Evening with a gold rim

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Evening with a gold rim is a fairytale farce by Arno Schmidt , which appeared in 1975 on 215 large-format typescript pages by S. Fischer Verlag . It is the last work that Schmidt completed during his lifetime. The full title is Evening with a Gold Rim - A Fairy Tale Posse, 55 Pictures from Laundering for Patrons of the Art of Prescription . The book consists largely of dialogues and short descriptions of scenes or stage directions, as well as quotes and excerpts from works by other authors and is sexually charged. The text is mostly in German in the vernacular notation typical of Schmidt and with inserts in English, Spanish, French, Latin and Luxembourgish as well as numerous handwritten notes.

action

The play takes place on three hot days at the beginning of October 1974 in a lake house in a heathland in the fictional village of Klappendorf. The residents of the house are the three older, bibliophile gentlemen, Eugen Fohrbach (56, retired major ), Egon Olmers (70, Eugen's brother-in-law, library councilor) and Arno Otto Gläser (60, also known as A&O, writer), Egon's wife Grete (45), the housekeeper Asta Reichelt (58) and 15-year-old Martina Fohrbach, the ward of Egon and Grete.

For the time of the action, the meadow and straw mountain next to the house are populated by a non-sedentary group called the Rotte, which is particularly disturbing due to nudism , public copulation and defecation . The crew is led by Ann'Ev, a woman from Luxembourg, who is over twenty and spends almost all of her time with her friend Martina during the plot. Ann'Ev, who lives in a barrel in front of the house during the action, has supernatural abilities. The other two main protagonists of the group are Egg (28) and the bastard Marwenne (26, also called BM), who have ensnared Asta and Grete from the start. At the end of the storyline, Martina beloved Klappendorfer Martin Schmidt also appears.

The three older men spend most of their time sitting together, engrossed in books and literary discussions. Martina and Ann'Ev go for a walk or swim and chat about men and school and tell each other about their previous lives. Grete and Asta complain about their responsibility for the household, the uselessness of the old men and are happy about the physique of Bastard Marwenne and Egg.

The arrival of the Rotte (Ann'Ev, Egg and Bastard Marwenne are already there earlier) messes up the heath idyll. Asta and Grete have a nightly rendezvous with Egg and Bastard Marwenne, which is observed and photographed by the girls and Olmers. Olmers begins a pedosexual relationship with the eleven-year-old gang member Babylonia for a fee . After being exposed, the women decide to join the gang on their way to Tasmania and take as much money and household items as possible with them.

Martina and A&O experience supernatural scenes with the leader of the gang: Ann'Ev enters the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch , wanders around in it and brings something back with her. She shows Martina and her friends what her school friends are doing (masturbating) or what will happen to them (bicycle accident). She detaches from her physical body and steps through the wall into a scene with A&O who remembers how she was sitting naked in the armchair. A&O gradually admits its affection for Ann'Ev as the story progresses.

The last part of the book contains three building blocks separated from the plot:

  1. A & Os description of his origin, family and youth. This section presumably contains a great deal of autobiographical information about the difficult family conditions in the author's childhood and adolescence.
  2. At Martina's request, A&O reads a manuscript by Martin Schmidt. According to Rolf Vollmann , “Schmidt augurs” suspect this text to be an unpublished manuscript by the young Arno Schmidt.
  3. After Ann'Ev and A&O have confessed their love, they travel to heaven on a cloud and return to earth in a boat. A&O promises to wait a hundred years for her.

The book ends with the gang including Asta, Grete and Olmers leaving the village on trucks in the direction of Tasmania during storms and rain.

expenditure

  • Evening with a gold rim - a fairy tale farce, 55 pictures from the countryside for patrons of the art of prescription . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1975. ISBN 978-3-10-070604-1
  • Evening with a gold rim. A fairytale farce, 55 pictures from the countryside for patrons of the art of prescription .
Arno Schmidt: Works . Bargfeld edition, group of works 4, study edition vol. 3. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​Haftmann 1993. ISBN 978-3-518-80065-2

literature

  • Gunar Ortlepp: Lament from the book cave , in: Der Spiegel, No. 37, 1975, pp. 120–121.
  • Rolf Vollmann : Excursion into the sea of ​​air , in: Die Zeit, No. 21, 1976.