work that has already started or only with great difficulty. It shows a social phase in Schiller's life and at the same time documents a piece of everyday history from the late 18th century.

content

Friedrich Schiller painting by Anton Graff

The short piece presents an excerpt from the life of the notoriously overburdened Senior Consistorial Councilor Körner, who can initially be seen in his study in a dressing gown and slippers and wants to work on a manuscript. Relieved to have the morning to himself, he calls his servant Gottlieb to shave him. But there is a constant knock on the door, suppliers, shoemakers, tailors, city judges and others appear, harass him with questions and offers, involve him in hectic conversations and distract him.

Schiller appears right at the beginning , asks for Raphael's manuscript (Raphael's letter to Julius) for his philosophical letters , but finds only an incomplete sentence on the desk. When asked "Where are you leaving?", The exasperated Körner replies: "That's all."

Time flies with the constant change of characters. Körner tries in vain to be denied, his resolute wife Minna slaps the face, urges him to hurry and reminds him of a meeting. Around noon he finally feels himself alone for a moment and wants to put on his trousers to rush to the consistory, but is watched by Dorchen , who is shocked and runs screaming from the room. After all, it is one o'clock and Körner missed the meeting. Minna, Schiller, Dorchen and Huber call out in chorus what he had been doing all morning in God's name. Körner poses and replies: "I had myself shaved."

Creation and publication

Christian Gottfried Körner (Portrait of Anton Graff )

Since the flight of the Countess de La Motte to England on June 5, 1787, is told as news at one point in the play ("You know that La Motte has echapped."), Schiller must make the relevant statement afterwards ( terminus post quem ) written and completed the work by Körner's 31st birthday.

The author had also given him literary birthday presents in previous years. In 1785, shortly after they met, Schiller wrote the conventional casual poem Unserm dear grains . A year later, he drew 13 pen sketches that related to everyday situations , were supplemented by comments from Ludwig Ferdinand Huber and presented as avanturas of the new Telemach or Exsertionen Körner in the form of a bound festival newspaper. The play was presumably performed on July 2, 1787 in the Körners house, Schiller was not only the actor himself , but also the soap acquaintance , while Dora Stock (Dorchen) , Minna, Huber and Körner played themselves.

After the death of her husband, Maria Körner initially kept the manuscript, but then sold it to the autograph dealer Carl Künzel in 1837 on the condition that he should either destroy the entire booklet or the passages that "cast any shade of shadow on Koerner's or Schiller's character." Künzel said yes by writing this and a personal oath on the last page: “I swear to do this, if God will help me. Amen."

About thirty years later there was a debate in the Allgemeine Zeitung , in the course of which Künzel was accused of withholding the comedy writer Schiller from the world. Because of the increasing stress, he finally decided to publish the work and chose the title I let myself be shaved . When Karl Goedeke included the farce in the fourth volume of his complete edition, he chose the title that is still popular today.

background

Minna grains

With his short piece, Schiller parodied the Dresden circle around Körner. Art and philosophy suddenly meet all sorts of adversities in everyday life. For example, Huber wants to present his article on the conspiracy of the Tribune Cola di Rienzo , but is interrupted by the intervening shoemaker who asks Körner whether he would like high or low heels . Rising philosophical plans are juxtaposed with the confusion of daily life, which threatens to sink into chaos when many people come and go and find no peace in the messy apartment with the laundry lying around and the unpaid bills.

With his farce, Schiller referred to the contribution expected by Körner to the Philosophical Letters , which appeared in the third issue of Thalia at the end of April 1786 and were to be continued. A fragment of the promised letter was finally published at the beginning of May 1789, but was probably mostly written by Schiller himself. Clearly, Schiller alluded to Körner's weakness in fulfilling promises on time. His passivity and indolence, his "Trödeley", as Körner himself called and lamented it, had also been ridiculed by other contemporaries.

The structure of the piece is based on the Proverbes dramatiques , one-act plays with a pointed and witty style that appeared in France during the reign of the Sun King and presented a thesis or a certain way of life in the course of a game of intrigue. At first they were only performed in aristocratic salons, but later also in public theaters on the boulevard. The plays drew their themes preferably from moral studies , but also from current political events, from press reports and even gossip stories and represented a genre that the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal took up again in his lyrical dramas Gestern and Der Tor und der Tod .

Schiller may not have written any more of his own comedies, but this piece was not his only experience with comic material. At the request of Duke Karl August , he later edited and translated two comedies by Louis-Benoît Picard : Encore des Ménechmes (first Die neue Ménechmes , then The Nephew as Uncle ) and Médiocre et rampant (initially mediocrity and creeping or how to get up , then The Parasite or The Art of Making Happiness ). In a few places he intensified the comic effects, corrected insignificant careless mistakes and transferred the original , written in Alexandrians , to the bourgeois conversational tone. The relative fidelity to processing is less due to philological meticulousness than a simple lack of time. So he wrote to Körner that Picard's execution was too dry, but further processing would have burdens him excessively and for a basically dubious work.

