At the State Court
The title of a novella by Theodor Storm is on the Staatshof . It was written between autumn 1856 and January 1858 during his time in Heiligenstadt and was published in the fiction yearbook Argo in 1859 . Art and Poetry album released. In 1860 it appeared together with the prose texts When the apples are ripe , Posthuma and the fairy tale Der kleine Häwelmann in the anthology In der Sommer − Mondnacht in a revised version.
The novella is an early example of poetic realism and depicts the decline of the eponymous property and the short life of Anna Lene, the last offspring of an old noble family from Eiderstedt , in the narrator's memories .
content
At the beginning, the first-person narrator explains to Marx how sketchy his memory is, from which he wants to reproduce fragments drop by drop. He cannot judge whether the end was an “act” or a mere “event”. In the course of the novel, he calls himself conscious of individual scenes and describes the decline of the noble family and the inability to live of his girlfriend, whose delicate and ethereal appearance fascinated him.
He remembers his hometown, which was "right on the border of the marshland ". In his youth he wandered from there across the country over the fens and past the scattered farmsteads , until after about half an hour he reached "the state courtyard", which lay on a terp under gloomy elms and silver poplars . Of wide and deep moats surrounded, he had a beautiful garden , which was "created with patrician luxury". For generations the estate with the typical Haubarg has been owned by the van der Roden family, who had owned over 90 farms a long time ago. The pretty girl Anna Lene lived there with her grandmother, the aging Frau Rathmann van der Roden. The children met often because the narrator's father worked for them as a lawyer.
In an early scene he plays with Anna Lene in a storage room for the hay , where she eagerly covers him with stalks, bends over and moans several times and finally asks the maid Wieb if he is dead. Later, for reasons of age, the grandmother moves to the city with her granddaughter, while the State Court is looked after by Marten and his wife Wieb. Marx visits Anne Lene regularly, quickly taking on small assignments for his father and inviting her and grandmother to his family home for Sunday coffee on these occasions. There the children sit at a table next to them, and the girl shows good manners by not staining either the napkin or the white dress with coffee, while the narrator has certain difficulties with this. On the occasion, Anna Lene suggests to her boyfriend to dance the minuet , an “old Franconian” art that they both practiced a few weeks ago in the dance school . While Mrs. Rathmann and the father discuss business matters, the children go to another room where the mother sits down at the piano and chooses the minuet from Mozart's Don Giovanni . Anne Lene soon glides gracefully over the floor and performs “the tours of the old dance” so gracefully that Marx and his mother, who can no longer look at the keys, cannot take their eyes off the “floating figure” and the narrator confesses that “the little dancing feet” had “confused his whole boy's heart”.
After about a year, the grandmother dies, whereupon Anna Lene is accepted into the narrator's house as a ward . The weeping pale face and the “fine gold-clear hair” of the girl seem even more tender than usual on the day of the news of her death. On Sundays, the two of them regularly walk to the State Court, where they are received by Wieb and Marten, and stroll through the deserted rooms where they damp marsh air has already attacked the ceiling and walls . You wander through the lush garden and penetrate to an old pavilion by the moat, which is, however, locked because the wooden floor has become unsafe and there is a risk of falling into the water through the rotten boards.
The years go by. Anna Lene has become an “adult girl”, Marx will study medicine and leave town. To say goodbye to his old friends, he visits the State Court with her. When the two reach the property, they meet the beggar Trin ', who quarrels and scolds each other outside the front door. Marx knows that for years she has believed that old Rathmann van der Roden had betrayed her maternal inheritance. The friends want to walk through the people who complain, but the angry woman cheekily stands in Anna Lene's way and provokes her by alluding to future poverty and the decay of the State Court and saying ambiguously that grandfather Anna Lenes once had her “stockings ... moved out". Enraged by the sight of his helpless girlfriend, Marx grabs the beggar woman by the arm and drags her from the courtyard, to which she reacts with curses. When Anna Lene asks the maid for clarification, she reacts evasively. She recognizes this as a lie and a little later puts down the diamond cross that she used to wear on a chain as a "sign of the old splendor".
