Andreas Thameyer's last letter
Andreas Thameyer's last letter is a novella by Arthur Schnitzler , written in 1900 and published on July 26, 1902 in the newspaper Die Zeit in Vienna.
Before his suicide, Andreas Thameyer writes a letter with which he wants to cleanse his conscience. His wife Anna had horns on him and had given birth to a dark-skinned child.
content
Fourteen days after the birth of the child, the 34-year-old Sparkasse employee Andreas Thameyer has nothing to hide in his letter to the malevolent Viennese people. That was about nine months ago. Andreas had visited his seriously ill father for a few days. Meanwhile, his wife Anna, who stayed at home, had strolled through the zoo in the evening and passed where "giant people with glowing eyes and big black beards ... had set up camp". Thameyer believes his wife every word of her experience report and absolves her of guilt. He dies out of love for Anna; because he cannot stand "that the people mock". Anna really is completely innocent in the eyes of the letter writer. She just got scared. Hence the newborn's skin color. Before writing it down, Thameyer researched evidence of Anna's innocence from the literature. For example, the inverse phenomenon is said to have already been observed. Heliodorus reported in his Libri aethiopicorum that the Ethiopian queen Persina had given birth to a white daughter to her husband Hydapes. According to Malebranche , a pregnant woman looked closely at a portrait of St. Pius . The son, born later, would have looked like the saint's face. In his table speeches, Luther spoke of a man from Wittenberg with a skull. The mother of the unfortunate would have been terrified of a corpse during pregnancy. In the area around Havre a woman would have given birth to a boy in 1637 after her husband had been absent for four years. She became pregnant after she had only “dreamed of her husband's fervent embrace”. In his “Enigmatic Processes of Nature”, Hamberg tells of a woman who watched a lion dressage while pregnant. The child was born with a lion head. After all, Limböck wrote in “On the Mistake of Women” about a pregnant woman who had to experience a conflagration. The child was born with a burn on the cheek. Thameyer had the Limböck from Dr. Walter Brauner - the only noble and good person around him. Still - Thameyer kisses his wife and child one last time and goes into the woods.
reception
- After Perlmann, Thameyer has lost social standing. He was destroyed and suspected that all “scientific” underpinning with “specialist literature” is of little use to him. So he hopes that after his suicide the gossip will fall silent.
- Sprengel suspects that Thameyer wanted to cover up his impotence with the letter.
Web links
- The text at Zeno.org
In English
- West Virginia University Philological Papers: Imagination and procreation: Schnitzler's "Andreas Thameyer's Last Letter" by Florentina Costache dated September 22, 2005
literature
- source
- Arthur Schnitzler: Andreas Thameyer's last letter. P. 184–191 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Arthur Schnitzler: Leutnant Gustl. Stories 1892 - 1907. With an afterword by Michael Scheffel . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (2004 edition). 525 pages, ISBN 3-10-073552-8
- First edition in book form
- Andreas Thameyer's last letter . In addition to Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg , Das neue Lied , Die Fremde and Die Weissagung contained in: Arthur Schnitzler: Dämmerseelen. Novellas. S. Fischer, Berlin 1907. 132 pages
- Secondary literature
- Michaela L. Perlmann: Arthur Schnitzler. Metzler Collection, Vol. 239. Stuttgart 1987. 195 pages, ISBN 3-476-10239-4
- Peter Sprengel : History of German-language literature 1900 - 1918. Munich 2004. 924 pages, ISBN 3-406-52178-9
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . S. 555, 2nd column, 17th Zvu Stuttgart 2004. 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8
- Imke Meyer: Masculinity and melodrama: Arthur Schnitzler's narrative writings. Würzburg 2010. 192 pages, ISBN 978-3826040504