The temple
The little temple is a short story by Werner Bergengruen that appeared in Zurich in 1950. ZDF broadcast a film version on October 15, 1966.
A Russian grandmother looks back wistfully at her unhappy love for a Polish insurgent .
time and place
The grandmother tells an incident from Belarus from the beginning of the 20th century.
shape
The grandmother is the widow of a lieutenant colonel who taught war history in Petersburg during his lifetime . Now the old lady visits her birthplace, the Makarjewskoje estate, and tells the story of her childhood sweetheart to her granddaughter Jelisaveta.
content
The grandmother relates that at the time, shortly before she became engaged to her future husband, she sometimes went for a walk in the estate's park. Her preferred destination was a “wooden summer house, a little white temple in the Greek manner.” One day she found a young, decrepit Polish refugee in it, whom she hid from her parents and the other Russians for three days, cared for and helped to escape. The Polish officer had taken part in the insurrection against Russia . The state of war prevailed in the Belarusian governorate and those who sheltered insurgents were punished. The fugitive called himself Jerome and otherwise remained rather silent. He would have attended foreign universities, he loved Gluck and wanted a free Poland. It is unclear to the narrator how her daring relief efforts at the time could go undetected. The power to disguise, she suspects, must have given her love. She had been naive as a teenager. So she had asked the officer, who would soon have to flee further, for a message in which he was to inform her about his further fate. Of course, such carelessness was out of the question for the experienced insurgent. He couldn't follow his heart. The young Russian woman clung to the three words "follow my heart" - but they spoke of reciprocated love. When she parted, she got a kiss on the mouth, if only in the form of a fleeting touch. She lived on that for years, but had to marry a Russian out of reason. The marriage, which was blessed with children, did not make the narrator happy, but nevertheless satisfied. And so the sum of her life turns out to be philosophical: She is not entirely satisfied with her satisfaction, but who knows, she probably would not have been entirely happy with her happiness either.
literature
- source
- Werner Bergengruen: The temple. Story (= The Little Books of the Ark. 90, ZDB -ID 251917-3 ). Peter Schifferli Verlags AG "Die Arche", Zurich 1950.
- Secondary literature
- Frank-Lothar Kroll (ed.): Word and poetry as a place of refuge in difficult times. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-7861-1816-7 .
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. Biographical and bibliographical concise dictionary based on authors and anonymous works. German authors. A – Z. 4th, completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 50.
Individual evidence
- ^ Kroll (Ed.): Word and poetry as a place of refuge in difficult times. 1996, p. 66.
- ↑ Video Das Tempelchen in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on January 26, 2014. (offline)
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 5
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 6.7
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 41
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 26
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 34
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 44
- ↑ Bergengruen p. 47