Narcissus and Goldmund
Narcissus and Goldmund is a story by Hermann Hesse . It was written between April 1927 and March 1929 and published in 1930 by S. Fischer Verlag .
content
The story takes place in the Mariabronn monastery school in the Middle Ages and is about the friendship of the novice Narcissus and the pupil Goldmund. Narcissus is a teaching assistant at the school when the good-looking and clever young man Goldmund is brought to the monastery by his father as a pupil. Goldmund made a close friendship with Narcissus, whose acumen he admired.
Goldmund, who grew up without a mother and siblings, wants to be accepted as a novice. Narcissus recognizes in him his opposite pole and his complement. In conversations, Narcissus reveals the maternal side of Goldmund, which the latter has repressed. Goldmund realizes that something has broken out in him and recognizes the image of his mother, a dancer and seductress who left her family a long time ago and moved into the unknown.
After his first love experience with a stranger, the young Lise, Goldmund decides to go out into the world like his mother once did. Narcissus has expected this moment, interrupted his ascetic exercises and said goodbye to his friend.
Goldmund experiences several love affairs on his hikes, among others with Julie and Lydia, the daughters of a knight in whose small castle he spends the winter. One day he kills the tramp Viktor in self-defense when he tries to steal from him and tries to strangle him. He goes to a church to go to confession. A statue of the Virgin reminds him of his mother. He is so fascinated by her that he visits the artist, Master Niklaus, to learn the craft of woodcarving from him.
Goldmund made his masterpiece with him: a figure of John based on the model of his childhood friend Narcissus. When he reflects on his life as a sedentary artist, he sees his mother's picture again. This “mother's call” drives him to leave the city to gain new experiences. He rejects the master's offer to marry his daughter Lisbeth and become a master himself. He goes on a journey again. During a plague epidemic, his lover Lene, who later dies of the plague, and a companion Robert join him.
When he is back in the city of Master Niklaus and enters into a love affair with Agnes, the governor's beautiful lover, he is discovered by him. Goldmund succeeds in disguising himself as a thief, but is still sentenced to death. The abbot with whom he can make his last confession is his old friend Narcissus. Goldmund is pardoned by his intercession, but has to leave the city. Both return to the Mariabronn monastery.
There Goldmund got a job as an artist and tried to dedicate himself to the faith that he had long neglected. He carves figures for a pulpit that embody people he met on his travels. In between, he occasionally takes the liberty to go hiking for a few days.
One day Goldmund returns to the monastery, aged and sick, after falling on his horse and breaking his ribs. Narcissus sees that his friend is going to die and confesses his love and admiration to him. Goldmund says goodbye to him happily because he knows that his mother will take him in after death. The last words of Goldmund burn like fire in Narcissus' heart: “You cannot die without a mother”.
Interpretations
It is not difficult to recognize Hesse's preoccupation with Friedrich Nietzsche as a defining background , here above all his birth of tragedy and Zarathustra . In addition, Hesse's acquaintance with the theory of archetypes of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung , with whom Hesse corresponded, is also relevant. Both Nietzsche's idea of the regression of the mind towards the child and Jung's archetypes of the anima and the great mother are expressed in Goldmund's turn to and from the “mother”.
The approach to the perfection of Narcissus and Goldmund
The two opposing characters are, each in their own way, people in search of perfection. While Narcissus approaches the idea of perfect life and God in a spiritual and religious approach, Goldmund seeks fulfillment as a wanderer and free artist. Driven by visions of the "mother", whose secret is to unite the greatest opposites such as birth and death, goodness and cruelty, life and destruction, he gets lost in art and turns away from God by following the vows of Withdraws the order, neither confesses nor prays and becomes a manslaughter. Again and again in the phases of reflection he recognizes the mother's face, which determines his life.
The price Narcissus has to pay for his way of life is the lack of realization of the maternal life principle. But Narcissus opts for a life of asceticism, while Goldmund loses himself in the maternal principle of life and has to struggle with the eternal restlessness and transience of life in art and this stagnation, which allows him to flow back into life from the sedentary life of an artist. At the end of the novel the beginning of Narcissus led Goldmund is himself the leader when he is dying and asks his friend how this could die once, because: "Without a mother you can not love and without a mother can not die one." This last words burn in Narcissus and make him think about his own life, because it is a criticism of a life that is only centered on God and neglects the maternal principle.
