The 35th of May or Konrad rides in the South Seas
The 35th May or Konrad rides in the South Seas is a children's novel by Erich Kästner , which was published for the first time in 1931. The illustrations were by Walter Trier at the time, and by Horst Lemke in the next editions .
content
Even the title suggests that crazy things will happen on May 35th. The boy Konrad visits his uncle, the pharmacist Ringelhuth, every Thursday. Since Konrad is good at mathematics at school, he should write an essay about the South Seas so that his imagination is stimulated.
Konrad and his uncle meet the roller-skating circus horse Negro Kaballo in Dresden, who was unfortunately dismissed. When Konrad and his uncle are sitting at home with coffee and cake, the horse Negro Kaballo is standing in front of the door.
Inspired by the nephew's idea, the three enter the hall cupboard under the guidance of Negro Kaballo and enter a fantasy world in which the strangest things happen. They pass through a wide variety of countries, including:
the land of milk and honey, where all wishes can be fulfilled, one is deported under a weight of two hundred pounds and where Konrad's former class worst, the big daphne, is now president;
the castle to the great past, with Charlemagne as gatekeeper, in which characters from history come together for the Olympic Games and Uncle Ringelhuth gets into trouble with Napoleon because he takes his seat (without having a ticket for it);
the upside-down world, in which children take over the tasks of adults, while tyrannical adults are sent to a behavior school (Konrad's school friend Babette is ministerial councilor for schools there), which is why Uncle Ringelhuth is initially sent to the "beginners course", but from which he is is freed again by Babette, Konrad and Negro Kaballo;
Elektropolis, the fully automated city where people work for their pleasure, to stay slim, to give someone a gift or to learn (during the stay an electronic collapse occurs that makes the machines go crazy, for example made of leather- and dairy products makes cows alive again);
and finally the longed-for destination, the South Seas. You can get there via the equator, a steel band that holds the globe together. A scrubwoman has to clean this equator regularly so that it does not rust through - and it must not be made rustproof by painting it so that she can keep her job.
Arriving in the South Pacific, the three meet the girl, parsley, who is dyed in a checkerboard pattern (whose father is a tribal chief, but the mother is a typist on a coconut flake farm there) as well as her father Rabenaas, who with the help of his pocket knife, which he usually loads with hot fried apples, even whales (which are known to be mammals and only accidentally live in the water) can scare away. Negro Kaballo meets a gray lady and decides to stay with her and never speak again. Then Ringelhuth and Konrad make their way home again and, with Rabenaas' help, arrive just in time for the uncle to start the night shift in the pharmacy and the nephew to write his essay. The former is still reading this when he visits Konrad's parents. Although they consider him insane, as he freely reports on his experiences, he, the experienced well-traveled, does not care: he knows what he has experienced.
Trivia
In the preface to Emil and the Detectives , Kästner wrote in 1929 that he actually wanted to write a novel about the South Seas and that he only wrote the book about Emil because he no longer knew how many legs a whale would come from the jungle. And if the number of legs is wrong, Chief Rabenaas could never hit him with his baked apple-riddled pocket knife.
expenditure
- Atrium Verlag, Zurich 1931 (with illustrations by Walter Trier)
- Williams Publishing, 33–43. Th., 1948
- The children's book publisher Berlin, East Berlin 1968, 2nd edition 1988, ISBN 3-358-00169-5
- Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1970
- Long-playing record: Pfiffikus BKS 9015, 1976
- dtv paperback, 2004
- Audio cassette: Verlag Oetinger, 2006, or CD: ISBN 3-789-10147-8 .
- May 35 as a comic by Isabel Kreitz . Dressler, Hamburg 2006 (Max and Moritz Prize 2008 for the best German comic for children)
Opera version
A very successful children's opera by the Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu based on Kästner's novel was premiered in 1986 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim . After a rehearsal at the Dresden Semperoper in 1990, a new version was performed at the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater in 1991. The play was performed at the Vienna State Opera in 2001, at the Mainz State Theater in 2007 and at the Freiburg Theater in 2008.