Almansor (Heine)

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Data
Title: Almansor
Genus: tragedy
Original language: German
Author: Heinrich Heine
Publishing year: 1823
Premiere: August 20, 1823
Place of premiere: Braunschweig
Place and time of the action: around 1500 in the area of Granada

Almansor is a tragedy in eight pictures by Heinrich Heine , published and premiered in 1823.

action

The action takes place around 1500 in the Granada area . The young Maure Almansor has returned to his homeland from exile in the hope of seeing his beloved Zuleima again. He meets Hassan, the former servant of his family, and he tells him about the plight of the Moors who have remained in Spain and who have converted to Christianity. - At the castle of the former Moorish nobleman Ali, who was baptized and is now called Don Gonzalvo, the engagement of his daughter Zuleima (now Donna Clara) is celebrated. Ali confesses the confused childhood story of his bride to the groom Don Enrique: Ali and his good friend Abdullah had two children, Almansor and Zuleima, who were promised to each other from childhood. But because Ali's wife died giving birth to the child, he had his son raised by Abdullah, but shortly afterwards took his daughter Zuleima on as his own child. Since Ali believes that Almansor is dead, he now gives Zuleima to a Christian as a bride. - After the end of the festival, Almansor tries to get in touch with Zuleima and serenades under her balcony. Zuleima recognizes Almansor, and the old love quickly flares up again. The next morning Almansor was almost ready to accept the hated Christian faith for the sake of Zuleima when she confessed to him that she would be celebrating a wedding with a Spaniard that day. Almansor leaves them shaken, but soon devises the bold plan with Hassan to kidnap Zuleima during the wedding party. Together with other loyal Moors, they storm Ali's castle during the festival, and Almansor actually manages to take Zuleima with him in the turmoil. Meanwhile, Ali has learned that his son Almansor, who was believed to be dead, is still alive and hurries after him with his followers. In a rocky area they catch up with the lovers, but they consider the crowd to be enemy pursuers and throw themselves into the ravine to be united in death at least.

background

Heinrich Heine in the 1820s

The tragedy Almansor from the years 1820-22 is one of three literary works by Heinrich Heine with this title. Just like the poems Almansor (1826) and The dying Almansor (first printed in 1847), the title does not make any reference to the regent in the Caliphate of Córdoba Almansor or to another historical person by the name of al-Mansur . The name Almansor ( Arabic المنصور, DMG al-Manṣūr  'the victorious'), actually a throne or epithet of various Islamic rulers or generals, is used by Heine as a simple Arabic name for various fictional characters.

Around 1820, Heine had captured the same romantic enthusiasm for the history of Islamic Spain that produced various artistic fruits in the 19th century, best known in the short story collection The Alhambra by Washington Irving (1829). Heine's immediate sources were the Gayferos romance from the novel The Magic Ring (1812) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué , the old Arabic love story Madschnūn Lailā and the historical novel about the civil wars of Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita (1604).

Heine's tragedy takes place around 1500 in the area of ​​the former emirate of Granada . After centuries of relative coexistence of the main religions Islam, Christianity and Judaism in Al-Andalus , the situation for Muslims and Jews in Spain had become threatening with the completion of the Reconquista following the fall of Granada (1492). Although the last Moorish emir of Granada Muhammad XII. in the surrender negotiations at the end of 1491 had negotiated the granting of freedom of belief for non-Christians, the Catholic kings Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón issued the Alhambra Edict in 1492 , with which the Jewish population was expelled from the country. The remaining Muslim population ( Morisks ) also came under increasing pressure. In 1499 the Archbishop of Toledo and later Grand Inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros ordered the burning of 5000 books of Islamic theology (including the Koran ), philosophy , historiography and natural sciences ; only the books on medicine were expressly spared and brought to Alcalá de Henares . Hassan's statement alludes to this cremation : "That was only a prelude, where you burn books, you burn people in the end ." This sentence was later interpreted as a prophetic statement by Heine with regard to the book burning in Germany in 1933 .

