The Owl House (Marlitt)

The two authors: E. Marlitt and Wilhelmine Heimburg (actually Bertha Behrens)

The Owl House is a novel ( romance novel ) that was started by E. Marlitt († June 22, 1887 ) and, after her death, at the suggestion of Adolf Kröner , designed and completed by Wilhelmine Heimburg . It was published in 1888 in the family weekly Die Gartenlaube (numbers 1–25). The book edition, with illustrations by Carl Zopf, followed in the same year in the publishing house of the former publisher of the "Gartenlaube", Ernst Keil , who died in 1878 .

The novel tells the story of the young Claudine von Gerold, who almost falls victim to a court intrigue, but can rehabilitate herself and in the end also get the man she loves.

action

The personal relationships in the novel

The location of the action is the fictional Paulinenthal in the Thuringian Forest , the time the present of the authors, i.e. the 1880s.

Joachim von Gerold, widower and father of a small daughter, is a bookworm and dreamer who was not made to be a farmer and who ran down the manor he inherited. Neuhaus goes under the hammer. Joachim moves to the Owl House, a modest property that his grandmother left him. In order to be able to stand by him and run the household, his 23-year-old sister Claudine, lady-in-waiting of the Duchess mother, asks the beloved employer for her dismissal.

Baron Lothar von Gerold, a distant relative of the siblings, becomes the new owner of Neuhaus. Like Joachim, Lothar is a widower and father of a young daughter. He lives on the inherited Altenstein estate, together with his sister Beate, who was brought up in the same institute as Claudine and is her friend. Claudine and Lothar love each other, but they know nothing about each other's feelings, and the happy ending of love is delayed for a long time due to various misunderstandings.

Lothar is a favorite of Duke Adalbert, who bought Neuhaus from him in order to spend the summer there with his wife, Duchess Elise. Elise, who has advanced tuberculosis , seeks Claudine's friendship. This brings Claudine into a terrible conflict, because although her esteem for the Duchess knows no bounds, Adalbert also tries to make her, Claudine, his lover. A letter in which Adalbert confesses his love for her is stolen by the Duke's scheming private secretary, Herr von Palmer.

When Lothar receives a visit from his sister-in-law, Princess Helene, Claudine's complicated feelings are mixed with jealousy. Helene, who Lothar has loved for a long time, is accompanied by her mother, Princess Thekla. Thekla jealously watches that Lothar doesn’t hook up with anyone other than Helene, because she fears that anyone else would deprive her of her beloved grandchild. Claudine is quickly identified as the most dangerous rival. Through her friend Alice von Berg, the lover of Herr von Palmer, Helene got hold of the Duke's compromising letter. She decides to take this opportunity and use the letter as evidence that Claudine is the Duke's mistress. The addressee, Duchess Elise, does not fall for the attempt to slander Claudine, but believes firmly in her innocence. Since Claudine, in order to spare Elise, has to remain silent about the Duke's advances, she would like to confess to her friend that she loves Lothar to relieve her. Since she believes that she will not be loved again, this way out is also denied. The fact that Lothar takes sides with Claudine at court and finally even proposes to her is a mere expression of his class-typical terms of honor.

When Elise needs a blood transfusion after a hemorrhage , Claudine has the opportunity to provide ultimate proof of her loyalty to the Duchess. She agrees to give her blood for the patient and is suddenly relieved of all accusations through the selfless act. After the successful operation, Claudine agrees to be engaged to Lothar, but declares it to be purely a matter of form, by which she herself, but Lothar, is not bound.

For health reasons, the Duke takes the Duchess to Cannes , where her condition deteriorates so much that the couple soon returns to the residence. Since Elise wishes to see her again, Claudine also sets off for the residence, not without witnessing how the ducal private secretary Palmer and his lover, Alice von Berg, withdraw. It is later revealed that Palmer has embezzled money from the Duke.

Thanks to Duchess Elise's mediation efforts, Claudine and Lothar finally find each other. The Duchess is still getting married and then dies.

Three years later. Claudine and Lothar are parents of two sons; Lothar bought back the house of their childhood, Altenstein, for his wife. Joachim and Beate also got together as a couple and got married. Princess Helene saw her injustice and asked Claudine's forgiveness. She becomes engaged to the duke.

