The Strange Child (Gertrud von le Fort)
The Stranger Child is a story by Gertrud von le Fort , which was published in 1961 by Insel Verlag in Frankfurt am Main .
Von Gläschen's love for SS officer Jeskow is unhappy.
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The action at Groß-Ellersdorf Castle begins around 1900 and ends after the collapse of the Third Reich .
The first-person narrator Charlotte von Nestritz and her cousin Colonel Jeskow von Nestriz withdrew from their lost north-east German homeland to southern Germany and, years after the end of the Second World War, wrote about the life and death of her friend Caritas Freiin von Glas - called Gläschen.
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Jeskow was the first cavalier of Princess Manuela - noble lady from a grand ducal house. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I , however, the cavalier gave preference to glasses at a ball, to the astonishment of the aristocratic ball audience. In contrast to Manuela's wealthy family, their mother was impoverished. That ball audience had waited in vain for the announcement of the apparently due engagement of Jeskow with glasses. At the time, the girl was not interested in a stronger bond. After that early summer ball, the light-footed pursuit of a kitten and its rescue from a thunderstorm was more important to her than the kiss of her lover.
Jeskow goes to war in his blue dragoon uniform and survives it as the only heir of his line. Believing in the stab in the back , he could never accept the German defeat. When the elitist loser returns home unharmed, Gläschen lives in southern Germany. The girl stayed with relatives there during the starvation winter .
During World War II Jeskow takes in the black uniform of the Waffen-SS in the eastern campaign in part and follows commands even when Poland and Jews to be shot without trial. But when a little Jewish girl pleadingly looks at Jeskow during such a wicked action in the Warsaw ghetto , he no longer wants to obey. Soon after " believing the collapse of his leader ", he was shot in the back by his own people in an attack. For Jeskow the war is over. At Groß-Ellersdorf Castle, he is dependent on a wheelchair.
Gläschen returns home from southern Germany with an approximately four-year-old Jewish girl, little Esther. Esther had Gläschen registered as her child and thus saved from the impending deportation . The two come under with Mr. Klitsch, a "fat Nazi ".
Jeskow encounters glasses in the Groß-Ellersdorfer Schlosspark at the same place where she had recovered the soaked kitten as a young girl after the aforementioned ball. The now aged young lady, accompanied by Esther, is still rather light-footed, leans over to the wheelchair and kisses her lover. At the sight of the child, Jeskow thinks of the girl in the ghetto and wishes Esther hated him. But the little one feels drawn to Jeskow. Klitsch knows the SS officer Jeskow von Nestriz from his time in Warsaw and also knows about his ultimate attitude towards the “solution of the Jewish problem”. When Klitsch wanted to have Esther deported as a Jew, Jeskow prevented this with his residual authority as a party member and formerly commanding SS officer. A glass that protects a Jewish woman is shot in the Groß-Ellersdorf palace gardens. None of the locals want to believe the suicide myth. The once so blasé Jeskow takes Esther in and finds consolation in her affection. Together with the first-person narrator and Esther, he evades the Russian army to southern Germany.
Esther's mother survived the war and is going to Tel-Aviv with her daughter .
Groß-Ellersdorf Castle, destroyed in 1945, will in time become a beautiful dream for the two northern Germans waiting in southern Germany.
literature
- Used edition
- The strange child. Narrative. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961.
- Secondary literature
- Nicholas J. Meyerhofer: Gertrud von le Fort . (= Heads of the 20th century. Volume 119). Morgenbuch Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-371-00376-0 , pp. 22-23 and pp. 90-92.
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German authors A - Z. Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 382.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ The name Groß-Ellersdorf was invented. This means both the Majorat Boek on the Müritz and the Polßen estate east of Templin ( Groß-Ellersdorf is Boek and Polßen , see also Meyerhofer, p. 22).
- ↑ One time Jeskow is addressed as Herr Colonel. That would then be SS Standartenführer .