The law

Thomas Mann: Das Gesetz , first printed in 1944 as a special edition

The Law (1944) is a story about the exodus of the Israelites from exile in Egypt , which Thomas Mann wrote as a commissioned work in the spring of 1943. Their action is based on the 2nd Book of Moses (Hebrew Shemot , Greek Exodus ) of the Bible .

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According to Thomas Mann's story, Mose (Egyptian son ) is the illegitimate child of a pharaoh's daughter who has fallen in love with the sad eyes and strong arms of a Hebrew slave and who puts the newborn in a box made of reed in the reeds of the Nile, finds it there and then the Entrusts the care of a simple Hebrew family. His beautiful father is killed by Egyptian guards immediately after the act of love. When Moses had outgrown his boyhood, he was picked up at the behest of his birth mother, the princess of Pharaoh Ramessu, and given to an Egyptian boarding school for further education. However, Moses does not want to make friends with his spoiled classmates from the Egyptian upper class. So after a few years he runs away from the Theban school to return to his subjugated people. While working in the fields at home, he has to watch an Egyptian overseer beat up a toiling Hebrew. In anger, Moses slays and buries the tormentor. When the rumor of his bloodshed spreads, Moses flees to Midian , takes the noble Zipora as his wife and tends his brother-in-law's sheep in the Sin desert .

One day the shepherd has a vision. On Mount Horeb the invisible God Yahweh speaks to the chosen Moses from a burning bush and gives him the divine commission to lead his enslaved people out of Egypt through the desert into the land of promise . Moses returns to Egypt and soon realizes that he can only go to work very carefully. Because the enslaved Hebrews do not want to see that a reed boy - and one as rhetorically as untalented as Moses - should become their leader on such a risky expedition. But Moses also finds allies. The militant Joschua in particular is enthusiastic and immediately begins to drill a troop of young men for emergencies.

The Egyptians, of course, distrust Moses even more. They know of his manslaughter, but they are powerless against Moses because he is still under the protection of his royal mother. When Moses came to Pharaoh Ramessu several times and asked his people to leave for an alleged festival of sacrifices in the desert, not even the almighty ruler, who saw through this ruse , dared to have his grandson killed. Even the first nine of the ten divine plagues that plagued Egypt in the following years did not change the king's mind. Only the last evil, the so-called dying of the firstborn , behind which in truth is not Yahweh and his strangling angel , but Joshua with his drilled men, causes a rethink. In addition, Ramessu previously tightened the labor for the Hebrews so much that the general outrage among the exploited grows day by day. In this way, the extended vacation becomes an open escape to the east.

Moses prays for victory against the Amalekites . As long as he lifts his arms, the Hebrews are victorious; as soon as he lets them sink, the opponents win. Since the battle lasts a full day, Moses' arms must be supported. Painting by John Everett Millais (1923).

On the way to Midian, the refugees have to cross a watt-like arm of the Red Sea . A particularly favorable wind - and Moses' request for divine assistance - allows a dry march. When the Pharaoh's army of persecutors tries to follow them into the wet element, there is a sudden calm, the water returns and the Egyptians are devoured with horse and cart. The Sur, Paran and Sin deserts still have to be overcome as far as Midian . Drinking water and food are becoming scarce. The ungrateful rabble shifts to mass grumbling . Only the disgustingly stinking water of a spring, made by Moses - necessity is inventive - made drinkable through a filter device, and the meager manna lichen guarantee a makeshift survival.

The nearby oasis of Kadesch is raising new hopes. You want to settle there. But the fertile area belongs to the militarily far superior Amalekites . They want to be defeated first. Moses, the man of God, follows the battle from a hill. Whenever he raises both arms to God, his people succeed in advancing against the enemy. Whenever Moses' arms go weak, the fortunes of war turn. The Amalekites can finally be sent into the desert, not least thanks to Joshua's modern art of war. The victorious Hebrews conquer the oasis together with the enemy's wives and children - a welcome increase in population. They decide to stay for the time being, especially since Jehovah's Mount Horeb is very close by.

From now on Moses worked day in and day out on the moral education of his stubborn nomad people. He struggles, does everything himself, speaks right for hours and wants to educate and shape the huddle into a holy people . There are setbacks. Even Moses is not without fault. Instead of lying next to his wife Zipora at night - for the sake of relaxation - he lies with a plump Mohrin with mountain breasts, rolling eyes and bulging lips, which to sink into with a kiss might be an adventure . That does not really fit together with his personal choice as Yahweh's sole mouthpiece on earth . When his siblings, Aaron and Mirjam, bitterly reproach him for this, an earthquake and volcanic eruption occur. Moses understands the divine pointing, goes alone to Yahweh's smoking seat , Mount Horeb, invents the Hebrew characters there, chisels Yahweh's Ten Commandments on two stone tablets and paints the writing red with his own blood. When he returns home, both boards under his arm, tense after forty days stonework to his family, they have now become idolaters, dancing in Luder dance around the golden calf . In his anger, Moses smashes the idol with its two tablets of the law, which are broken into pieces. Joshua gathers his faithful and executes all those idolaters who danced frenetically around the work and claimed that it was not Yahweh but the calf who had freed them from the Egyptian labor. Then Moses has to go up to Horeb a second time to chisel new tablets. But he secretly admits to himself: When he smashed the calf with the two original tablets, he had probably taken into account in his stretches that some of his new characters were still quite unsuccessful and therefore it wasn't too bad about them.

After another forty days the new tablets are ready: the law , the alpha and omega of human behavior . Before leaving the mountain, Moses asked the Lord to forgive the Hebrews of their sins. Only after long diplomatic persuasions on the part of Moses is the Old Testament God finally ready to exercise mercy, to show mercy before justice and to forgive his chosen people. However, he decreed that, with the exception of Joshua and his lieutenant Kaleb , only the children were allowed to enter the Promised Land. All adults who are already over twenty years old would fall with their bodies into the desert .

comment

The story describes in a joking tone and at the same time with profound seriousness the efforts of the biblical Moses to found the people of the Jews from a loose Hebrew clan association by educating the "blood" for morality. In the text, intertextual references to Friedrich Nietzsche in particular become clear, who also describes the genesis of a moral law in the genealogy of morality . However, Mann describes the development of Jewish law, while Nietzsche tries to reconstruct the development of Christianity.

In the end there is a very serious curse on those who persuade the people to break God's commandments of human morality. What is meant is Hitler (Thomas Mann to Alexander Moritz Frey on May 14, 1945). When the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel was convicted in 2007, the judge read this final curse from Thomas Mann's story.

expenditure

• The law. Narrative. Bermann-Fischer Verlag, Stockholm 1944.
• The law. In: Die Erzählungen Volume 2. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1975, ISBN 3-596-21592-7 .
• The law. In: The Deceived and Other Stories. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1994, ISBN 3-596-29442-8 .
• The law. In: Death in Venice and other stories. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-596-20054-7 .
• The law. Novella (1944). With comments by Volker Ladenthin and Thomas Vormbaum. Berlin-Boston 2013 (= contemporary legal history. Ed. V. Thomas Vormbaum. Dept. 6: Law in Art - Art in Law. Edited by V. Gunter Reiss. Vol. 39).

literature

• Hans R. Vaget in: Helmut Koopmann (Ed.): Thomas-Mann-Handbuch. Kröner, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-520-82803-0 , pp. 605-610.
• Volker Ladenthin: Fair telling. Studies on Thomas Mann's short story 'Das Gesetz', on Theodor Storm and Ernst Toller. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 16, 2007, p. 7.