The chosen

First printed in 1951 with an edition of 68 copies

First edition 1951 for the trade

The Chosen One is a 1951 novel by the German writer Thomas Mann , which, according to his diary, was written between January 21, 1948 and October 26, 1950.

background

The novel tells the legend Gregorius or the good sinner by Hartmann von Aue from the 12th century with a different thematic emphasis. Hartmann's Middle High German story, written in verse, probably refers to the French legend Vie du pape Gregoire . The story of the miraculous grace of God and the birth of the blessed Pope Gregory in the late medieval sample collection Gesta Romanorum draws from the same sources .

content

Wiligis and Sibylla

Thomas Mann settles the novel in Flanders - Artois , where the duke and duke Grimald and Baduhenna lead a full life at court. Only the previously unfulfilled desire to have children limits their happiness. When this does come true, Grimald has to accept the death of his wife in childbed. The twins Sibylla and Wiligis, who emerged from this birth, are raised by their father in a ducal manner. Grimald shows a lot of love and pride for his daughter in particular. Both children are extremely beautiful.

The father can hardly defend himself the marriage proposals for his daughter from the royal houses of the surrounding countries, but rejects them all and one, sometimes very gruff. On the deathbed, he places the task of caring for Sibylla in the hands of his son. But the twins, who mostly only spent their time together in close bonds and in a narcissistic self-love, cannot perceive any stranger as worthy of their kind. This mutual narcissism leads to the incest of the two. Sibylla becomes pregnant by her brother.

Full of horror and desperation at what they did, they turn to Ritter Eisengrein, an advisor to their father, about what to do. His advice is firstly to bring Sibylla to the knight's castle for her childbirth, and secondly to send Wiligis on a crusade to the Holy Land to purify his sins. On the way there, before boarding in Marseille, he dies. Sibylla gives birth to a son who is abandoned in a barrel on a boat in the English Channel. Eisengrein's wife, who is also Sibylla's midwife, and Sibylla secretly enclose the child in the barrel with a substantial sum to support the child and a board describing the child's origin as aristocratic, but also as a result of an incest relationship.

The young Gregorius on the island

The child is found by fishermen on a channel island. The abbot of a Cistercian monastery on this island holds his protective hand over the child. He first arranged for the child to be permanently cared for with a fishing family and later took care of the upbringing of the child himself in the convent school, where he acquired thorough knowledge, especially in the areas of ancient scriptures, law and Christian doctrine. The cleverness of the boy baptized Gregorius , his fine nature and his strikingly handsome figure let him come into conflict in adolescence with his foster brother, a rather coarse fellow of almost the same age. Although Gregorius cannot compete with his strength, he is on a par with his concentration and skill, physically and athletically. The brother finally wants to force a test of strength through an argument, but during the fight Gregorius knocks in his nose. When the fisherman's wife, who until then was taken by her biological children as well as by Gregorius to be his real mother, sees her bleeding and permanently damaged son, she can no longer keep her secret and reveals Gregorius' true origins to him screaming : He was just a foundling. - Gregorius overhears this and falls into an identity crisis. The abbot now has to fully explain his origin and the circumstances of his finding on the island and gives him the tablet, which he himself - the abbot - has read very carefully. The young Gregorius now knows about his dreadful ancestry, and nothing can stop him from leaving the island to find the exact roots of his origins on the mainland and to redeem his parents. The gold pieces baked into a bread in his barrel were given to a Jew by the abbot soon after he was found, so that Gregorius's knight's outfit can be purchased with the fortune that had accumulated over the years. The first part ends and Gregorius comes to the European mainland after 17 years with the city of Bruges.

On the mainland

Once there, he receives news of the "Minnekrieg", i. H. the siege of the city of Bruges (Bruges), seat of the Duchess Sibylla, his mother, by Duke Roger of Hochburgund-Arelat, a violent suitor who has been devastating the country for years, in an unconditional urge to get the Duchess as his wife.

Filled with the youthful thirst for action and atonement for his guilt, which consists in his sheer existence, Gregorius defeats the besiegers in a duel and thus frees the Duchess and the country. In spite of this exemption, the Duchy Council urges the Duchess to marry so that such events do not recur. The Duchess agrees and takes her son, the liberator, as husband.

This marriage, from which in turn two daughters arise, lasted a few years until the Duchess was pointed out to the secret of her husband by a curious and talkative maid: In his room alone, Duke Gregorius sobbed over a table. The ruler's hunting trip is soon used to get to the bottom of the matter. Sibylla faints when she recognizes the tablet, which comes from her own hand. Once again, the love she longed for has turned into incest. She is desperate and threatens to die - the Duke is called, who on arrival must find his beloved wife as his own mother. The pain seems bottomless, but Gregorius at least finds the strength to organize the next steps. Sibylla should abdicate and devote himself to caring for the poor and the sick, he wanted to surrender to a life of penance as a hermit.

