Boëtius of Orlamünde
Boëtius von Orlamünde is a boarding school and development novel by Ernst Weiß , which, written in the mid-twenties, was published by S. Fischer in 1928 in Berlin. From 1930 onwards, the novel was mostly published - also in the authoritative Ernst Weiss edition of the Suhrkamp Verlag (1982) - under the title The Aristocrat .
In the summer of 1913 the young prince's son Boëtius von Orlamünde made his way from aristocrat to proletarian.
time and place
The novel is set from June 19 to August 29, 1913 - first in the East Belgian noble boys' monastery of Onderkuhle and then in Brussels .
action
- Onderkuhle
Boëtius Maria Dagobert von Orlamünde, the “weak faith”, almost destitute son of an “impoverished, jobless prince” from Brussels, simply calls himself Orlamünde. The 18-year-old thinks he is a “poor person”, has completed six years in Onderkuhle and sits between the chairs in the pen. Orlamünde does not know what will happen to him because his father, who he “misses a lot”, has not written for five weeks. So he is occasionally entrusted with a difficult task by the master, whose paternal benevolence he enjoys, and is also used to supervise mainly younger pupils while riding and swimming. During such an undertaking Orlamünde saves his "only friend" Titurel from drowning. In gratitude, the rescued person turns away from the rescuer. When Orlamünde had to give the little boy Alma Venus, called Alma, swimming lessons and the little guy failed, the "swimming instructor" had pity, but had to lock the loser on the fencing floor because this punishment was so in the "Spartan" regulations of Onderkuhle for being afraid of water is prescribed. When the Rendant sets fire to the monastery, Orlamünde is so busy with rescue work that he forgets Alma and the little one can only be saved with great effort and at the last minute. The pen burns down. Orlamünde flees home.
- Brussels
The refugee does not go to his parents in Brussels but moves into shabby accommodation at his own expense. The prince's son accepts "proletarian work" in a turbine factory. Orlamünde, offspring of a "slipping sex", wants to "forego any inheritance", wants to be his "own servant" and his "own master". He informs the parents of this by letter. Orlamünde later visits the parents and takes care of the dying father. The deceased has consciously renounced all goods in life and consequently cannot bequeath anything to the son. Orlamünde, recently “machine tool made of flesh and blood”, is satisfied. The young Orlamünde has big plans. He wants to "father as many children as" he can make bread for them. But initially there is no suitable woman in sight. In this male novel, only one appears - Orlamündes Mama.
Quotes
- Nobility lonely. Work connects.
- Orlamünde is frightened by the immense distance from our poor earth to the light lakes of the sun .
- Who is an aristocrat to the sun?
- All domination begins with self-control.
words and phrases
- A horse that does not want to obey at all is finally put on a crepe halter work and is shot.
- During a third grade funeral , solemn junk - like iron candelabra - is carried around.
shape
- To the above complicated tasks that Orlamünde have to solve include the taming of the wild stallion Cyrus and work as deputy captain in the supervision of a column of pupils, the horses in the alluvial ride. The “pure classical tone, told with suppressed passion and hidden sadness” is impressive. These two passages in the text of the novel can be assigned to the masterpieces of German-language prose art from the first half of the 20th century.
- Orlamünde fears "T., the real death". He shudders at the “world in its infinity up to the wall-less rooms of eternity.” Constant fear of death and constant solitude at Orlamündes constitute oppressively the “unnatural feeling of Onderkuehle”.
Honors
- Ernst Weiß, a Berliner since 1921, won a silver medal for Germany at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam for the "sports chapter" in the novel . Even so, as a Brno after the war , the author was a Czech according to his passport .
- In 1930 Ernst Weiß received the Adalbert Stifter Prize for his novel .
literature
source
- Ernst Weiß: Boëtius von Orlamünde. Novel . 197 pages. Construction , Berlin / Weimar 1982 (License: Claassen, Hamburg 1966)
expenditure
- Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, Berlin 1930 (title: The aristocrat Boëtius von Orlamünde ); Claassen, Hamburg 1966; Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
Secondary literature
- Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Ernst White . Issue 76 of the magazine Text + Criticism . Munich, October 1982. 88 pages, ISBN 3-88377-117-1 .
- Klaus Johann: Limit and stop. The individual in the “House of Rules”. On German-language boarding school literature (= contributions to recent literary history , volume 201). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1599-1 , (dissertation Uni Münster 2002, 727 pages). Especially pp. 565-567.
- Margarita Pazi : Ernst Weiss. Fate and work of a Jewish Central European author in the first half of the 20th century (= Anneliese Kuchinke-Bach (Hrsg.): Würzburger Hochschulschriften zur Moderner Deutschen Literaturgeschichte , Volume 14), Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-631-45475-9
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . Stuttgart 2004, 698 pages, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 658.
Web links
- The text at Gutenberg-DE
Individual evidence
- ^ Alfred Klein, epilogue in the source p. 199
- ↑ a b Pazi, p. 140
- ↑ Weiss, p. 43, 4th point
- ^ White, p. 195, 19.Zvo and p.197, 15.Zvo
- ^ White, p. 6
- ↑ Weiß, from p. 136 and p. 124, 16.Zvo
- ↑ Weiß, p. 179, 10th to 14th Zvo
- ^ White, p. 38
- ^ White, pp. 41,42
- ^ White, p. 42
- ↑ White, p. 44
- ^ White, p. 50
- ^ White, p. 143
- ↑ Weiß, pp. 44–59
- ↑ Weiß, pp. 60-77
- ↑ From the blurb of the source
- ^ White, p. 35, 85
- ^ White, p. 183
- ↑ Klaus-Peter Hinze: ... and that to me, the anti-communist. in: Arnold S. 50
- ^ Arnold, p. 81