Old man at the bridge

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Ernest Hemingway with the commander of the XI. International Brigade, Ludwig Renn, in the Spanish Civil War 1936

Old Man at the Bridge (dt. Old man on the bridge in a translation by Anne Marie Horschitz-Horst , 1950) is a short story of American writer Ernest Hemingway , the first time in May 1938 in the journal Ken was published under the impressions of the Spanish Civil war arose.

The short story, written in March and April 1938, was also included in an anthology with other shorter stories by Hemingway in the same year, including snow on Kilimanjaro . Over time, it became one of Hemingway's most famous short stories.

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The extremely short storyline describes how civilians flee from the artillery of the approaching fascist front in the Spanish Civil War . The first-person narrator is obviously an officer who, according to his own statements, has the order to cross the makeshift bridge set up for the refugees in order to explore the bridgehead and to observe the enemy movement. Apparently he is supposed to take care of the evacuation of civilians on behalf of the Republican government. The narrator gets into a conversation with an old man from San Carlos who, after being asked to leave his hometown, sat down on the roadside, away from the stream of refugees, after crossing the pontoon bridge instead of continuing his flight. He says of himself that he is too tired to go on and he worries about his animals that he had to leave behind on his small farm. The first-person narrator tries in vain to persuade the old man to cross the bridge in order to get to safety from the approaching front. After a short conversation, the narrator moves on, leaving the old man behind. The latter is now talking to himself in which he says of himself that he has done nothing more than tend animals.

Interpretative approach

The fact that the old man had to leave his animals makes the attempt to continue the escape pointless for him. The short story addresses the absurdity of flight and, indirectly, the absurdity of war in general. The old man's final remarks express, as Paul Goetsch explains in his interpretation of the short story, “laconically the stoicism of the Hemingway hero, who always fits into the unalterable”. Only when the old man no longer summarizes the futility of his situation for the first-person narrator but for himself (in the original: " I was taking care of animals ... I was only taking care of animals ") does the narrator understand that the old man has lost its future with home. Although the external situation with regard to the protagonist does not change throughout the short story, the relationship between the two main characters changes as a process of rapprochement and alienation at the same time. Every time the narrator urges the old man to leave, the old man thanks him for his sympathy, but at the same time distances himself, since continuing the flight is pointless for him. The action, ironically, takes place on an Easter Sunday.

Old Man at the Bridge is one of the shortest short stories Hemingway wrote. Despite the real historical embedding, however, not only an event in the Spanish Civil War is discussed. In this short story Hemingway designed in a few sentences, an almost " archetypal human destiny" by all the futility of war at all, and the helplessness of the innocent victims of the example of the harmless, peaceful old man, whose whole concern only his animals has been considered, exemplary illuminated becomes. The message of the story takes on a timeless, universal validity beyond the few individual traits with which Hemingway depicts the old man and the officer in this short story.

Narrative design

In addition to the helplessness of the old man and the officer is in Old Man at the Bridge storytelling an exodus in confined spaces captured attend the numerous soldiers and civilians. Initially, refugees cross the makeshift bridge on foot, in carts and trucks. The flow of refugees only gradually subsides over the course of the story, only to dry up completely. Towards the end of the story, the trucks that could still take the old man with them are already far away on the road to Tortosa, and contact with the enemy is imminent.

The officer has returned from scouting, possibly to initiate the demolition of the bridge. The abundance of events takes up a considerable amount of time on Easter Sunday; In addition, Hemingway's narrative goes beyond the present-day plot and refers to both the past and the future; analogously, the scope of action is not only limited to the immediate area, but also includes the distant area, which is divided twice. Tortosa and Barcelona refer to the escape area on the other side of the Ebro, while San Carlos concretizes the old man's homeland, which fell into the hands of the fascist troops. This contrasting division of the real space into a “this side” and a “beyond” of the Ebro corresponds to the dualistic structure of the action-determining motives and the action itself into a “forward” and a “backward orientation” and thus reflects the turmoil of the war situation.

The thematic material of the story is condensed by Hemingway in an extreme form with the help of various presentation principles and techniques. The human tragedy and the implications of flight in war are exemplified; the overall situation remains sketchy and is only rudimentarily individualized in order to concentrate the representation in the story entirely on typical events during the escape: Hemingway's intention is to “ illustrate the general in the individual case ”.

