Auguste Bolte (literature)
Auguste Bolte is the title character of a story of the same name by Kurt Schwitters from 1923, which can be attributed to Dadaism due to its "rejection of aesthetic laws" and "logical connections" and "control by the mind" ; the signature "Merz" at the end of the story puts it in the context of Schwitters' own MERZ art, which elevates the collage of fragments of reality to the principle of her works. In the meantime it has been made into a film (Gerd Winkler 1974) and adapted for the stage (Gregorhabenbach, production by the group a rose is 1998, Henning Vogt 2007).
Frame text
The "self-ironic petty bourgeoisie of the Hanoverian Kurt Schwitters" manifests itself in the framework text of this narrative, which is preceded by a "poem", which at first glance has no reference to the main narrative, through a diagram with the subtitle "Symbol of Art - Criticism "and an introduction with self-reflective comments on" Reviews in daily newspapers "as well as a comment at the end on the open end of the story and on any claims the reader may have to solve the riddle from the plot part. The footnotes that are repeatedly interspersed in the story - actually a sign of a scientific work - point to the "dissolution of the work category", so that a generic classification as a " novella " appears problematic.
Internal narration
If the external form of the text assembles and satirizes various discourses such as criticism (in the form of a criticism of criticism), scientific treatise and literary narrative, then in the internal narrative, the actual Auguste plot, there are still other discourses like the so-called common sense, logic (and its counterpart, paradox), sexuality, philosophical and psychiatric discourses all their jokes. Again and again, bourgeois educational content is called up and thwarted. Among other things, genre-specific terms from the novelistic are interspersed: the attribute "unheard" runs through the text, which, like the terms "unusual occurrences" (p. 159) and "extraordinary occurrences", is reminiscent of Goethe's definition of the novel. The "turning point" or the "turning point" are also generic features.
Auguste Bolte observed ten people walking in one direction on the street. This mere circumstance leads them to the conclusion that “something must be wrong”. In order to find out what that is, she pursues the people Auguste perceives as a group. When this splits up, she decides to follow one subgroup first, then she runs in the opposite direction and follows the other five. In between, she strips down to her undershirt and also puts her handbag on the sidewalk so that she can walk more easily. It can be foreseen that the group of five, which Auguste Bolte finally follows, will split up again: a young girl leaves the group and disappears into a house. After Auguste has also followed the group of four, then the two separate groups of two and finally the last couple, who have also split up, with each person going to a different house, she decides to go to the girl who is first from the last Group of five has separated. Her repeated ringing of the doorbell and her silence about the reason for her visit brings the girl, Anna Sündig, to despair, so that she screams and cries and lets the stranger into the apartment without resistance. Auguste asks Anna about her personal circumstances, which she informs her without further ado; Anna denies that she belonged to the group of ten and then five people. It comes to a scandal: Auguste gets angry because the truth is supposedly withheld from her, and smashes the furniture. Now "something is really going on" and Auguste leaves the restaurant by sending all the people she meets to this apartment because "something has happened" there. A passer-by calls her a "harmless lunatic" in this context.
Auguste meets a girls' boarding school on the street: ten girls are walking in the same direction. If she still concluded from the first observation of this kind that something must have happened, she now decides to believe the opposite, but is not sure whether the appearance of these girls doesn't mean something after all, pursues them by always reverses in the opposite direction, because it could be that the appearance does not mean that something has happened, but that it "could experience the whole truth [...] of other things [sic!]" (p. 162 ). When a man sees her from afar and "turns around in horror", she pursues him, who, however, fled into a taxi. She also takes a taxi and now alternates between the "fleeing man" and the girls' boarding school. The man finally runs into a house. Auguste wants to follow him, but cannot pay for her taxi, so the chauffeur, who thinks she is "crazy", forcibly puts her back in his car and leaves her on a military training area.
The narrative is permeated by August's reflections, which are conveyed to the reader using the stylistic device of the experienced speech : Again and again she sums up the events and draws her conclusions from them, but also free associations - one feels reminded of the écriture automatique of the surrealists - or Associations through rhymes and puns dominate Augustes thinking.
Examples of philosophical parcels of discourse in this potpourri of bourgeois educational content are terms such as "conscientious", "duty", "decent", "indifference to all values" and Augustes' search for truth, her realization that nothing can be known - scio me nihil scire (Socrates) - and the moral quintessence of Auguste's findings:
- "Man had to decide. And he had to decide. And he had to decide, not because he had to decide, but precisely because it was in itself indifferent whether he made a decision and how he made a decision." (P. 167)
Thus, in this story, bourgeois values are not only satirized , but - albeit in caricatured form - perpetuated . What presents itself as madness on the action level gains relevance again on a meta level , the apparent paradox becomes the initiation of action, the apparent nihilism of the fragmentation of language and logic demands moral action. In this way, aesthetics is once again right in relation to aesthetic criticism.
literature
- Text basis: Kurt Schwitters, Auguste Bolte . In: German storytellers . Second volume. Selected and introduced by Marie-Luise Kaschnitz, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, 3rd edition 1979, pp. 141–169.
- Funkkolleg Literary Modernism. European literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. Study letter 4th ed. German Institute for Distance Learning at the University of Tübingen, 1993, p. 12/4
- Gero von Wilpert: Sachwörtberbuch der Literatur , 6., verb. u. exp. Edition, Kröner Stuttgart 1979, Dadaism
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.buecher-wiki.de/index.php/BuecherWiki/SchwittersKurt
- ^ Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörtberbuch der Literatur
- ^ Funkkolleg Literary Modernism . 1993, p. 12/4
- ↑ Quoted from: German narrators . Second volume. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1979, pp. 141-169.
- ↑ Funkkolleg , pp. 12/27
- ↑ books-wiki
- ↑ Goethe mentions the "unheard-of occurrence" as a characteristic of the novella.
See also
- Anna Blume , another Schwitters figure who - Schwitters himself points out - shares the initials AB with Auguste Bolte, just like Arnold Böcklin .