Brand's Haide

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Brand's Haide is a short story by Arno Schmidt (1914–1979). The story, first published in 1951 in the volume Brand's Haide together with Schwarze Spiegel , was later republished together with From the Life of a Faun and Schwarze Spiegel as the second part of the Nobodaddy’s Kinder trilogy . It is about three refugees who arrive in a village in a forest after the war and try to settle there despite existential poverty. The drastic realism of the description is interwoven with the appearance of nature spirits and other fantastic elements in the eponymous fictional forest of Brand's Haide as well as the romantic literature , especially Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués . While Brand's Haide is definitely part of the German post-war literature in terms of literary history, the narrative within Arno Schmidt's work can be understood as an attempt to combine the romantic fantasy of his early juveniles of the 1930s with the drastic, often political realism with which Schmidt at the end of the 1940s entered the literary stage.

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Like other stories and novels by Schmidt, Brand's Haide also has a tension that, according to Helmut Heißenbüttel , “can be described as an uninterrupted effort towards understanding and agreement. This effort is the actual content of the story. ”(Heißenbüttel, 1974, p. 50) The action takes place primarily in the respective main character himself. Just as the main character perceives, the reader should also perceive it. The reader is asked to understand it intensively, but this requires a certain amount of practice and considerable general knowledge. The narrated is filtered through the perspective of the main character.

The short novel is divided into three parts. Each part has its own special title. The first part ›Blakenhof or the survivors‹ comprises 153 sections, the second ›Lore or the playing light‹ 137 and the third ›Krumau or do you want to see me again‹ 63 sections. The narrated time encompasses a period of six months and twelve days, namely from March 21 to November 2, 1946. Of these, only 15 days are shown selectively.

Blakenhof or the survivors

The April 16, 1945 when Vechta in captivity guessed Sergeant Schmidt is admitted Blakenhof by the authorities in the (fictional) Lower Saxon village. Schmidt arrives there on March 21, 1946. At the entrance to the village he meets an elderly man from whom he wants geographic information and first of all has an interesting conversation. Amazingly, he knows about Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué , about whom Schmidt collects materials for an extensive biography. With a request from the district administrator, Schmidt introduces himself to the village teacher, Ms. Bauer. Her son Schorsch, himself a teacher, shows Schmidt “the hole” in which he will have to settle for the near future. While looking for a hand brush and dustpan, he made his first acquaintance with the refugee women Lore and Grete who lived next door. His efforts to get the coveted utensils as a stranger are initially unsuccessful. Then he meets the “old man” again, who lends him a hand brush and dustpan and, by the way, suggests certain strange things that affect the little wood near the village.

On the second day of his presence in the village, Schmidt tries to establish closer contact with the two refugee women ; He gets on particularly well with Lore. He made an enormous impression on the two 32-year-olds, primarily because of his enormous knowledge and education. Another common topic of conversation is the fact that, like him, they are refugees from the East from Silesia .

On the following Saturday, Schmidt sat over manuscripts on Fouqué's biography. While reading, the teacher's son Schorsch tries to have a conversation with Schmidt. But Schorsch seems to be more interested in Lore, who has sat down with Schmidt. In the following, Schmidt tries to eliminate the rival by trying to interest Lore in Fouqué's biography, which he succeeds in doing. Lore even becomes his colleague who copies the texts. Finally, the village pastor Schrader joins this group. Schmidt asks him about old church registers because he wants to look up something in them. In the evening he is alone with Grete, as Lore probably went dancing with the teacher's son Schorsch. In conversation with Grete, he succeeds in captivating her for the idea of ​​helping him as an employee.

The following Sunday is initiated by a dialogue with Pastor Schrader, with whom he also plays chess. He reveals himself to him as "an unbeliever." After lunch with Lore and Grete, Schorsch engages Schmidt in a conversation about politics. The two take a walk through the village to the sports field, where Schmidt leaves the enthusiastic viewer of the football game. On the way back he meets the "old man" in the dark, to whom he tells of his progress with regard to the Fouqué biography. The old man proves to be extremely knowledgeable, because without Schmidt having mentioned the name, the old man says goodbye with the sentence: "Well, have fun for Mr. Auen."

