From the life of a good-for-nothing

First printed in 1826

From the life of a good-for-nothing is a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff . It was 1822 / 1823 finalized and published in 1826 for the first time. The work is considered the climax of musical prose and is exemplary of late Romanticism . As in many of his works, Eichendorff uses an open form and enriches the epic text with lyrical elements by including numerous poems and songs in his text.

A miller sends his son out into the wide world, whom he scolds for a good-for-nothing because he lets him do all the work alone. The son happily takes his violin and leaves his village without a clear goal in mind. Soon a carriage stops next to him, in which two women sit who enjoy his music. They take him to their castle near Vienna , where he is immediately employed as a gardener's boy. Soon he falls in love with the younger of the two women and is promoted to customs collector . He frees the garden of the customs house from the potatoes in order to plant flowers there, which he regularly deposits for his beloved. He decides to give up traveling and save money to make it big, and befriends the porter at the castle. When, however, one day he sees his “most beautiful wife” with an officer on a balcony and she now seems inaccessible to him, he packs his things and leaves the castle.

The good-for-nothing now wanders "towards Italy " (see Grand Tour ) and stops in a small village on the way there. Suddenly two horsemen appear in front of the inn, whom he takes for robbers. They ask him to accompany them to the village B. and pose as the two painters Leonhard and Guido. The three of them continue their journey to Italy, do not allow themselves a break and are on the move day and night. After they have stayed in an inn once and the good-for-nothing wants to wake his companion the next morning, all he finds is their empty room, in which there is a full wallet that is intended for him. When the postillon urges to continue, the good- for-nothing jumps into the stagecoach and travels on alone until he reaches a castle where he is received by an old woman and a gaunt man. After a rich meal, he is led into a splendid room and can now lead a life here “as a person in the world can only wish for”. One day he receives a letter from his Aurelie, the “most beautiful woman”, who asks him to come back to her because “all obstacles have been removed” and she “can hardly live” without him. This letter is the key to the whole novella. Because the letter comes from Aurelie, but is not addressed to the recipient, it is also not a love letter at all, but a friendship letter from woman to woman, but this only becomes clear at the very end.

Overjoyed, the young man leaves immediately. Fleeing and without knowing the way, he leaves the castle and finally arrives in Rome . As he strolls through the night streets of the big city, he suddenly thinks that he has heard the voice of his "beautiful wife" and recognized her white figure. However, since his search remains unsuccessful, he falls asleep outdoors. The next morning a young compatriot speaks to him, introduces himself as a painter and takes him to his house, where the good-for-nothing looks at some paintings. In the process, he discovers two pictures that he likes and asks the painter whether it was he who painted them. He replies that they are works by Leonardo da Vinci and Guido Reni . The good-for-nothing proudly claims that he knows the two of them and has traveled with them day and night. The young man also learns from the painter that he painted the young woman who came to Rome especially to see the good-for-nothing, Leonhard and Guido. Full of enthusiasm, the good-for-nothing begins to look for the house in which he saw the figure dressed in white, but does not find it again.

The painter later takes him to a garden where suddenly a couple arguing loudly appears. It is the maid of the castle, where his "most beautiful wife" lives. She slips him a note containing an invitation to meet the beautiful young countess. The good-for-nothing goes straight to the house and sees a figure in the coat of the painter, whom he recently met, and suspects that he is trying to assault the beautiful countess. Screaming loudly, he rushes towards her, trips over flowers, falls to the floor and sees that the figure in the white robe is only the maid of the chamber. When the young lady herself, with whom he was supposed to have the rendezvous , joins them, the good-for-nothing sees only a strange, corpulent lady instead of his longed for loved one.

He then makes his return trip to Germany sad. On the way he meets three Prague students who, like him, are on the move and earn their living with badly played brass music. When one of them told us that his cousin was the porter at a castle not far from Vienna and played the bassoon, the good-for-nothing recognized the castle and porter in the descriptions and they decided to leave immediately and take the post ship on the Danube to Vienna, especially As a clergyman traveling along wants to know, there will soon be a wedding at court, which the good-for-nothing relates to himself and his "most beautiful".

As soon as the musicians reach their destination, the good-for-nothing runs into the stately garden, hears the voice of Mr. Guido, but instead discovers a young woman with a guitar who sings an old tune to his beloved Aurelie, who screams in surprise at the sight of him. To his astonishment, the good-for-nothing also finds Mr. Leonhard there. He takes the beautiful woman by the hand, leads her to him and finally clears up the confused story: he himself is the count of the castle, Mr. Guido is really Flora, his lover. Her mother initially did not approve of the love between them because there was another influential applicant for her hand. That is why they fled to Italy disguised as painters, but were persecuted on the way, so that they let the good-for-nothing travel on alone, as Flora disguised as it were.

