The epiphany
The epitome is a cycle of novels by the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller . Keller wrote down his first ideas for the work in Berlin in 1851, where he also put the opening chapters on paper in 1855. Most of the text, however, was not written in Zurich until 1881, while the preprint was already being made in the Deutsche Rundschau . An expanded book version followed at the end of the year.
The cycle is named after a symbolic poem ( epigram ) by the Baroque poet Friedrich von Logau , which plays a role in it. It reads: “How do you want to turn white lilies into red roses? / Kiss a white Galathee: she will laugh reddeningly! ” Galateia , (Galatea, Galathée), the most beautiful of the daughters of the sea god Nereus , has long been considered the embodiment of the exciting, but at the same time restraining effect of female beauty on male desire. In the spirit of gallant poetry , Friedrich von Logau turned to young cavaliers and advised them “through the flower” not to allow too strict reins to be put on them. Poets and public of the 19th century also associated the name Galathee with Ovid's metamorphosis tale by the artist Pygmalion , who, for lack of a lovable companion, creates an ivory statue for himself, whereupon the gods have mercy on him and the image come to life under his kiss.
The seven epigram -Novellen, each a happy or unhappy love choice as its theme are in a frame narrative woven, which itself is a love novel. This takes place in Germany in the 1850s in the romantic setting of a university town. From there on a fine June morning the young naturalist Mr. Reinhart rides out to make - as he calls it - scientific observations. In the evening he reaches the country residence of the book-loving and linguistic Lucie high above the valley. Herr Reinhart is enchanted by the beauty and wit of his hostess; at the same time he feels challenged by their intellectual independence. In this mood, he tells her the Logausche epiphany, which he uses as an erotic travel guide and guide to kissing experiments. When he also gave the best of the experiences he had gathered during the day - one just laughed while kissing, another just blushed, with a third he broke off the attempt - the angry Lucie punishes him with the story of a foolish person who sneaked into it Kissing makes you unhappy. With this, she opens a dispute based on example narratives, which revolves around the spiritual equality of men and women as a prerequisite for happy marriages. To Lucie's delight, Reinhart turns out to be not a heartbreaker , but a fateful narrator; to their annoyance, he only lets the heroes of his stories make happy choices when they bond with humble, subservient women. Lucie's uncle, an old cavalry colonel, contributed a personal experience and gave Reinhart's belief in male freedom of choice in love a heavy blow. Once again, the guest strikes back and impresses with the story of a Portuguese navigator who literally picks up his future wife, an African slave, from the ground. But Lucie counters elegantly with a young Indian woman who steals the trophies of his heartbreaking career from a French officer. Disarmed, the researcher clears the field, but returns - and now the affection of the two quickly grows beyond friendship and flares up as a great love. At the kiss, Lucie blushes and laughs: the Logausche epigram has proven itself.
The epitome gave Keller the greatest success of his writing career with contemporary readership and literary criticism. Several editions appeared in quick succession. Reviewers certified the author's classic format and placed the work on the side of the Decamerone . Literary historians praised the interweaving of the framework and internal narratives as being uniquely artistic. The latter was later also disputed: The change in literary taste that occurred in the 20th century made it difficult for readers and critics to access a work whose author seemed to be deliberately avoiding modern topics. The fact that the narrative actually unfolds a broad spectrum of such topics, among them as topical as the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between natural sciences and humanities (" two cultures "), only became clear from the 1960s, when literary studies dealt with narrative theory , Gender studies , discourse analysis , history of science opened up new research areas. Because of its variety of topics, the cycle places high demands on the performers. Above all, the question of Keller's attitude towards women's emancipation and scientific progress calls for controversial interpretations. Most of the performers agree on the high literary quality of the work.
Keller divided the text into thirteen chapters. From the seventh to the twelfth these are headed with the title of the novella that is told in it. Before and at the end, the headings announce what is going on in the chapter. This trick, based on the model of Cervantes ' Don Quixote , bathes Mr. Reinhart's undertaking in a cheerfully ironic light. The frame story is told from the perspective of the main male character throughout. The traveling naturalist initially sees his kissing adventure as steps in a series of scientific experiments, but does not take himself as seriously as his distant role model.
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A naturalist discovers a process and rides across the country to test the same
Mr. Reinhart's day's work begins with the darkening of his study. From the whole beautiful summer morning only a thin beam of light is allowed to enter through a small hole in the shutter, and then to be directed through crystals, whose construction secrets it is supposed to clear up. But as soon as Reinhart looks into the tube, a stabbing pain reminds him of how badly this work damages his eyes. While he thinks about what is good to see and hear with healthy senses - the female figure and voice, for example - he has the feeling that with the dawn he has shut out the world and people and is missing life through his science. Startled, he pushes the shutters open again and looks for one of the books that deal with half-forgotten human things . When he opens it, his gaze falls on the Logausche epigram:
How are you going to turn white lilies into red roses?
Kiss a beautiful Galathee, she will laugh and blush!
“What a delicious experiment!” He exclaims. “That's how it has to be: laughing and blushing!” He notes down the recipe and puts the slip of paper in his wallet. Then he gets ready to travel, rents a horse and leaves town, determined not to return until he has succeeded in the tempting attempt .
In which it works halfway
The traveling naturalist comes to a beautiful new bridge. At the well in front of the customs house, the young customs officer combs her damp hair from her morning wash. Reinhart compliments her, chats with her and hears that it was the young woman's lover who designed the bridge so slim and slim. Of course, in order to receive the contract, the young master builder had to take the hunchbacked daughter of a councilor as his wife. Since then he has only stealthily looked at her, his ex-girlfriend, and no longer dares to say hello. In return they knew and said hello to all river boatmen, and whoever crossed the bridge would turn to look at it. Reinhart's knightly offer that he too would like to spread praise for her beauty - for a kiss - she refuses. “I will still speak like that, even if you don't kiss me, wicked beauty!” Then she swings up to him, hugs him and kisses him with a laugh. But she does not blush, though there was the most comfortable and graceful place for it on her white face.
In what the other half succeeds
At lunchtime, Mr. Reinhart stays in a village parsonage. His acquaintances, the pastors, praise their family life as a finely crafted work of art of the divine world government, while the blooming daughter puts on her sky-blue silk dress for the sake of the visitor: She had also unleashed two golden curls and tied a snow-white kitchen apron; and she put a pudding on the table as carefully as if she were holding the globe. She smelled pleasantly of the spicy cake she had just baked. When saying goodbye, she secretly waves the guest behind a lilac bush and hands him a letter to her friend in the country house on the mountain. Reinhart seizes the opportunity: She stood still, trembling, and when he hugged her, she even got up on her toes and kissed him with closed eyes, doused with red over and over, but without just smiling, rather so seriously and devoutly, as if she were taking the sacrament.
How to avoid going backwards
In the “zum Waldhorn” inn, Reinhart has oats poured out for the horse and talks to the lonely, good-looking landlady's daughter. He withholds the compliments that she would like to hear, talks about the hay harvest and the prices, and teases her with them until she asks him to flirt: “Go ahead, sir! and be funny and cheeky, and I will act graceful and brittle! ”But now he is speechless because of her glib and she denies the conversation with rudeness and strange flattery almost alone. The researcher refrains from the attempted kiss, especially since he predicts that the beautiful woman will laugh but not blush. Because already it urges him to make no more useless attempts and to make himself worthy of the lovely success in advance . He politely bids farewell, excited to see what awaits him at the pastor's daughter's friend.
Mr. Reinhart begins to sense the scope of his enterprise
The traveler has taken a side path that soon gets lost in the thicket of a mountain forest. When he reached the heights after arduous wandering, the wilderness gave way to an artistic park. Horse and rider cause some damage on the winding paths and come to a standstill in the middle of flowerbeds in front of a delicate grating. In the glow of the evening sun, Reinhart sees a terrace with a country house surrounded by old trees. In front of it, at a marble fountain with a bowl carried by dolphins, stands a slender woman in a white summer dress and arranges a basket of freshly cut roses. Reinhart dismounts, opens the wallet and hands her - instead of the letter - the paper with the gallant verse: She held it between both hands and looked at the very confused and blushing Mr. Reinhart with wide eyes, while it was doubtful whether it was angry or in a good mood to twitch her lips. When the latter corrects his mistake , stammering apologies , her expression brightens. She greets the intruder with a mischievous sermon, whereupon he comes back and answers in the same tone. He secretly resolves to try old Logau's little saying here or nowhere .
In what a question is asked
Lucie , the lady is called, goes away to report the arrival of a guest to the sick host, her uncle. Herr Reinhart accepts her invitation to take a look around the house and examines the pictures and books in her study. A collection of autobiographies is close at hand by the desk, plans for parks are on another table, and vocabulary books and dictionaries on a third. What he sees fills him with respect, but it also almost makes him jealous . When Lucie returns, he exclaims: “Why are you doing all this?” To which, instead of answering, she asks him to sit at the table with a little stricter courtesy .
From a foolish virgin
Although the guest immediately sees what is wrong with his question, he behaves again wrongly at dinner, which is also attended by Lucie's pretty maids. First he mentions his eye disease and quotes an old folk medicine book: Sick eyes are to be strengthened and become healthy by diligent looking at beautiful women . Then, plagued by imprudent sincerity, he relates the complete course and nature of his excursion . Now it's enough for Lucie: she rises from the table with a flush of anger: “So you are thinking of continuing your elegant adventures in this house?” Reinhart barely manages to avert his expulsion, but has to show that he is not up to anything. deliver the nefarious rhyming slip . After Lucie has burned the paper, she lets the girls take out their spinning wheels and tells the story of a foolish maiden , the landlord's daughter who, as a precaution, did not allow the naturalist to kiss him while he was resting in the "French horn". Her name is Salome .
- Salome, a beauty as a young girl, considers herself exceptionally smart because of her nimble mouth. Without ever having learned anything right - she can only read and write with difficulty - she sets out early on to ensnare one of the young city lords, who gather in droves on hunting trips in the "French horn" and court her. To her grief, however, no one means it seriously, least of all a Junker Drogo, who stalks her the most and outperforms society when it comes to thinking up gross teasing. It occurs to him to pretend that Salome has secretly heard him. In order to make a fool of his buddies, who sneak up on him everywhere, he sits down in a dark gazebo in the evening and fakes a tête-à-tête with whispers and kisses in the air . Little does he know that Salome previously hid in the arbor in order to sulk undisturbed. In a flash she seizes the opportunity, throws herself on his neck and the air kisses become real kisses. The crowd assaults the couple with hello and congratulations, Salome's parents and a frowning brother demand an explanation, and so Drogo has no choice but to become engaged to her.
- But there is no wedding. Transplanted to the city, where she is supposed to learn finer manners from friends of her future in-laws, Salome is so clumsy that she is soon only called the camel behind her back . When one day the couple's intimate get-together ends in a yawning duet for lack of something to talk about, the groom calls them that himself. Salome's anger seizes: She throws his bride's presents at Drogo's feet, leaves the house on the spot and runs back to the village to her parents, crying loudly.
She's still sitting there, concludes Lucie. Too fine for a country man, too coarse for a city dweller, pursue her favorite mood of despising men and playing with them.
Regine
Despite all recognition of the narrator's free point of view, Reinhart finds this judgment too harsh. The punitive allusions to his kissing adventures have not escaped him either. So he decides to stand up to Lucie and defend the beautiful woman who was left behind: After all, she has shown pride. Perhaps a truly educated, intellectually superior man could find a worthwhile task in “tying the rice of such a beautiful vine to the stick and pulling it straight.” Lucie looks at him pityingly: “Noble gardener!” […] “But those So you don't reveal beauty as easily as your intellect? " Beauty is not the word, says Reinhart, but pleasure, and if the face, " the figurehead of the physical as well as the spiritual human being " pleases in the long run, it could be beyond all the differences between Stand, education and temperament hold a couple together. Lucie doesn't accept any of this , turns it mercilessly against him: Now she finally understands: “The pleasing face becomes the characteristic of the buyer who goes to the slave market and checks the ability of the goods to be refined, or isn't it?” With such “oriental views “ , She predicts, he will one day get a maid from the kitchen.
The girls giggle and prick up their ears, Reinhart takes the cue calmly: He doesn't know what is in store for him, but he has experienced the case “that a respected and very educated young man really took a maid from the herd and was happy with him for so long you lived until she really became an equal lady of the world, whereupon the disaster hit. " He says:
- The American Erwin Altenauer, embassy secretary in a German capital, sees the land of his ancestors in a romantic light and hopes to bring a very sensible and exemplary German woman home across the ocean. However, what sparkles from afar as the Rheingold of the Nibelungen song turns out in the capital's salons as Talmi , and in the civil wreath province the gossip bother him with any resulting compound is coated immediately. So for the time being he gets married out of his head. Then he meets the simply dressed Regine on the stairs to his apartment, who is on duty in the same house. The maid's stature, gait and noble facial features remind him of a king's child from old German legend.
- Regine quickly realizes that she has no intrusiveness to fear from the strange gentleman, and secretly meets with him in his room to chat. She is the youngest child of a large family of farm workers who support her with her low wages. Brothers and sisters make her grief and sometimes she thinks of emigrating to leave the misery behind. Erwin teaches her a little English and is amazed at how easily she learns. Finally he asks her if she would like to be his wife. Then she bursts into tears and flees. He follows her, finds her with her relatives and asks for her hand. After he has paid the debts on the tiny farmer's estate, Regine gets into the carriage with him. A few months later she learned to wear good clothes and she goes on her honeymoon at his side.
The girls have stopped spinning and have started dreaming. Lucie sends her to bed, fearing that the announced disaster will be related to education. Reinhart offers to spare her the end; after all, he contradicts his own tenets. But she wants to hear the whole truth.
