Evil (Bruno Frank)

Isenheim Altarpiece , The Temptation of St. Anthony (detail), 1512–1516.

Das Böse is a novel by Bruno Frank , which first appeared in February 1911 in the magazine Die neue Rundschau . The first independent publication took place in April 1911 in the refugee collection at Verlag Langen in Munich.

The novella describes a man who despairs of his helplessness before the personified evil and who takes his own life.

Note: Numbers in round brackets, for example (246), refer to the corresponding page in the stories by Bruno Frank from 1926 ( #Frank 1926 ).

content

After a ride in his car, young Mr. Antonio strolls happily through the maze of small streets of Florence at dusk. In a side street he meets a decrepit person, "some guy without a hat or collar and shuffling at every step" (247). He holds a small dog by the fur and continues to brutally beat it against the wall while running. The animal's howling in pain cannot be ignored, but Antonio tries to convince himself that it is none of his business. As he walks on, however, he can no longer get rid of the thought of the tortured creature.

At the end of the alley he comes across a portrait of an apostle that strangely touches him. With a violent surge of emotion, he runs back the way and searches for the tormentor of the little dog with the intention of punishing him. He discovers him at an open stove in a doorway as he stabs the dog in the eye with a red-hot iron. Antonio is violently upset, he fluctuates “from level of being to level of being: from avenger to judge, from judge to saint and again to avenger” (250). He jumps up and frees the dog from its torment with a shot at grace. With the revolver in hand, an "immoderate desire for revenge" fills him: "I must avenge everyone", he thinks in a gloomy mood (252). But death would not be a punishment, one should torture the criminal as he tortured the dog. But then you would become a criminal yourself! After a hard internal struggle, "in the onslaught of horror, his head in embers, flying frenzy all along his body, Antonio put the revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger" (254).

Emergence

In the spring of 1910, Bruno Frank and his girlfriend went on a trip to Italy to cure his rheumatic complaints. The trip also took him to Venice and Florence, the original home of the novella, where Giovanni Boccaccio and his Decameron wrote the first collection of novels in literary history. It was in this stimulating environment that the novellas that Frank published in 1911 under the title Refugees were written .

In the novella Das Böse , Mr Antonio's lively walk through the alleys of Florence is reminiscent of the relaxed lightness of the Italian novella - until Antonio encounters a brutal animal abuser. It is not known whether the scenes of cruelty to animals are based on actual observations, but Frank was probably aware of the primal experience of the battered pack horses, which had deeply affected him in his youth (see Cruelty to Animals ).

Against this background, Frank shows the dichotomy of a man who after an encounter "with an obviously vicious, instinctive animal tormentor" first hesitates to interfere, then, driven by his sense of justice, is seized by a violent desire for vengeance in order to finally realize his impotence to satisfy this lust for Rachel, and it breaks.

reception

The novella Das Böse was published in 1911 in the collection of novels refugees . The title referred to "the central motif of the short story collection, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Frank himself said about the collection:

“The“ punch line ”seems to me to be reprehensible everywhere, and wherever I“ succeed ”I am always a little sad about myself. But it contributes to the effect. "

The writer Jakob Schaffner accuses Frank of not mastering the "strict novella form":

“Bruno Frank suspects something of the thing called a novella [...]. He strives after him as one strives after an ominous little girl, a little frivolously, a little complacent, swinging a stick, talented, but little inclined to hard work. [...] "Evil" is well laid out and rare to find, yet in the end it looks like a farce; the power was not yet ripe enough to shape this subtle horror. It just had to be told, Frank tells it with rolling eyes. In the novella, technology is a condition of life. If Frank wanted to get really serious about himself, we could get very strong novels to read from him. "

Another contemporary critic finds Frank's novellas unsuitable for "opening up a credible perspective of its own to a far-fetched idea [...]" and criticizes: "In these novels the style has not yet caught up with the motif."

While Frank cheated the reader out of the punchline in the novella Der Glücksfall, Das Böse ends with a “sought after and almost forced punchline”. The author fails to conclusively derive the surprising twist from the character of the protagonist. Shortly after the Second World War, a literary historian ruled:

"The helplessness in dealing with evil - that was to be understood as a very German problem in 1947, Bruno Frank's novella also as a parable about the misery and failure of the distinguished citizen and the intellectual in confrontation with evil personified."

