Burning secret
Burning Secret is a novella by Stefan Zweig . The work was first published in 1911 in the volume First Experience - Four Stories from Kinderland from Insel-Verlag .
action
A young baron takes a vacation on the Semmering and is disappointed and bored with the company he finds there. Later, however, he notices a somewhat aged but still attractive Jewish woman with her twelve-year-old son Edgar. The baron befriends the boy and promises him a dog, among other things, but his main concern is Mathilde, his mother.
A love affair ensues between the baron and the married lady. Both the baron and the mother withdraw more and more from Edgar. The boy does not understand the reasons why the couple wants to be left alone. Hatred and jealousy build up in him. Edgar tries to find out the secret of the two adults. When his mother tries to deport him and gives him room arrest, he climbs out the window and follows the couple through the night. There is a tangible argument between the baron and Edgar, who does not understand what the man is up to with his mother. All his anger discharges against the man.
The next morning Edgar thinks it was all just a dream. But his bruises remind him of reality again. The baron has since left. The mother asks Edgar to write an apology to the baron. Edgar refuses. Full of shame, he takes the train alone to Baden near Vienna to visit his grandparents. But his mother has already found out about his escape and meets him with his grandparents. The two are reconciled because they now have a common secret.
In his story, Zweig describes the boy's development and his relationship with his mother and the baron, his initially fatherly friend. In particular, the double standards of the time, the social class differences and the feeling of being exploited make it difficult for the boy to orient himself. Ultimately, however, he has to face his feelings and he realizes what it means to belong to the adult world and to share its secrets.
reception
The novel quickly found its readership; In the first year of publication, the single edition had a print run of 10,000 copies. Contemporary critics praised the novella. Her poet colleagues like Hermann Hesse also paid tribute to her.
Zweig's view of the psychological changes and the sensitive descriptions of Edgar's steps into the adult world between dream and reality were new at the time. They met the zeitgeist in Sigmund Freud's and Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna . The boy's situation in a generation conflict with the rules of the game of adults, which extends to physical confrontation, can be interpreted as a metaphor for the transition of the established social order of the fin de siècle into a new century on the eve of the First World War .
Over the years, the novella reached a circulation of 170,000 copies, until Zweig's works were put on the lists for the book burnings of the Nazis in 1933 . Burning Secret then had to be relocated from Vienna. From 1938 this was no longer possible either.
expenditure
- First published in: First experience. Four stories from Kinderland. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1911
- with the novellas: Story in the Twilight , The Governess , Burning Secret and Summer Novelette
- Single edition: Burning Secret. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1913
- Anthology: Burning Secret. Novellas. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1914
Film adaptations
Under the title The Burning Secret , the novel was filmed in Germany in 1933 under the direction of Robert Siodmak with Willi Forst and Hilde Wagener ; Hans Joachim Schaufuss played the role of the boy Edgar . However , the film was immediately banned again by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda , established in the same year ; allusions to the fire in the Reichstag on February 27, 1933 were suspected. For Siodmak it was his last film shot in Germany for a long time. The final scene with the mother drawing a curtain was not only symbolic of the secret that was supposed to be hidden, but also of Siodmark's film work in Germany.
Already in 1956, a year after his first full-length feature film was released in cinemas, was Stanley Kubrick at MGM a screenplay submitted for the adaptation of the novel; however, the project was never realized. The subject of the confusion of feelings between dream and reality, violence and eroticism occupied Kubrick until his last film Eyes Wide Shut based on Arthur Schnitzler's dream novel .
In 1977 the Burning Secret was filmed with Christiane Hörbiger and Thomas Ohrner .
Andrew Birkin , who had worked as an assistant to Stanley Kubrick for a long time, took up the subject again: in 1988 the novel was published under the English title Burning Secret , directed by Andrew Birkin with Klaus Maria Brandauer in the role of the baron and Faye Dunaway as mother filmed again.
Web links
- Burning secret full text as an e-book at Project Gutenberg
- Burning secret in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Burning secret full text as an audiobook at Librivox
Individual evidence
- ↑ Oliver Matuschek: Three lives. Stefan Zweig - Eine Biographie S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2006, p. 123 ISBN 3-10-048921-7
- ↑ After you recently left, I read your “Burning Secret” again, and the intensity and truth of this lovely poem spoke again ... From: Hermann Hesse: Correspondence. Library Suhrkamp 2006, p. 96 ISBN 3-518-22407-7
- ^ Thomas Haenel: Stefan Zweig. Passionate psychologist. Life and work from the perspective of a psychiatrist. Droste Verlag, 1999 ISBN 3-770-01035-3
- ↑ See Lou Andreas-Salomé : Im Zwischenland. Five stories from the mental life of teenage girls. JG Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Successor, Stuttgart a. Berlin 1925
- ↑ Achim Küpper: "A track that runs into the dark". The failure of epochal transitions and the dehumanization of humans: Stefan Zweig's “Burning Secret”. Modern Austrian Literature, 42, 2, pp. 17–40, 2009
- ↑ Alfred Pfoser: Confusion of feelings as confusion of a time. Comments on bestselling author Stefan Zweig and on psychology in his novels . In: Heinz Lunzer and Gerhard Renner (eds.): Stefan Zweig 1881/1981. Articles and documents. Vienna 1981, p. 8
- ↑ Hilde Wagener and Willi Forst in "Burning Secret" Photo in the documentation picture album at aeiou
- ↑ Burning secret at Cinema
- ↑ Newsletter No. 15 ( Memento of the original dated August 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Stanley Kubrick's unrealized projects on The authorized Stanley Kubrick Exhibition website (March 2005)
- ↑ Filming 1988: Burning Secret in the Internet Movie Database (English)
