Anecdote to drop the working moral

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The anecdote about lowering work ethic is an anecdote by Heinrich Böll . It is about a tourist who gets to know a fisherman and in conversation with him understands that you can be happy even without a great career. Böll wrote it for a broadcast by Norddeutscher Rundfunk on "Labor Day" on May 1, 1963.

Table of contents

In a port on the coast of Western Europe, a tourist wakes a poorly dressed fisherman sleeping in his boat when he takes photos of him. The vacationer is very accommodating, asks him about his catches today and learns that despite the excellent conditions, he does not want to go out again because he is already satisfied with his harvest.

The tourist does not understand why the fisherman does not want to increase the frequency of his trips in order to increase financially and to build up a successful fishing company in the long term.

At the height of his career, he could then retire and doze off in the harbor. The fisherman replies that he can do it now and that further efforts are not necessary. The tourist becomes aware that one can be happy even with low earnings, and he feels envious of the fisherman's satisfaction.

Historical context

In the midst of the German economic boom, and on Labor Day, Böll provokes his readers by questioning their newly conquered values ​​and their freshly won self-confidence. At the beginning of the story, the tourist embodies the ideal type of time: Success enables him to be educated and to travel, and to appear patronizing. The fact that he can go on holiday abroad appears to him to be a self-achieved result of successful economic activity, to which the fisherman's carefree " laziness " forms a contrast that irritates the tourist from the start. The story contrasts the poorly dressed fisherman with the chic tourist. But although the traveler in the sense of the economic miracle initially appears to be the winner (he is the active one and therefore dominant), he seems nervous and insecure from the start towards his outwardly poor interlocutor.

It is the various values ​​of the economic boom that Böll's irony targets , not only materialism , but above all the hectic activity that only allows itself to rest if it appears to be justified by a busy life. The fisherman's attitude, on the other hand, seems almost to be an anticipation of the post-materialistic attitude that spread in the leading industrial countries of Europe after the economic miracle . According to this attitude, man work to live and not live to work.

Adaptations

Under the title The wise fisherman who published Carl Hanser Verlag in 2014 a conversion of the narrative as a picture book . The illustrations come from the French draftsman Émile Bravo . The book was in 2017 as Young book for the city in Cologne selected and the region. Mirijam Steinhauser wrote in KinderundJugendmedien.de that it was "a successful and surprising picture book that should delight adults and children and stimulate thought" about questions about life planning, material wealth and freedom of choice, "which are just as relevant today as they were fifty years ago."

swell

  • First printing: Welt der Arbeit (formerly the DGB weekly newspaper ) from November 22, 1963
  • Heinrich Böll, anecdote about lowering work ethic . In: Robert C. Conrad (ed.): Heinrich Böll. Cologne edition. Vol. 12, 1959–1963, Cologne 2008

literature

  • Hans-Christoph Graf von Nayhauss : Problems of literary reception using the example of Heinrich Böll's "Anecdote on the lowering of work ethic". In: Heinrich Böll - Dissident of the affluent society. Edited by Bernd Balzer and Norbert Honsza. Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1995. pp. 173-200.
  • Klaus Zobel: Text analysis. An introduction to the interpretation of modern short prose. Paderborn [et al.] 1985. [S. 180–186 to: Anecdote about the lowering of the work ethic .]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Oehlen: Heinrich Böll for children - a funny reading experience . In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger from March 4, 2017.
  2. ↑ Mirijam Steinhauser: The clever fisherman . In: KinderundJugendmedien.de .