But the rats sleep at night

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The rats sleep at night is a short story by the German writer Wolfgang Borchert . It was written in January 1947 and was published in Borchert's second collection of prose This Tuesday in November of that year . The text is a well-known example of the rubble literature after the Second World War and is anchored as school reading in the curricula of many federal states.

The short story takes place in a city that was destroyed by an air raid during the war . A nine-year-old boy guards the place where his dead brother is lying under the rubble to protect him from rats . A man who happens to pass by succeeds in winning the boy's trust. By claiming that rats slept at night, he takes the tired boy from his watch and gives him back a piece of lost hope.

Ruins in Hamburg , Borchert's hometown, during World War II

content

Nine-year-old Jürgen is sitting in the rubble wasteland of a city destroyed by a bombing and guards the buried body of his four-year-old brother because he believes it would otherwise be eaten by rats. An older man tries to win Jürgen's trust and learn what the boy is watching. With the rabbit food in his basket, he arouses the suspicious boy's curiosity, but the boy declines an invitation to look at his rabbits, as he cannot leave the watch.

Only when the man turns to go does Jürgen begin to tell. He reports about the bombing in his house and the buried little brother. His teacher had taught him that the dead were eaten by rats, which is why he guarded his brother day and night. The man then claims that rats slept at night. Jürgen could suspend his watch after sunset and go home without worries. Only after hearing these words does Jürgen show that he is exhausted. The old man leaves under the promise to pick up the boy after dark, give him a rabbit and accompany him to his parents' home.

shape

As in many of his short stories, Wolfgang Borchert tells In The Rats Sleeping Night an episode from the Second World War , whereby, according to Hans-Gerd Winter, he focuses exclusively on the victims of the war and exemplarily shows their suffering. The political and historical framework conditions are connoted , but not explicitly stated. What is happening cannot be precisely classified in terms of time or location. The protagonists are not detailed in their personality, they remain types (“the boy”, “the man”). Only the boy receives a proper name in the course of the story.

The narrative has an open beginning and ending, as is typical of short stories in post-war literature. It is in the Er-form, but takes the boy's perspective, whereby the age difference is additionally emphasized by the spatial position of the figures in relation to one another (the standing man, the seated child). The encounter at the center of the narrative is composed as a dialogue ; a descriptive or even commentary narrator takes a back seat. This gives the confrontation between the two protagonists the dramatic form of a theater scene, the medium from which Borchert originally came as an actor and theater director.

Linguistically, according to Hans Helmut Hiebel , the short story is determined by the “artless staccato of the clear-cut prose ”. Typical rhetorical stylistic devices are repetition and color symbolism . Using metaphors and comparisons , Borchert creates the expressionist opening image that functions as the background and frame for the story. The rubble is personified with verbs like “yawned” and “dozed” , while the feelings of the people are expressed through things (the restless legs, the swinging basket). Everyday language dominates , whereby the man adapts to the boy in language use. The tenses past tense (in the narrative passages) and present tense (in dialogue), according to Alfred Schmidt, alternate "in rhythmic equilibrium". Without psychologizing the distress of the protagonists, the short dialogues depict the inner happenings, especially the boy's change. The economy of narrative means and the condensation of form remind Manfred Durzak in its precision of Ernest Hemingway .

interpretation

Basic structure

Memorial stone for Wolfgang Borchert in Hamburg-Uhlenhorst with a text from Generation Without Farewell

At night the rats sleep according to a basic structure from Borchert's stories, in which the protagonists, according to Károly Csúri, merge from an initial state "in a still harmonious stage of virtual-timeless security" through an intermediate state "temporally historical outcast" through the "help of ambivalent mediating figures" The final state of "virtual, timeless security (or pseudo security)" is achieved. According to Hans-Gerd Winter, the initial state of a healthy family life for Jürgen is already in the past at the beginning of the story. His smoking proves how much circumstances the nine-year-old grew beyond childhood. In this transitional state of history, the boy's overstrain and the resulting insecurity and fearfulness become visible again and again. He is a representative of the generation that Borchert described in his text Generation without Farewell as "the generation without [...] protection - cast out of the playpen of childhood". Only the man helps the boy to return to childhood and a state of protection. In the final state of the story, the boy is offered a future perspective again, but without all questions of future survival being clarified.

Dynamic development

According to Anna Maria Giachino, the rats sleep at night using a typical stylistic device of post-war literature, for which Borchert was the main leader: the dynamic development within history. The process of bringing the boy back from a world of ruins and death to a world of trust and life is demonstrated through the use of numerous linguistic and visual contrasts. The initial image of the gray, dreary, dead, rubble desert is transformed into a red, warm final image that promises life and hope, in which the sun shines through the man's crooked legs and thus makes him the mediator of life. A change is also taking place in the conversation between the two characters: While only short sentences and chunks of sentences are exchanged at the beginning, the boy's language in particular becomes more and more different towards the end, becoming more direct and its sentence structure more complete, until the final loud shout life and hope lie again.