The identity of the “most beautiful” is also clarified. Aurelie is not a nobleman at all, but an orphan who was once brought to the castle by his uncle, the porter, and adopted by the countess as a foster daughter. So nothing stands in the way of a double connection: the count marries his Flora and the good-for-nothing his Aurelie. As a wedding present, the latter are given a small white castle with a garden and vineyards and they decide to spend their honeymoon in Italy.

interpretation

The characters in this novella can be divided into two groups: on the one hand, the romantics and (life) artists, who look optimistically and courageously into the future and who are eager to walk and adventure. They strive for individuality and freedom and distance themselves from the given behavioral patterns of working bourgeois society. They include all musical (Kali) figures: In addition to the singing and good-for-nothing who fiddles his violin, above all the beautiful young lady with the guitar, then the shepherd with his shawm, the fugitive lovers disguised as a painter and finally the musicians, the is the name of the oboe, clarinet or the French horn-blowing student.

On the other hand, there are the Philistines , who lead a down-to-earth, monotonous and pedantic bourgeois existence and give the "lazy people" and "lollies" disapproving moral sermons. These include the gardener, the porter, the farmer and the new toll collector, but above all the father of the good-for-nothing. When the hard-working miller insults his lazy son, who is enjoying the spring sun, right at the beginning of the plot and sends him out into the world, in order to let him take care of his livelihood himself, and this from the good-for-nothing as a welcome opportunity to "make his fortune" , is viewed, it already shows the different views of life in the two worlds.

Nevertheless, Eichendorff tries to reconcile poetry and life, which is all the easier for him as he defuses both sides, both that of subjectivity and that of reality. The latter appears weightless throughout, partly caricatured benevolently, partly idyllically transfigured into permanent Sundayness; the former is reduced to the assured unconsciousness of a naive fairy tale hero, who rarely has to make a decision, who encounters all the essentials without his intervention, who is simply taken along by life like a carriage and more or less overslept the most important stages in life: was Goethe's Italian journey a conscious looking, perceiving and forming oneself, in Eichendorff's ironic twist against Goethe it is about a programmatic non-looking, non-perception: an enormous intoxication with sleep that mocks the sun-like wakefulness of the classic. The motif recurring personification of that attempt to reconcile poetry and everyday life is the dazzling figure of the porter, who with his well-meaning wisdom is not only right in the end, but is even supposed to accompany the young lovers on their honeymoon.

Eichendorff dispenses with a description of the outward appearance of the good-for-nothing. Only his mostly unsuitable clothing is mentioned from time to time. He approaches others innocently and openly and leaves an impression that is as harmless as it is pleasant on most of his fellow men with his free and good-natured ease and unpretentiousness. Apart from playing the violin, with which he knows how to express his feelings and how to entertain others, he has learned nothing that could be used for a normal livelihood. The extent to which this is true is proven by the fact that he owes his job as a tax collector more to his engaging nature than to his accounting skills, and that he throws the potatoes and other vegetables out of his tax collector's garden and instead plants flowers to give them to the lady of his heart .

As a typical romantic, the good-for-nothing never stays in one place for long. At home he is driven on by wanderlust, in the distance by homesickness. He loves nature in all its manifestations. Not infrequently, it reflects his mental state - and vice versa. In particular, the mysterious rustling of the forests, the singing of the birds and the silence of the night are mentioned again and again as leitmotifs and accompany him on his lonely hikes.

Narrative

The event is portrayed from the first-person perspective . The autodiegetic narrator is part of the reality presented and experiences what is happening. The reader is dependent on his subjective presentation, so that a feeling of connection with the narrating self arises.

Eichendorff loosens up the epic form of the novella with lyrical elements by incorporating some of his poems into the text as songs. In addition, the novella partly bears traits of a fairy tale , which is expressed both by the simple and naive language of the good-for-nothing and by the fortunate coincidences that determine the fate of the good-for-nothing, and the romantic landscapes with their castles, gardens and forests.

Hiking motif

The wanderlust of the good-for-nothing is shaped by an external and an internal motivation. The external motivation is his father, who sends him out into the wide world to learn something right. The inner motivation is the good-for-nothing's longing for the big wide world in order to try his luck there. The good-for-nothing moves from one place to another. Again and again, the desire to travel grabs him and he is drawn into the distance. Through this constant wandering he flees from bourgeois reality. He is running away from his civil duties. The good-for-nothing cannot settle down in one place for a long time in order to lead a secure civil life there. Even at the end of the novella, the wandering time of the good-for-nothing is not yet over. Although he leads a secure bourgeois life at the castle with Aurelie, whom he met at the castle in Vienna, he wants to leave for Rome soon.

