The house of the dark pitchers
The House of Dark Jugs is a novel by Gertrud Fussenegger (1912–2009) that was first published in 1951.
action
Rittmeister Balthasar von Bourdanin, head of a bourgeois family in the brewery town of Pilsen , knew how to marry his cousin Marie through a trick: he kidnapped her on Sunday morning, still in her nightgown, in a carriage and drove her around the main square. With a heavy heart, the parents had to give the compromised daughter to their nephew, even if they felt that the sensitive Marie would not have it easy with the defiant man.
Balthasar does not meet the bride and later the woman with empathy, proud in his masculinity and in his insistence on duty and honor. Despite her poor health, he forces the woman, who is heavily pregnant with twins, to fulfill her housewife duties. After the twins are born, Marie cannot get up for weeks, when she finally tries, she dies of a blood clot.
Balthasar stands alone with the two little ones and takes care of them right and wrong, supported by the servants. The nurse's carelessness leads to an accident in which the stroller overturns and both children end up in a pool. The father saw this by chance and saves the children, but doesn't really know what to do with the dirty, crying little ones. He is saved by the seventeen-year-old Marie Halik, a teacher's daughter who lives in the same house and looks after the little ones. Overwhelmed by her gripping manner and her charm, the forty-year-old Balthasar asked the young woman. With a heavy heart, Father Halik gives his consent. The older sister Ernestine, who is secretly in love with the Rittmeister, then goes to the country, where she becomes a partner in a rich factory owner. There she lives in the books that she has to read to her mistress. But she is depressed by the stories about the abysses of the human heart and so after three years she returns to her father's house in the hope that real life will be less abysmal.
For Marie, life with a man who is looking for respect and honor is not easy. She now has to grow up quickly and in the following years is stuck in housekeeping, child rearing, pregnancies and births. The Rittmeister does not show the same affection for their children as they do for the children from their first marriage. He is unable to show emotion and his difficult financial situation, aggravated by a stock market crash, weighs on his mind.
Balthasar's sisters Emma, Sibylle, Rosine and Franziska and his brother-in-law Hans always cause excitement. Sibylle, married to a powerful, rumbling man who humiliates her again and again, finally collapses completely. It is thanks to Marie that she is saved from the insane asylum that her husband tried to arrange.
Raisin married a doctor who actually loved Sibylle and is supposedly having an exemplary marriage with him. She insists on adopting two farmer's children, who she then deportes. Finally, Marie takes care of the children.
Balthasar's hapless cousin and brother-in-law Hans, unable to pursue a meaningful occupation, joins a showman and plays the organ grinder at a ring game - a shame for the middle-class family. Balthasar tries to put an end to it, but Hans escapes and only returns to his parents' house after a few unsuccessful years as a failed existence.
Emma, married to the realtor Wanka, surrenders to good living and gluttony. She soon fell ill and gave her husband and daughter Karlinchen to her sister Franziska on her deathbed. The strict, old youthful Franziska does not suit the fun-loving Wanka and also condemns his fraudulent business conduct. She discovers that Emma and her husband have cheated the Rittmeister out of quite a bit of money, whereupon she decides to bequeath her fortune to the Rittmeister's children. But Wanka made a mistake, and Marie of all people, depressed by worries about her children, is the driving force that leads Franziska to save her husband with this money instead.
Behind many of these strokes of fate that struck the Bourdanin family lies the lawyer Doctor Zerff, who uses supposedly secure secret information to get Wanka to speculate. Likewise, he tempts the Rittmeister with a forged document, which allegedly shows that the family is from nobility, to make a fool of themselves. Marie's sister Ernestine has to accept the worst defeat, who succumbs to Zerff's persistent advertising against her own will and then returns forever to her cold-hearted mistress as a companion.
Exhausted by her busy life in poverty, depressed by Ernestine's departure and the awareness that her children have deprived her children of Franziska's inheritance, Marie falls seriously ill. In his concern for the daughter, Halik's father accuses the Rittmeister of having become terminally ill because of his hard-hearted, loveless manner and the worried life at his side. Balthasar then wants to release Marie, but barely recovered, she succeeds in moving the man, and finally love blossoms in his rigid heart.
review
The novel is named after a chance find in a previously hidden cellar of the Bourdanin family's ancestral home: for centuries, the jugs rotted in a long-forgotten, but still filled with water well. The family who got rich with the beer brewery in Pilsen and a stroke of luck and their ups and downs is embedded in the historical background between around 1840 and 1880 in Bohemia . This work was referred to in the press as the “Bohemian Buddenbrooks ” and, in its milieu studies, is reminiscent of the French writer Balzac . The author herself describes this novel as “my Bohemian house book”.
Fifty years ago Gertrud Fussenegger published the family novel "The House of Dark Jugs". Critics like Werner Ross have described him as the “Bohemian Buddenbrooks ” . The comparison with “Buddenbrooks” did more harm than good to the “House of Dark Mugs”. It has been quiet around this house for a long time. This is surprising in view of the narrative tension of the novel, in which the history of the soul of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century is captured in the story of a Bohemian family, the solidification and decay of their canon of values - vaulted by an increasingly hollow concept of honor - is reflected in many facets.
The author's art of visualization, which always precisely locates people and objects in the context of the time, points more back to the French social novel of the nineteenth century than to the specifically German romantic tradition. What moves the “House of Dark Jugs” today more than ever is the deep strangeness between the sexes, the way of the cross of women in the history of the bourgeois family, the constant violation of their sensitivity in a society characterized by male power and specifically male values. Dieter Borchmeyer , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 30, 2002, No. 25 / page 42
expenditure
- Gertrud Fussenegger, The House of Dark Jugs, Salzburg, Müller 1951, first edition
- Gertrud Fussenegger, The House of Dark Jugs, New Edition Stuttgart, DVA 1958;
- Gertrud Fussenegger, The House of Dark Jugs, Munich, Kraft 1974;
- Gertrud Fussenegger, The House of Dark Jugs, Bergisch Gladbach, Bastei-Lübbe 1980
- Gertrud Fussenegger, The House of Dark Jugs, DTV October 2004, ISBN 978-3-423-20743-0 .
Various book club editions have also appeared.
literature
- Peter Kraft : Revival of a novel. The House of Dark Jugs by Gertrud Fussenegger as a homage to the author's nineties , in: Kulturbericht Oberösterreich, Volume 56, Linz, 2002, Volume 5, p. 11