Outwardly, not much has changed at the end of the story: The boy is still in the middle of the ruins, and the contents of the last sentences are also taken up on the entrance panel. According to Helmut Christmann, however, there is also the moment of movement: the statics have transformed into dynamics. The image of the excitedly swaying basket symbolizes the transformation that has taken place below the surface. The colors that reflect what is happening inside the person have also changed. Although the reddish-gray colors of the beginning are found at the end of the story, a new, symbolic color has been added: the green of hope, even if it is still "a bit gray from the rubble." It is in the world of destruction and des Death for life, indestructible in spite of everything. For Wilhelm Große, the initial image of the apocalypse has turned into an image of hope, the lifelessness, the rigidity of the beginning has given way to a new vitality, the characters have found communication and mutual trust. The title The Rats Sleep At Night also contains the statement that the power of destruction is limited, precisely by such a simple and direct humanism as demonstrated by the man.

The old man and the teachers

For Harro Gehse, the old man awakens associations with God from Borchert's homecoming drama Outside the Door, also called Old Man . But while the latter remains weak, only lamenting the fate of his "children" without being able to help them, the old man from The Rats at Night succeeds in helping the boy and breaking through his initial rejection. His therapeutic white lie contradicts the crude horror story of the man-eating rats that the teacher served his students, a dubious school knowledge that offers the boy no assistance in coping with his traumatic war experiences. Borchert, himself the son of a teacher, came to terms with his personal aversion to teachers who raised their students with enthusiasm for war and sent them off to the front without preparing them for the horror that awaited them there. In 'place of the returning soldiers Beckmann settles: "So excited they were. And then the war was finally here. And then they sent us there. And they didn't tell us anything. Just - take care, boys! did you say. Take care, boys! That's how they betrayed us. "

Embedding in the overall work

According to Joseph L. Brockington, the initial situation from The Rats Sleeping at Night can be found in many short stories in post-war literature and especially in those of Wolfgang Borcherts: A person is isolated and alienated from his fellow men through the war experience . But in contrast to Borchert's story Die Hundeblume , where prisoners just march past each other on their daily courtyard walk without meeting, the rats do come into contact between the man and the boy at night asleep .

Such contact often remains one-sided in Borchert's works: a person is ready to free himself from the past and isolation, but his fellow human being is not, the contact breaks up. This outcome can be found, for example, in Beckmann's relationship with the girl in Outside the Door and in short stories like Stay the Giraffe or The Sad Geraniums . At night the rats sleep, but there is an optimistic outcome: Both people make a future-oriented decision for each other and are ready to try a personal "turn of the world".

Nevertheless, for Brockington, the rats don't sleep unreservedly at night , but with an open ending. Although the reader wants to accept the return of the man, the realistic possibility of an opposite end remains conceivable. Borchert expressed the fundamental disgust for the happy ending that was typical for many authors of his generation in the text This is our manifesto : “We no longer need well-tempered pianos . We are too much dissonance ourselves . ”Nevertheless, at night the rats sleep in the sunlight through the man's bent legs with a glimmer of hope. Borchert puts his programmatic announcement against the nihilism of the zero hour. This is our manifesto counter: “Because we are naysayers. But we don't say no out of desperation. Our no is protest. [...] Because we have to build a yes into nothingness again, we have to build houses in the open air of our no [...], houses made of wood and brain and stone and thoughts. "

History of origin

The rats sleep at night is one of the more than 50 prose texts that Wolfgang Borchert wrote after completing his first post-war story Die Hundeblume on January 24, 1946 up to his last texts in September 1947. Due to a liver disease, which he contracted during the war against the Soviet Union and during imprisonment for so-called " defensive decomposition ", Borchert had to write most of his texts from bedside, and his health deteriorated increasingly. The pronounced will to live with which Borchert endowed the nine-year-old Jürgen can also be seen as a projection of the terminally ill writer who transferred his own longing for the future to his characters.

In Borchert's self-made list of his texts, he noted the year of origin "47" before the rats sleep . One of the versions copied in a gray exercise book that Borchert gave his father on his 57th birthday is dated January 11, 1947. The short story first appeared in November 1947 in Borchert's second collection of prose on this Tuesday at Rowohlt Verlag . In the same month Wolfgang Borchert died at the age of 26 as a result of his liver disease in Basel. In 1949 the short story was included in the complete works of Wolfgang Borchert, also published by Rowohlt . In 1986 the publisher published a facsimile edition of the original manuscript of the stories The Dog Flower and The Rats Sleep at Night .

reception

The rats sleep at night but is one of the most famous stories by Wolfgang Borchert. It is considered to be an example of the German post-war literature , which is often referred to as clear-cut or rubble literature , and has also been examined linguistically. It is often used as school reading. The perspective of the little boy makes it easy for schoolchildren to understand and an easy introduction to Borchert's work.