The change in narrative forms in the story shows the different intensities of the presentation. In the beginning part of the short story begins with a summary of various events, the duration of which is determined by the repeated reference to the old man who sits there motionless for the whole time. To further emphasize the contrast between the movement of the stream of refugees and the motionlessness of the old man, Hemingway moves in the second paragraph from the durative gathering to the leaping gathering. The first-person narrator briefly describes his military mission and gives a brief report on his long exploration. After observing the refugees again, while the old man remains on the side of the road, Hemingway mainly resorts to the means of scenic design.

The dialogue is interrupted for the first time when the officer resumes his activity as an observer and again summarizes the result in a brief summary. In his conversation with the old man, the first-person narrator is aware of the overall situation and only asks what is necessary to clarify the particular situation of the old man. The contrast between activity and passivity, movement and rigidity, which is applied in the scenic parts, further contributes to the thematic tightening; All events are mirrored or modulated by Hemingway on the subject of escape. Twice the first-person narrator urges to leave; however, the old man is unable to continue his escape, so a brief comment is enough to close the narrative.

In addition to the typification of the two main characters, Hemingway's handling of the narrative point of view in this short story is striking. The narrative ego is only used to summarize processes or events; the main process is conveyed from the point of view of the officer from the perspective of the experiencing ego. This change in the narrative perspective allows the story to be left out for minor details such as the past or the further fate of the officer. Likewise, there is no reflection on what has been experienced at the moment of the experience; the narrator restricts himself to reproducing his perceptions and dialogical utterances; as Goetsch explains in his analysis of the narrative, the observations of the experiencing ego are reduced to a minimum. Thus the reader learns of the narrator explicitly not even begin to what the fate of the old man is at the bridge for him; such a comment by the narrator is superfluous due to the overall structure of this short story ; the avoidance of self-reflection or a representation of the sensations or feelings of the first-person narrator emphasizes how much the narrator, in contrast to the old man, is focused on the current factual situation and his task of observing the refugees and enemy troop movements.

This fact is also reflected in Hemingway's style in this short story, which reduces reality to the minimal factual and leaves it to the reader to add to the information or perceptions that have been strung together. Especially in the dialogic passages, the language is drastically simplified to an almost laconic degree. The sympathy of the first-person narrator is hidden behind his question about the kind of animals that the old man looked after. Likewise, the old man's dismay is only shown concealed in his question about the further fate of his animals, which is apparently based on factual information. At the end of the story, the helplessness of the two protagonists and the presumed fate of the old man are again only hinted at by recourse to a few facts, rather in the form of an "understatement".

In this form, Hemingway achieves a condensation of the narrative material that relies almost exclusively on the evocative power of the factual and largely omits the thought or the emotional or at best only suggests it. The timing of the action on Easter Sunday indicates that "ironically, on the day of the Lord's Resurrection, the old man cannot get up with either human or divine help (which he cannot count on) to continue his flight."

The placement of the time stamp as factual information mentioned almost casually in the final part of the short story also underlines the evocative power of the text, whose meaning gains depth without expanding the narrative content. Nor does the narrator explain what the fate of the old man and his animals means to him. Nevertheless, the text suggests this very meaning, in that Hemingway parallels the abandonment of the animals by the old man with the abandonment of the old man by the generally helpful officer. Through the selection and arrangement of the facts, a completely different, far-reaching scope of meaning is achieved in the extremely condensed presentation of the narrative in line with Hemingway's iceberg theory .

History of origin and impact

Old Man on the Bridge was one of the first non-journalistic works in 1938 in which Hemingway addressed the Spanish Civil War. In the same year he wrote the short stories The Denunciation , The Butterfly and the Tank and The Evening Before the Battle . Another short story followed in the next few years with Hinter der Front and a play with The Fifth Column . In 1940 Hemingway's main work on this subject appeared with the novel Whom the Hour Strikes .

Old Man at the Bridge is one of Hemingway's most haunting works from the time of the Spanish Civil War. The short story is based on a preliminary draft by Hemingway in a dispatch dated April 3, 1938 from Barcelona with the title The Flight of Refugees , which, like numerous other dispatches by Hemingway from this period, impresses not only with its journalistic quality as a factual report, but also with its literary qualities . In Hemingway's work, it is difficult to draw a precise line between 'journalism' and 'literature'; for the writer himself there was no clear division anyway. With 762 words in the original text, Old Man on the Bridge is also one of Hemingway's shortest prose works.

The linguistic design of this short story is characteristic of Hemingway's style, which the writer and essayist Dieter Wellershoff described in his study as the “language of banished horror”.