On the fifth day of the first part of the short novel, Lore and Grete want to do laundry. Schmidt's sparse laundry should be washed too. He still has to chop wood for the nightly washing operation. A package arrives while chopping. It is from his sister Lucy Kiesler from the United States. This is now unpacked by all three. On the occasion, Schmidt bequeathed the two of them some coveted items. In return, Lore and Grete want to do him the favor of swapping a few things for him on the black market : crockery, locker, laundry, etc. Grete goes to work in Krumlov. Lore and Schmidt go to sleep and get up again at night to do their laundry. Thanks to Schmidt's active help, they are ready at 7.30 a.m.

Lore or the playing light

While the first part takes place in the cold of March, the narrator now jumps into July of the same year with the second part.

July 26, 1946, it is midsummer. Schmidt and Lore go to the forest to collect mushrooms. The two get closer and when Grete joins them later, she “resignedly notices” that the two are using duet. The evening described then becomes a key part of the short novel. Since Pastor Schrader “finally got the church registers out”, Schmidt can now start the research. Lore and Grete become helpful employees. Grete looks through the births column, Lore the marriages and Schmidt the deaths. The church registers are of interest to Schmidt because he would like to find out something worth knowing about Fouqué's first tutor, Wilhelm Heinrich Albrecht Fricke and his ancestors. The father of Fricke's mother, the gardener Johann Wilhelm Auen, has a strange biography. The strange events of the time around 1730 are related to the small wood that is near the village. Much of what the village preacher Overbeck recorded in the church registers still lives on today in the superstition of the village population.

The following day, a Saturday, was very uneventful. In the evening Schmidt goes for a walk with Lore after she has turned down teacher Bauer's invitation to go dancing with her. He brings the church records back on Sunday morning. In conversation with the pastor, he proves his knowledge of "unpleasant details" of church history, with which he once again wants to document the superiority of his intellect and his worldview to him (and the reader!) . This is followed by a polemical and ironic dialogue with the teacher Bauer about war, politics and ideals, in which Schmidt, with his extensive knowledge, is completely superior to the teacher. During the night Lore and Schmidt get up. They want to steal apples. On the way back they meet the "old man" in the forest. When Schmidt went to bed early in the morning, he was in pain and had a restless sleep. Lore advises him in the morning to go to the farmer Apel to cure the cold with schnapps. Again he gets into a dispute with the teacher, at the end of which Schmidt wins again. Finally he gets on his bike and cycles to Farmer Apel. The next day he doesn't get up until noon. But he's feeling better, and in the evening he can steal to the wood with Lore and Grete again.

Krumau or do you want to see me again

The third part of the short novel describes the last two days of October and the first two days of November of 1946. The time is mainly filled with Schmidt reading to the two women from Fouqué. In the further course Lore tells him that she has now decided to move to her cousin in Mexico. Lore surrenders to the “dangerous competitor”, a “idealized truck with a lot of wild spirit” by Schmidt. Meat too, yes. ”She prefers the financially secure life with the German-Mexican to life with the poet. Schmidt takes Lore to the train station and is left alone.

Interpretative approach

When Arno Schmidt was writing the short novel, he was doing intensive and extensive research on the biography of the romantic Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué. In “Brand's Haide” there is also a peculiar interweaving of biographical material from Schmidt and Fouqué's lives.

The short novel has diary-like features.

In the Fouqué biography, published for the first time in 1958, Arno Schmidt shows various key experiences of the romantic poet that are incorporated into his works. For example, “Alethes”, of which large sections are read in “Brand's Haide”, is based on the experience of Fouqué's disappointing marriage with his second wife Caroline.