- Carefully guided by Erwin, Regine begins to catch up on what she lacks in terms of education and lifestyle. When the couple returned to Germany from long stays in London and Paris, no one recognized the former Cinderella in the beautiful lady . An urgent family matter calls Erwin to America. Regine pleads with him to take her with him, but he travels alone because of the onset of autumn storms, but also because he only wants to introduce her to Altenauer's house after he has completed his educational work. Obsessed with the idea of transforming Regine into a picture of transfigured German folk tales, he recommends her to the care of three women who have a reputation for great and beautiful education .
- What he does not know is that behind their backs, these ladies are called " the three Fates " because they eventually cut the thread of life from whatever they took care of . In the need to shine for herself, they soon make Regine the object of a beauty cult and induce the innocent to sit as a model for an enterprising painter. So it happens that on his return Erwin encounters portraits of his wife in strange places, including a half-act . This adorns the apartment of a young diplomatic colleague. He thinks Regine has changed, and reacts strangely disturbed to his questions. When he learned from a reliable source that she had received a man's visit during his absence, her infidelity hardly seemed to him to be in any doubt. But a feeling of complicity prevents him from condemning her, in fact, he does not even confront her. He silently awaits an explanation from her. But Regine, who suspects nothing of his suspicions, is silent.
- She is also silent when leaving for America, on the week-long journey across the sea and after moving into Altenauer's house. Since Erwin is about to leave and the house residents treat the melancholy young woman with great care, she soon lives there like a voluntary prisoner . On the way Erwin feels twice the burden of misery that he and Regine get into and breaks off his journey. Determined to discuss it wholeheartedly, he returns home, rushes to her and finds her hanged in her bedchamber. Her suicide note shows that she wanted to spare him from being married to a criminal's sister. The night visitor was her brother, who slew his employer in an argument. Regine helped him to escape, but he was arrested a little later, convicted of a robbery on false appearances and executed.
Altenauer returned to Germany to take care of Regine's family, but did not remarry, Reinhart ends his story. Lucie thoughtfully admits to him that the three Fates and the painter were a bad form of education that had an impact on Regine's fate. But Erwin had neglected to "give his women's education the right backbone" out of vanity . It's gotten late, people are withdrawing. She is almost afraid, says Lucie when saying goodbye, “to see the beautiful person hanging on a silk cord like a mythical heroine in a dream” .
The poor baroness
Lucie's uncle, the retired colonel, is led to the breakfast table on crutches. He looks the guest sharply in the eye and realizes that as a young lieutenant he was close friends with his parents. The discovery sets off a cheerful conversation in which the uncle teases his niece a little: "I hope there is a beautiful old maid of her who will stay with me forever and grow pious roses on my grave" . Lucie passes on the teasing: That could easily happen if views like those of Mr. Reinhart prevail: “Just imagine, uncle, […] the educated men now only associate themselves with maids, peasant women and the like; but we educated girls have to take our house servants and coachmen in return for retaliation, and then one ponders a little! ” Whether Reinhart might have another stair marriage in store? The guest replies in the affirmative, announces "a marriage out of pure compassion" and says:
- Brandolf, a young legal scholar, son of a bourgeois landowner, is only happy when he can improve people, be it through rewards or through educational punishments. One day he overlooks a maid on the stairs to a friend's apartment and nudges her hard. When he reproaches himself for this, the friends laugh at him: the person is a baroness, too stingy to keep a maid, too proud of the nobility to have a word with the residents. Brandolf immediately decides to improve her, and since the lady lives from the subletting, he moves in with her. But his zeal has come to nothing: the Baroness Hedwig von Lohausen is shy of people, but not haughty, and what appears to be greed turns out to be an inevitable thrift. The actually pretty, but careworn and cinderella-like woman feeds on almost nothing. One winter morning Brandolf finds her helpless in her freezing bedroom with a high fever. He looks after the doctor and nurse and clears one of his rooms for her. He fears for her life for weeks; then she smiles at him for the first time, while a faint reddish sheen, like that on the roses, spreads over the pale cheeks . (The narrator cannot help but weave in the nefarious epithet at this point ).
- As Hedwig's recovery progresses, she confides her story to Brandolf: In the von Lohausen family, men have been wasting their wives' dowries for generations. She herself was betrayed of her inheritance by a villainous trick. She married her two brothers to what appeared to be a man of honor, who then brutally abused her, as did her child, who died as a result. Although she got a divorce, the three accomplices have disappeared with their fortune, only the feudal household effects remain with her. She wants to sell it now and look for a job as a housekeeper. Brandolf, delighted, points her to his widowed father. After Hedwig had managed his house for one summer, the old man wanted her to be his daughter-in-law and urged Brandolf to marry. Neither of them need persuasion, their wedding day is set for the grape harvest festival.
- Then the Lohausen brothers and their accomplice reappear. You gambled away Hedwig's fortune on the stock exchange and then sat in prison for fraudulent bills. Brandolf, worried about Hedwig, comes up with a plan to get the three of them off her neck once and for all by means of an educational punitive action. He has the Junkers, who have meanwhile sunk into begging musicians, invited to his wedding. For money and plenty of food, they are supposed to embody the devils of bad wine in the masked procession of the winegrowers and play their miserable music. On the wedding day, the three are dressed up as Krampus and dragged on their devil's tails in front of the bride's pavilion. Hedwig doesn't recognize them and waves to them in amusement; but they do recognize their abused sister and wife. The shock to see her raised to the status of a shining bride works: a few days later they can be put on an emigrant ship to America, provided with money and passports.
The ghost seers
Lucie asks the narrator whether his noble woman's savior, Brandolf, “was not chosen in the end while he thought he was voting” . When the latter is taken aback, she explains: Wasn't he really overlooked anything when telling the story, which would indicate “a modest influence, a small procedure, [...] a remnant of his own will” from Frau von Lohausen? Reinhart, outraged, defending his character: It was far from his to describe Hedwig as a person who is wrapped with played Ohmachten their lodger, but it is ! "A female figure by their helplessness only wins and enough sex for decoration" - Helplessness as an ornament of the female sex? Lucie triumphs: “Of course, yes! That's how I understand it too! [...] one more gentle woolen sheep on the market! This time it is still about the usefulness of a good housekeeper ” . The two are now on the verge of quarreling in all seriousness. Uncle recognized this and intervened: Lucie didn't need to get excited, since she wanted to stay single; But even Reinhart had to back off: “Our freedom of choice and our glory, dear friend, is not that far away, and we mustn't insist on it that much!” He himself once “became the subject of a woman's election considerations” and shamefully inferior. Does his story interest young people?
- As the wild, daring student he once was, he sought a counterbalance and joined a fellow student of sedate nature, a Kantian who energetically attacked the romantic fantasies of his friend with reasons of reason. Little by little, they would have become inseparable, if they had also fallen in love with the same girl, rich people child, the unconventional and boyish Hildeburg. He, the narrator, had been called her marshal because of his impetuous manner and his riding skills, but her friend, because of his always cool head, her chancellor.
- That Hildeburg is seriously in love with both of them was shown in 1813 when the war of liberation broke out . When the students volunteered in droves, the marshal in the cavalry, the chancellor in the infantry, she took her friends aside when they said goodbye. Carried away by the heroic, exalted mood in the country, she solemnly vows to them that she would never become a man's wife, unless one of them. But for that the other has to fall. If both fell or both returned, she would remain single.
- A year goes by and they both return promptly, the marshal between two campaigns, the chancellor after a serious wound. Despite all the joy of seeing each other again, the trio is unhappy about their bewitched love being , especially since separation and danger to life have fanned the fire violently. Now it happens that they spend a few days in a little castle that is rumored to be home to a poltergeist. In fact, it makes a thud at night. In the morning the marshal, visibly shaken, said that he had met a ghost, a gray-veiled, witch-like grinning old woman. The Chancellor rather believes that his friend will relapse into old fantasy due to the war and offers to sleep in the haunted room the following night. Hildeburg advises against it, but he insists and - is engaged to her the next morning! She was, of course, the ghost: determined to end her conflict and belong to the one who doesn't let himself be fooled, she staged the ghost. The test passed the Chancellor, who took the ghost in his arms, whereupon it dropped the wax mask and gray covers.
The colonel added that it was clear to him at the time that the election corresponded to Hildeburg's most secret wishes. Then he dryly informs his audience that Hildeburg, real name Else, has soon married the lawyer Reinhart and will therefore be the guest's mother. "Is she still alive? and how are you? ” The naturalist, suddenly confronted with his creation, blushes. Lucie doesn't make a face, but her eyes are laughing. Then he laughs bravely, answers the question in the affirmative and kindly gives the old gentleman information. Lucie only looks at him with glee and glee when the pastor's family comes to visit in the afternoon and he has to shake hands with the daughter he has kissed so briskly behind the lilac bush.
After Reinhart befriended the idea of being the son of the most arbitrary male choice of a cocky virgin , his belligerent mood returns. Late in the evening he picks up one of Lucie's old books, which is about sea voyages and conquests of the 17th century, and discovers a story in it that seems to be a great defense against the arrogance of equal women .
Don Correa
Reinhart does not know of a third stair marriage that Lucie asks him the next morning, but the case "where a distinguished and very well-known man literally picked his nameless wife off the floor and became happy with her."
- The Portuguese naval hero Salvador Correa de Sa Benavides, already governor of Rio de Janeiro at a young age, wants a wife who loves him not for his wealth, but for himself alone. He therefore goes incognito to look for a bride. In Lisbon his eye falls on a beautiful young widow, Donna Feniza Mayor de Cercal . He follows her unnoticed in the southwest of Portugal to her rock castle high above the sea. Here, where nobody knows his face, he approaches her in the mask of a shipwrecked poor nobleman and quickly wins her favor. He ignores warnings that Feniza is a witch and the murderess of her first husband and lets himself be married to her. He lives with her for a few months as if on the island of Calypso . But when the king promises him to be appointed vice admiral through secret messengers, the commander in Correa awakens again. Against Feniza's will, he takes a horse, stunned and pale with anger, the lady of the castle has to let him go. On the way to Lisbon, he imagines her surprise with amusement when he appears before her in the glory of his true identity. On the way back, he lets his fleet anchor in the bay in front of the rock castle at night, orders a wedding party to be set up and goes ashore in the old disguise to pick up the wife. Now his surprise is when he finds her at the side of a depraved lover. He barely escapes her murder attempt. After he had Feniza and accomplices hung in the blackened ruins of the tower in which she wanted to burn him, he continued his journey to Brazil, mindful of the teaching,
- that in marriage matters, even in the good sense, one should not make artificial arrangements and perform fables, but rather leave everything to its natural course.
- Ten years pass before Don Correa comes up with a new marriage plan. He is now at war with the Dutch in Angola . When he negotiates with the black Princess Annachinga , instead of a chair, he offers her only a seat cushion. The state-wise woman evades humiliation by kneeling down a young slave from her entourage and taking a seat on her back. She gives him this, her living field chair , as a present when he leaves. Don Correa tells the slave to get up and shakes hands with the swaying woman. Moved by her beauty and the sadness in her eyes, he kisses her on both cheeks and vows never to leave her.
- But it is difficult for him to keep his word. As soon as Zambo , that is the name of the slave, has been baptized in the name of Maria, he has to snatch her away from the Jesuits who want to consecrate her to heaven. He sends her across the sea to an aunt, abbess in Rio, to have her prepared for a Christian marriage. When he tries to pick her up there, it is said that the ungrateful creature has escaped. But he learns that the abbess handed her over to the Jesuits who dragged her across the Atlantic to Cadix . He embarked immediately, but found the Spanish port closed because of the plague. With a heavy heart he sets course for Lisbon after smuggling his page Luis ashore. The cunning boy discovers Zambo in a monastery and gives her a hint where her master is staying. In the meantime the admiral has applied for her extradition from the Spanish government. Weeks go by, he is under pressure to end his stay in Europe. One night, as he was wondering whether Zambo-Maria would be better off in the monastery than at the side of a warlord, the house bell rings. Luis opens it and comes back beaming, holding the African woman. This time she really ran away. Covered with dust and exhausted, she falls at her master's feet, from where he picks her up a second time. The next morning he puts his mother's wedding ring on her hand.
The curls
When Reinhart had finished, Lucie gave him ironic applause: they wanted to remember "how useful humility is" . Then she goes over to the counterattack: Speaking of people of color, she will now also contribute a reading fruit. The Colonel speaks of a duel in which he got into, Reinhart of a cannon that is aimed at him, but both encourage her to fire:
- The young Queen Marie Antoinette had the flagjunker Thibaut von Vallormes presented a gold watch in thanks for the page service at her wedding and accompanied the gift with the words that he would have to win the charms himself over time . The harmless boy Thibaut soon turns into a dangerous person and man who conquers female hearts in order to be given small pieces of jewelry which he then hangs on his watch chain. The first such trophy, a red coral heart, has yet to be stolen from its owner; the next he acquires by finer methods. Ultimately, however, all his art of conquest amounts to false vows of love. He does not notice the disaster he is causing with it and pursues his career as a gallant officer until there is no more space on his watch chain and he is bored of collecting. In the meantime he has also advanced to become a captain and is hungry for military action.
