Altaich

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Altaich is a short story by the German writer Ludwig Thoma published in 1918. The story describes the entanglements of a summer that occur in a place in Bavaria that advertises itself as a tourist destination and attracts summer visitors.

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When the Upper Bavarian village of Altaich was connected to the railway network, the merchant Natterer tried, with the hesitant support of the post office owner, to develop the place as a travel destination for summer visitors. You advertise in national newspapers and are surprised when some travelers actually come on vacation to the sleepy farming village.

The first guest to arrive is the honest chief inspector of an insurance company named Dierl, who is primarily looking for large portions of food and peace and quiet. He is joined by the Austrian officer von Wlazeck, a causeur and society lion, who was brought to Altaich above all by the pleasantly low prices. Professor Horstmar Hobbe is traveling with his family from Göttingen to complete his magnum opus on art history in a secluded place. A modern poet named Tobias Bünzli, the anecdote-loving Munich civil servant Schützinger, and the Schnaase family (privateer Gustav, including his wife Karoline, daughter Henriette and maid Stine Jeep) from Berlin complete the round of summer visitors.

Mr Schnaase let his wife persuade him to go on vacation and is now torn between loud indignation about the antediluvian conditions and the opportunity to excel in the further development of tourism. Soon he actively supports Natterer in the "Altaich Foreigners Committee", which aims to promote tourism. Dierl and Wlazeck watch the goings-on suspiciously.

During a trip to the dilapidated Sassau monastery, Natterer and Schnaase forge plans to turn the place into a tourist attraction with gastronomy. Konrad Oßwald, the young local painter, is supposed to depict the sights for posters; During this excursion, the artist approaches Henny, the daughter of the Schnaases, very gently. The maid Stine, who stayed at home, is faced with the brazen advances made by the locksmith Xaver, which she does not resist.

The Schnaase family visits the painter Konrad in their parents' mill; Konrad and Henriette realize that despite their mutual affection, there is more that divides them than connects them. On her return to the hotel, Henriette finds a fiery anonymous love letter, of which only the modern poet Bünzli could be considered.

Surprisingly, his daughter Marie comes to visit master locksmith Hallberger, who appears under the stage name Mizzi Spera in Munich and Berlin as a singer in cabarets. The daughter of the confectioner Noichl, Kathi, tries to get closer to the painter Konrad during a nocturnal encounter, but falls on deaf ears. Father Schnaase and Schützinger's office advisor visit the locksmith Hallberger to pay their respects to the "artist" Mizzi Spera; Schnaase approaches the young lady quite clearly and arranges another rendezvous. She is also supposed to appear at the committee's summer party with a couplet that Schnaase wants to commission from poet Bünzli.

Also in order to impress the ladies, the officer von Wlazeck wants to go for a ride on the local post horse, but fails to get the postman's servant to make the horse ready for him to ride, which only succeeds after the careful intervention of the landlord. The ride does not have the intended effect, as the steed follows its habit and not the rider. Gustav Schnaase commissioned the couplet for Mizzi from the poet Bünzli; Bünzli, on the other hand, whose legacy is almost exhausted, tries in vain to get into conversation with Ms. Schnaase as a potential son-in-law.

When Ms. Schnaase received the prospect of an advantageous connection for her daughter in Berlin in a letter, she wanted to arrange the engagement with her husband. But this fakes an urgent digestive walk - in truth, he has an appointment with Mizzi Spera, to whom he is actually supposed to give the couplet to be performed (which Bünzli did not write, of course). The two get caught in a storm; Mizzi rushes home with her father and Schnaase escapes to the Ertlmühle. At home his wife gives him the news and the Schnaases decide to leave immediately.

Chancellery Schützinger misunderstood this: He fears that Schnaase was caught red-handed and that he himself (who was with Mizzi Spera on the first visit) could now be dragged into the vortex. So he's leaving as soon as possible. By chance, Professor Hobbe has also finished his book and is traveling back to Göttingen with his family. Kaufmann Natterer's summer party has to be canceled due to a lack of guests and a program. The other summer guests are also gradually leaving.

Woven into the story is a side story about the Oßwald family, who run the Ertlmühle not far from Altaich. The miller Martin should actually have become a teacher when his older brother Michel went away completely unexpectedly and was looking for his luck as a seaman, but he took over his father's business. Later, as a schoolboy, his own son Konrad decides that he wants to become a painter. The father supports the boy in this. Towards the end of the story, Michel, who was believed to be lost and dead, returns from Australia and helps his brother run the mill.

background

The story takes place in Upper Bavaria around 1900. The place Altaich as well as the nearby Sassauer See are fictional. But there is a real (Nieder-) Altaich , a Benedictine abbey near Deggendorf in Lower Bavaria.

