The life and opinions of Herr Magister Sebaldus Nothanker

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The life and opinions of Herr Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (with illustrations by Daniel Chodowiecki) is a satirical novel by Friedrich Nicolai , which was published in three volumes from 1773 to 1776 and is considered an important fictional testimony to the Enlightenment . The title is borrowed from Laurence Sternes novel Life and Views of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman .

Content and appreciation

The work depicts the life of Sebaldus Nothanker, who lives in late enlightenment Germany. According to the explanation given in the preface to be uninterested in a possible tracing of the development of the Nothanker, it begins where, as the author thinks, many novels already end - with the marriage of the protagonist - and proceeding from here onwards Life report.

In the Enlightenment sense, the style is emphatically sober, almost sparse. Even a deeper or more extensive characterization of the figures is avoided. In the content, however, the emotionality with which all tendencies hostile to the Enlightenment of the time are tracked down, exemplarily interwoven with the life of the main character, whose service as a Protestant pastor fails on precisely this point.

In the first book (19-67) Sebaldus Nothanker is portrayed as a righteous clergyman who is more interested in the well-being of his simple-minded church members than in official guidelines and even more in the interpretation of the Apocalypse , from which he derives the negation of the hellfires and God as an equally just as kind to prove hopes. This is exactly where the resistance of the official church is attached , which uses the occasion of a patriotic sermon to remove the protagonist from office in a concise teaching process.

Wilhelmine, Nothanker's wife, fell ill as a result of this and died, put on the street by her husband's successor, in the room of an "honest farmer" (60) who was the only one willing to take in the unexpectedly homeless. Charlotte, the little daughter, had already died before her mother, so that Sebaldus, who had set out to ask old friends for help in his distress, only found the older daughter Marianne alive on his return. Even the supposed friends had not turned out to be such, so that Sebaldus threatens to sink into his misery, "[...] because with great sadness the sadness itself is the only pleasure" (62) , as Wilhelmine said earlier - unexpectedly the only friend shown as absent to the traveler for help, the bookseller Hieronymus, who finds the mourning man, takes him in, earns the daughter's wages and finally finds the master himself a job as a proofreader in Leipzig .

The novel, which already in the first book made up for the weak development of the characters with a revealing description of the conditions of the time, now develops completely into a portrayal of morals. At the beginning of the second book (70–135), a scholar and friend of mine explained the content, purpose and quality of the many writings to those who are enthusiastic about the city of books, and gave information about publishers, then writers and finally translators. Excerpts from the presentation of the same translators are exemplary, characterizing the attitude and tone of the novel:

“There are also translators who do nothing other than translate their entire lives; Translators who do their translations in extra hours to relax [...]; Fine translators, they accompany their translations with a preface, and assure the world that the original is very good; Scholarly translators, they improve their translations, accompany you with comments and assure you that it is very bad, but that you would have done it passably; Translators who become original authors through translations, they take a French or English book, leave out the beginning and the end, change and improve the rest as they see fit, put their name boldly on the title, and give the book for their own work out. Finally there are translators who do their own translations and those who let others do it. [...]
Did he [sc. the publisher] about three alphabets in large major octave or major quarters are still necessary to complete his mass, so he chooses from among all the new, as yet untranslated books of three alphabets the one whose title he likes best. If a worker is then found (which is just not difficult) who can take over three alphabets until the next mass, they deal with the poor French or English like two butchers over an ox or a mutton according to appearance or also according to weight . Whoever has sold the most expensive or bought the cheapest thinks he has made the best deal. Now the translator drags the victim home and either kills it himself or has the second or third man kill it. [...]
That is just the manufacturing aspect of the thing. You must know that there are famous people who contract the translations on a large scale, like an Irish supplier of meat for a squadron, and then hand them out again to their sub-translators. These people receive the first news of all the new translatable books in France, Italy and England, as a broker in Amsterdam has heard of the arrival of the East Indian ships in Texel. All booksellers in need of translation turn to them, and they again know each of their workers, what they are used for and how high they are in the price. They turn the hard-working to work, punish the defaulting by withdrawing their protection, weed out the mistakes in the translations or disguise them with their noble name, because mostly entrepreneurs of this kind are strong in preface writing. They also know exactly how much diligence is necessary in every type of translation, and what means are to be used so that their translations are widely praised and the famous man who wanted to make the German learned world happy with it. [...]
For theological books, for example, a venerable gentleman generally suggests to a bookseller that they have them translated under his name and with his preface; but it goes without saying that he does not translate the book himself, but gives it to one of his workers in exchange for two thirds of the payment agreed with the publisher. The latter generally hires it out for three-fourths of what the revered gentleman wants to grant him to a third, who sometimes, when the manufacture is going strong, gives it to a fourth for fifteen-sixteen-parts of what he gets. He really translates it as good or badly as he can ”(86–89).

In this way and in a similar way, the “opinions” and “views” of the master’s envisaged in the title are used again and again to focus on individual grievances, but also to paint a colorful, polemical picture of society. So it is not surprising that the figures of the Nothanker were repeatedly checked for their current reference. For example, the Vicar General Stauzius, who leads the impeachment proceedings, thought to recognize Johann Melchior Goeze , the opponent Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and in the daughter Marianne marrying infant Johann Georg Jacobi . The figure of Marianne itself, however, as already announced in the preface to the Nothanker , should keep up with Moritz August von Thümmel's comic epic Wilhelmine from 1764. Her fate, as well as that of her father, then turns for the better in the end. Not through God's help or that of society, but through banal luck: A lottery win enables Marianne's marriage to an infant, who, however, has to turn from an idealistic aesthetic to a solid farmer, and sets Nothanker free to write the commentary on the apocalypses that began at the beginning of the novel was announced and, in the course of the Nothanker, the reader had already seen the social conditions as written.

expenditure

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