In the short story Schafsblut by the German post-war author Hans Bender, there are not only various thematic, but also structural parallels and similarities to Old Man at the Bridge . Bender uses Hemingway's short story as a template without, however, directly adapting it. As in Old Man at the Bridge , Bender's story is about the loneliness of an old man in a reality that is shaped by war events and military rules and that suppresses the actual reality of life that counts for the two old men, namely their animals, that they have taken care of so far. Just as the animals become victims of the thoughtless violence of the soldiers fighting in the war, their defenselessness also reflects the hopelessness of the situation of the two old people in the stories. As Manfred Durzak writes in his analysis of the similarities in the two stories, they are "just as hopelessly caught in a reality determined by war events as the animals whose fate they are concerned about."

literature

  • Paul Goetsch : The scope of Hemingway's “Old Man at the Bridge”. In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag , 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 85-96.
  • Reiner Poppe: Old Man at the Bridge . In: Reiner Poppe: Ernest Hemingway · From the short story · Investigations and comments . Beyer Verlag Hollfeld / Ofr. 1978, ISBN 3-921202-40-X , pp. 62-68.
  • William Braasch Watson: Historical-Biographical Analysis - Old Man at the Bridge: The Making of a Short Story . In: Jackson J. Benson (Ed.): New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press . 2nd edition Durham and London 1998, ISBN 978-0-8223-1067-9 , pp. 121-134.

Bilingual edition

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Carlos Baker: Hemingway - The Writer as Artist , Princeton University Press, 4th edition 1972, ISBN 0-691-01305-5 , pp. 238 and 416. For the first publication see also Hemingway and The Magazines . On: University Libraries South Carolina . Retrieved May 26, 2015.
  2. ↑ The original version was first published in book form in 1938 in the collection The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: the First Forty-nine Stories and the Play The Fifth Column by Modern Library in New York and has since been reprinted in various collections and anthologies . The German translation by Anne-Marie Horschitz-Horst was first published in the Ernest Hemingway · 49 stories collection by Rowohlt Verlag Hamburg in 1950 and later reissued under various license editions. a. 1977 also in the then GDR in the (East) Berlin Aufbau-Verlag .
  3. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 92 and 94 f.
  4. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 94 ff.
  5. ^ Gerd Kaiser: Stundenblätter Hemingway Short Stories · Indian Camp / The Killers / The Battler / Old Man at the Bridge . Klett Verlag Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-12-925151-0 , pp. 67 and 73. See also in detail Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 86-88.
  6. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 87.
  7. ↑ See Reiner Poppe: Old Man at the Bridge . In: Reiner Poppe: Ernest Hemingway · From the short story · Investigations and comments , p. 65.
  8. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 88.
  9. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , pp. 88 f.
  10. ^ A b Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 89.
  11. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 90.
  12. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 91.
  13. ^ Paul Goetsch: The scope of Hemingway's "Old Man at the Bridge". In: Paul Goetsch (Ed.): Studies and materials for the short story . Diesterweg Verlag, 3rd edition, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1978, ISBN 3-425-04215-7 , p. 91 f.
  14. ↑ See Reiner Poppe: Ernest Hemingway · From the short story · Examinations and comments , p. 64. Cf. also Claus Traumann: Ernest Hemingway's short story Old Man at the Bridge and his newspaper report The Flight of Refugees . In: Die neueren Sprachen 92 (1993) 5, pp. 484-493. The original text of the dispatch is also in the By-Line collection : Ernest Hemingway - Selected articles and dispatches of four decades , ed. Reprinted by William White, New York Scribner 1967 (London Arrow Books 2013 reprint). For the history of the origins and processing of the despatch in the Short Story, see William Braasch Watson: Historical-Biographical Analysis - Old Man at the Bridge: The Making of a Short Story . In: Jackson J. Benson (Ed.): New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press. 2nd edition Durham and London 1998, ISBN 978-0-8223-1067-9 , pp. 121-134, especially pp. 128-134.
  15. ↑ Cf. Dieter Wellershoff: The indifferent - attempts on Hemingway, Camus, Benn and Beckett . Kiepenheuer and Witsch Verlag, 2nd edition, Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-462-01048-4 , p. 18, and Reiner Poppe: Old Man at the Bridge . In: Reiner Poppe: Ernest Hemingway · From the short story · Investigations and comments , p. 67.
  16. ↑ See Manfred Durzak: The German Short History of the Present: Author Portraits - Workshop Talks - Interpretations. Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-15-010293-6 , pp. 160-169. (2nd edition. 1983), p. 205.