In Werner Zimmermann's opinion, the tension between the boy's statements and the man's reply: “The rats sleep at night” causes an “immediate shock” in the reader. According to Manfred Durzak, Borchert “has created a picture of the situation in extreme condensation, which makes the horrific incursion of war into the child's imagination understandable without it being psychologized.” For Hermann Wiegmann , too, the story “communicates an apt, dense and harrowing dialogue very intensely between the old man and the boy. ”The“ poetically successful condensation of a situation ”portrayed Borchert as“ the Büchner of his time ”.

literature

Text output

  • Wolfgang Borchert: This Tuesday. Nineteen stories . Rowohlt, Hamburg / Stuttgart 1947, pp. 69–72 (first edition).
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-00652-5 (expanded and revised new edition, edited by Michael Töteberg , with the assistance of Irmgard Schindler), pp. 255-258.

Secondary literature

  • Hans-Gerd Winter: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night . In: Werner Bellmann (Hrsg.): Classic German short stories. Interpretations . Reclam, Stuttgart, 2004, ISBN 978-3-15-017525-5 , pp. 46-51.
  • Harro Gehse: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. The dog flower and other stories . Beyer, Hollfeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-88805-134-0 , pp. 75-78.
  • Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short stories . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-637-88629-2 , pp. 52-54.
  • Helmut Christmann: The rats sleep at night . In: Rupert Hirschenauer, Albrecht Weber (ed.): Interpretations of Wolfgang Borchert . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-01909-0 , pp. 76-82.
  • Manfred Durzak: The German short story of the present . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2074-X , pp. 323-324.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. on the chapter: Hans-Gerd Winter: Wolfgang Borchert: Night the rats sleep , pp. 46–51.
  2. ^ A b Hans Helmut Hiebel : The spectrum of modern poetry . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3201-2 , p. 24.
  3. ↑ Wilfried Barner (Ed.): History of German literature from 1945 to the present . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-54220-4 , p. 56.
  4. ↑ Helmut Christmann: The rats do sleep at night , p. 77.
  5. ^ Alfred Schmidt: Wolfgang Borchert. Speech formation in his work . Bouvier, Bonn 1975, ISBN 3-416-01085-X , p. 203.
  6. ↑ Anna Maria Giachino: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (pdf; 13 kB), p. 1.
  7. ^ Alfred Schmidt: Wolfgang Borchert. Speech formation in his work , pp. 47, 75, 153.
  8. ↑ a b Manfred Durzak: The German Short History of the Present , pp. 323-324.
  9. ↑ Károly Csúri: Semantic fine structures: literature aesthetic aspects of the compositional form 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 , p. 157.
  10. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Generation without parting . In: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 67.
  11. ↑ Cf. on the section: Hans-Gerd Winter: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night , pp. 46–47, 51.
  12. ↑ See the section: Anna Maria Giachino: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (pdf; 13 kB), pp. 3-4.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night . In: Das Gesamtwerk , p. 258.
  14. ↑ See section: Helmut Christmann: The rats sleep at night , pp. 77, 81.
  15. ↑ See section: Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , pp. 53–54.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door . In: Das Gesamtwerk , p. 184.
  17. ↑ See section: Harro Gehse: Wolfgang Borchert: Outside the door. The Dog Flower and Other Stories , pp. 77–78.
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: This is our manifesto . In: Das Gesamtwerk , p. 519.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: This is our manifesto . In: Das Gesamtwerk , pp. 522–523.
  20. ↑ Cf. to the chapter: Joseph L. Brockington: A yes into nothing into building: Possibilities and forms of hope in the literature of the post-war generation. Wolfgang Borchert and the "young generation" . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective , pp. 29–30.
  21. ↑ Hans-Gerd Winter: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night , p. 51.
  22. ^ Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I believe in my luck , construction, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7466-2385-6 , p. 193.
  23. ↑ Hans-Gerd Winter: Wolfgang Borchert: The rats sleep at night , p. 49.
  24. ↑ Data according to: Gordon Burgess: Wolfgang Borchert. I Believe in My Luck , pp. 284–285.
  25. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: The dog flower. The rats sleep at night . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-498-00502-2 .
  26. ↑ Pascal Frey: Read what? A lexicon for German literature . hep, Bern 2003, ISBN 3-03905-042-7 , p. 41.
  27. ↑ See Harald Kittel (Hrsg.): Translation: An international handbook for translation research , de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-1101-3708-9 , p. 553.
  28. ↑ See Detlef Kochan: Literature didactics, reading canon, literature lessons . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1990, ISBN 90-518-3044-0 , p. 301.
  29. ↑ See Helmut Fuhrmann: The Fury of Disappearance: Literature Lessons and Literature Tradition , Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-742-5 , p. 89.
  30. ↑ Ingrid Kunze: Concepts of German Lessons: A Study of Teachers' Individual Didactic Theories . VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-8100-3784-2 , p. 331.
  31. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II . Schwann, Dusseldorf, 1979, p. 135.
  32. ^ Hermann Wiegmann: Occidental Literature History . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2572-5 , p. 575.
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 10, 2011 in this version .