André and Ursula

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André and Ursula is a pacifist novel by Polly Maria Höfler from 1937 , which should be an " attempt at Franco-German understanding " - according to Höfler in a foreword from 1948. The book consists of two parts: The diary of the unknown soldier , in which the war experiences of the young soldier André Duval take center stage and André and Ursula , where Ursula's stay in France is described.

Goal setting

One of the aims of the book is to be read right at the beginning as a kind of dedication: The war brought hundreds of deaths and created thousands of lives. What we now create and strive for is based on the deed of our dead. They sacrificed themselves for us, and they have won what we must win in order to have it permanently: peace. According to her Grenzland novel Der Weg in die Heimat (1935), Polly Maria Höfler was indeed considered a Nazi sympathizer in the Third Reich, but she obviously saw Hitler as a peace-maker and thought that, like her, the reconciliation between Germany and France was important to him lie. Your most successful novel is therefore consistently pacifist.

In 1948, Polly Maria Höfler apologized in the foreword to the new edition for having “young and religious” believed in Hitler's peace intentions. She therefore dedicated the new edition of her novel to “the unknown soldier of World War II” and with this message she was able to sell a total of half a million copies of her book.

In 1955 it was filmed under the direction of Werner Jacobs with Ivan Desny as André Duval and Elisabeth Müller as Ursula Hartmann, see the article André and Ursula (film) .

Part One: The Unknown Soldier's Diary

The main character of the book, Ursula Hartmann from Frankfurt, finds the war diary of the soldier André Duval in her father's estate , which she herself had received as a child on Christmas 1918 from a German soldier who in turn had taken it from the French soldier André Duval, who was believed to be dead . Ursula reads the diary that same night. She is deeply shaken by the experiences of André Duval in 1916. André describes in a haunting manner his experiences in the trenches of the First World War , which are nothing new to remind you of the bestseller Erich Maria Remarques In the West .

Second part: André and Ursula

In 1936, the German student Ursula fell into the hands of the French soldier André Duval's World War II diary, whereupon she visited him in France and soon fell in love with him and his country. The book is dedicated to the fallen of the First World War and an urgent appeal for reconciliation between Germany and France.

expenditure

Polly Maria Höfler: André and Ursula . 3rd ed. Dt. Literature publ. Melchert, Hamburg 1990 (DLV-Taschenbuch Nr. 53) ISBN 3-87152-055-1

swell

  1. ↑ Frundsberg, Berlin 1937. Edition: 390,000.
  2. ↑ quoted from Mediaculture online: Die unlückliche Liebe ( Memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lmz-bw.de
  3. ↑ Cf. Tobias Schneider: Bestseller in the Third Reich. In: VfZ , 2004, no. 1, pp. 77–98, here p. 95 ( PDF ).
  4. ↑ Cf. Tobias Schneider: Bestseller in the Third Reich. P. 96.