- So he joins the expeditionary forces of the Lord of Lafayette and does not do badly as a soldier in the New World. His compatriots' enthusiasm for the American struggle for freedom sweeps him along, as does their Rousseau enthusiasm for unspoilt nature and the noble savages . The French meet both on the march through a wide river valley, in which an Indian tribe has pitched its tents. While the negotiations are taking place, there is a lot of traffic between the camps, and Thibaut would not be Lord of Vallormes if he did not take a liking to young redskinned women. One of them is called Quoneschi, a water maiden , glitters around him like a dragonfly and turns his head so much that he comes up with the plan to make her his wife: How would philosophical Paris astonish him [...] with this epitome of nature and To see the originality return to the arms and step into the salons. Since the communication between Thibaut and Quoneschi is limited to signs and a few bits of English, it remains unclear whether she understands the marriage proposal. He understands her all too well for that: She demands his watch chain and curls. Thibaut is startled. But then the trophies of an outdated culture do not seem too high a price for a bride who embodies the eternally young nature. He removes the glittering hanger from his watch and gives it up. The Indian woman leaves happily and keeps calling out tomorrow! Tomorrow! .
- On the next day the Indians invited the Europeans to a festival. In fact, Quoneschi does not leave Thibaut's side during the feast, so that he already reaches out his hand to caress her velvety back. But first a group of young Indians appear with war dances. (The narrator affectionately describes its leader, the wonderfully grown and wildly decorated thunder bear). Quoneschi is ecstatic at the sight of the mighty warrior, pulls Thibaut by the sleeve and shouts something. An American translates it: Donner-Bär is her bridegroom, with whom she will have a wedding today. The giant spotted his bride, dances close and - the French burst out laughing : “Parbleu! he has the charms of Herr von Vallormes hanging on his nose! ” Thibaut was just able to convince himself of the truth of this remark when the Thunder Bear Quoneschi had already swung onto his shoulders and ran away with her. The Lord of Vallormes sees neither the curls nor the girl again.
In which the epitome proves its worth
The narrator is obviously in a hurry to leave the group and smilingly apologizes to a waiting craftsman. Sadly, Reinhart sees his gentle Zambo eclipsed by Lucie's wild Quoneschi and the kiss-collecting that brought him here is compared extremely unfavorably:
- “What's the matter with your splendid niece,” he said, “just for being angry with my poor protégés for shooting satirical arrows at me? That is almost over the target! "
- “Well now,” replied the Colonel with a laugh, “she actually only defends herself against her skin, which, by the way, is a fine fur! And don't you notice that it would be less flattering for you if the Lux showed itself indifferent to the fact that you rave about all sorts of ignorant and poor creatures, one of which she has no luck or merit? "
After his penny dropped, Reinhart was also in a hurry. He saddles the rent horse who has eaten himself out on Lucie's pasture and thanks for the successful eye treatment. They split up in friendship, he promises to come back soon and goes on his way as seriously as a traveler to Africa.
Back in his laboratory, he realizes how much he misses Lucie and that he is on the way to losing his bachelor freedom. During the summer he writes her letters, but does not reveal anything about his condition, especially since he is afraid of getting a basket . Lucie sends him an invitation: Reinhart's parents are guests at the country house, and the son is urgently requested. Reinhart doesn’t allow himself to be asked twice, and when the old people set off on a visit to the pastor’s family on a beautiful day in the late summer, the youngsters are among themselves for the first time.
Your self-consciousness disappears during a conversation in the library. Reinhart asks Lucie for one of her books. With the help of the good thoughts that she wrote in the margin, he hopes to find out what captivates her about these books of life. Now she no longer owes him the answer: "I try to understand the language of people when they talk about themselves" . It is not easy; because every autobiographer, no matter how frankly he comes up with confessions, conceals any mistakes and weaknesses:
- “When I now compare them all with one another in their sincerity, which they consider crystal clear, I ask myself: is there any human life about which nothing can be concealed, that is, under all circumstances and at all times? Is there a very true person and can one exist? "
While they were exchanging their opinions on this question, Reinhart was leafing through a book and discovered a strange bookmark: two hearts embroidered from colorful silk, one rooted in the ground, the other soaring fiery towards the sky. The picture, explains Lucie, represents earthly and heavenly love. She made it during her time in the monastery. “Because I'm a Catholic!” She adds, blushing. Reinhart finds no reason to blush, since denominational differences mean little to him. She replies: “I was not born a Catholic, I became one!” When he looks up in shock, she continues: “You see, we have a story about which you don't know whether to confess or keep it quiet ! "
- Lucie's youth story
- Her father was a Lutheran, but tolerant and open to the world. Her mother, a Catholic, joined her husband's church without a formal conversion . She herself was raised Protestant, but the father watched benevolently when the wife and child boarded the house's own boat at the cheerful Catholic church festivals to go on a pilgrimage to a nunnery downstream and spend the day with Sister Klara, the childhood friend and closest confidante of the mother , to spend.
- At the same time, a young relative of her mother's, also a Catholic, went to Lucie's parental home. Whenever he sees the child, he takes it on his lap, kisses it and calls it his little wife. Later, Lucie no longer accepts kissing, but becomes dissatisfied if the visitor forgets to call her his little wife or bride. Leodegar , as he is called, now comes less often. The child is all the more impressed with his increasingly brilliant appearance as a student, as a military man, as a cosmopolitan.
- At twelve, Lucie loses her mother. The father goes on a journey and leaves the daughter in the care of a housekeeper and a governess. Both are preoccupied with their own business and have no understanding of the needs of the young orphan. Lucie withdraws to the world of books alone. When she reads Schiller's Wallenstein , she falls in love with the figure of Max Piccolomini and fantasizes about the role of Thekla , who is mourning his grave. She notices that the dead hero is increasingly taking on the features of the distant Leodegar.
- When he returned home again, Lucie, not yet quite sixteen, received him in place of the father who had been away. Your ambition as a hostess has awakened. She spares no effort in giving him a festive farewell and gives herself a grown-up reputation with clothing and jewelry. But at the table she sits stiffly and silently like a wooden doll , while the governess takes the guest for herself. Even when taking a walk, the teacher steps ahead on Leodegar's arm, the pupil behind them, deadly unhappy, secretly shedding tears. Leodegar notices it, and when the governess pursues her lucrative private pleasure, the hunt for rare beetles, for a while, he pulls Lucie onto a bench and asks: "A bride, a little woman who is crying, where is this going?"
- Then I burst into tears again; I longed for trust, for friendship and love, for a better home than I owned, and this longing now, without my being able to change it, vented with the strange words:
- “Cousin Leodegar! When are you going to marry me? "
- The not so young man thinks about it and smiles strangely. Then he says: “You good girl, once you’re Catholic, the wedding will be!” When he’s about to be tender, the governess returns.
- The following night, Lucie secretly packs her things, leaves a message where she can be found, and gets on the boat. She arrives at the monastery for early mass, turns to Sister Klara and tells her that she wants to become a Catholic. Klara shakes her head, but reports the matter dutifully. After the application has been thoroughly examined, the monastery is instructed to prepare the daughter of a Catholic for the return to the bosom of the church, but to keep the conversion secret until the person to be baptized into religion . After the baptism, Lucie's Protestant conscience reports. She confesses the reason for her step to Klara, whereupon she sheds tears in thoughts of her own youthful suffering, but she bids to be silent and busy with the creation of the symbolic picture as a distraction and warning.
- When Lucie's father returns home, he is furious and dismisses both supervisors. Then he brings the runaway back from the monastery. Have you tried to get them to convert? According to the truth and yet ambiguous , Lucie denies. In order to counteract a possible infection from the Catholic atmosphere, her father is now taking her to a boarding school run by Protestants. Here, with discreet teachers and well-behaved classmates, Lucie finds her cheerfulness again, but has to be careful at every turn not to reveal her secret.
- The only one who could release her from the unworthy game of hide-and-seek, Leodegar, still shines in her soul, but as distant and dumb as a star. After waiting in vain for two years, she learns that he has joined the Redemptorist Order and has become a famous penitential preacher. He will certainly take it to the cardinal, her father writes to her from Rome, where he ran into Leodegar and noticed his fanatical gaze. It is the last letter from his father, shortly afterwards he develops a fever through careless travel and dies.
The narrator ends, her uncle has become guardian until the age of majority. Together with him, who has no idea of her conversion, she bought the country house seven years ago and has lived here ever since:
- I soon recovered from the premature foolish passion and its subject, as it fell like scales from my eyes. But through my pranks, I had my youth, life and happiness, or whatever you think, shut off from my face. I couldn't undo the move if I didn't want to get into the rumor as an adventurous double convert. In the meantime I have learned to console myself with the idea that my story has saved me from later disaster, evil and devilries, which I could have experienced or caused without this experience. There are also diseases that are inoculated into children so that they are protected from them later!
Reinhart does not want to accept the parable of the vaccination. What happened to her happened only to beings "whose noble, innocent generosity of the heart hurries ahead of the time impatiently, innocently and unconsciously." To this generosity belongs the child's belief in the joke of the cardinal like one dove's wing to another, "and with such wings they fly Angels among men ” . Lucie thanks, as usual, mischievously for the politeness and the “gracious judgment” , but breathes audibly: “You see, now I am completely freed from the cursed secrecy. How difficult it is to find the kind of confessor you need! "
Now both are forced to go outside. On a walk through the forest down to the village and the river, you will encounter all sorts of small natural and cultural wonders: an oak tree holding a beech tree in his arms, a snake that the knowledgeable Reinhart frees from a brook crab that tries to eat it, and finally a shoemaker who sings Goethe's youth song "With a painted gang" while pulling pitch wire in his workshop, saxoning and accompanied by loud canaries. They are actually supposed to deliver a message to the young master from his bride, Lucie's maid. But overwhelmed by the noisy hope for life in the shoemaker's house, they forget it and turn to each other. When she kissed, Lucie's eyes were full of water, but she laughed at it and turned purple from a long-deprived and spurned feeling. Only on the way home do they remember that they have now carried out old Logau's recipe, without even thinking about it. Reinhart asks Lucie for her hand and the two return as fiancés.
Interpretations
Contemporary reviewers and readers praised the end of the epigram without going into the final punch, the verification of the epigram. When the need arose 30 years later to gain a deeper meaning from the work and to develop a central theme that unites the stories, the interpreters promised themselves the key from this epigram.
On the subject of "blushing laughter"
Blushing and laughing , physical signs of mental and spiritual processes that are completely or largely beyond the control of the will - what do they indicate? What significance does Keller attribute to them when he takes up the 200-year-old epilogue by Friedrich von Logau and processes it in terms of motifs? The cycle offers a kind of phenomenology of involuntary emotional expression: main and internal narrators distinguish between happy, sullen, triumphant, forced laughter, shameful, confused, angry, joyful blushing. Men, too, are in the epigram blush, vornweg Mr. Reinhart; he and Lucie blush the same number of times, twice even at the same time; the main phenomenon, the Galatheen-like blushing-and-laughing, announces itself several times; however, it appears in full clarity only once and at the very end. What does it mean?
Until the mid-1960s, Emil Ermatinger's interpretation was almost unreservedly true : “Blushing is the sign of shame, the feeling of the necessary moral limit; Laughter is the sign of sensual well-being, of serene freedom. "And:" Preservation of the moral barrier in the midst of free enjoyment, that was the interpretation that Keller had to give Logau's word 'blushing laugh' based on his worldview ". Mr. Reinhart, it was clear to Ermatinger, “wants to establish a good marriage by kissing, not just amusing himself.” If this is the case, the researcher does not go on a lively and spontaneous erotic journey of discovery, but pedantically and carefully looking for a bride ; he does not kiss because he feels like it, and to get to face the alluring phenomenon, but instead carries out a series of systematic personality tests in the expectation that the simultaneous blushing effect will qualify the test person as a wife. According to this, Keller would have reinterpreted the gallant epigram "out of his worldview" as a philistine adviser on the matter of choosing a wife.
In 1963 , Wolfgang Preisendanz objected to this interpretation in a widely acclaimed article. He referred to the final chapter, in which the epigram proves its worth at the moment when the two of them don't even think about the terrible recipe (Lucie), the delicious experiment (Reinhart). The attempt succeeds although or precisely because it no longer has to prove anything. Preisendanz thus opposed the view that Keller's epitome came "from the world of the bourgeois family novel " and remained caught up in it, a prejudice that the reader must come to if he followed Ermatinger's interpretation without knowing the text.
In addition, the scheme of sensuality-morality leads to an “oppressive formulaic understanding of the individual stories”. It is important to read these impartially and to check for similarities. Recapitulating came Preisendanz to the conclusion that it all epigram go to the distinction between "reality and appearance, essence and appearance, reason and surface, face and mask, shape and disguise" -Novellen to the "problematic tension between what one People represent, pretend, represent, and what he withholds, conceals, hides ”- think of Lucie's skeptical view of the sincerity of the autobiographers. It is true that in the spontaneous expression of emotions, in the Logausch phenomenon, the firm connection between the moral and physical world on which the natural scientist Reinhart trusts is revealed. But in the border area of the two worlds, where the winding paths of human arbitrariness and the straight lines of natural causality cross each other, the experimental method has lost the game. What the epigram promises can only be experienced by those who go to Lucie's territory and learn to understand human destinies with her, history and stories, foreign and personal. Here, in the labyrinth of imaginations, ambiguities, disguises, her method of doubting the shell and asking about the core is the more appropriate.
To justify this method, namely the traditional one used by the storytellers and poets, over against the modern, scientific one, that is the main concern of the author. Preisendanz's essay closes with a reference to Zola's manifesto Le roman expérimental , with which naturalism began to break out around 1880 . In this sense, the cycle is also gaining the reputation of a literary positioning: Keller addressed the epigram against the demanded by the naturalist scientific nature of literature and calls for the imperial immediacy of poetry , which he means the right at any time, even in the age of tailcoats and the railways, to tie in with the parable and the fabulous .
