Cervantes (Bruno Frank)
Cervantes is a novel by Bruno Frank . He describes various stages in the life of the Spanish poet Miguel de Cervantes , the novel thus takes place in the second half of the 16th century .
History of origin
Bruno Frank writes this novel in exile after he had to flee Nazi Germany in September 1933; the book was first published in Amsterdam in 1934 . It is his second historical novel after Trenck - a novel of a favorite . He himself describes it as autobiographical and initially gives it the general title A man named Cervantes . Martin Gregor-Dellin calls Cervantes and Trenck "the great two peaks in Bruno Frank's novels".
content
The novel - divided into two books - describes the important stages of the author of Don Quixote condensed .
The first book describes the formation of the protagonist Cervantes, as the young valet of Cardinal Giulio Aquaviva he traveled to Rome with him in 1569. Later he will move from here as a soldier to the sea battle of Lepanto (1571), in which Juan de Austria fought against the Turks under Selim II . On the way back from Italy to Spain he is captured by pirates and brought to Algiers. He was held here for five years before he was ransomed and returned to Spain.
Frank tries to explain the change in his Cervantes from a young poet to a desperate one-armed man. He describes the important people whom Cervantes meets, both clearly and briefly, including Philip II. Similar to the novel Trenck Frederick the Great , the ruler is also introduced here in contrapuntal form. The second book will describe the death of the king in the chapter Escorial .
Now that Cervantes has returned to Spain, the second book is devoted to his life at home up to the creation of Don Quixote . Frank describes his Cervantes as a man who tried unsuccessfully as a writer at the Madrid theater Lope de Vegas and finally, in order not to starve to death, roamed the country as a hated royal tax collector until he was jailed on vague allegations; here he will write his great life's work Don Quixote .
In this novel, Cervantes is described as a man who is pushed to the top, but who is rejected again and again and who is ultimately mutilated, poor, disappointed with the world and once again imprisoned, writing one of the great novels of Spanish literature .
First edition
- Bruno Frank: Cervantes. Novel. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag , 1934.
Other issues
- Bruno Frank: A man called Cervantes. Translated by Helen Tracy Porter-Lowe. London: Cassell, 1934.
- Bruno Frank: Cervantes. Novel. Edited and with an afterword by Martin Gregor-Dellin . Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung , 1978.
- Bruno Frank: Cervantes (reading in the MDR, speaker: Ulrich Noethen )
literature
- Erwin Ackerknecht : Afterword. In: Bruno Frank: Political Novella. Stuttgart 1956, pages 127-136, here: 135.
- #Carpenter 1952 , pp. 30-35.
- Martin Gregor-Dellin: Afterword . In: Bruno Frank: Cervantes. Novel. Munich 1978, pages 343-350.
- # Günther 1946 , page 136.
- Herbert Günther : Revolving stage of the time. Friendships, encounters, fates. Hamburg 1957, page 92.
- Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887–1945) - life and work . Düsseldorf: Grupello , 2009, ISBN 978-3-89978-095-6 , pages 230–247, 12, 226, 227, 229, 249, 251, 265, 267, 270, 295, 330, 331, 335, 371, 393, 399, 400, 402.
- Thomas Mann : [Preface to #Frank 1978.1 ]. In: # Mann 1984 , pages 387-391.
- #Mann, Erika 1991 , page 316.
- Ulrich Müller: Writing against Hitler. From historical to political novel. Investigations into the prose work of Bruno Frank. Mainz 1994, pages 55-68.
- # Umlauf 1982 , page 111, 112-115, 123.
- Bruno Frank. Cervantes. In: Klaus Ulrich Werner: poet exile and poet novel. Studies on the hidden issues of exile in German exile literature 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pages 104-158, bibliography: 261-265.
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ # Gregor-Dellin 1978 .
- ↑ mdr.de: Bruno Frank: "Cervantes" | MDR.DE. Accessed February 12, 2018 (German).
- ↑ Erwin Ackerknecht was a brother of Eberhard Ackerknecht . This and Bruno Frank were schoolmates at the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart and long-term friends.