The Sassauer See with its idyllically situated monastery could correspond to the Seeon monastery . The similar sounding Altomünster , which Thoma was very familiar with, could have served as a model for Altaich; the connection of Altomünster to the railway network already served as the occasion for Thomas' play The Local Railway .

The Altaich of history lies in the valley of the (actually existing) Vils (Danube) , at least in a rather unspectacular part of the Upper Bavarian hill country at a considerable distance from the Alps .

language

The different levels and characteristics of language and dialect are an essential element with which the clash of cultures in Altaich is portrayed. The Schnaase family from Berlin speaks in typical Berlin jargon, the Austro-Hungarian officer Wlazeck uses a strongly Bohemian Austrian, the Altaich speak Bavarian dialect.

Origin and reception

At the time of its creation in 1918, Thoma lived and worked at Tegernsee after his discharge from military service in the First World War . The story was written before Thomas's unhappy love affair with Maidi Liebermann von Wahlendorf and his deep bitterness over the war defeat. On the contrary, the cheerful and carefree tale of the undiminished war-loving Thoma could have been intentionally intended to distract and amuse his increasingly war-weary compatriots.

The story is basically doubly nostalgic: it tells from the time of the turn of the century, when the first tourists came to Bavaria, and evokes the time before, when the rural culture was not yet seized by the foreign guests.

The humor (if it is not of a linguistic nature) is based essentially on the encounters of cultures and the conflicting interests of the protagonists. The active businessman Natterer endeavors to market Altaich as a travel destination; He is less concerned with his own profit than with the prestige for himself and the village. On the contrary, the phlegmatic post host Blenninger can only slowly and gradually be persuaded to offer the foreign guests a tasty tourism program, although he is the main beneficiary of the summer vacation, as most of the guests stay in his house.

The guests, on the other hand, let themselves be carried away in part by the drive to make Altaich a renowned travel destination, in part they view all measures with suspicion because they fear for the originality on the one hand and expect that the very favorable price level could increase on the other.

The figures are designed with different depths. The swaggering Austrian officer, the cheeky and dominant Berlin privateer, the demi-world diseuse, the crazy modern poet and the world-distant professor are rather crude types who, with their expected demeanor, collide with the good-natured, phlegmatic Bavarian villagers.

The figures of the natives are drawn more finely; Thoma was the deepest and most serious portrayal of the young painter Konrad, who decided in favor of art and against inheritance as a miller - in this figure he must have worked through some of his own person; According to another opinion, Thoma created a portrait of his friend Ignaz Taschner here , while he drew an unflattering picture of Erich Mühsam in the mad Swiss poet Bünzli . Brother Michl, returning from Australia, shows parallels to Thomas's own brother Peter.

Thomas' deep aversion to Berlin and the anti-Semitism that he showed in his articles in the Miesbacher Anzeiger from 1920 onwards can not yet be found in Altaich . The story is apolitical; the Berlin family is rather friendly caricatured; Admittedly, with their hasty departure, the Schnaases prevent their daughter from becoming engaged to their glamorous tennis partner James Dessauer, who is apparently a Jew.

Overall, the work can be interpreted as conservative and idyllic: the cabaret singer Mizzi, who went to Munich and Berlin from Altaich, is portrayed most negatively, while the returning sailor Michl, who has returned home after years in the distance, is around Working in the father's mill has a strong positive connotation.

Karl-Heinz Bieber filmed the story for television in 1968 - Michl Lang , Beppo Brem and Ludwig Schmid-Wildy played the main roles . In 2012, Bayerischer Rundfunk broadcast an adaptation of the material as a play in a performance by the Chiemgauer Volkstheater .

Work editions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This thesis is represented by Klaus (2016).
  2. ↑ This thesis is represented by Klaus (2016).
  3. ↑ Thoma himself subtitled Altaich with "a cheerful summer story".
  4. ↑ For the real references in Thomas Werk cf. Klaus (2016).
  5. ↑ In the eighth chapter, father Schnaase expresses himself quite disparagingly about the young Dessauer: "'Let him go! James Dessauer with his Seebelbeene! as James and Tennisfatzke ... '"
  6. ^ BR Online

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