The German from Bayencourt

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Der Deutsche von Bayencourt is a historical novel by Adam Kuckhoff , which was first published in 1937 as a serial in the Kölnische Zeitung and then in the same year as a book by Rowohlt Verlag in Berlin. Adam Kuckhoff had been in contact with the resistance group around Arvid Harnack and Mildred Harnack since 1933 , from which the Rote Kapelle resistance group later emerged. Kuckhoff's first great novel, originally planned as the beginning of a trilogy, can be interpreted as an act of literary resistance: by distributing speeches among several protagonists, critical positions on nationalism, patriotism and war are presented.

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When the First World War broke out, the German-born farmer Bernhard Sommer - a French citizen since 1897 and owner of the "Ferme de la Haye" in Picardy - suddenly got caught between the fronts: many of his fellow citizens lost their trust, some even consider him a traitor. Sommer himself despairs of his duty to be a good Frenchman without actually being able to be a German. When the front approaches and a German patrol seeks refuge on his farm, the situation escalates completely: the soldiers are discovered, Sommer is arrested, sentenced to death by a court martial as a traitor and shot. Meanwhile, Sommers son Marcel fights as a French soldier at the front and kills a German soldier in a trench war in the last scene of the novel. The plot of Der Deutsche von Bayencourt spans the period from late July to early October 1914.

Time criticism

For Kuckhoff, the publication of the novel was an act of resistance - for him it was a matter of “keeping the political awareness of the readers alive and sharpening their eyes”, wrote his wife Greta Kuckhoff looking back at the end of the 1940s. The difference between the “German von Bayencourt” and the front-line or homecoming narratives of other war novels from the Third Reich, which focus on the integration of the individual, is clear: Values ​​such as camaraderie, willingness to make sacrifices or obedience are not conveyed in Kuckhoff's novel. In the end, Bernhard Sommer dies homeless because the multi-layered nature of his biography cannot be reduced to an isolated national identity. As a patriotically thinking person, the protagonist himself appears as naive as many of his new compatriots, while his son Marcel takes the pacifist opposing position in conversations with his father. Finally, the socialist-anarchist counter-position is represented by the day laborer Barnabas, who, from the point of view of the poor proletarians, fundamentally questions concepts such as home and fatherland. The political positions distributed among various people act as a rhetorical stylistic element and as literary camouflage at the same time. The harsh criticism of patriotism is not shared by Sommer himself, but even condemned - it is put up for discussion and communicated to the reader anyway.

Text output

  • Adam Kuckhoff: The German from Bayencourt . Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1937 (first edition).
  • Adam Kuckhoff: The German from Bayencourt. Unpatriotic novel . ebooknews press Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3944953-564 (new edition with afterword).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerrit Lungershausen, World War with Words: War Prose in the Third Reich 1933 to 1940, Heidelberg 2016, p. 254.
  2. ^ Matthias Konzett, Encyclopedia of German Literature, Chicago 2000.
  3. ↑ Greta Kuckhoff, Rote Kapelle, in: Structure. Cultural-political monthly. Berlin 1948, Aufbau-Verlag, 4th year, issue 1, pp. 30–37, here: p. 33.