On the subject of the relationship between the sexes
When in 1880, shortly before the epiphany was published , Ibsen's Nora or Ein Puppenheim caused a sensation on German stages, the young theater critic Otto Brahm compared the play with the epiphany . His impression: “This poem also revolves [...] basically around the same social question, here too the author polemicizes the man's egoism, who in his wife is not an equal comrade, but rather a child to be monitored and raised, a fragile one Toys from the 'doll's house' sees “. Fritz Mauthner said in a similar way : The epiphany in his outlook on the marriage question is "as modern as George Eliot , as only Ibsen in his' Nora" and the most self-confident woman could be satisfied with the position that Keller assigns him. "Such views remained isolated. Ermatinger's reading proved to be formative. This was based on Reinhart's caricature of the three educated women and the painter in Regine and showed that Keller hates the emancipated "in the worst possible way because they seek to falsify nature by falsifying the gender differences." Under these conditions, Lucie was either not perceived as emancipated , or as a person who “has to unlearn the arrogance of the emancipated and give space to their feelings”. This image of Lucie also predominates in the feminist interpretations that have emerged since the 1980s, albeit with the difference that she is now seen as a woman who surrenders to the man in the final chapter. The semantic coloring that Ermatinger Reinhart's activities had given by the word "Brautschau" was retained regardless of its inconsistency. It found its way into literary stories, but also into extensive interpretations such as that of Gerhard Kaisers . For him, Mr. Reinhart “set out to select a lady for marital purposes in a systematic and experimental manner”.
What Lucie has for Reinhart and he for her
- “You are only loved where you are allowed to show yourself weak without provoking strength.” Theodor W. Adorno
Preisendanz's reading revealed that the cycle is not about a one-sided rehearsal, but rather a mutual examination. Behind the “banter” about marriage on the stairs and electoral glory is the question: “Who am I actually dealing with?” Lucie calls the views Reinhart brings up in the dispute against her “oriental” and compares his attitude to that of a pasha on the Slave market. The mocking defense, however, does not prevent her from attentively following the fates he tells. His three stories contain messages that concern them closely: the man should not leave the woman alone in a difficult social situation like Erwin Regine, should plant the stunted in good soil like Brandolf the poor baroness, he should offer the depressed the hand to stand up like Don Correa the Zambo. Lucie has no illusions about the precariousness of her own situation: every attentive observer has to ask himself why she, a radiant figure, spent her best years in this noble solitude in a monastery-like house - what happened there, what gnaws at her? An ordinary educated person, whether he is a reckless hooker or a serious suitor, would keep such questions quietly to himself and show his admiration for literary, independently thinking women. Reinhart, on the other hand, asks loudly and improperly: "Why are you doing all this?" He embarrasses Lucie, she blushes; But he too, since he thinks of it boiling hot, where this question boils down to: Nicest, don't you know anything better to do? or even more clearly: what did you experience? But then he tells in three attempts how a maid who grew up in misery, a divorced woman severely injured by her brothers and sisters, and finally a slave can become a long-term companion to an educated man, provided that he does not forget simple humanity through his education. Lucie notices that the strange guest doesn’t speak to her. Even the scorn with which she holds up to him the sheer self-interest that usually drives the lords of creation when they act as saviors and formers of the female race, does not deter him from defending his point of view. She likes it; if she wants to fall in love again, then not with a fickle one .
By telling strangers about love affairs, the two have explored each other, their external likes and dislikes, but also their core character. Lucie has not escaped the fact that in the Mietsgaulreiter as in Don Quixote a noble, timeless knightly heart beats. The final guarantee for this is his reaction to the disclosure of her secret. But the fact that she confides it to him shows how little she fears that he will take advantage of her social list to turn her into "a depressed housewife, such a modest, warmed-up sauerkräutchen" . Preisendanz: "Only in front of a man whose core she is completely safe can Lucie free herself from cursed secrecy ".
Conversely, Reinhart can rely on Lucie's education going in-depth, education of the heart, not glamor , a means of satisfying the urge for self-recognition and the need for power as with the three Parzen that he shows in Regine . Immediately after the nightly discussion of Regine's fate, he was sure of his affection:
- With strangely excited feelings, Reinhart went to bed in the strange house, under a roof with the most graceful woman in the world. Just as there are people whose physical body, if you accidentally touch or bump it, feels solid and sympathetic through their clothing, so there are still others whose spirit is familiar to you through the enveloping of the voice at first hearing and speaks to us fraternally , and where both meet, a good friendship is not far out of the way.
What takes the naturalist for Lucie is her spirit. The fact that this also expresses itself as a spirit of contradiction makes him temporarily faint-hearted: "I praise myself for the calm choice of a quiet, gentle, dependent female who does not rob us of our minds!" He says to himself after the story of Hildeburg's choice of spouse to continue: “But of course, these are mostly those who blush when they kiss, but don't laugh! It always takes a little mind to laugh; the animal doesn't laugh! ” Friendship , spiritual community, a relationship in which no part patronizes and dominates the other appears in the epiphany as a preliminary stage of love and a good omen of marriage.
Reinhart a male chauvinist?
The fact that Keller represents friendship as the basis of lasting love is partly recognized and partly disputed in more recent interpretations. The latter from Adolf Muschg , when he says: “Great poetry often speaks of women no differently than the beer table.” Keller's epic poem is “in an unfriendly light, examining a selection program of women's goods [...] artistic and instructive market tip [...] a higher kind of meat inspection. ”On the other hand, Gunhild Kübler finds “ a considerable emancipatory, even feminist potential ” in the epithet . Instead of the dream in which the woman by man's grace exists, “new, enlightening-egalitarian ideas of eroticism and conjugal love, as they are unique in the literature of the time.” Her conclusion: “Great poetry [...] doesn't talk about women like the beer table, and that is exactly one of the characteristics of their size. "
While most of the interpreters see a learning and development process in Reinhart, for Ursula Amrein and the majority of feminist interpreters he remains a chauvinist , “who, in order to assure himself of his male superiority, demonstrates in two cases how the inferiority of women becomes unconditional One of the prerequisites for a happy marriage. "Lucie's self-revelation appears as an act of submission, Reinhart's reaction to it as an" integrative appropriation of the woman ":" This appropriation takes place when the man subordinates the woman as a confessor to his law and she thus as his creature in the order represented by it transferred. As a confessor, he also solves the woman's riddle. This process, which is presented in the text as the redemption of women, actually includes their submission. Because when the man solves the woman's secret, he gains power over her. ” Gerhard Kaiser sees it similarly when he predicts a doll's house fate for Lucie: it is true that she“ will not shrink to a home at the stove ”; Nevertheless: "The narrowed natural scientist will be a happy natural scientist in the future, to whom the cultivated, loving wife caresses the wrinkles of the forehead and the tiredness of the eyes." Read this way, Keller's epitome does not amount to the recognition of Lucie's intellectual equality and equality, but to Appropriation, utilization and taming of an unruly .
On the subject of "two cultures"
According to Kaiser, Reinhart and Lucie represent different ways of life, the scientific-technical and the aesthetic-literary - two cultures in the sense of Charles Percy Snow's thesis , which have become increasingly foreign to each other since the 19th century. Their opposition is fundamentally effective in the dispute about the equality of men and women and is not canceled by the peace kiss of the opponents. Especially here, during a walk in the forest, a remark by Reinhart clearly shows the break line between his scientific explanation of the world and Lucie's way of life based on language and understanding. The dispute over primacy between the two cultures continues behind the back of the united couple. The story does not end with a triumph of Lucie's culture, the author deliberately keeps the outcome in suspension, but clearly indicates which side he is leaning towards. This is done through interwoven references to Goethe and his criticism of Newtonian optics . In addition, Lucie is pronounced as the superior and "humanly richer figure".
Reinhart an "enlightened dark man"?
The epitaph as a justification of the poetic in the face of the scientific challenge - Kaiser agrees with Preisendanz's thesis, but does not share his view that the natural scientist also contributes to this Keller project, unless as a negative contrast figure. Reinhart appears to Kaiser as “an enlightened dark man” who for a time comes closer to Lucie's spiritual world, but who never fully emerges from his darkened study. Even in the love scene, he behaved strangely wooden and callous. Unlike Lucie, who entrusts him with her eventful youth story, he has no past worth telling, is historically devoid of history and therefore appears faceless - a life-planning rationalist, as his combination of (useful) eye care with (pleasant) bride-to-be shows. With him, the “narrow-eyed scientist”, “a leading type of the time is turned into a questionable hero”, a person whose “abstract scientific approach to life and the world has something killing about it”. Kaiser is astonished that such a person, as a charming conversationalist and serious narrator, can “speak” and win over a woman like Lucie. To explain it, he refers to the Keller's imperial immediacy of poetry : The main plot is like in a fairy tale, where “Dummies […] win happiness in the end” and wise women have wondrous cathartic powers.
Kaiser's view has recently been contested from the biographical side. Letters from Keller's friend Jakob Christian Heusser , which were only published in 2011, show that the Reinhart figure is not fictitious. Keller equipped them with trains from Heusser, a scientist. The two met in Berlin in 1851, where Heusser was working on crystal-optical examinations in Heinrich Gustav Magnus' laboratory . Many details of the first chapter, the description of the work chamber, the apparatus built in it, even Reinhart's eye pain, owe to the author's dealings with this friend. The fiction begins at the point where Keller lets the naturalist discover the Logausche epic poem, which in reality he himself discovered in 1851. In this respect, the Reinhart figure is a mixed portrait in which Heusser's features merged with Keller's features. This - so the argument goes - explains the author's attitude towards his character: friendly irony mixed with self-irony. If Keller had wanted the natural scientist to appear as a sinister pedant or in some other way dark man, he would have had the means of biting satire at his disposal. Instead, he rewarded him with a woman like Lucie. The demonization of the Reinhart figure, noticeable in secondary literature since the 1960s, is an interpretive artifact and expression of the resentment against natural scientists widespread in the humanities ; thus itself a symptom of the increasing alienation between the "two cultures".
"Keller Lessing"
Klaus Jeziorkowski examines the references to other literary texts woven into the epiphany . He draws attention to a scene in the opening chapter from which another, less gloomy and contradicting picture of the naturalist Reinhart emerges: When Reinhart reflects on the long neglected human things, his collection of aesthetic literature occurs to him. It stands in a floor chamber. After he has let the daylight in again, he climbs up there and first of all picks up a volume of Lessing - the volume in which he discovers the Logausche epigram a little later. He pulls it out, frees it from the dust and says:
- “Come on, brave Lessing! It is true that every laundress leads you in the mouth, but without having a clue of your real being, which is nothing other than eternal youth and skill for all things, the unconditional good will without falsehood and gilded in fire. "
Jeziorkowski: "For Keller, Lessing is the light-bringer, the enlightener in person". There is, therefore, not a little of Keller's character in the figure of the natural scientist, also in his extravagant remark about people who only talk about the poet. Jeziorkowski identifies the laundresses as writers who aroused Keller's anger with bad literary stories and adulation of Lessing.
Obviously, the natural scientist dealt intensively and critically with aesthetic literature before devoting himself entirely to studying nature. Without such a prehistory, the main plot would not get going, or would end at the latest when Lucie invites her guest to take a look around the country house. A specialist with limited horizons would hardly be interested in Lucie's book collection, feel no jealousy of her goings-on and ask no provocative questions; he couldn't compete with her.
Educational history of a natural scientist
Reinhart only mentions his somewhat arbitrary and unregulated studies to Lucie once . More about the naturalist's way of life, philosophy and educational history can be found in the opening chapter. Preisendanz examined the wealth of allusions and the telling irony of this “epic entrance” for the first time: the mention of a work by Darwin in the very first sentence ( law of natural selection ), the description of Reinhart's work chamber and inventory ( study of a Doctor Fausten , but definitely into the modern age , Translated comfortably and gracefully ), the remark about the aesthetic writings in the attic room ( a neglected amount of books ) and other more. The following passage, read against the background of the Lessing invocation , shows why Reinharts lives with his back to the literary business of his present:
- Moral things, he used to say, flutter in the air like a discolored and decrepit butterfly anyway; but the thread by which they flutter is well tied, and they will not slip away from us, even if they always show the greatest desire to make themselves invisible.
- But now, as I said, he felt uncomfortable [...].
The reason for turning away is the discolored, shabby education, the museum's admiration for classics, the cult around the plastered Venus, which he caricatures in Regine . Goethe's Faust , "smarter than all the monkeys / doctors, masters, clerks and priests", turned to magic. Kellers Reinhart, disgruntled by the litter of writers, concentrated on exploring the material and sensual . This happened in the trust in the firm connection between the natural laws and the moral phenomena. But now he feels that this trust cannot prove itself if you lock yourself up and postpone the encounter with life on the back burner.
With this insight, the modern Faust leaves his laboratory, drives out - the gallant poem serves as Mephistopheles ' magical cloak - and meets Lucie. It is she who brings life back to life again to those who are tired of education. Through them, the author addresses his readership and encourages the representatives of the long-established literary culture to approach the representatives of the newly emerging culture and their literary entourage with self-confidence.
From fluoroscopy to enlightenment
The opening chapter of the epitome is peppered with ironic points against natural science. The first sentence already contains one:
- About twenty-five years ago, when the natural sciences were again at their highest peak, although the law of natural selection was not yet known, one day Mr. Reinhart opened his shutters [...].