Brand's Haide is mentioned for the first time in Adelung. There it describes a landscape that is located in the Fläming , a low mountain range north of the Elbe between Coswig and Magdeburg. This landscape consists mainly of forest, moor and heather. It got its name after Benno Friedrich Brand von Lindau , who had his manor in Wiesenburg / Mark .

As a boy, the young Fouqué often had to accompany his parents when they wanted to go to Lauchstädt from Sakrow, the residence of the Fouqués. Because of its border location, Brand's Haide served "many smugglers and robberies" as a place to stay. Fouqué's first tutor, Wilhelm Heinrich Albrecht Fricke, is said to have been of particular importance in the opinion of Arno Schmidt. Fricke's parents and grandparents actually came from the area in the Lüneburg Heath where the short novel is set. The similarities of the landscapes (Brand's Haide and Lüneburger Heide), the connection via the private tutor Fricke, further associations with Fouqué and the fact that - in addition to this processing in the novel - Arno Schmidt actually deals with Fouqué's biography "as an eternal lamp", in order to later publish a "biographical attempt" about it, all together form the occasion to name the novel "Brand's Haide".

According to Wolfram Schütte, Arno Schmidt's assembly and collage technique has striking similarities with the “projections and reflections, reflections and distorting mirror versions, graduations and overlays, picture-in-picture processes” by the painter Eberhard Schlotter , “the only visual artist who maintained intensive personal and artistic relationships with Schmidt and with whom Schmidt ”. "The complete work as a complicated context becomes clear in such an entanglement of allusion, cryptic quotation and (...) dissolution also in the material borrowings from Fouqué: ..." (Huerkamp, ​​1981, p. 329) The conscious interleaving and entanglement that " Quoting-analytical montage of particles of diverse cultural origins "produce this novel beyond the authentic descriptions of Schmidt's experiences in the post-war year 1946" as a kind of waste product of his Fouqué research ". Such entanglements are not limited to the different time levels, but can also be demonstrated using the example of places, people, motifs from literature and art.

expenditure

  • Arno Schmidt: Brand's Haide . In: Arno Schmidt: Brand's Haide. Two stories . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1951, pp. 5–152 (first edition).
  • Arno Schmidt: Brand's Haide . In: Arno Schmidt: Nobodaddy's children. Trilogy. From the life of a faun, Brand's Haide, Schwarze Spiegel . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1963 (first edition as a trilogy).
  • Arno Schmidt: Brand's Haide . In: Arno Schmidt: Works. Bargfeld edition . Werkgruppe I, Volume 1, Haffmans, Zurich 1987, pp. 115–199 (authoritative edition).

Radio play editing

literature

  • Sören Brandes: Aisle into the Otherworld. Arno Schmidt's poem "The gold-soaked sky above me" . In: Bargfelder Bote , Lfg. 351–353, June 2012, pp. 3–17 ( online ).
  • Josef Huerkamp: "Chained to dates & names". Three studies on ´authentic´ narration in the prose of Arno Schmidt . Munich 1981.
  • Kai U. Jürgens : Ni Dieu, Ni Maîtresse. Exile and eroticism in Arno Schmidt's »Nobodaddy's Children« . Verlag Ludwig, Kiel 2000, ISBN 3-933598-17-6 .
  • Peter Piontek: To the forest piece »Brand's Haide« . In: Bargfelder Bote Lfg. 71–72, 1983, pp. 3–23
  • Heinrich Schwier: Lore, Grete & Schmidt. A commentary on Arno Schmidt's novel “Brand's Haide” . edition text + kritik, Munich 2000.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Piontek first pointed this out in : On the forest play “Brand's Haide” , in: Bargfelder Bote , Lfg. 71–72, 1983, pp. 3–23.
  2. ↑ Sören Brandes: Aisle into the Otherworld. Arno Schmidt's poem “The gold-soaked sky above me” , in: Bargfelder Bote , Lfg. 351–353, June 2012, pp. 3–17, here in particular p. 13f.
  3. ↑ Nobodaddy's Children - Brand's Haide. BR radio play Pool