Goldmund, who lived out his feelings, sees through Narcissus' life and knows that he cannot be satisfied with his life. Goldmund believes that he has not found peace with God, but is happy because "sensuality" was able to inspire him through art. He dies believing that he will return to his "mother", while he believes that Narcissus can never die in such bliss because he has no "mother" to guide him through his life. Despite their differences, both are interdependent and complement each other. Narcissus taught Goldmund as a thinker or intellectual person, and at the same time profited from his way of life as a sensory person.
- “Narcissus is just as little a pure spirit person as Goldmund is a pure sense person - otherwise one would not need the other, otherwise they would not both swing around a center and complement each other. Narcissus can utter the brutal word of the saint and libertine, and in the end he can affectionately affirm the whole of Goldmund's life. "
- (from a letter from Hesse to Christoph Schrempf in 1931)
Relation to Maulbronn Monastery
Hermann Hesse was in 1891/92 Evangelical Seminar in Maulbronn sustainable traumatized . Hesse dealt with this trauma literarily in his story Unterm Rad (1906) and in his poem Im Maulbronner Kreuzgang (1914).
The plot of the story Narcissus and Goldmund begins in the Mariabronn monastery. From the description of the monastery complex it can be concluded that the template for the fictional Mariabronn is the Maulbronn monastery, which Hesse got to know intensively. The name has hardly been changed, the narrator only imagines what the Protestant seminary looked like as a Catholic monastery before the Reformation and how monastic life must have been. The cheerful mood at the beginning of the book shows that in 1930 Hesse was able to write impartially and positively about the place where he had suicidal thoughts in 1892 and which had left him with mixed feelings in 1914.
Relation to Würzburg
From the tenth chapter onwards, Hesse Goldmund allows people to enter a bishopric town, the description of which, especially in the 15th and 16th chapters, makes it clear that this refers to Würzburg, a town that the poet had already visited in March 1928 (before he was mainly in Worked on Narcissus and Goldmund in the summer of 1928 ) and impressively portrayed it again both in 1928 in Einst in Würzburg and in his 1945 book Walk in Würzburg .
Book editions
The S. Fischer Verlag published the story, written for the first time on January 23, as a preprint between October 1929 and April 1930 in the Neue Rundschau , with the subtitle "History of a Friendship". The first edition appeared there in 1930 as part of Hesse's collected works. The Manesse Verlag published the story in 1945 as the 8th volume in the Manesse Library of World Literature series . In the library Suhrkamp they first appeared in 1971 when Paperback 1975th
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Fischer, Berlin 1930.
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Narrative. Manesse, Zurich 1945.
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Narrative. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 3-518-01065-4 (= Library Suhrkamp 65).
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-518-36774-9 (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 274).
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Narrative. With a comment by Heribert Kuhn. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-18840-2 (= Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek 40).
- Narcissus and Goldmund . Narrative. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-518-47123-4 (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 5123).
filming
On February 19, 2020, the film adaptation of the material , directed by Austrian director and Oscar winner Stefan Ruzowitzky, premiered at the Bavarian representation in Berlin . The two title roles were played by Sabin Tambrea and Jannis Niewöhner .
Others
A large part of Hermann Hesse's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . The manuscript of Narcissus and Goldmund is there in the Museum of Modern Literature seen in Marbach in the permanent exhibition.
literature
- Maria-Felicitas Herforth: Hermann Hesse: Narcissus and Goldmund . Bange, Hollfeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8044-1927-8 (= King's Explanations 86).
Individual evidence
- ^ Hermann Hesse: Once in Würzburg. In: Volker Michels (ed.): Hermann Hesse: The art of idleness. Short prose from the estate. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 418-423.
- ^ Hermann Hesse: Walk in Würzburg. Edited by Franz Xaver Münzel, private print (Tschudy & Co), St. Gallen (1945).
- ↑ Petra Trinkmann: Madonnas and fish. Hermann Hesse. In: Kurt Illing (Ed.): In the footsteps of the poets in Würzburg. Self-published (printing: Max Schimmel Verlag), Würzburg 1992, pp. 81–89; here: pp. 86–89.
- ↑ Petra Trinkmann: Madonnas and fish. Hermann Hesse. In: Kurt Illing (Ed.): In the footsteps of the poets in Würzburg. Self-published (printing: Max Schimmel Verlag), Würzburg 1992, pp. 81–89; here: p. 86.