Initially, the plot is dated to the mid-1850s, the time of the materialism dispute . The point is directed against the glory of the scientific spokesmen in this dispute, who see the summit of the explanation of the world reached with each new discovery, where a little later an even more recent one surpasses it. The author-narrator continues in the same tone and describes the study of the modern Faust: No stuffed monster hung on a smoky vault, but a living frog humbly crouched in a glass and waited for its hour . He may wait a while, because the researcher is currently investigating the structure of crystals and instead of frogs he is stretching rays of light over the ordeal - an allusion to Goethe's polemic against Newton . In this environment, Mr. Reinhart enjoys the great spectacle [...] which seems to lead the infinite richness of the phenomena inexorably back to a simplest unity, where it is said that in the beginning there was power or something - again an allusion to Faust, combined with a swipe at Ludwig Büchner's strength and substance and scientific reductionism .
The names of the main characters already show that such peaks are firmly anchored in the structure of the frame narrative: The crystal researcher, whose name is made up of the words “pure” and “hard”, becomes the object of investigation himself. He gets to do with a female being who is called “Lux, my light” . This light being stimulates him to a kind of phosphorescence in the form of that imprudent sincerity that attacks him at the table. It is penetrated by the hard rays of their satirical arrows , heating up considerably, but retaining its consistency . In the end he is enlightened , now shines himself and calls the time when he did not yet know Lucie, ante lucem, before daybreak . The text analysis of the natural scientist Henrike Hildebrandt leads on the trail of this Concetto . Interpreters of the humanities - the vast majority in number - recognize less the object in the crystal body than the tool of investigation, the light-splitting prism . While Keller lets Reinhart do something completely new, crystallography , a research direction with a future, they see him repeating those ancient experiments whose interpretation by Newton once prompted Goethe's polemics. At the end of this trail he is discovered as a Newtonian converted to Goetheanism . There is no reference in the text to such a reversal. Reinhart follows Goethe's call to "Friends flee the dark chamber", but this does not turn the declared despiser of cults into a follower of the theory of colors , the signature of the Goethe cult. In short: Keller's ironic defense against the arrogance of his equal natural science does not cross the line, does not revert to the arrogance of the poet, who demands unrestricted interpretative sovereignty for himself and his followers in the field of human and moral issues. At the end of the epiphany , Reinhart remains what he was at the beginning, researcher, more seeker of truth than owner of truth, committed to empiricism . This emerges from a remark he makes in the final chapter.
Darwin in epiphany
What does the mention of the law of natural selection at the “epic entrance” of the epiphany mean? "Why are we reminded of Darwin of all people, perhaps the most momentous scientific work of the 19th century, although it was not yet known at the time of the incident?"
As the Lessing passage shows, Reinhart is a bearer of hope for the author, a natural scientist as he should be: someone who sticks to the facts, even if - as in the Regine story - they run counter to his beautiful theory; not an ideological propagandist, free of expert airs, but when it comes down to it, knowledgeable about nature and present with advice and action. For example, on the walk in the woods, when he gives Lucie to hold the snake that had been attacked by a cancer ("Just hold on tight with both hands, it's not a poisonous snake!") . Lucie overcomes her shyness, the little rescue adventure makes her happy ("how glad I am that I learned to hold the creature in my hands!") .
- “Yes,” replied Reinhart, “we are delighted to be able to protect the individual for the moment in the general war of extermination, as far as our power and mood extend, while we greedily eat.” [...]
Jürgen Rothenberg, who reads Keller's epitome as an anti-Darwinist polemic , quotes the comment, but leaves it out while we are greedily eating . Kaiser complains about this and argues against it that "Reinhart's last word on the snake adventure is Darwinian." The remark exactly marks the fault line between the two cultures. Through them the natural scientist again reveals his lack of life. He appeared as a lecturer, as a distanced theorist, as a statuary authority and suddenly presented a comprehensive interpretation of nature; it lacks “the slightest undertone of an emotional perception of what is happening. Rather, the situation is X-rayed like a flash, its living surface, its breathing skin, so to speak, penetrated and skeletonized into a deadly world of predators ”. This contradicts what Reinhart says further as he watches as the freed snake slips along the path through the grass:
- [...] "But you see, this time the creature seems to be grateful and to escort us!"
Reinhart knows that Lucie can take the truth. But now it seems to him as if he had put too much of it on her by thinking out loud. Concerned, he directs her mind back to the friendly, fairytale-like nature of the scene. In this context, the remark about the general war of extermination in nature takes on a different meaning. Her gesture is also not the one that Kaiser implies: Reinhart does not trump, does not use ideological propaganda speech, least of all he speaks as a cynic . It expresses what an attentive observer, who looks at the relationship between man and nature without illusion, goes through the head of such a rescue adventure. His remark also testifies to feeling, namely to that quiet basic mourning without which, according to Keller, there is no real joy. As far as the fault line between the two cultures and the shadowy presence of the new doctrine of descent are concerned, his words also say this: We do well not to forget our animal nature, especially in the exhilaration of happiness above our human grandeur. Darwin expresses himself in the closing words of his second major work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection , whose key messages were known to Keller, in roughly the same sense:
- I have given the evidence to the best of my ability, and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with the sympathy he feels for the lowest, with the benevolence which he does not merely show towards other people, but also extends to the lowest living beings, with his god-like intellect, which has penetrated the movements and constitution of the solar system, but with all these high forces still bears in his body the indelible stamp of his lower origin.
On the subject of literary poetry
Reinhart's invocation of Lessing, the discovery of the Logausch epigram, the allusions to Goethe's Faust ; the examination of Lucie's books of life with mention of a good two dozen work titles on and off the main street from the younger Pliny to Darwin - all of this makes the epitome a learned poem , a literary poem . There are also mythological and biblical allusions, references to characters from fairy tales and legends, as well as the formal traditions that the work continues, Boccaccio's Decamerone and Cervantes' Don Quixote . These - in the broadest sense - figures are not adornment of knowledge, educational ballast, the narrator uses them economically, lets them intervene in the plot, even if not all as dramatically as the Logau epigram at the beginning and the little Goethe song at the end. “If you wanted to ignore the reflexes of cultural and literary history in the epithet , you would not separate an ingredient, but would ruin the work.” Says Klaus Jeziorkowski , who follows some of these references down to their ramifications and further, less obvious ones discovered, for example in Regine Keller's defensive stance against Richard Wagner's Nibelungen poetry. Like Altenauer's “early Wagnerian” glorified image of Germany, Don Correa's astrological fables, Reinhart's thoughtless handling of the epigram and Lucie's young-girl identification with Schiller's Thekla show that the characters in the epiphany “are generally endangered by the fact that they are between them and reality Literature assumes that they act, think, live in literary form, barricade their access to reality through books. You have a book in front of your head ”. Reinhart expresses a related thought after the Colonel shed a light on the reason for Lucie's resistance: “That's how it works,” he said with an imperceptible movement, “if one always speaks in pictures and parables, then one finally understands reality no longer and becomes rude. " Jeziorkowski:
- This poetry tells of the wrong "getting a picture" through literature and reading, of dangerous idealization and of correcting what is wrong. To get an idea of literature, of systems - which are essentially idealistic systems - means missing the world and life; letting go of such constructions leads into the world and life - this never explicitly given “morality” makes the epic poem a model for overcoming classical historicism of the 19th century, a playful victory over it. In a dialectical way, the abolition of the secular historicism compulsion is only possible if Das Sinngedicht presents itself as a literary poem of the purest water, as a fully developed product of historicism.
On the subject of mythology
Nereids, mermaids, nymphs
Keller's method of distinguishing between actuality and history is also evident in his treatment of mythological figures. The name Galatea, originally intended as a title, comes in epigram almost exclusively quote as before, determined to Logau epigram involved. But this quote, refreshed twice, creates a lasting, leitmotif echo. Whenever the text speaks of blushing or laughing, this name echoes from afar. The author-narrator also arranges it in such a way that the female characters have multiple attributes of Nereids , characteristics that the painterly, epic and lyrical tradition ascribes to these beings. One of them is their homely proximity to the water, another is their desire to lure, tease, overwhelm, bewitch, even destroy men. Both together do not result in the mythical sea goddess, but one of her aspects: the mermaid . The bridge customs officer, who combs her long, open hair over the river and looks for boatmen, wears features of the Heineschen Loreley ; also Salome, the beautiful landlord's daughter "zum Waldhorn": like the bridge builder's abandoned lover, she nourishes a deep resentment against the opposite sex, and Lucie explains her favorite mood [...] to despise men and to play with them . In contrast, Reinhart's three heroines are largely free of mermaid and witchcraft, while his man-murdering anti-heroine lives on a cliff above the water. Lucie calls her heroine Quoneschi, a water maid. That such a nymph will one day show the young trophy hunter the master, the narrator prophesies from the case of the pocket watch that the young Thibaut is given:
- The inside of the bowl, however, was even enamelled with a colorful painting; a tiny amphitrite drove in his carriage, drawn by water horses, on the green waves, surrounded by a rose-colored veil, and a white cloud stood on the blue sky. In the foreground there were still tritons and nereids.
With the mention of Amphitrite , the beautiful and famous sister of Galathea (often confusingly similar to her in paintings), the narrator also targets Reinhart, who sees “Galathees in every woman” with his erotic travel guide in his head.
Pygmalion and Galathée
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Nineteenth-century poets and audiences also associated the name Pygmalion with Galathea . In the 10th book of Ovid's Metamorphoses the statue of a woman, which the sculptor creates for lack of a lovable companion and which is brought to life by the goddess Venus at his request , was nameless. It remained so in the retellings and adaptations of this fairy tale for many centuries. Only the age of sensitivity was no longer satisfied with this. Rousseau was probably not the first to give her the name Galathée, familiar from the shepherd's game and the shepherd's novel , in his melodrama Pygmalion , but this name stuck better than others and caught on.
The philosophical interest in the artist-creator Pygmalion and the sensitive participation in his educational work was joined early on by the pleasure of the comic side of the statue miracle. Stage poets and composers of the 19th century recognized it as a grateful material for operettas and comedies in which the sculptor appears as a unlucky fellow, for whom the Galathée, which has come to life of its own, causes all sorts of annoyance. Under these conditions, a stage-appropriate tragedy version of the material was out of the question.
If you Herbert Anton follows Keller has understood however that the comedy batch hang down (or ascended) figure into the tragedy to turn, but by concealing their name and crafts. Anton: “The key to Keller's reception of the Pygmalion story is contained in the Regine novella of the epitome. “In fact, a kind of upside-down statue miracle is taking place there: the diplomat Altenauer, disappointed by the daughters of his social class, chooses noble natural material to create a picture of transfigured German folk tales. But the brilliant conclusion of his educational work fails, the lively Regine falls silent and turns into a monument, cold and lifeless , that mythical hero-woman of whom Lucie speaks. In other narratives and in the framework novella, too, Anton discovers motifs from various traditions from the history of sculptors.
Feminist interpreters go beyond Anton's evidence of mythological parallels and see the Pygmalion tale as the master key to the cycle. According to Ursula Amrein, this fable can be used to describe “the structure of a male creative delusion, in which those killing, animating and incest fantasies are prefigured that accompany the woman's entry into the order of her husband in the epic poem .” The author, who In her text analyzes , she lets herself be guided by Kristeva's deconstructivist reading method and excludes topics such as affection, trust, friendship, love between woman and man, draws the following conclusion: “The woman [...] is not only the object to be animated by Pygmalion. At the same time, it is denied the ability to produce life itself. The man places himself at the origin of life to the exclusion of the woman. He makes himself - like the natural scientist Reinhart - the creator of nature itself by transforming it in the kiss experiment on behalf of the woman. ”If this is meant seriously, then Keller would have invented a figure with Mr. Reinhart that all megalomaniac natural scientists since Frankenstein dwarfed; Which raises the question of whether such an invention does not weigh heavily on its inventor from a feminist point of view. But Amrein justifies Keller and gives him the credit for making the "liberation transfigured appropriation of women into submission linked to violence" transparent. This transparency is due to Keller's ambiguous, picture-puzzle-like spelling, which, as it were, prepares the ground for deconstructivist reading (the results of which are clear). For this reason, in the closing words of her study, Amrein does not place the author of the epithet among the literary epigones , but rather gives him a place among the representatives, or at least forerunners of the postmodern narrative style.
Herbert Anton's thesis was also broadly disputed: Altenauer and Reinhart could not be interpreted as Pygmalion ciphers, nor would Logaus Galathee have anything to do with Rousseau’s Galatée: the shepherdess nymphs of the gallant poets are figures that awaken life and love, with one of the A sculptor's fable independent, tracing back to the ancient Galateia tradition. In view of such disputes, one should remember the sentence that Keller puts into Reinhart's mouth: "If you always speak in pictures and parables, one ultimately no longer understands reality" . That people misunderstand reality, are wrong, with comical or tragic consequences, is part of reality. In this respect, Erwin and Regine stand for real people, their tragic silence past each other is copied from life. Lucie, too, cannot be reduced to any mythological role model, neither to the ancient, nor to the baroque, nor to the Goethean Galathea, that "epitome of perfect beauty that awakens love, but is not touched by love itself." According to Jeziorkowski, "the work around his nerve", one wanted to overlook the fact that the narrator lets a reflection of the Nereus daughter fall proudly on her in the shell car. But without prejudice to such lighting, he primarily portrays them as sober, clever people who strive to clear the reality of life, which has been disguised by all kinds of masks and imaginations. Interpreters could take an example from her, and from Reinhart: Even texts are realities whose access, according to Preisendanz, is blocked by reading in a postulated expectation of meaning - ideas, images, mythologems.
Emergence
Jonas Fränkel , the editor of the first text-critical Keller edition, states: “Among all the books by Gottfried Keller, none has the same long history of origin, none was written in the same short time as Das Sinngedicht. “The long“ incubation period ”of the cycle has always occupied biographers, editors and interpreters.
