The high school graduation day. The story of a youth debt

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The Abituriententag is a 1928 novel by Franz Werfel . The novel is subtitled Story of a Youth Guilt.

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Werfel's novel takes place in an unspecified Austrian provincial town between the two world wars.

There the forty-three-year- old examining magistrate from Vienna , Dr. Ernst Sebastian von Portorosso in 1927, on the day of a class reunion, to interrogate an arrested person who is suspected of having shot the prostitute Klementine Feichtinger in her apartment.

Sebastian is single and lives in a nice apartment. A mistress who emigrated to Argentina may have a child by him. Dodging all requests, he has so far been able to refuse promotions. It is enough for him to be invited to the “Castles of Ex-Austria” as the son of the former supreme judge of the old monarchy.

When the suspect is brought to him, he politely receives him standing, as he always does in these cases. Although Sebastian speaks to him in a friendly way, the man is intimidated and only protests his innocence two or three times. The file that the judge opened reads: "Franz Josef Adler, born on April 17, 1884 in Gablonz in Bohemia." Sebastian is of the same year. And coincidentally he was invited to a class reunion that very evening on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his high school graduation. One of his classmates was called Franz Adler. He is convinced that he is now sitting across from him as a suspect, but he does not reveal himself.

Of the former students who graduated from the Nikolausgymnasium in 1902, only half come to the Adriakeller for the Abitur day. Some have already died or fallen in the war, cannot be found or have withdrawn from the invitation. Sebastian tells of his meeting with Franz Adler. The former classmate is accused of having shot a prostitute. Burda, a former classmate present, said that Adler was in New York and was a genius, to which Sebastian denied, because no seventeen-year-old is a genius. Then you begin to absorb the thought that Adler could be a murderer and eventually become indignant. Even the old history teacher Vojwode, who was invited to a very old age, is appalled by Adler.

When Sebastian arrives at home after the high school graduation, he sits down at his desk and begins to write a kind of life confession.

His father had been President of the Supreme Court during the monarchy. He had divorced his wife shortly after their son was born. She died when Ernst Sebastian was six years old. Since the arrogant father hated failures, he insisted, after his son almost failed in the quinta of the renowned Schottengymnasium in Vienna, that the latter transfer to the Nikolausgymnasium in Prague at the beginning of the sexta, where he was to live with two aunts.

Sebastian was soon not much better off than August Komarek, the worst student of the year, due to his stupid answers, while a certain Robert Fischer was class leader, and Franz Adler was respected as gifted by teachers and classmates Ressl, Burda and Schulhof alike. Sebastian admired this student Adler, who read texts he had written himself to a small group of classmates.

Adler's living conditions were problematic, his mother was a sick, destitute widow who had to stay in bed. His father had committed suicide years ago. His hated uncle, a cloth merchant, wanted only one thing from Franz, namely that he work in his shop to get to know life. Franz, however, wanted to study. Over time, a competitive relationship developed between Franz and Sebastian. In order to disparage Adler and his excellent plays about Friedrich, Sebastian lied that he had already published a poem in a newspaper under a pseudonym. In order to maintain his construct of lies, he copied poems by Justus Frey in an ancient, tattered work in the library of his aunts to pass them off as his own. With this he increased the recognition of his classmates Burda and Schulhof, but Adler was surprised that he was interested in the revolution against Napoleon at all. In order to expand his position, Sebastian initiated the establishment of a dramatic association. On the way to school he raved about performing Die Räuber as the first play and claimed the lead role for himself. Adler then rebuked him: "Be glad that you are allowed to participate at all and wait for the role that you will be assigned." he started a sneering laugh that everyone else, including the teacher, joined. When he moved, Adler began to fight with him, but lost to the stronger one. After that, Adler was so insecure that he failed more and more often even in German and Latin classes. He ended up laughing at himself and losing all self-respect.

Sebastian devised elaborate schedules for his friends to skip school and forged all excuses. Instead of going to school, they went to play billiards or to a restaurant, where they encouraged eagles to drink beer and schnapps, although alcohol actually disdained. Adler, however, had a craving for snacking, through which Sebastian could drive the degradation to extremes. Once in a pastry shop, Sebastian got his rival to kneel on the floor in front of him and ask for a fruit bar. In a nightclub that the truant group regularly visited, the industrialist Fritz Ressl pressed a banknote into the hand of the prostitute Marfa so that she could withdraw with Adler. After a while, Ressl and Sebastian followed them upstairs and opened Marfa's room door: Adler was sitting desperately on the edge of the bed in his underwear. When they accompanied the completely confused eagle through the nocturnal streets, gave him Swedish punch and finally wanted to bring him home somewhat restored, they met Komarek, who had just fetched vegetables from the market. When Komarek saw the situation with Adler, he gave Sebastian the only slap in the face, as in affect, that he had ever received in his life.

Seven weeks before the end of the school year, the class teacher threatened some students, including Adler, with being left sitting. Thereupon Sebastian and Adler sneaked into the staff room after school. While Adler was supposed to be careful that no one came, Sebastian began to forge two out of three “unsatisfactory” in mathematics into “sufficient”. When he was caught by Kio, the class teacher, he spilled too much of the ink ex on the book so that a correction was no longer possible. Although Adler wasn't even there, Sebastian could claim that he hadn't done anything himself, but that it was Adler. Kio had Sebastian sign this statement.

