The peat bog
Das Torfmoor is a parodistic work by Julius Stinde with an anti-naturalistic tendency, which was published in 1893 by Freund & Jeckel (Carl Freund) in Berlin as a brochure with an illustration on the cover by Edmund Brüning .
The print contains the drama “Das Torfmoor” and fictitious texts about the drama in which Stinde parodies the contemporary literary criticism of naturalism. The writer and dramaturge Jörg Gronius is of the opinion that in a theatrical realization, both the drama and the secondary texts would have to be presented because they form an inseparable unit.
content
The information on the title page, the imprint and the stage directions are:
“ The peat bog Naturalistic family drama in one act (performance prohibited)
With literary contributions by
Einar Drillquist: Author's interrogation, Ola Bagge-Olsen: The ethical significance of peat bog, Rasmussine Tosse, stud. rer. nat .: The female figures of the peat bog, Mads Dosmer: Fr. Nietzsche's philosophy and the peat bog, Gumme Griis: The stage of the peat bog. Berlin, 1893, published by Freund & Jeckel. (Carl Freund)
People .
- Mrs. Quakers
- Leie
- Knude
- Pastor Vaaser
Place of action: A wretched hut on the edge of a wide peat bog interspersed with unfathomable bog holes. Time: Everyday afternoon, four and a half clock Central European clock setting. Weather: initially cloudy, then enlightening, finally evening sunshine. Temperature: 18.5 ° C. Barometer reading: 762.2. Wind: 0.S.0., Later clockwise 0. to ONO
All props must be genuine, i.e. H. to be old and used: the clothes and underwear tolerated quite nicely, to symbolize poverty as vividly as possible. Knude goes barefoot. Leie allows herself the forgivable luxury of Danish wooden shoes. The actress Lys creates the foam at the mouth during the cramps by chewing ordinary house soap. The Quärkersen actress best practices her role during a strong cold, in order to hear the subtle nuances of nature's cough.
When the curtain rises, a heartbreaking smell of carbolic spreads from the stage. (The interior of a hut, poor, dirty, but true to nature. In the background to the right, a bed, the foot facing the viewer. In the background, a window, in front of it a wobbly table, in whose drawer old bread bark smells. View of a peat bog. In the foreground, a door , a chair. Under the bed are turnips, potatoes, and head of cabbage. Bed cover is dirty, but true, infinitely true.) Frau Quärkersen (lies in bed as if dead). Knude and Leie (look in through the window, then come through the door on the left. Knude with a bunch of straw). "
Stinde as a polemicist, satirist and parodist, as a culture-critical fighter with a pen has so completely disappeared from the memory of literary history as if this facet of his production never existed at all. This type of literature makes up a good quarter of his work. The earliest parodies and plays that Stinde wrote for Carl Schultze's Hamburger Vorstadttheater have been lost. The Wagner parody Lohengrün or Elsche by Veerlann is known at least by title . Later he wrote The Victims of Science (1878), The Decameron of the Misunderstood (1881), Berlin Art Criticism with Marginal Glosses by Quidam (1885) and the parodistic colportage novel Emma, the mysterious housemaid (1904), whose tendency (despite all the differences in detail) was directed against the untrue, the extreme, the forced, the violently exaggerated in science and culture, in art and literature. In literature in particular, Stinde, allied with like-minded people in the Allgemeine Deutsche Reimverein , took action against the hardship of Karl Bleibtreus “Revolution of Literature” and its lyrical consequences. Exalted phenomena of literary naturalism were also the target of his derision. The story of Pienchen's Brautfahrt (1891) already contains anti-naturalist polemics. Stinde only lets his resentment against Ibsen , Zola and the whole direction go really freely in the peat bog , of course, in a playful way, by acting in changing linguistic masked costumes. He probably just wanted to treat himself to some relief fun. The respectable reading world seems to have been rather embarrassed and not very amused at the time, with the exception of those in the immediate vicinity of Stinde. Stinde's sister Conradine wrote to Berlin on November 17, 1894 from the rural Lensahn in Ostholstein:
“Fritze wants to read the peat bog, the Duke would have praised it so immensely; it is the best of you and very commendable that you stood up against the others. He even told him a few things about the smell of corpses, etc. "
Two years later, in Wilhelmine Buchholz's memoirs , Stinde takes up the subject again by having Frau Wilhelmine report on a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts .
“Theater was not dear to us. Fritz lent various stages lamps, writing utensils, support clocks and such showpieces to stylishly dress up the scenery, on which the value of the pieces is becoming more and more dependent, and, if a drama still did not go right, received a few package seats so that the house was in the newspapers appeared filled because, where there are pigeons, pigeons fly to We also had to make decoys
for the ghosts , once, but never again. There is a woman who has an asylum built in memory of her deceased husband, a chamberlain, but because he was drinking and singing, she reproaches herself for lying to herself and the people with this monument, and she accuses the pastor of having him did not get up and away with her when she ran away from her husband and knocked in the preaching room. Nice wife! Her son Oswald is a painter who comes from Paris and finds it too gray in his Norwegian home, which is why he drinks champagne with his daughter's carpenter Engstrand and does beautiful things. The mother knows that her son's girl is a half-sister of the deceased chamberlain and says: Just one more bottle, life is short and my son wants to have fun, that's what he got from his father. Such inherited tendencies are ghosts. Nice mother. Then the asylum burns down, Oswald helps extinguish the fire, the exertion pays him the rest, he becomes awkward on the stage - from his father - and demands the sun from his mother. Since she cannot get close to the so-called star of the day, she gives him the morphine powder, which he saved because a doctor had told him that he would perish from softening of the brain, that would be his father's inheritance. We were relieved when it was over, so the play had frightened and tormented us without our understanding why? To teach the audience that children can never be too careful when selecting their parents? - "What kind of cardboard head would Oswald have become if he had the pastor for his father?" Asked Uncle Fritz, but there was no detailed answer, since the memory did not want to linger on the piece, which we often do, especially after Wilhelm Tell in the playhouse, indulging in repetition and repetition until past midnight. And the Maid of Orleans with Lindner. Oh how beautiful. And how well one became afterwards.
[...]
Then my husband asked, "Doctor Zehner, is it really the same with the inheritance of brain softening, as in the piece?" if it weren't for that, it's miserable as a drama. Do you think Oswald's father would have been a dutiful forester who eagerly pursued game and wood thieves and acquired lung disease on the nightly forays to which he finally succumbed, Oswald inherits the tendency to lung disease, as a landscape painter increases the disposition to it by sitting in the open air, catches a cold when the fire is put out and dies of pneumonia on the stage. That would be the same piece, only with a small shift in the cause of the disease, but the undramatic, the petty of the motif, the poor artistic content becomes clear even for those who let themselves be dazzled by skillful scenic detail painting and the characters imagined on the stage half of which belong in an idiot institution. The pastor and the mother as well as the paralytic son "."
expenditure
- Julius Stinde: The peat bog. Naturalistic family drama in 1 act. Centenar reprint of the first and only edition published by Freund & Jeckel in Berlin in 1893. Bargfeld: Luttertaler handshake, 1993 (reprint in Luttertaler handshake 1)
literature
Nikola Roßbach: Julius Stinde: "The peat bog" In: Roßbach, theater about theater. Parody and Modernism 1870-1914 . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 216–226.
Web links
- Text of the drama at "pinsel park"
- Text of the drama in the "Erlanger List"
- Reproduction of the entire work at the Internet Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Julius Stinde: The peat bog . Freund & Jeckel, Berlin 1893, pp. 3-6.
- ^ Letter in the Stinde estate at the Berlin State Library, printed in Family Letters from Ostholstein , Luttertaler Handedruck, Bargfeld 1991, pp. 20–22.
- ^ Julius Stinde: Wilhelmine Buchholz 'Memoirs . Freund & Jeckel, Berlin 1895, pages 217-218.