Manuscripts, letters, notes
The preprint of the cycle - still without Lucie's story - took place from January to May 1881 in five follow-up issues of the Deutsche Rundschau . Keller produced the manuscript for each episode in a race with the typesetter. In the letter accompanying the final delivery, he wrote to the Rundschau editor Julius Rodenberg : “You once asked how the manuscript was made. With the exception of the part in the January issue, it is the first and only writing, while the novellas and the framework were drafted in my head two decades ago and have been my quiet companions on walks and with a glass of wine ever since. Still, I didn't know much about what would become of each of the stories. "
According to Fränkel, the manuscript part of the January issue - it includes the opening chapters up to the first half of Regine - shows "unmistakable features of a copy". A manuscript that was begun in Berlin, but was then left behind, apparently served as the model. Since this is lost, it can no longer be determined with certainty how far the author has rewritten it when copying it. The genesis of the epiphany is therefore largely in the dark.
In the first ten years that Keller carried himself with the Galatea novels, he described the book he had in mind as cheerful and elegant - "a nice little decameron " - and announced its imminent appearance in numerous letters to publishers and friends . But only in exceptional cases did he reveal something about the narrative and structure. With the exception of an early notebook entry, his notes bear little evidence of his plans. If you put the statements in the letter together chronologically, the result for the period from 1855 to 1860 is not the picture of leisurely spinning “with a glass of wine” , but that of agonizing not-getting-from-the-spot, guilty pushing forward and melancholy waiting for inspiration.
Chronology of creation
- In 1851, while working on the Green Heinrich in Berlin, Keller discovered the Logausche epigram and noted it in his notebook as a novella.
- In 1853 he sent his publisher Eduard Vieweg "the beginnings of some novellas" and explained: "Galatea is the main novella and goes through the whole volume, whereas the rest are included in that one."
- In 1855, after Vieweg did not accept his offer, Keller offered the “collection of cheerful and transparent stories” to the publisher Franz Duncker , in whose house he was a welcome guest. He shows him the beginnings of the novellas, which he has recovered from Vieweg with difficulty - this manuscript has also been lost - and receives the urgently needed advance payment and contract. In it he undertakes to deduct penalties from the fee if he does not deliver the manuscript "by mid-November of this year" . Before the deadline had expired, however, he informed Duncker that he had “lost all interest” , put him off for the following January and prepared to leave Berlin.
- 1856-1860. As a freelance writer in Zurich , Keller repeatedly announced the imminent completion of the Galatee to publishers and friends : In 1856, he replied to Duncker's wife Lina, who asked him about the progress of “her” novellas, with a parody of the style of discussion in literary salons : “However, all the marvels that I have 'created' so far are real wipes in comparison to the novels of perfect classicism, which I would ask you to await with a little patience. They will happen next. They are divine, of strict nobility of soul, of endless grace and immersed in the eternal villainy of disdainful infatuation, forget-me-nots and rational silk breeding. She and her uptight sister, who is gawking south, can then roll the dice to which one I should dedicate the 'work' ” […]. A year and a half later,
- In 1858, when there was no longer any question of the penalties, since they had long since exceeded the remaining fee, he resignedly explains to the pen pal: “The novels mainly got stuck because the plan was for them to consist exclusively of love stories and for the time being I had a light mood for the like got lost, while my life here inspired me to do more solid and praiseworthy things. ” The allusion to more praiseworthy things is aimed at Keller's political and journalistic activity .
- In 1860, he tells his friend Freiligrath , who lives far away in London, Logausche epigram and writes: "Furthermore, next time ready [...] two tapes novellas titled, The Galatea '. One of them reads Logau's distich […] and travels to try the thing. Among other things, 7 Christian legends are woven into these novels. ” This refers to the Seven Legends , the first version of which has been on paper since 1857/58.
He put Duncker off again: "Your novellas are drawing to a blissful end and are being worked on for the last time." - 1861–1870, in the first decade of Keller's office as Zurich state clerk , his correspondence lacks any reference to the Galatea project.
- From 1871–1879, Keller had the final version of the Seven Legends and the increased edition of the People of Seldwyla appear step by step at Goeschen Verlag ; after his resignation from office (1876) also the Zurich novellas (preprinted in the Deutsche Rundschau ) and three volumes of the revised Green Heinrich . Duncker, in business difficulty, is disappointed with these publications. When he had to give up his publishing house, Keller found out about it, paid back the advance payment and interest, and thus preserved the friendship of the Berlin couple.
- In 1880, while he was still working on the new version of the Green Heinrich , Keller and Rodenberg agreed to publish the "Duncker Novellas" under the title Das Sinngedicht in the Deutsche Rundschau . He cannot keep the good resolution of only giving up the finished product and is again under time pressure. So the batch for the January issue only reached Rodenberg at the beginning of November 1880.
- In 1881, after completing the preprint, Keller revised the text, taking into account criticism and suggestions from friends and allowing Lucie to tell her life story. The book version will be published in November by Wilhelm Hertz , Berlin, with the year 1882.
Try to explain the long time it was made
- "So little was Keller able to deal with the demoniac of poetry, which reached down into the abyss from which a scornful echo answered his resolutions." Jonas Fränkel
According to Fränkel, the typical transcription errors in the Rundschau print template extend "to about page 80 of our text", i.e. H. to the point where Altenauer asks Regine if she would like to become his wife. Regine's reaction ("She flinched, turned pale and stared at him like a dead person") , her tears and her escape point to the coming calamity. This suggests that the writing came to a standstill because Keller was not clear about the nature and extent of this calamity, and perhaps even shrank from letting the story run tragically at all. Two circumstances, one literary and one biographical, support this assumption.
"Contra Auerbach"
At the beginning of a series of ideas that Keller wrote down in Berlin in 1851, this is found:
- 1. Variations on Logau's epiphany
How do you want white lilies etc.
2. The above novella versus Auerbach.
Karl Reichert described this note as “the crystallization core” of the epithet . The contra was Berthold Auerbach , the author of the then much-read and highly acclaimed Black Forest village stories . Keller had already quoted and commented on one of these stories, Die Frau Professorin , in an essay in 1849 . However, he excluded one figure from the praise: the “miserable Reinhard in the 'Frau Professorin'” .
- Auerbach's Mr. Reinhard lives as an artist in a southern German royal seat. From there he is often drawn to the Black Forest, where he surrenders to a rapturous love of nature, painting and hunting. In the village inn, where he usually stays, he portrays the beautiful landlady Lorle. Painter and model fall in love, and when Reinhard becomes an art professor, he marries the girl. With Lorle he hopes to transplant a piece of nature into the city. But then he is ashamed of his wife's ignorance, who is portrayed as a naive but by no means foolish child of the people. The painter's genius dissolves in self-pity, neglects the young woman and begins to drink. Lorle leaves him and flees back to her home village.
The word of the miserable Reinhard is not only aimed at the character, but also at the clichéd drawing of the figure as the ingenious and torn artist who torments himself with the choice between folk life and educational drives, nature and culture - a wrong alternative for Keller. Where commonplaces took the place of living figures, what was important to Keller could not be achieved, namely to depict the real distance between the less educated and the educated. Artistically, he found himself in a dilemma: On the one hand, he was convinced that large educational differences between lovers could be bridged - he had a specific case in mind. On the other hand, the Regine fabric was reluctant to have a flat happy ending in its entire system.
The confrontation with Auerbach left three traces in the epilogue of 1881: in the story Of a foolish virgin , in Regine , and in the framework itself. Formulated as objections, the three stories say this:
- If a foolish landlady's daughter teams up with an equally foolish gentleman from the city, nothing can come of it. - Keller parodies Auerbach.
- If an educated man marries a strong and intelligent maid, it can go well; but there are dangers lurking. - Keller describes Regine's and Altenauer's happiness as a swaying bridge over the murky flood of false culture, on which one wrong step can have catastrophic consequences.
- An educated man still drives best when he falls in love with an educated woman, especially one like Lucie, whose different education complements his. - Keller lets this educated man be a natural scientist and calls him Reinhart (with a hard t ), thus clearly designing him as a counter-figure to Auerbach's self-pitying art professor Reinhard (with a soft d ).
In order to explain the persistent stagnation in writing, Reichert put forward the thesis that Keller, out of concern that it would spoil it with Auerbach, postponed these objections and temporarily considered filling the Galatea frame with the Seven Legends , a subject that was influential to his Friend and sponsor not mending stuff. Speaking against the intimate intertwining of the "contra Auerbach" narratives with the background story: dissolve Without this and ensure that the project variations to the Logau'schen epigram to throw completely overboard, Keller would hardly the Virgin foolish let alone on Regine can do without .
Jakob Henle and Elise Egloff
Jakob Baechtold , Keller's friend and estate editor of many years, names another reason for the long delay in Regine's continuation . In his Keller biography (1894–1897), Baechtold reports for the first time the specific case that contributed to Keller's conviction of a possible happy relationship between an educated man and “girl from the people”:
The anatomist and physiologist Jakob Henle met the seamstress Elise Egloff during his stay in Zurich (1840–1844) . “They fell in love, and Henle took his Lisette home as his wife at Easter 1846 after many mental struggles and confusions, and after he had trained her in a pension in the Rhineland. Berthold Auerbach turned it into his 'Frau Professorin', which Henle was not very happy about. Elise died as early as 1848. I have no doubt that Gottfried Keller […] had a romantic marriage story in mind for the touching beautiful figure of Regine Henles, but with tender reluctance put the subject aside for decades. "
Keller had met the newlyweds briefly in 1846 in the old Zurich Circle of Friends of Henles. When he visited Henle in Heidelberg two years later, Elise had already died of pulmonary tuberculosis. Keller heard Henle's anthropological lecture and portrayed the esteemed teacher in the Green Heinrich . His relationship with him was, however, much less close than that between Altenauer and the narrator of Regine , but the poet apparently took a similarly warm interest in Elise's fate as his character Reinhart in Regine's. The first, happy half of the Regine novella shows, heavily veiled, the outlines of Henle and Egloff's love affair, as far as Keller could have known them. The second, unfortunate half, on the other hand, was invented by him. This invention - it amounted to the construction of a bourgeois tragedy in the form of a novella - was difficult for him. What exactly inhibited his ingenuity cannot be decided due to a lack of clear self-testimony. This also applies to Baechtold's assumption that Keller's delicacy towards Henle, who was offended by Auerbach's indiscretion, was the reason.
reception
Fellow writers
“In the evening Emilie reads to me the beginning of G. Keller's latest novella 'Das Sinngedicht'. Original, caring, also beautiful and important in detail, but nevertheless strangely composed (romantically arbitrary) and sometimes forced and crude , e.g. For example, the story told by the beautiful young lady about the 'French Horns' daughter. It's not humorous enough and looks almost ugly in the mouth of a young and clever lady. "
- It is noticeable here that a colleague with whom Keller neither exchanged personally nor in writing, reacts to Lucie's first story in a very similar way to her listener Reinhart: The young woman's detailed and somewhat sharp eloquence about the weaknesses of a neighbor and comrade of her gender had initially alienated him and let fear an almost unfeminely critical nature . A few months later, Fontane judged with appreciation, but still concerned:
"Emilie reads me the end of G. Keller's novellas (overall title: Das Sinngedicht). It is very difficult to talk about these short stories. Is it a supreme or at least the finest task to praise something to someone in a clever, unique and constantly spiced up by witty sentences and individual beauties, never falling into the trivial , so that ultimately a feeling of wellbeing as a whole and a thought, an image in detail remains in the soul - is the highest task, so you can not provide high enough these things. There is indeed something Superiores in it, the venture can not just what the ordinary man, not being able to again. But I am not sure whether what has been described are the tasks that one should face. An exact description of real life, which of course also betrays the master in its way , the appearance of real people and their fates, seems to me to be something higher. A real, whole work of art cannot exist without truth, and the arbitrary, the capricious, so charming, so witty, as superior as it may appear, takes a back seat. I know very well that the level of art in these Keller-like things is also very large and that anyone would be very mistaken if he believed he could easily imitate these whims and ideas, on the contrary, all this is and is given to few just hard enough for this too. But it is the difficulty of artifice . And one has to beware of this in art. "
- Conrad Ferdinand Meyer wrote to his compatriot:
“Now that the lines of the epiphany are beginning to close, may I tell you how much I enjoy it? In such a way that wherever a concern arises, it is easily overwhelmed and crushed by this slow and powerful narration and development.