After a year she becomes engaged to a nobleman whom Marx knows and despises. When he returned to his home country two years later as a doctor , he found out that the Junker had dropped her because the value of the State Court, and thus of the heiress Anna Lene, had fallen due to falling land prices.
In the summer, Marx takes part in a country party to the Staatshof organized by the up-and-coming Claus Peters. His father, a wealthy farmer, wants to buy the property for his son, who is already playing himself up as the future owner, criticizes all sorts of things and a little later gets an old violinist who plays to dance but cannot find notes for a minuet. At first Anne Lene isolates herself, but then she waltzes with Marx, although worried Wieb reminds her that the doctor has forbidden it. Marx is happy, but feels the weakness of his girlfriend, who, however, does not want to stop until she grabs her heart and gasps for breath.
The two go outside and wander in silence through the night until they reach the moat where they used to play and get lost as children. Soon they are standing in front of the old garden pavilion, the doors of which have been broken. In the moonlight, Marx looks at her hand, which is in his, and is struck by a shudder, “which is so wonderfully mixed with the desire for earthly lust and the painful feeling of transience.” She withdraws and enters the pavilion. Marx sees the water glittering through the gaps in the unsafe wooden floor and wants to hold it back, but she appeases him, goes to the opposite window and remembers the broken engagement. The Junker had probably “not been so wrong; - who will get the daughter out of such a house! ”When Marx replied to comfort her, she fell through the rotten boards into the water. He jumps into the ditch next to the pavilion, but is unable to rescue Anne Lene and finds her so late that even a doctor who has been summoned cannot do anything. Claus Peters takes over the property, has “the old Haubarg” torn down and replaced with a modern house.
Emergence
On the cover of the manuscript, which had been corrected several times, Storm noted the different phases in which the novella was written: "Autumn 1856 - December 1857 - January 1858". For the book edition of 1860 he changed the text by trying to emphasize the "local tone" even more intensively and further characterizing the figure of Marx. With this he was reacting to the criticism of Rudolf Hermann Schnees, to whom the narrator had not seemed energetic enough. In the new version, at the end of the novella, Marx tries in vain to save his girlfriend from the water.
According to Storm, the “idea” for the novella came to him in the fall of 1856 during a sleepless night in the “Hotel zur Krone” in Göttingen . On his return from Heiligenstadt to Husum , he stayed there with his father and thought of a country party he had undertaken years ago “with young people of both sexes”, which had led them to a neglected state farm in the Eiderstedter Marsch, and of a rumor an impoverished aristocrat from Friedrichstadt . As the “last of a large family”, she is said to have had around 100 farms. The location of the action and the theme of decay emerge from these memory fragments.
Background and interpretation
For Christian Demandt, the gruesome memory of the small hand that shimmers in the moonlight links the two central motif strands and thus the micro and macro structure of the work: the “desire for earthly lust” and the melancholy “feeling of its transience”. The pleasure is not only negated by the time limit, but also justified, kindled and intensified. In Regina Fasold's view, this shows the core of the “core of Storm's art”, the basic mood of his poetry, which can be heard in the song of the harp girl from his lyrical novel Immensee .
“Today, only today
am I so beautiful;
Tomorrow, oh tomorrow
everything must pass!
Only for this hour
are you still mine;
To die, oh
shall I die alone. "
Unlike his earlier, atmospheric and sentimental novella, Storm no longer arranged the scenes around individual poems, which the protagonist entrusted to his “parchment volume”, but rather designed a coherent plot. His prose thus detaches itself from its unchangeable image-relatedness, offers more than a “mosaic of stationary situations” and is permeated by the painful mood of his poetry between desire and transience.
