Anton Reiser

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Anton Reiser is a psychological novel by Karl Philipp Moritz , the first three parts of which were published in Berlin between 1785 and 1786. The fourth and last part appeared there in 1790.

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The focus of this psychological novel is the development of a young person from a poor family who tries to overcome the petty-bourgeois world of his father, shaped by the quietism of the French mystic Madame Guyon . The plot with easily decipherable autobiographical features of Moritz takes place predominantly in Pyrmont , Braunschweig , Hanover and Erfurt . The time frame corresponds to the restless training and orientation years of the author before his permanent position as a teacher and the career as a professor.

Anton's belligerent parents cannot recognize his intellectual talent and artistic ambitions in the narrowness of their religious sectarianism; they regulate his life through restrictive regulations and try to forbid him from reading novels (Greek sagas, robinsonades, etc.) that contradict their educational ideas. After a short visit to the Latin school, they teach Anton to a hat maker for financial reasons. The harsh working conditions overwhelm the ailing boy's strengths, who also see physical work as a humiliation in his excessive self-esteem. After attempting suicide, the master sends him back to his parents. His experiences, which determine the next years of his life, are the sermons of a pastor, who take him into a fantasy world, of which he makes transcripts with the help of his great memory and which he plays to the brothers.

After abandoning his apprenticeship, Anton's father sent his son, who was beaten out of the species, to a free school attached to a teacher training institute. There his talent for taking notes and presenting them is discovered. He confesses to one of his teachers that he wants to study, and he works with his superiors for him to attend grammar school as a scholarship holder . Here, however - in the main part of the novel - the story of suffering continues in repeated ascending and descending curves. Through constant comparison with the sons from wealthy families, to whom he is talented and who do not see him as socially equal and who exclude him from their events, Reiser experiences life as a scholarship holder as just as humiliating as life at home and during his teaching. He feels that the landlords of his sleeping quarters have only tolerated him and he feels humiliated by the possibility of having a free table with a different family every day. On the other hand, he is obsessed with the self-satisfied desire for successful presentation in front of an audience and tries to realize this with poetry and in theater. The highlight of his attitude towards life is the recitation of a birthday poem for the Queen of England in front of her brother, the prince, and the city notables. Such actions increase his reputation, but at the same time he lives in his fantasy world, increasingly loses his sense of reality, neglects his education and private lessons, with which he pays for his book purchases, and goes into debt.

Encouraged by his classmate Iffland , he finally left school and looked for an engagement in the Eckhof theater company in Gotha . When these plans fail, he has the opportunity to study in Erfurt , but he does not use this opportunity either, this time to join a group of actors in Leipzig . This attempt remains unsuccessful as the troupe disbanded after the director stole the theater costumes.

classification

Karl Philipp Moritz stages an area of ​​tension between the protagonist's cramped origin and his striving to fight for success and recognition. So the author wants the tradition of developing novel describe the development of young people - between ambition, social distress and moral decay on the one hand and social stereotypes and individual hopes on the other. Problems and failures are not presented here as a result of origin, but rather as a result of the wrong decisions of Anton Reiser and the narrow-mindedness and self-interest of his educators and teachers. In this sense, this developmental novel about a talented young person functions firstly as a caricature of traditional educational concepts, but secondly as an example of the exaggerated sensitivity of a pupil, which is shown above all in his tendency to hypochondria and oversensitivity to his environment. For Reiser, the theater becomes a stage for self-expression, but also the scene of a sensitivity that Moritz describes in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther . The psychological parts of the novel are designed according to the model of pietistic self-exploration, which ends in a condemnation of oneself and has a forerunner in Edward Young's The Complaint, or Night Thoughts from 1742 to 1744 (German 1751 and 1844). Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions 1765-1770 are role models in their specific expression of sensibility, of introspection and exploration, but also in the supposedly autobiographical presentation of the subject.

expenditure

Audio book

Adaptations

literature

  • Jutta Eckle: "He's like a younger brother of mine". Studies on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister's theatrical mission” and Karl Philipp Moritz's “Anton Reiser” . Königshausen u. Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2458-3 .
  • Hee-Ju, Kim: I-theater. For identity research in Karl Philipp Moritz '"Anton Reiser" . Carl Winter, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8253-5026-6 .
  • Lothar Müller: The sick soul and the light of knowledge. K. Ph. Moritz '"Anton Reiser" . Athenaeum, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-610-08913-X .
  • Heide Rohse: Split-off grief. The perspective of the suffering child and “strategic” adolescence in K. Ph. Moritz 'Anton Reiser. In: Freiburg literary psychological discussions. Yearbook for Literature and Psychoanalysis , Vol. 16: Adolescence. Edited by Johannes Cremerius (among others). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, pp. 87-101. ISBN 3-8260-1352-2 .
  • Eberhard Rohse: Karl Philipp Moritz: Anton Reiser. A psychological novel. In: Renate Stauf u. Cord-Friedrich Berghahn (ed.): World literature. A Braunschweig lecture . Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2004 (= Braunschweiger Beiräge zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur , vol. 17), pp. 169–189. ISBN 3-89534-527-X
  • Norbert W. Schlinkert : The self-illuminating consciousness as poetic self. From Adam Bernd to Karl Philipp Moritz, from Jean Paul to Sören Kierkegaard . A hermeneutical-phenomenological investigation. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2011, ISBN 978-3-86525-152-7 , therein: Chapter 3.2. Quietism in Pietism and the coinage of Anton Reiser , pp. 105–108, chapter 3.5. The continued sufferings of the young Anton Reiser as the ultimate inner history of man , pp. 131–143.
  • Christof Wingertszahn : Anton Reiser and the »Michelein«. New finds on quietism in the 18th century. Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2002, ISBN 3-932324-59-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Coquettish Terrorist in: FAZ of October 10, 2011, page 36.