Book burnings had also occasionally occurred in the Moorish town of Al-Andalus. In particular, the usurper Almansor (who is not identical to Heine's title hero) had, in order to make himself popular with fanatical Islamic legal scholars, burned many books of ancient scientific content suspected of heresy from the famous library of caliph al-Hakam II . However, this event took place around 500 years before the plot of Heine's drama and was not the subject of Heine's description.

Origin and publication history

Heine began working on the Almansor in the autumn of 1820 in Bonn-Beuel. On February 4, 1821, he reported to his college friend Friedrich Arnold Steinmann that he had finished the play “except for half an act”. When exactly the completion took place is not known, possibly in Berlin in April 1821, at least before the end of January 1822. In 1821 an incomplete preprint appeared under the title Almansor. Fragments from a dramatic poem as a continuation in the journal Der Gesellschafter . In 1823 the first complete print version appeared in print together with the drama William Ratcliff in the volume Tragedies along with a lyrical interlude ; in the same year Almansor also had its world premiere.

reception

The reception of the Almansor by the reviewers was mostly friendly. Out of fifteen contemporary reviews, seven received ratings that ranged from praise to enthusiasm. Only four reviews were mostly critical, the rest were undecided.

Braunschweig National Theater, engraving by AA Beck (1747)

The first performance of Almansor took place on August 20, 1823 in the Braunschweig National Theater in a production by Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann . Klingemann had intervened in the play in several ways, dividing it into two acts, deleted several passages and, against Heine's will, provided the playlist with a list of people.

The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr , editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition , the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered "Der Jude Heine" in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew's nonsense? We don't want to tolerate that any longer! Let's knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. The cause of the theater scandal would therefore be anti-Semitism in connection with a simple confusion of names.

As far as is known, the unsuccessful premiere was the only staging of the play and one of Heine's dramas at all.

In recent times, Heine's tolerance piece has received several awards, especially from the Islamic side.

expenditure

  • Heinrich Heine: tragedies along with a lyrical interlude. Dümmler, Berlin 1823 (first print; full text in the Google book search)

literature

Web links

Commons : Tragedies with a Lyric Intermezzo, 1823  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Almansor  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. In the final version of the play, the place and time are not expressly stated. In the preprint in the partner in 1821 is the information: “The setting is in the area of ​​Granada. - The action takes place at the time of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. "( Digitized in the Google book search)
  2. Heinrich Heine: Almansor , from: Die Heimkehr (1823/24)
  3. ^ Almansor in the Gutenberg-DE project
  4. ^ The dying Almansor in the Gutenberg-DE project
  5. ^ Ginés Pérez de Hita: History of the civil wars in Granada. Translated by Karl August Wilhelm Spalding. Reimer, Berlin 1821 ( full text in the Google book search). - Heine probably knew the work from the French translation by Alexandre Marie Sané, Paris 1809.
  6. ^ Heinrich Heine: Tragedies along with a lyric interlude. Dümmler, Berlin 1823, p. 148 (first print; digitized in the Google book search).
  7. Manfred Windfuhr (Ed.): Heinrich Heine. Historical-critical complete edition of the works. Volume 5. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-455-03005-X , here. P. 16 ( online ).
  8. ^ André Clot : Moorish Spain: 800 years of high Islamic culture in Al Andalus. Albatros, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-491-96116-5 , p. 125.
  9. ^ Antonio Muñoz Molina : City of the Caliphs. Historical forays through Cordoba. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 978-3-499-13281-0 , p. 168 f.
  10. ^ Letter to Friedrich Steinmann dated February 4, 1821 in the Heinrich Heine portal based on the Heine secular edition
  11. ^ Klaus Briegleb : Commentary on Heinrich Heine. All writings. Volume 2. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-446-12242-7 , p. 784 f.
  12. The associate or leaves for mind and heart. 5th year, Berlin 1821 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  13. Mounir Fendri: Fascinated by the old Arab poetry . qantara.de, May 30, 2006
  14. Tawfiq Dawani: A brief appreciation of Heinrich Heine's drama "Almansor" . ibn-rushd.org, summer 2010.