April (Joseph Roth)
April. The story of a love is a story by Joseph Roth , published in 1925 in Berlin by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz Nachf.
The narrator's love for a beauty that is difficult to reach is not fulfilled, but is thwarted.
action
Before continuing on to New York, the narrator who is passing through stays in a town from April to the end of May. In the evening, lovers mate in the park on the outskirts. The narrator sleeps with the unmarried Anna. The young woman, a stranger to the town, has a small child, was left sitting and financially poor.
The narrator is called the man under the window , because he falls in love with a beautiful girl who sits at that window and occasionally looks up at the sky. On the third day she smiles . Anna notices the admiration and explains the narrator. The girl at the window is consumptive and lame ; must die soon . The narrator then decides to continue the journey. The beloved girl must die soon anyway. So what else is he supposed to do in the town? At the station, just as the train is starting to move, the beautiful girl walks along safe and sound; not at all lame, not at all consumptive . Once more the narrator looks the beautiful woman in the eye.
reception
Steierwald examines the construction of expectations and their dismantling .
filming
In 1978 Dagmar Damek filmed the story under the title Story of a Love for Television.
literature
source
- Fritz Hackert (Ed.): Joseph Roth. Works. Volume 4: Novels and Stories. 1916-1929. Pp. 333-351: April. The story of a love. 1925. With an afterword by the editor. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-7632-2988-4 .
expenditure
- Joseph Roth: April, the story of a love , cover and pictures by Carl Rabus , JHW Dietz successor, Berlin 1924 (first edition), OCLC 247021884 .
- April in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Joseph Roth: April, the story of a love , illustrated by Svato Zapletal, Svato Zapletal, Hamburg 2013, OCLC 935185988 .
Secondary literature
- Helmuth Nürnberger : Joseph Roth. In personal testimonies and picture documents (= Rowohlt's monographs , volume 301). Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-499-50301-8 .
- Ulrike Steierwald: Suffering from history. On the historical conception of modernity in the texts of Joseph Roth (= Epistemata. Series: Literaturwissenschaft , Volume 121), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1994, ISBN 3-88479-880-4 (Dissertation University of Munich 1992, 335 pages, 24 cm).
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German authors A - Z. 4th completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 519.
- Wilhelm von Sternburg : Joseph Roth. A biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2009 (2nd edition), ISBN 978-3-462-05555-9 , pp. 319–322