Authorship

The "Gartenlaube" had originally announced that the novel would be published in autumn 1887. In the past, Marlitt, who suffered from painful arthritis, had repeatedly been unable to meet scheduled appointments. In October 1886 she also fell ill with pleurisy , of which she died on June 22, 1887. As to how far their work on The Owl House had progressed at this point in time, the “Gartenlaube” had contradictions to be announced: In issue 29/1887 it was stated that Marlitt “did not complete the novel , but promoted it to the extent that it was can be completed in their sense by a force called upon to do so. ” In volume 50/1887, on the other hand, there was only talk of a“ fragment ”that Marlitt left behind. Years later, after publication in volume 52/1906, a commentator expressed himself even more clearly: “She was unable to complete her last novel“ Das Eulenhaus ”(II, 1888); but it was completed by another garden gazebo author, Bertha Behrens (W. Heimburg), with great skill according to her own invention, since a plan by the late author was not drawn up. ” The literary scholar Urszula Bonter also assumes that Marlitt wrote the novel has started at best and that the vast majority of the work has been written by Wilhelmine Heimburg. Heimburg had already made her debut in the Gartenlaube in 1878 with her very successful novel Lumpenmüller's Lieschen , and from 1884 she contributed another work almost every year.

Many of the plot and formal elements that are so characteristic of Marlitt's prose work are missing in Das Eulenhaus . The otherwise omnipresent plea for religious tolerance and social justice is missing. Although the plot is closer to the nobility than in any other Marlitt novel - in a real Marlitt work there would be droolers who try to bask in the vicinity of the Highnesses - no figure shows conceited features.

At the level of the plot, the enigma is missing that Marlitt had always put at the center of her novels and stories. The novel does not contain any secrets that the main female character has to uncover. It is also atypical that the lovers of this novel, Claudine and Lothar, love each other right from the start and only have to wrestle with the fact that they fail to recognize the other's feelings. In her self-developed work, Marlitt gave the act of love spice and liveliness by always allowing love to arise in the field of tension between an initial indifference or even aversion and the gradual revelation of the good character of the other person.

The protagonist Claudine also falls out of the ordinary when it comes to characterizing her characters. It is true that, as other Marlitt protagonists have done, the donation of blood, which in the 19th century was an operation with an uncertain outcome (the AB0 system was only discovered in 1901), is a taste of extraordinary courage. Claudine gives the blood donation less for charitable reasons, but rather to publicly demonstrate her loyalty to the recipient. While the behavior of Marlitt's main female characters is characterized by insubordination and initiative, Claudine also behaves largely passively, which brings the novel closer to the subject of “ persecuted innocence ” more than was the case with Marlitt .

The Samaritan service, which is otherwise indispensable for Marlitt's protagonists, is limited to the friendly care of the sick Duchess; Two other figureheads that are otherwise central to Marlitt are completely missing: the bourgeois work ethic and the upbringing that took place under exceptional circumstances: Claudine conventionally attended a girls' boarding school. With her 23 years of age and her past as a lady-in-waiting, she is also older and more experienced than the Marlittian defiant heads. The choice of a French first name for the protagonist is also striking; Marlitt had always reserved French names for negative characters (e.g. Countess Gisela , Im Schillingshof ). The introduction of a seriously ill secondary character (Duchess Elise) who is constantly in need of care and who arouses sympathy, mercy and pity in the audience is a typical Marlittian element.

Formally, there is no intertextuality : the explicit references to other literary texts that Marlitt had always allowed to flow in at least occasionally. In view of the final form of the work, the choice of title is incomprehensible. It is true that Marlitt had previously included theaters of action in the titles: In the House of the Commerzienrathes and In the Schillingshof . While in these two cases the designated places are inextricably linked with the central action puzzle, the “Owl House” is not just a place without any secret, but a mere sideline, where nothing happens at all that drives the development of the action in any way.

Expenses (selection)

• The owl house . Bär and Hermann, Leipzig 1917.
• The owl house . Schreitersche Verlagbuchhandlung, 1930.
• The owl house . Kaiser, Klagenfurt 1964, ISBN 978-3-7043-1184-9 .
• The owl house . Deutscher Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-87152-205-8 .
• The owl house . Kelter, Hamburg 1993.
• The owl house . Hofenberg, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8430-3183-7 .

In other languages

• La casa de los buhos . Biblioteca “Las Grandes obras”, Buenos Aires 1915.
• La maison des hiboux . ( Online [PDF]).

Mention of the novel in the "Gazebo"

Wikisource: 1887, Issue 20, p. 336  - Sources and full texts

Wikisource: 1887, Issue 29, pp. 472–476  - Sources and full texts

Wikisource: 1888, issue 50, p. 859  - sources and full texts

Wikisource: 1889, Issue 5, p. 192  - Sources and full texts

Wikisource: 1906, Issue 52, pp. 213-216  - Sources and full texts

Web links

Commons : Das Eulenhaus  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Wikisource: The Owl House  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Urszula Bonter: The popular novel in the successor of E. Marlitt: Wilhelmine Heimburg, Valeska Countess Bethusy-Huc, Eufemia von Adlersfeld-Ballestrem . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2979-8 , p. 76 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
2. ↑ Urszula Bonter: The popular novel in the successor of E. Marlitt: Wilhelmine Heimburg, Valeska Countess Bethusy-Huc, Eufemia von Adlersfeld-Ballestrem . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2979-8 , p. 28, footnote 1 ( limited preview in Google Book search).