In the post-war novella Der Goldene from 1921, Frank succeeded “narrative far more convincingly” in executing the revenge motif. While Mr. Antonio judges himself "because he is unable to tame his thirst for revenge in any other way in the face of the tormented creature", the protagonist of this novella gains after the abandoned attempt to murder his former tormentor "a perspective that allows him to return to life."

details

animal cruelty

Near his parents' house in his hometown of Stuttgart, Bruno Frank observed time and again in his childhood how carters mistreated their horses in order to drive them up a mountain with their heavy loads. In 1930 he published his most successful play, the comedy Storm in a Water Glass . In it, one of the main characters, a journalist, explains why he is risking his existence to publicly accuse an injustice:

“A big slope began right in front of our house. The trucks went up every day with heavy stone loads. Many were too heavy for the horses. But the horses had to go up. They lay down in the harness so that the straps cracked. Often it still didn't work. Then the carters struck. On the horses 'backs, in the horses' faces. With the handle of the whip on the nostrils, with the fist in the eyes, with the heel of the boot into the points. It just had to go. It always worked. I've seen that from the window of our apartment for fifteen years. "

"Back then I swore to myself ... that I would not tolerate anything once I grew up."

Frank had already described the underlying childhood experiences five years earlier in an article in a magazine. While the animal-torturing truckers still believed they had a rational reason for the mistreatment of the horses, the tormentor in Das Böse maltreats the little dog apparently for no reason, just out of the desire to torture a living being.

The cruelty to animals is not a main motif of the story (and the comedy), rather it serves Frank as a vehicle to shed light on moral questions of justice and moral courage in the face of injustice. With the advent of the Nazis, these questions became terribly topical. In his magazine article in 1925, Frank had written: “But on every path on earth I encounter the pack horses from Silberburgstrasse, in a hundredfold transformed shape, tormented by roaring servants.” Without knowing it, he had the prophetic image of an impending end times conjured up.

The red neck

After the encounter with the animal tormentor, Mr. Antonio, inwardly uneasy, continues on his way until he discovers the statue of an apostle in a dark niche in the wall, “of whom only the naked neck was mysteriously and terribly illuminated by the red lamp burning below. His eyes wandered astray, jumped from a dark part of the wall to a light one and then back to the red neck. ”(248) Violently moved, he runs back the way, finds the tormentor in a doorway in front of a stove, who gives the dog a glowing Iron catches the eye. He redeems the animal with a shot with his revolver, and "all his life was concentrated in the eyes that tried to hold the gaze of the criminal" (251). In the glow of the fire, Antonio suspected “perhaps more than he saw it” that the man behind the stove had “what a red, rough-skinned bare neck” (252).

literature

expenditure

• Evil . In: Bruno Frank: Refugees. Novellas. Munich: Langen, 1911, pages 57-68. - Published April 1911.
• Bruno Frank: Evil. Novella. In: Die neue Rundschau Volume 22, 1911, Volume 1, Pages 237–241. - Published February 1911.
• Evil . In: Bruno Frank: Faces. Collected short stories. Munich: Musarion-Verlag, 1920, pages 371–382.
• Evil . In: Bruno Frank: Stories. Rowohlt, Berlin 1926, pages 243-255.

Secondary literature

• Leonhard Adelt: Of heroes, lovers and fools. In: The literary echo. Semi-monthly publication for lovers of literature. Volume 14, 1911/1912, column 468-473, here: 472.
• Julius Bab: Bruno Frank. In: Die Weltbühne Volume 14, 1st half of 1918, Pages 412–416, here: 414.
• Rüdiger Bolz: Broadcasting and literature under American control. Radio Munich's programs from 1945–1949. Wiesbaden 1991, pages 183-184.
• Klaus Mann : What do you work? Conversation with Bruno Frank. In: The literary world , volume 2, number 29, July 16, 1926, page 1.
• Jakob Schaffner : New Books. Refugees, short stories by Bruno Frank. In: Die neue Rundschau Volume 22, 1911, Volume 2, Page 1768.
• Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887-1945). Life and work. Düsseldorf 2009, pages 47-48, 114-115, 388.

swell

• Bruno Frank: Pack horses. In: owl Volume 2, Issue 12, September 1925, page 37, online: .
• Bruno Frank: Storm in a glass of water. In: Selected Works. Prose, poetry, plays. With commemorative words by Thomas Mann as an introduction: In memoriam Bruno Frank on the 10th anniversary of his death on June 20, 1955. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1957, pages 512-571, here: pages 542-543.

Web links

• Bruno Frank, Digital Works, Stories

Footnotes

1. ↑ # Frank 1911.2 .
2. ↑ # Frank 1911 .
3. ↑ #Bolz 1991 .
4. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 43. - For the “birth” of the novella see also: Bücher-Wiki .
5. ↑ #Bolz 1991 , page 183rd
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
7. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 46.
8. ↑ #Schaffner 1911 , page 1768.
9. ↑ #Adelt 1912 , page 472.
10. ↑ #Bolz 1991 , page 184th
11. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 115.
12. ↑ #Frank 1957 , page 542-543.
13. ↑ # Frank 1925 . - See also: Silberburgstrasse (Stuttgart), Bruno Frank .
14. ↑ # Frank 1925 .
15. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 46.
16. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 388.