The cathedral (Gertrud von le Fort)
The cathedral is the last story by Gertrud von le Fort , which was published in 1968 by Ehrenwirth Verlag in Munich.
The Magdeburg orphan Angelika finds a new father.
content
After her mother's death, Angelika feels very lonely and abandoned. Aunt Sophie and Uncle Harro came from the Rhineland especially because they want to take the little girl with them. The couple have longed for a child. Angelika asks her aunt to pray together in the cathedral . So the girl hopes to be a little closer to her mother in the familiar church environment. The aunt does not enter a Protestant church and takes Angelika to one of the Catholic churches in Magdeburg.
Angelika has to overhear at home as the aunt bitterly argues with her uncle about the question of denomination, and indeed about the church in general. The uncle no longer goes to church. There is only one god. As a result, he cannot approve of multiple denominations. Angelika retreats into one of her hiding spots near the apartment, completely confused. There she meets playmate Otto. The boy comforts the girl, but when it comes to the dead mother, he doesn't know what to do next.
The two playmates already have ideas; only whose realization sometimes fails. If Aunt Sophie doesn't go to the cathedral, Otto has to show his playmate the way. That is proving difficult. The approaching evening gets in the way of the children. Ultimately, Uncle Harro looks for and finds the runaways thanks to his agile automobile and picks them up. Not the pious aunt, but Uncle Harro, this opponent of the schism in the church, whom Angelica had considered to be quite unbelieving, leads the orphan on the way to God. The uncle visits the cathedral with Angelika. In prayer, the child finds closeness to the beloved dead mother and suddenly notices: Uncle Harro next to her, who holds his hands over her praying children's hands, is her new father.
shape
After reading it, the reader suspects that the first-person narrator Angelika wrote the text as a teenager or as an adult, because a child is hardly capable of such virtuoso handling of language.
Used edition
- Gertrud von le Fort: The cathedral. Narrative. 52 pages. Franz Ehrenwirth Verlag, Munich 1968
literature
- Nicholas J. Meyerhofer: Gertrud von LeFort (= heads of the 20th century. Vol. 119). Morgenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-371-00376-0 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Meyerhofer, p. 104, entry from 1968