Atli, the best man

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Atli, der Bestmann brings together two stories by Ernst Wiechert that were published in Berlin in 1938.

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Atli, the best man

The crew of the 23-meter-long three-masted schooner “Marianne” consists of the captain, his best man Atli, four sailors and the first-person narrator. The latter is a young writer who takes part in the trip with a freight of wood to Newcastle at the request of the shipowner because he had published a poem on the "Marianne". The narrator - a landlubber - starts talking to the best man at sea and asks him where his name comes from. Atli wanted to become an athlete as a child and no one in the area could say the word at the time. The narrator learns to appreciate Atli on the trip. Both men become friends.

In Newcastle the freight is unloaded and bran loaded for the return journey to Sweden. The captain dies on the way back. Atli takes over the command of the ship. The ship goes off course in a storm. Atli does not turn back after the storm, but sails to the land of his dreams: via Fayal , the Bahamas to the Amazon River. One morning the self-proclaimed captain Atli left. The narrator remembers the evening before, the bright, bold face of the best man, when, looking upstream, longing for the distance, he thought that the river was the greatest he had ever seen.

Anchored back home in Scandinavia thanks to a new second helmsman, the five-man crew is lucky. The shipowner once again gives mercy to justice.

Tobias

The student Tobias turns his back on the university town and marches south to his grandmother for four days. Tobias killed. He shot three times. When Tobias got home, he threw the remaining cartridges and pistol into the mill ditch. The rest of the action takes place in the grandmother's mill and is about overcoming. Ernst Wiechert presents the "fight" between grandmother and grandson in the form of a parable . Tobias thinks back to childhood. His upbringing had been in the hands of his grandmother at the time. Once upon a time, silence, waiting and prayer were the three grandmotherly instruments used to convert the lying apple thief Tobias. So now too. The grandmother's instruments for the retreat of the again lying Tobias, this time a man who killed, have remained the same. Again, the grandmother's approach is successful. When she has done her new educational work with a heavy heart, she lets the grandson go to town.

Text output

  • Ernst Wiechert: Atli the best man. Tobias. Two stories. G. Grote'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Berlin 1938 (Grotes Aussaat-Bücher. Vol. 19). 55 pages (first edition).
  • Atli, der Bestmann (PDF; 90 kB, edition used) .
  • Tobias . Pp. 73–94 in short stories . Verlag L. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1947. Library of the youth. Head of Josef Rick . Vol. 2. 139 pages ( Die Hirtennovelle . Tobias . The Children's Crusade . My First Eagle ) (Edition used).

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