Because of the forgery of documents, a conference of the teaching staff was called. Sebastian persuaded Adler that they would both be expelled from school. Without a high school diploma, they would not have been able to study. To avoid the shame, they planned their joint suicide, lay down in Sebastian's room and put out the flame of the gas light so that the gas could collect in the room. After a while, Sebastian got up and left the room. He thought that he could blame Adler after his suicide, but then he returned, tore open the window and shook Adler awake, because he had a better idea: Adler should flee, take the train to Hamburg and there hired as a cabin boy on a steamer to America. Sebastian stole jewelry from his aunts and persuaded Komarek to help him move them to the Jolowicz fence. From the 800 kroner he received, Adler was able to live for a year and emigrate to America. The recollection ends here.

On Monday morning, examining magistrate Dr. Ernst Sebastian continues the interrogation of Franz Josef Adler. The legal intern Doctor Elsner, who keeps the record, notices how absent-minded the examining magistrate is. Finally, Sebastian sends the intern out and asks the accused whether he still has not recognized him, after all, they went to school together. Sebastian confesses to ruining Adler's life. However, through guilt he also failed himself. In contrition, he asks his forgiveness. When he looks the man in the face again, he suddenly notices that he bears no resemblance to his former classmate, and when he checks the personal details in the file again, he realizes that there was a mix-up.

After the prisoner has been taken away, the judicial officer, Doctor Elsner, returns and reports to the examining magistrate that the police are now on the trail of another suspect. Sebastian then orders the immediate release of Adler. He presented his nightly shorthand to the Rechtspfleger, but he could not decipher the script, even though he was a part-time teacher of shorthand. So the life confession disappears in a drawer on the large judges' table.

characters

  • Ernst Sebastian: examining magistrate, 43-year-old first-person narrator, who, within one night after an interrogation and a class reunion, tells the story of his youthful guilt, the moral and social annihilation of Franz Adler, and writes in shorthand.
  • Franz Joseph Adler or Rätseljosef: Delinquent in the short framework story, who is mistaken for a schoolmate by the examining magistrate.
  • Franz Adler: the humiliated, ridiculed and tormented student who is degraded from the best of his year to the worst and who does not defend himself, but takes on an extremely passive victim role.
  • Kio: Latin teacher, an archetype of the old Austrian civil service.
  • Ressl, Burda, Schulhof: wealthy schoolchildren who let Sebastian trick them into skipping school. Members of a reading group.
  • Komarek: worst student, reflects the Czech majority of the then population in the new Czechoslovak Republic and is named as belonging to the Lumpenproletariat.
  • Doctor Elsner: Legal trainee who further resolves the mix-up and announces that there is another suspect of murder.

History of origin

Franz Werfel wrote the manuscript of the novel Der Abituriententag within a month in 1926, possibly inspired by a meeting with his former classmates Willy Haas and Ernst Deutsch. Kindler's literary dictionary assumes a meeting with Hermann Sudermann in Italy. The descriptions of his hard school days were inspiration. Nevertheless, there is a striking parallel to the characters in the novel in Werfel's biography, because he also moved from Vienna to Prague to the German grammar school in Stephansgasse and suffered from the old school system.

Interpretations

fault

"Not the school milieu, not the aberrations of the youth, no psychological and less pedagogical side views form the real subject of the story, which dares to raise one, no, perhaps the most terrible question of human life: the question of guilt." (Franz Werfel, 1937)

Power and powerlessness

Sebastian and Franz Adler represent power and powerlessness as a pair of opposites. All that remains for them is the possibility of friendship or enmity, union or annihilation. Sebastian turns Adler into a crony who endures all cruelty completely passively. Sebastian carries out the work of destruction "of which he was no longer master". The humiliation is planned in advance step by step, it culminates in the equation of Adler with the absolute nothingness when he wants to “get rid of a dead person”. Komarek puts Adler on the train and disappears from view. But the greater the destruction of a victim, the less chance the prospect of ever being able to free oneself from them becomes. The guilty person atones for his deeds through a failed life. He sees it: “There is no means of salvation other than love against the great virtues of another” (Goethe: Elective Affinities, motto at the beginning of the novel). In the case of the victim Franz Adler - explained the Jewish writer Franz Werfel - he had imagined a Jew, "because this race has the mysterious fate of making others guilty of it, of luring out the cruel and evil in them". Ernst Sebastian does not want to go out into the world, perhaps to meet Franz Adler there, but rather to survive the political revolts of the Czech nationalists as a small investigating judge, which is why he does not want to climb the career ladder.

output

Film adaptations

literature

  • Hartmut Binder : Werfel's youthful activities. “Der Abituriententag” as an autobiographical novel. In: Karlheinz Auckenthaler (Ed.): Franz Werfel. New aspects of his work. (= Acta Germanica. 2). Reprir, Szeged 1992, pp. 99-151.
  • Alexander Schüller: Revolution against the spirit. About the structure of the reversal in Franz Werfels “Der Abituriententag”. In: Ashkenaz. 20, H. 1, 2011, pp. 119-165.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Franz Werfel: Between above and below. Prose, diaries, aphorisms, literary supplements . Edited from the estate by Adolf D. Klarmann. Langen-Müller, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-7844-1562-8 , p. 883.