Above 'Regine', there is not a word to be said about it. The ghost story makes you laugh and think. The judicial act of dragging past the 'Baroness' is softened by the baroque. And finally, Don Salvador with his astrological cloak and other qualities, who marries 'a chair', if I am correctly told! The frame rich and heavy. Impossibilities in detail (- which, by the way, one has to admit or admit to every poet, even the greatest, and which one is so happy to do when - as with you - one is compensated by such intense pleasure) - improbabilities in detail are quasi canceled out by the substantial of the whole. Hardly does an 'educated' girl say: 'You hope the devil!', But who would want to do without that? "
- Keller thanked him and replied: "After a known bad habit I still have to protect the so-called Hildeburg from the possibility of the devil's call, resp. bark at the criticism. The girl in question is supposed to be a kind of original who allows herself what others don't. Night ghost visits in young gentlemen's bedrooms are far less likely and yet the backbone of the story. Incidentally, there were women from noble houses among us who, brought up before 1798, presented such originals and, among other things, could curse and whistle like the carters. "
- Keller's pen pal Theodor Storm also combined his praise with criticism:
“In the meantime I received a card from Petersen in Zurich, stating that you have become five years younger than you last met. I should be surprised if it wasn't like that. This rosy and fresh cycle of the new novels, whoever writes it, must thereby gain a good part in addition to the quantity of youth that must be his own. You should be highly praised and thanked for this. So that you can now see how much this comes from my heart, you should also receive your correctly anticipated, and therefore probably just scolding, without further ado. How the hell, Master Gottfried, can such a tender and beautiful poet be able to give us such rawness - yes, just keep pretty still! - to picture as something delightful that a man shows his lover their former husband and brothers in such a hideous, farcical demeanor to increase their festive joy! Here I am not standing with hat in hand and saying: 'Wait, the poet wants to have fun first!' No, dearest friend, you have not thought about that, it has to be found out before the book is published. "
- Keller rejected the criticism: “Unfortunately, the story with the three ragged barons, which annoyed you so much, remains like one of those cursed roof tiles on a house that is haunted. But they overlooked the fact that the bride and the wedding guests have no idea about the matter and Brandolf is an eccentric who can well perform such a comedy and after all takes care of the Hallunken. "
- Paul Heyse admitted doubts about the context and probability to his friend Keller after the preliminary print had been completed. In a much-cited letter to him, Keller referred to the “imperial immediacy of poetry”: [With regard to the psychological motivation] “I believed that, for a change, one could cultivate the short novella in which one sometimes reads between the pages with regard to character psychology has, resp. between the facts what is not there. [...] As far as the improbability is concerned (apart from the greater or lesser bad taste for the time being) it is the same in all these cases. The story with Logau's epithet, Reinhart's departure for the kiss rehearsals, does not occur either. Nobody undertakes this, and yet it plays through several chapters. I secretly call this the imperial immediacy of poetry; H. the right, at any time, even in the age of tailcoats and the railways, to tie in with the parable, the fabulous, a right that, in my opinion, should not be deprived of any cultural changes. "
- Heyse after the publication of the book version:
“The scene in front of the shoemaker's room, when in the midst of the crazy singsong and all the wonderful poverty of the situation, their long-sluggish infatuation suddenly flares up in a bright flame and they kiss without making a fuss, that's so beautiful, like that only you can make it so that now, now that I have read it for the second time, I felt my eyes go over for sheer pleasure. Here I met Levi , who did not know the epiphany yet. He took the loose sheets of paper, opened them at the comfort of his pocket, and came to a perfectly flush place, which he began to read aloud. Then we talked about various other things that I want to spare your modesty. It is also good that you are not present when I preach the gospel to the Gentiles as a travel preacher, and I have recently had the experience that everything has already been converted and that I do not even need to strengthen the weak in faith. You mustn't blame me for the fact that this still amazes me. The world in which your figures breathe is by no means for everyone , a fairy-tale fragrance as it has completely disappeared from the shabby 'now time', surrounds your most tangible figures, and that gold tone shimmers through their flesh, that of Giorgione so irresistible power, that I wonder how the same worthies people at garden Arbor anecdotes refresh, can feel a Herzenszug to your eternal poems. And yet it is so, from which once again it is clear that one can form human nature in the ground, and yet not completely suffocate the heavenly spark that only waits until it is blown at by the right mouth to cheerfully flare up again. "
A philosopher
“Last spring I asked my old mother to read me your epithet - and we both blessed you with all our hearts (also with all our hearts: because we laughed a lot): this honey tasted so pure, fresh and grainy. "
Literary historian
“Every sentence is formed with a sure hand. Everything has an inner necessity, is rich and exhaustive. In addition to such art, almost everything simultaneous appears in the field of German narrative as if by chance. "
“So here the old framework of the novella from the 'Dekameron' has been renewed in a way that even surpasses the classic model in terms of artistic freedom and rigor. Of course, if we look at the question from the point of view of Keller's development, we see a further subjectification of the social framework, a further withdrawal of Keller from the immediate sociality and publicity of his choice of material into the problem of individual life, whereby, of course, with him the social Background also of the individual problems remains alive; the finest individual gradation of love experiences, stages of love between two people, never obscures the visible background that love and marriage are great public affairs of a democratic community. "
“Not a dialectical bracketing, but only a thematic parallel […] can be found between the framework and internal histories. Reinhart and Lucie's mocking or controversial comments on the narratives refer to this, but also the narratives themselves: dissolving in breadth, motifs of trivial romance and rigid human behavioral patterns uncritical, varying without the typical Keller formative power of humorous refraction, they additively side by side without to enter into a relationship of tension with one another or with the framework events, which again and again threatens to fade into the background, but does not necessarily develop from the narratives. This narrative problem arose from Keller's attempt to remove his novellas from contemporary reality. "
A writer today
“Unlike the main storyline, the interspersed novellas leave much hidden. They demand the 'parabolic' part of the 'imperial immediacy of poetry'. Open - hidden; parable - fabulous; 'Moral' didactic - vividly plastic; In Keller's epic poem this structural ambivalence responds to the challenge of using two great European traditions of storytelling to overcome a flat 'realism'. In this way, Keller comes close to the demands that Goethe placed on the didactic poem . In his famous essay on the subject, the following claims can be found: 'All poetry should be instructive but imperceptible; it should make people aware of what it is worth teaching oneself about; he must learn the lessons from it as from life. ' But how should the writer instruct without this instruction being noticeable, how should he draw attention without this becoming uncomfortably clear? This contradiction is artfully addressed and resolved in Keller's epic poem , a didactic poem unparalleled in German literature. "
A today's reader
“Anyone who has their eye on a hot policewoman can take Gottfried Keller's epic poem as an example. In it, Reinhart is supposed to pay bridge tolls to the customs officer's pretty daughter when he tries to cross a bridge. 'Truly, my child!' says Reinhart, 'You are the most beautiful customs officer I have ever seen and I won't give you customs until you've had a little chat with me.' And that's what the good girl does too - no wonder, after all, it's an extremely charming compliment that still draws today: 'You are the most beautiful policewoman ...' Even if the lady doesn't have time to chat, she is flattered feel in any case! "
literature
Text output:
- Gottfried Keller: The epitome. Novellas . Verlag Benteli AG, Bern and Leipzig 1934. (= Volume 11 of the text-critical edition by Jonas Fränkel and Carl Helbling: Gottfried Keller. Complete works . 22 volumes, Bern and Leipzig 1931–1948)
- Gottfried Keller: Seven Legends; The epiphany; Martin Salander . Edited by Domnick Müller. German classic publishing house, Frankfurt a. M. 1991 (= Volume 6 of the edition of Keller's complete works in the Library of German Classics ), ISBN 978-3-618-61740-2
- Gottfried Keller: The epitome . Reclams Universal-Bibliothek Vol. 6139. Ditzingen 1992, ISBN 978-3-15-006193-0
Representations
- Wolfgang Preisendanz : Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" . In: Journal for German Philology , Vol. 82 (1963)
- Karl Reichert: Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" - origin and structure . In: Germanic-Romanic monthly , new series, vol. 14 (1964)
- Henrich Brockhaus: Keller's “epic poem” as reflected in his internal narratives . Bouvier-Verlag, Bonn 1969
- Herbert Anton : Mythological eroticism in Keller's “Seven Legends” and in the “epic poem” . Metzler Verlag bookstore, Stuttgart 1970
- Jürgen Rothenberg: Mysteriously beautiful world. On Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" as an anti-Darwinist polemic . In: Journal for German Philology , Vol. 95 (1976)
- Klaus Jeziorkowski : Literarity and Historicism. Observations on their appearance in the 19th century using the example of Gottfried Keller . Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1979, ISBN 3-533-02858-5
- Ursula Amrein: eye treatment and bridal show. On the discursive logic of the gender difference in Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" . Publishing house Peter Lang, Bern u. a. 1994, ISBN 3-906752-61-5
- Henrike Hildebrandt: The enlightenment of the natural scientist . In: Language and Text in Theory and Empiricism , ed. by Claudia Mauelshagen and Jan Seifert. Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-515-07877-0 ; Google Book (2 pages not shown)
- Gerhard Kaiser : Gottfried Keller. The poetic life . (In it “ The epitome or the choice of women”, pp. 503-577). Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-458-04759-X
- Gerhard Kaiser: Experimenting or storytelling? Two cultures in Gottfried Keller's "epic poem" . In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society, vol. 45/2001; PDF (315 KB) (from July 2, 2014).
- Rainer Würgau: “The crystallographer in Gottfried Keller's epic poem . Christian Heusser as a model for the natural scientist Reinhart ”. In: Monthly Issues for German-Language Literature and Culture , Vol. 107 (2015) No. 2, pp. 179–200.
Web links
text
- The epiphany. ( Digitized and full text in the German text archive )
- The epitome at Zeno.org .
- The epitome in the Gutenberg-DE project
materials
- Gottfried Keller pages of the University of Zurich . Here is the keyword article Das Sinngedicht in Gero von Wilpert's Lexicon of World Literature , as well as Jakob Baechtold's review of the book edition in the NZZ of December 2, 1881.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The number of internal narratives is given differently: there are five from a publishing point of view ( Regine , Die arme Baronin , Die Geisterseher , Don Correa and Die Berlocken have appeared several times separately); six taking into account Lucie's first story ( Of a Foolish Virgin ); seven, if you include Lucie's youth story, which is told without its own heading in the final chapter. According to Hugo Aust, the uncertain count testifies to the intimate interweaving of frames and inserts ( Novelle , Metzler Collection, vol. 256, 4th edition, Stuttgart 2006, p. 121). According to Christine Mielke, Das Sinngedicht is formally a frame cycle, but in terms of content it approaches a novel ( cyclical serial narration. Narrated narration from 1001 nights to TV series . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2006, p. 202).
- ↑ The epitome is quoted from Volume 11 of the critical edition by Jonas Fränkel ( Gottfried Keller. All works , Bern and Leipzig 1934); Kellerscher text always in italics .
- ↑ Complete works ed. by Jonas Fränkel, vol. 11, p. 365.
- ↑ pitch wire
- ↑ "Small Flowers, Small Leaves" .
- ↑ Cf. the anonymous review printed in vol. 6 of the Keller edition of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, p. 949, as well as Paul Heyse's letter to Keller in the Reception section.
- ^ Henrich Brockhaus: Keller's "Sinngedicht" in the mirror of his internal narratives , Bouvier-Verlag, Bonn 1969, p. 4. Brockhaus' monograph offers an excellent research overview (until 1966) on the problem of the internal textual context.
- ↑ Priscilla M. Kramer read it: The Cyclical Method of Composition in Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" , Lancaster Press, New York 1939.
- ↑ Then did John Klein attention when he epigrammatic the structure of the narrative - rapid vicissitudes, mocking punchlines - worked out. ( History of the German novella from Goethe to the present , completed in 1933, published in 1954, 4th expanded edition Wiesbaden 1960, p. 325 ff.)
- ↑ Chapter 6, end and Chapter 13, beginning.
- ↑ So as a blush with a mischievous facial expression in Regine and as a blush with a touching smile in The Poor Baroness .
- ^ Emil Ermatinger: The poetical work of art , Leipzig and Berlin 1921, p. 106 f.
- ^ Emil Ermatinger: Gottfried Kellers Leben , Artemis-Verlag, 8th revised edition, Zurich 1950, p. 527.
- ↑ Gottfried Keller's life , p. 528.
- ↑ Wolfgang Preisendanz: Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" , in: Journal for German Philology , Vol. 82/1963.
- ↑ p. 149.
- ^ So Hellmut Petriconi: "Le Sopha" by Crébillon the Younger and Keller's "Sinngedicht" , in: Romanische Forschungen 62/1950.
- ↑ End of prices p. 131.
- ↑ p. 132.
- ↑ p. 148.
- ↑ p. 149.
- ↑ p. 149 f.
- ^ Keller to Heyse, July 27, 1881; see. also the sections literary poetry and reception.
- ↑ Otto Brahm: News from Gottfried Keller , in: Frankfurter Zeitung , December 7, 1881, (reprinted in part in vol. 6 of the Keller edition of the German Classic Publishing House, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, p. 958).
- ^ Fritz Mauthner: From basement to Zola. Critical essays , Berlin 1887, p. 15.
- ↑ Gottfried Keller's life , p. 530.
- ↑ Karl Reichert: Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" - Origin and Structure , in: Germanisch-Romanische MONTHShefte, New Series Vol. 14/1964, p. 92.
- ↑ So with Peter Sprengel: History of German Literature 1870–1900 , Beck-Verlag, Munich 1998, p. 247.
- ↑ Gerhard Kaiser: Experiment or Tell? Two cultures in Gottfried Keller's epic poem , in: Yearbook of the Schiller Society 45/2001, p. 289.
- ↑ Minima Moralia , No. 122.
- ↑ p. 143.
- ↑ Reinhart's thought, Chapter 6, conclusion.
- ↑ Comment by the author, Chapter 7, beginning.
- ↑ Chapter 6, conclusion.
- ↑ Reinhart's Thoughts, Chapter 7, beginning.
- ↑ See Jürgen Rothenberg: Gottfried Keller. The symbolism and reality of his narration , Winter-Verlag, Heidelberg 1976, p. 147.
- ↑ Lucie's Words, Chapter 12, middle.
- ↑ Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" , p. 143.
- ↑ Chapter 8, conclusion.
- ^ Adolf Muschg: Gottfried Keller . Munich 1977, p. 84.
- ↑ Gunhild Kübler: Feminist literary criticism , in: Femininity or Feminism? , ed. by Claudia Opitz , Weingarten 1984, p. 230.
- ↑ Gunhild Kübler: Tested love. From sewing girl to professor's wife , Artemis-Verlag, Zurich and Munich 1987, p. 14 f.
