Father Filucius

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Title page to Father Filucius
Two individual scenes from Father Filucius

Father Filucius is an anti-clerical satire by the humorous poet and draftsman Wilhelm Busch from the time of the Kulturkampf . It was published by Bassermann Verlag in 1872 .

prehistory

At the beginning of the 1870s, Wilhelm Busch published two picture stories that were already wholly or partly shaped by his anti-clerical stance. Saint Anthony of Padua , who was published by the Moritz Schauenburg publishing house , had, among other things, led the public prosecutor to charge the publisher Moritz Schauenburg in Offenburg with publishing an indecent writing. Moritz Schauenburg was acquitted of the indictment in 1871, but the story made Wilhelm Busch a well-known scandal author.

Since Moritz Schauenburg feared further charges, Busch's second anti-clerical picture story Die pious Helene was published by his long-time friend Otto Friedrich Bassermann , who continued the publishing house inherited from his father Friedrich Daniel Bassermann . Against the background of the Kulturkampf, this story was very successful and was even published abroad very quickly.

Otto Friedrich Bassermann then suggested to his friend to write a picture story that again aimed at an anti-Catholic readership. He hoped that the picture story would approach the quality of the first two picture stories. In their satirical exaggeration of bigotry, superstition and stuffy double standards, these two picture stories go far beyond the concrete historical context.

content

The main person in the picture story of Father Filucius is the wealthy privateer Gottlieb Michael. His two aunts belong to the two denominations that were fighting each other in Germany at the time this picture story was written. Aunt Petrine is luscious, sedate and Catholic, Aunt Pauline is thin, sharp and Protestant. The base Angelika other hand, is busty and blond. She is the first to be courted by Father Filucius, whose goal it is to deprive Gottlieb Michael of his money. When this does not succeed, he woos the affection of Aunt Petrine, to whom he gives, among other things, the little Schnauzer Schrupp, who is subjected to all sorts of atrocities. Father Filucius finds socialist cronies in the characters Inter-Nazi and the French Jean Lecaq, who together with him want to poison the wealthy Gottlieb Michael. Three friends of Gottlieb Michaels, the sergeant Hiebel, the teacher Fibel and the farmer Bullerstiebel, put an end to the hustle and bustle of the three villains with a rod, saber and pitchfork. Gottlieb Michael can finally marry his long-sought cousin Angelika. In later editions, Busch added the following "key":

One understands this allegorical representation of the ecclesiastical movement, which took place in the early 1970s, if one uses the German Michel for Gottlieb Michael, the Roman Church for Aunt Petrine, and the Evangelical Church for Pauline; the base Angelika is then the free state church of the future. The Jesuit Filucius introduces the dog Schrupp, the democratic press, and tries with his accomplices, the International and the French, to disturb the household; on the other hand, Michel Hiebel calls on the military, the primer to the teaching and the bull's to the nutritional level, with whose support he also throws the whole unclean economy out the window.

reception

It was Busch's most influential and successful satire, with a circulation of 39,000 copies by 1894. In some cases it was highly praised by contemporaries: Eduard Daelen saw it as a genuinely artistic work, despite the recognizable interest of the day, which has been given lasting value through allegorization.

Today's rating

The picture story Pater Filucius , which turns against the then very controversial Jesuit order , has a stronger reference to the time than Die pious Helene or Saint Antonius and was later referred to self-critically by Wilhelm Busch as an allegorical one -shot. Of the three anti-clerical writings of Busch, it is considered by some scholars to be the weakest and is also the only work that Busch produced at the suggestion of a publisher. Bassermann himself did not agree with the picture story. In the Börsenblatt of October 26, 1872, he announced it with half-hearted words: In this new little work, Busch deals with the Jesuit question, which is currently very demanding in the daily press, with his own sense of humor ... It is a small, apparently very harmless family play, in its comical one But scenes ... the representatives of all the contending parties appear in allegorical figures ...

The picture story is rated similarly by some authors today. The Busch biographer Eva Weissweiler describes it as a simple, quickly cobbled together pamphlet with a relatively low level of reflection and calls it a political tendency poetry with which Busch made himself a socialist eater and willing mouthpiece of Bismarck . Even Golo Mann called the story even as the most unpleasant of his Versgeschichten .

literature

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Diers, p. 99
  2. ↑ Katrin Baumgarten: Hagestolz and Old Maid . Waxmann Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8309-5514-6 ( com.ph [accessed on May 9, 2019]).
  3. ^ Father Filucius on Gutenberg.de
  4. ↑ Roisin Healy, Róisín Healy: The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany . BRILL, 2003, ISBN 978-0-391-04194-3 , pp. 7 ( com.ph [accessed May 7, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Eduard Daelen: About Wilhelm Busch and its meaning: a funny pamphlet . F. Bagel, 1886 ( com.ph [accessed May 9, 2019]).
  6. ↑ Kraus, p. 68
  7. ↑ quoted from Weissweiler, p. 213
  8. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 209
  9. ↑ quoted from Weissweiler, p. 209