This is evident at the beginning of the narrative, since the tragic relationship begins from its end, the death of Anna Lene, the reason for which remains uncertain as “deed or event”. As if in personal arbitrariness, the narrator is overwhelmed by memories that seem to be physically present, but can also leave him and form a finely woven fabric of sensual details with visual, olfactory and tonal references in the course of the novel. At the beginning he made it clear that he could only write what “memory” “gives” him. The two motifs "Desire for earthly lust" and "Feeling of transience" drive lines of development that collide with one another. Anna Lene's death path runs parallel to the decay of the State Court, while her erotic charisma on Marx grows at the same time.
In the ambiguous atmosphere of the novella, created by multifaceted associations, the motifs of pleasure and decay are closely linked. This becomes apparent when one day the friends meet the beggar Trin 'on the property, who is arguing with the maid Wieb on the doorstep. She repeats the rumor that a “fake good thing got in the way” during the economic rise of the house and alludes to the fact that the girl's grandfather once “took off her stockings”. In the fatalistic interpretation of the event, this appears as the reason for the later decline and shows itself as a disastrous fama that is fulfilled with the death of the girl.
Already the first memory of the narrator from childhood plays with the connection, in that Anna Lene sprinkles her motionless friend Marx with hay while playing, moans, bends over "again and again", tells him he will be "buried soon!" And finally the maid asks if her boyfriend is dead now. This may have been child's play at the time, but the adult narrator clearly evokes the death motif and the symbolic area of the sexual by describing specific movements and moans while the memory is so present to him that he paints it in the present tense . Similarly delicate is the sensually painted scene in which the children are asked to dance to the minuet from Mozart's Don Giovanni a little later and are accompanied by the narrator's mother on the piano. This tendency culminates in the second dance scene, when Marx waltzes with Anna Lene, who is in poor health, in the shabby hall of the State Court while the chandelier floats above them , which is decorated with fresh summer flowers.
For Christian Demandt, Storm succeeded for the first time in convincing the typological components of a novella. While the plot gradually builds up to the waltz scene and subsequent peripetia in the garden, the old world falls into disrepair, the facades crumble, the walls and ceilings of the abandoned rooms are destroyed by the damp air. The work already points to the later novellas Carsten Curator , Auf dem Heidehof and Der Schimmelreiter and approximates the structure of the classical drama . In addition to the garden pavilion, through whose moldy boards the girl falls to her death, the places and rooms of the property are the central symbols of the dark work.
According to Karl Ernst Laage , the author presented a locally manageable region in his novella, which, however, is connected to the “big world”. In a well-known phrase, Theodor Fontane had spoken mockingly in his late autobiographical work From Twenty to Thirty of Storm's “local patriotism” and “provincial talk”, with which he not only criticized the anti-Prussian attitude of the author, but also questioned the global content of his novels wanted to. Certainly the realist Storm wants to give the stories a clear background; his works and - with them the landscape descriptions - pointed poetically beyond the small reality of the Husum area. The death of Anne Lene is not just the "obvious picture" of the "decline of a family", but reflects the beginning of the capitalist economic order, the rise of a new and the farewell to the old patrician life and culture.
literature
- Christian Demandt: At the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-02623-1 , pp. 148–151
- Dieter Lohmeier: Narrative Problems of Poetic Realism. Using the example of Storm's novella “Auf dem Staatshof”. In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft 28, 1979, pp. 109-122
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 148
- ^ Theodor Storm: At the State Court. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, pp. 140-141
- ^ Theodor Storm: At the State Court. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, pp. 146-147
- ^ Theodor Storm: At the State Court. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 152
- ^ Theodor Storm: At the State Court. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 166
- ^ Theodor Storm: At the State Court. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 167
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 148
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage : Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 156
- ↑ Quoted from: Christian Demandt: Auf dem Staatshof. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 148
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 148–149
- ↑ Quoted from: Theodor Storm: Immensee. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, p. 260
- ↑ Quoted from: Christian Demandt: Auf dem Staatshof. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 148
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 148–149
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 149
- ↑ Christian Demandt: On the State Court. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 149
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 156
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 163