Aftermath in film and literature

The life of a good-for-nothing wasfilmed quite freelyby DEFA in 1973 under the direction of Celino Bleiweiß with Dean Reed as a good-for-nothing. For example, the Rome episode was suppressed, "probably in order not to stimulate the GDR residents' longing for travel". Instead, a meeting of the good-for-nothing with the robber chief Rinaldo Rinaldini was inserted.

A closely oriented to the novel film adaptation titled scamp has Bernhard Sinkel with Jacques Breuer in the lead role and music by Hans Werner Henze realized 1978th As a production with television, this version was also shown several times on ZDF . The film was awarded the Federal Film Prize (film ribbon in silver) in 1978 .

The poem The Good-for-nothing by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller is based on the protagonist of Eichendorff's novella.

In his narrative essay Tauge / Nothing , which was published in 2020 in edition taberna kritika , the writer and cultural scientist Norbert W. Schlinkert deals narratively and scientifically with the question of how a real good-for-nothing comes into being in today's modernity and where its diverse literary roots can be found.

expenditure

First edition

Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing and the marble picture . Two novellas with an appendix of songs and romances. Berlin: Vereinsbuchhandlung 1826, 278 pp. + 3 unpaginated sheets with publisher's advertisements.

Current issues

Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing . Hamburger Reader Verlag, Husum 2016, ISBN 978-3-87291-004-2 (= 5th Hamburg Reader).
Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing . Novella. Anaconda, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-86647-051-4 .
Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing , edited by Max Kämper. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-019238-2 (= Reclam XL, Volume 19238: Text and Context ).
Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing . Novella. Edited by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre. dtv, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-423-02605-5 (= dtv 2605: library of first editions ).
Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing . Novella. With a comment by Peter Höfle. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-18882-8 (= Suhrkamp-BasisBibliothek , Volume 82).

literature

Otto Eberhardt: Eichendorff's good-for-nothing - sources and background of meaning. Investigations into the poetic procedure of Eichendorff. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1900-8 .
Otto Eberhardt: Was Aurelie really initially thought of as a married countess in Eichendorff's “Good for nothing”? On a thesis by Karl Konrad Polheim . In: Archive for the Study of Modern Languages and Literatures, ISSN 0003-8970 , Vol. 248, 2011, pp. 322-332.
Walpurga Freund-Spork: Joseph von Eichendorff: From the life of a good-for-nothing. King's Explanations: Text Analysis and Interpretation (Vol. 215). C. Bange Verlag , Hollfeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8044-1940-7 .
Christian Klein: Eichendorff and “Flower Power”. The good-for-nothing as a cult book of the hippie movement? In: Aurora. Yearbook of the Eichendorff Society 2008/2009 . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, pp. 89-102, ISBN 978-3-484-33066-5 .
Friedhelm Klöhr: Joseph von Eichendorff. From the life of a good-for-nothing (= German interpretation aid). Stark-Verlag, Freising 1999, ISBN 3-89449-438-7 .
Gunnar Och: The good-for-nothing and his readers. Notes on the reception of a cult book. In: Anne Bohnenkamp and Ursula Regener (eds.): Finding Eichendorff again. Joseph von Eichendorff 1788–1857 . Catalog for the exhibition in the Freie Deutsche Hochstift. At the same time: Aurora. Yearbook of the Eichendorff Society 66/67. Free German Hochstift , Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-9811109-4-4 , pp. 87-109.
Theodor Pelster: Reading aid for: Joseph von Eichendorff, From the life of a good-for-nothing. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-15-015306-2 .
Hartwig Schulz: Explanations and documents on: Josepf von Eichendorff, From the life of a good-for-nothing. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 978-3-15-008198-3 .

Remarks

↑ The porter is also a musician, but the way he performs and plays his instrument ("In the midst of them, the magnificently dressed porter stood like a minister of state in front of a music stand, busily working on a bassoon") reveals that he is making music not viewed as a fun game, but rather a chore.

Individual evidence

↑ Jochen Schmidt: The history of the genius thought in German literature, philosophy and politics 1750-1945 . Darmstadt (1985), Volume 2, Page 45.
↑ Edith Glatz: Wandering in poetic texts . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4564-6 , pp. 56-61.
↑ Gunnar Och: The good-for-nothing and his readers. Notes on the reception of a cult book . In: Anne Bohnenkamp and Ursula Regener (eds.): Finding Eichendorff again. Joseph von Eichendorff 1788–1857 . Catalog for the exhibition in the Freie Deutsche Hochstift, p. 109.
↑ Gottfried Keller: The good-for-nothing
↑ Norbert W. Schlinkert: ne'er / Nothing . edition taberna kritika, 2020, ISBN 978-3-905846-56-0 .
^ Digitized and full text in the German Text Archive