The song of Bernadette

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The Song of Bernadette is a 1941 novel by Franz Werfel , which describes the life of St. Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes .

Preliminary remark

While fleeing the National Socialists, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma found shelter in Lourdes for several weeks in the summer of 1940 before they were able to flee via the Pyrenees and further to America. Franz Werfel writes in his foreword to the novel that in this way he got to know the wonderful story of the girl Bernadette Soubirous. In his great distress he had one day made a vow: when he reached the saving coast of America, the first thing he would do before any other work was to “sing the song of Bernadette” as best he could:

“I dared to sing Bernadette's song, even though I'm not a Catholic, but a Jew. The courage for this undertaking gave me a much older and much more unconscious vow. In the days in which I wrote my first verses, I had sworn to myself that I would always and everywhere glorify the divine mystery and human holiness through my writings - regardless of the age that turned away from these ultimate values ​​with ridicule, anger and indifference of our life."

Once in America, Werfel wrote the novel in just five months. It became Werfel's most commercially successful work.

dedication

The book is dedicated to Manon Gropius . She was the child of Alma Mahler-Werfel and her second husband Walter Gropius . The girl died of polio in 1935 after Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel had devotedly cared for her for almost a year. Alma Mahler, who already had two daughters from her first marriage to the composer Gustav Mahler and one of whom also died early, had loved her third child very much and it was many years before she could overcome her death.

action

Bernadette Soubirous is the oldest child of the Soubirous couple who, after losing their mill, found shelter in the town's former prison in great financial need. Bernadette suffers from asthma and is therefore often absent from school. After having been out looking for wood with her younger sister and a school friend, Bernadette remains alone near the river Gave de Pau . The place is used as a kind of landfill of the place and is called Massabielle. Here, suddenly and unexpectedly, “a beautiful lady” appears in a niche in the grotto. She is wearing a white dress with a blue belt. She is barefoot and has a golden rose on each foot. When Bernadette sees "the lady" again the next day, she wishes that she would come back for the next fifteen days.

Franz Werfel now describes the sequence of the apparitions to Massabielle. Bernadette remains indifferent to praise or criticism, but her wish to see the "lady" again remains overwhelming. During one of the apparitions, the “lady” gives Bernadette the job of digging for a source in Massabielle. And indeed there is water that has a wonderful effect, which attracts people from near and far.

As a young woman, Bernadette entered the Saint-Gildard monastery of the Sisters of Mercy in Nevers , where the novice master Mère Vauzous, who was her religious teacher in Lourdes, was plagued by doubts about the supernatural character of the apparitions and the “worthiness” of the simple girl becomes. Bernadette dies of bone tuberculosis at the age of 35. The last chapter of the novel, The Fiftieth Ave , an allusion to the rosary , tells of Bernadette Soubirous' canonization in Rome.

Copyrights

The song by Bernadette has been in the public domain in the European Union since January 1, 2016 .

filming

Radio plays

In 1959, Bayerischer Rundfunk , directed by Heinz-Günter Stamm, based on Werfel's novel, produced Das Lied von Bernadette as a radio play , edited by Fred von Hoerschelmann and Richard Miller with Solveig Thomas as Bernadette, Walter Richter as François Soubirous and Edith Schultze-Westrum as his wife Louise. Two other radio versions were each produced as a two-part series.

literature

  • Franz Werfel: The song of Bernadette [novel]. In: Collected works in individual volumes , Fischer- Taschenbuch 9462, Frankfurt am Main 1991 ff, ISBN 3-596-29462-2 .
  • Swetlana Gorbacevskaja: Werfel “The Song of Bernadette” . Strategies for a text analysis in preparation for translation. In: Martin A. Hainz, Edit Király, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler: Between languages ​​on the move . Symposium of the former Werfel scholarship holders on questions of translation and cultural transfer on 21./22. May 2004 in Vienna. Praesens, Vienna 2006, ISBN 978-3-7069-0361-5 .

Web links

  • Angelika Ebrecht: Truth, Delusion and Miracles - On the psychoanalytic social psychology of religious belief in miracles using the example of Franz Werfel's novel “The Song of Bernadette”.