- ↑ Gunhild Kübler: Feministische Literaturkritik , p. 238. On the other hand, Uta Treder ties in with Muschg's dictum when she claims that Keller is taking revenge on the emancipated Lucie by letting her fall in love with Reinhart ( Von der Hexe zur Hysterikerin. Zur Solidification history of the "eternal feminine" , Bouvier-Verlag, Bonn 1984, p. 97). Other feminist interpreters move away from this: Ursula Amrein explains Muschg's “extremely ambivalent valuation” with a flawed research approach ( eye treatment and bridal show. On the discursive logic of the gender difference in Gottfried Keller's “Sinngedicht” , Verlag Peter Lang, Bern et al. 1994, pp. 10 ff. ); Antje Pedde refreshes the beer table dictum in the title of her study, putting a question mark after it, but does not go beyond Amrein's methodological distancing in the text ( “Great poetry often does not speak of women differently than the beer table ”? and gender course in Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" and "Eugenia" legend , Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2009, p. 22 ff.)
- ↑ Eye treatment and bridal show , p. 13
- ↑ Eye treatment and bridal show , p. 271.
- ↑ Gerhard Kaiser: Experiment or Tell? , P. 297.
- ↑ Experimenting or telling , p. 281. PDF (315 KB) . The study, published in 2001, bears the subtitle Two Cultures in Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" . In it, Kaiser updates his detailed interpretation of the cycle of novels (in: Gottfried Keller. Das Gedichte Leben , 1981, pp. 503-577).
- ↑ More on this in the section “Darwin in a Epiphany ”.
- ↑ Experimenting or storytelling? , P. 295 et passim .
- ↑ Das Gedicht Leben , pp. 505 and 509.
- ↑ Experimenting or storytelling? , P. 280 and p. 284. - Kaiser's drawing largely corresponds to the image of the natural scientist in nineteenth-century novels. See Roslynn D. Haynes: From Faust to Strangelove . Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature , Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 1994.
- ↑ Experimenting or storytelling? , Pp. 279 and 291.
- ^ Renate Helbling: Jakob Christian Heusser (1826–1909). Letters to the family. Zurich 2011.
- ↑ Rainer Würgau: “The crystallographer in Gottfried Keller's epic poem . Christian Heusser as a model for the natural scientist Reinhart ”. In: Monthly Issues for German-Language Literature and Culture , Vol. 107 No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 179–200.
- ↑ Literarity and Historicism , 1979; therein the chapter "On the 'Sinngedicht" (p. 21–113) with the sections “Kellers Lessing” (p. 21–34) and “Lux - Keller's Goethe” (p. 90–103).
- ^ A b Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's entire writings , critically edited by Karl Lachmann , fifth volume, Berlin 1838.
- ↑ p. 22. On the high reputation that Lessing enjoyed with Keller, cf. also Rätus Luck: Gottfried Keller as a literary critic. Francke Verlag, Bern and Munich 1970, pp. 128–34.
- ↑ Literarity and Historicism , therein pp. 149-184 the chapter "Against 'bad literary stories'". On the specific occasion of Reinhart's polemics, see Keller's letter to Hermann Hettner of August 3, 1853, Collected Letters , ed. by Carl Helbling, Bern 1950, vol. 1, p. 373.
- ↑ Chapter 8, 2nd half.
- ↑ Preisendanz, in contrast to Kaiser, takes note of the Lessing passage, cf. the outlook at the end of the article.
- ↑ a b Goethe: "Nature falls silent on torture" ( Maximen und Reflexionen , No. 498). The lockout of light is ridiculed by Goethe in a poem in which it says: "Friends flee the dark chamber" (cf. Herbert Anton : Mythological Erotik in Keller's "Sieben Legenden" and in "Sinngedicht" , Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1970, p. 79).
- ↑ Cf. Faust. A tragedy. # Study room (I) - Poodle scene: Faust, Mephisto .
- ↑ Chapter 9, beginning.
- ↑ Chapter 7, beginning. Lucie threatens here that she will give Reinhart “a guide and a lantern” , so she wants to “ light up ” him.
- ↑ Henrike Hildebrandt: The Enlightenment of the Natural Scientist , in: Language and Text in Theory and Empiricism , ed. by Claudia Mauelshagen and Jan Seifert. Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2001. Hildebrandt analyzes the narrative structure of the epitome and concludes with the confession: “The author, who works both in the natural sciences and in the humanities, enjoys Keller's humor because of her worldview when the narrator who is critical of science is at the 0 level [Main story] the enlightenment of the natural scientist is linked to his development as a poet. "
- ↑ So by Gerhard von Graevenitz: Knowledge and Seeing , in: Knowledge in Literature in the 19th Century , ed. by Friedrich Vollhardt u. a., Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2002, p. 175.
- ↑ Reinhart, history seems Don Correas magnificently to ward off the arrogance to suck the evenly matched Frauengemach BadS (Chapter 10, final). Keller recognizes the second culture, rival of the first, as equal, but defends himself against its arrogance.
- ↑ Preisendanz, p. 130.
- ↑ Mysteriously beautiful world. On Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" as an anti-Darwinist polemic , in: Journal for German Philology , Vol. 95 (1976).
- ↑ Das Gedichte Leben , p. 704, note 1.
- ↑ Experimenting or storytelling? , P. 294.
- ↑ In the end all those who know and are something beyond the question of bread are more or less sad; but who in the end would want to live without this silent basic mourning, without which there is no real joy? Keller to Wilhelm Petersen, April 21, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.1, p. 381.
- ↑ From The old and the new faith by David Friedrich Strauss . More information from Philip Ajouri: Telling after Darwin. The crisis of teleology in literary realism , de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, p. 257.
- ↑ Charles Darwin: Human Descent and Sexual Selection , 3rd Edition, translated by J. Victor Carus. In: Ch. Darwin's collected works, Vol. 5 & 6. E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagshandlung (E. Koch), Stuttgart 1875, end of the 2nd volume.
- ↑ a b Keller describes the Galatea novels in his letter to Hettner of April 16, 1856, Collected Letters , ed. by Carl Helbling, Bern 1952, vol. 1, p. 429.
- ↑ See Henrich Brockhaus: Keller's "Sinngedicht" in the mirror of his internal narratives , p. 168.
- ↑ Literarity and Historicism , p. 103.
- ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski: Literarity and Historicism , pp. 59–66.
- ↑ Chapter 11, middle.
- ↑ Literarity and Historicism , p. 105.
- ↑ Chapter 13, beginning.
- ↑ Literarity and Historicism , p. 107.
- ↑ Keller to Eduard Vieweg , November 5, 1853, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, p. 80.
- ↑ When Reinhart gave Lucie the slip of paper with the epigram instead of the letter of recommendation (5th chapter, end) and when, in spite of her, he recited it by heart (9th chapter, middle).
- ↑ In Eichendorff's role poem Forest Conversation, the sorceress warns the knight with the words: “The men’s deceit and cunning are great, / My heart is broken in pain, / The French horn is wandering here and there, / O flee! You do not know who I am."
- ↑ Cf. Faust. A tragedy. # Witches Kitchen .
- ↑ For the transfer of names cf. Heinrich Dörrie : Pygmalion. An impulse from Ovid and its effect up to the present , Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1974, p. 55 ff.
- ↑ See August Wilhelm Schlegel's poem Pygmalion (1797) and Karl Leberecht Immermann's story The New Pygmalion (1825).
- ↑ So already in a poem Pygmalion by the young Goethe.
- ↑ The first was Victor Massé with Galatée (1852), set to music by Franz von Suppè as the beautiful Galathée (1865). Their London performance inspired William Schwenck Gilbert to do comedies : Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), which in turn paved the way for Shaw's serious conversational play Pygmalion (1913). For the variety of adaptations cf. the article : Pygmalion (mythology) # Re-interpretations of Pygmalion .
- ↑ Herbert Anton: Mythological Erotik in Keller's "Seven Legends" and in "Sinngedicht" , Stuttgart 1970, p. 89.
- ↑ Augenkur and Brautschau , p. 291. The penultimate chapter of the treatise is entitled: “Pygmalion and the Logausche recipe: incest, killing and revival” (pp. 282-314).
- ↑ Eye treatment and bridal show , p. 313 f.
- ↑ Eye treatment and bridal show , p. 282.
- ↑ Eye treatment and bridal show , p. 12.
- ↑ Cf. Anneliese Kuchinke-Bach: Gottfried Keller's meaning poem - Logau's meaning taken literally , in: Euphorion , Vol. 86 (1992), pp. 39-64.
- ^ Cf. Faust II, Classic Walpurgis Night .
- ↑ Heinrich Dörrie: Pygmalion , p. 56. Cf. also by the same author: The beautiful Galatea. A figure on the edge of the Greek myth from an ancient and modern perspective , Ernst Heimeran Verlag, Munich 1968, pp. 58–87.
- ↑ Jonas Fränkel, Ed .: Gottfried Keller. Complete Works , Vol. 11, Bern and Leipzig 1934, p. 383.
- ↑ Keller to Julius Rodenberg, April 8, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, p. 386 f.
- ↑ a b Complete Works , ed.Frankel, Vol. 11, p. 402.
- ↑ Keller to Adolf Exner , December 16, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 2, pp. 279 f.
- ↑ This is what happened through Klaus Jeziorkowski: Poets on their poems: Gottfried Keller , Heimeran Verlag, Munich 1969, pp. 337–396.
- ↑ Keller to Eduard Vieweg, November 5, 1853, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, pp. 80 f.
- ^ Keller to Franz Duncker, September 29, 1855 and November 8, 1855, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, pp. 168–171.
- ↑ Betty Tendering , who was enthusiastic about Italy and with whom Keller fell hopelessly in love in 1855.
- ↑ Keller to Lina Duncker, June 11 or 12, 1856, Collected Letters , Vol. 2, p. 156 f.
- ↑ Keller to Lina Duncker, July 23, 1858, Collected Letters , Vol. 2, p. 174.
- ↑ Keller to Ferdinand Freiligrath, April 22, 1860, Collected Letters , Vol. 1, p. 268.
- ↑ Keller to Franz Duncker, April 24, 1860, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, p. 175.
- ^ Franz Duncker to Keller, September 28, 1878, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, p. 177f.
- ^ Keller to Julius Rodenberg, October 30, 1880, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2, p. 376.
- ↑ According to Karl Reichert, Regine was originally supposed to end happily ( Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" - origin and structure , p. 86).
- ↑ See Walter Morgenthaler u. a. Ed .: Historical-Critical Gottfried Keller Edition , Stroemfeld-Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1998, vol. 23.1, p. 275 and p. 235. - In the commentary it is doubted that the above novella refers to the epithet , cf. P. 18 f.
- ↑ Karl Reichert: Gottfried Keller's "Sinngedicht" - origin and structure , p. 82 ff. See also previous note.
- Jump up ↑ Gottfried Keller: Jeremias Gotthelf , in: Blätter für literary entertainment , Jg. 1849, No. 302; Complete Works Vol. 22 (Bern 1948, edited by Carl Helbling), p. 49.
- ↑ See Jonas Fränkel's comment in Gottfried Keller. Complete Works , Vol. 11, p. 393.
- ^ Karl Reichert: "Meaning poem" - origin and structure , p. 85 f.
- ↑ Reichert: “After Auerbach's laudatory review of the first five Seldwyler novels […] (April 1856) the continuation and publication of the Galatea novellas 'contra Auerbach' was no longer an option. In the second phase of the creation of the work, the later legends therefore became the focus of this conception ”( “ Meaning poem ”- origin and structure , p. 86 f.)
- ↑ Furthermore, Keller was not a fan of literary coterie . His letter to Hermann Hettner of October 18, 1856 shows that his willingness to challenge Auerbach, which was not dampened by his praise, shows: “Meanwhile, my best regards to him [Auerbach]; I am eager to see how he will look at my next novels, as they will wholly or at least change the tone of what he so kindly and genuinely noble praised in the 'People of Seldwyla'. Because I hope gradually to show or to try that I am not only playing on one string. ” ( Gesammelte Briefe , Vol. 1, p. 436).
- ↑ Baechtold, who died in 1897, did not know the Auerbach biography, which was published in 1907, in which Anton Bettelheim opposed this view, which has persisted in the literature on Henle, Egloff and Keller to this day, with valid reasons. According to Bettelheim, Henle did not resent his friend Auerbach The Frau Professor from 1847, but rather a passage in his novel New Life from 1852. Cf. Anton Bettelheim: Berthold Auerbach; the man, his work, his estate . Cotta, Stuttgart 1907, p. 236; PDF (14 MB) .
- ↑ Jakob Baechtold: Gottfried Keller's life. His letters and diaries , vol. 1, Berlin 1894, p. 325.
- ↑ In the first chapter of the fourth volume.
- ↑ Keller and Henle were in different political camps; see. Keller's letter to Wilhelm Baumgartner of January 28, 1849, Collected Letters , Vol. 1, pp. 273–281.
- ↑ Cf. Chapter 8, middle; Complete works (Fränkel), vol. 11, p. 106.
- ↑ Chapter 8, beginning.
- ↑ Keller to Mayer, May 1, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.2., P. 328.
- ↑ Keller to Storm, August 16, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.1, p. 465.
- ^ Heyse to Keller, June 5, 1881.
- ^ Keller to Heyse, July 27, 1881.
- ^ In the appendix to Wilhelm Scherer : History of German Literature , Berlin 1918, p. 630.
- ↑ Quoted from: Georg Lukács: The Entombment of Old Germany. Essays on German literature of the 19th century , Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopädie, Vol. 276, Hamburg 1967, pp. 59 f.
- ↑ Keyword article Das Sinngedicht , in: Kindlers Literaturlexikon im dtv , Munich 1986, Volume 10, pp. 8749 f.
- ^ In: Yearbook of the Schiller Society No. 30. (1986), p. 470.