Special features and reception

In the text there are a number of interjections such as "Schicke!", "Allzeit!" And "Natur!", Which are not lexically listed and indicate a private language within the circle. Schiller's friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe characterized such a private language as "a kind of crook's idiom which, by making the initiated extremely happy, remains unnoticed by strangers or becomes annoying when noticed."

In contrast to the older type comedies , the described " vices " are more the rule and no longer the exception and serve as strategies to escape the malaises of everyday life. Money, in particular, plays a central role in Körner's morning , as it is always about certain legal transactions such as buying and selling, lending and inheriting. Schiller, who had found a generous patron in Körner, also knew that material conditions not only influence everyday bourgeoisie but also high art .

Even before the comedy went to press, a controversial discussion arose in the professional world about its meaning. Alfred von Wolhaben spoke of Schiller's “only original comedy”, which offered a closed view of his “cheerful mood”, with which the picture of the poet could be completed. Kuno Fischer, on the other hand, who was looking for central elements of the comic in Schiller's work, warned against an exaggerated assessment. The farce is “nothing more than a nice domestic joke”, which the cheerful Schiller “designed with a happy hand”.

David Friedrich Strauss

While Maria Körner feared that the harmless piece could damage Schiller's reputation and disavow him, David Friedrich Strauss considered such fears to be absurd in view of its size and importance. Since his “transfiguration”, “Schiller always remains Schiller even in his dressing gown”. At his "noble figure" the world looks up "believing and adoring". Even the little one is valuable, especially since it is nice to see the poet as a person who moves "in a close circle among relatives and friends ... leisurely" and also enjoys "little jokes and teasing".

Carl Künzel responded to the public disputes about the piece by subtitling the first print with A dramatic joke and writing in the January 16, 1863 edition of the Neckar newspaper that the piece was artistically meaningless and “even as an occasional work it was not of the slightest value “If it did not come from Schiller's pen and did not refer to Körner. This assessment shaped the reception until recent attempts were made to appreciate the work as literarily independent and to interpret it in the context of literary history .

For Grit Dommes, those passages depicting Körner's weaknesses in decision-making and other personal problems already hint at the neuroses of the modern individual. The contradictions between him and the social demands are extremely complicated and cannot therefore be overcome by simple moral principles. The Carpe diem of the beginning, the time to take advantage of the morning makes sense proves to be so deceptive that grains can only meet with "perverted self-confidence" to him at the end and in significant pose the Petty puts forward: With its grotesque reference to shave it confirms instead of invalidating the charge of wasting time.

expenditure

• Friedrich von Schiller: I had myself shaved: a dramatic joke by Friedrich von Schiller . Publisher of the English Art Institute AH Payne 1862

literature

• Peter-André Alt : Körner's morning . In: Schiller, Leben - Werk - Zeit , first volume, Munich 2000, pp. 424–425
• Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 88–92

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Note: The dates differ here, while Gritt Dommes gives 1863, Peter-André Alt speaks of 1862
2. ^ Helmut Koopmann , comments on Körner's morning. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume I, Dramas I, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 931
3. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui , Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 88
4. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, Körners Morning , in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works , Volume I, Dramas I, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 621
5. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, Körners Morning , In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works , Volume I, Dramas I, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 627
6. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, Körners Morning , in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume I, Dramen I, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 624
7. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 88
8. ^ Peter-André Alt : Körner's morning . In: Schiller, Leben - Werk - Zeit , first volume, Munich 2000, p. 422
9. ↑ Quoted from: Grit Dommes: Körners Morning . In: Schiller manual, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 89
10. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 90
11. ^ Helmut Koopmann, comments on Körner's morning . In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works , Volume I, Dramas I, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 931
12. ^ Peter-André Alt, Körner's morning . In: Schiller, Leben - Werk - Zeit , first volume, Munich 2000, p. 425
13. ^ Peter-André Alt, Körner's morning . In: Schiller, Leben - Werk - Zeit , first volume, Munich 2000, p. 426
14. ^ Heinz Gerd Ingenkamp: Editing and translations . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 533
15. ↑ Quoted from: Grit Dommes. Körner's morning . In: Schiller manual, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 89
16. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 91
17. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 91
18. ↑ Quoted from: Grit Dommes: Körners Morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 91
19. ↑ Grit Dommes: Körner's morning . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 90