Penance and papacy

On his hike through the wilderness he comes to a fisherman's house, which at first has nothing to offer him except the fisherman's biting contempt. Only the pity of the fisher's wife enables him to at least spend the night in the shed. The next morning the fisherman takes him by boat to a mighty stone in the middle of a lake and chained him up with an iron. There, on this stone, he is saved from starvation by a wonderful source of food, a kind of nutrient lymph from the core of the earth, which gathers in a rock hollow and feeds him anew every day, like a mother's child on the breast. So he lives and does penance on this rock for another 17 years, getting smaller and wizened, falls into regular hibernation, endures the summer heat until he is finally freed by two Roman envoys:

During his time of penance in Rome, after the death of the previous Pope, rioting and civil war broke out between opposing parties and ultimately led to the church's schism. In this apparently hopeless situation, two high-ranking Roman citizens, a clergyman and a layman, appear the vision of a sacrificial lamb, which gives precise information about a hermit in the far north. - In Flanders, the penitent Gregorius can be found on a stone, and he is the next Pope. Both immediately set off on the journey and finally find Gregorius on the stone with the help of a fisherman. He had offered the travelers a fish for dinner, but in which the key to Gregorius' fetter came to light. This omen, which the fisherman mockingly anticipated at the time with the words “I'll ever get him out of the depths of the wave and see him again, then I will beg you, saint”, moves him to take the Romans across to the stone. The fisherman, who has to assume that he will only find the remains of Gregorius, but also the two ambassadors are now put to a severe test, because instead of the chosen one they only find a stunted being who speaks to them to their astonishment. When asked about its name and origin, the creature answers as prophesied. The cleric is outraged. Please don't make a "bristly animal" pope, the Turks and pagans would "mock the church". Disappointed, the visitors want to leave when they hear the shaggy little animal behind their back say "modestly": "I once studied grammaticam, divinitatem and legem". Now the layman can persuade the reluctant cleric to recognize a higher deed in this encounter. On the boat trip to the mainland, Gregorius is transformed back into his human form.

In Rome, Gregorius is crowned Pope and leads the Church with wisdom and charisma into a new, glamorous phase. A few years later, his mother, aged in the service of the needy, decides to make a pilgrimage to Rome and is received there by Pope Gregorius. At first both pretend not to recognize each other, but in the end mother and son fall into each other's arms. In this last section they also confess that they secretly suspected the identity of the other at their wedding.

interpretation

The central theme of the novel is the fateful- unconscious incest of the protagonists. In this myth, often referred to as Christian Oedipus , incest takes place in two generations. Wiligis and Sibylla fall for each other in their self-love and the resulting son Gregorius marries his mother seventeen years later. The second incest is also reprehensible and avoidable, because the son and mother (see last chapter) suspect the true identity of the other.

The comparison with Oedipus is justified, as Gregorius comes back to his mother just through the search for his roots. But it is precisely at this point, the marriage to his own mother, that another great element of the novel comes into play: guilt . The guilt in the form of self-love that results from low self-esteem. Due to the mutual and irrepressible fascination, mother and son ignore all concerns and precautions.

In addition, the author dealt with the incest of two siblings who were convinced of their common uniqueness at an early stage ( Wälsungenblut ), but at that time subliminally focusing on other problems.

The question remains, however, whether the persons concerned really are morally guilty, or whether they were tempted to imitate Christian guidelines.

Formal strategy of the author

Nesting removes the sensitive issue from Mann's presence. He invents the “spirit of the narrative” that appears right at the beginning, to which we thank a fictional narrator, Clemens the Irish, who is finally allowed to tell the story. In this way, it is particularly easy for a man to make fun of the strict moral standards of this time, as represented primarily by the Catholic Church, but also of the freedom of movement of the nobility. The finding of the future Pope in the form of a marmot is a model of irony and ridicule .

Thomas Mann already used a fictional narrator in the previous novel Doctor Faustus .

evaluation

"For most readers, it will be enough for most readers to feel the ironies of this delightful poem, but probably not for all of them to recognize the seriousness and piety that still stands behind these ironies and that gives them true, high serenity."

- Hermann Hesse : Hermann Hesse - Thomas Mann. Correspondence

literature

• Carsten Bronsema: Thomas Mann's novel "The Chosen One". An investigation into the poetic significance of language, quotation and word formation . (Dissertation, University of Osnabrück), Osnabrück 2005.
• Thomas Mann: The Chosen One. Novel. First edition, Frankfurt a. M .: S. Fischer 1951, DNB 770103537 .
• Thomas Mann: The Chosen One. Fischer (p.), Frankfurt; ISBN 3-596-29426-6 .
• Klaus Makoschey: Source-critical examinations of Thomas Mann's late work. "Joseph the breadwinner", "The law", "The chosen one". Frankfurt am Main 1998 (= Thomas Mann Studies. Volume 17), pp. 123-235.
• Volker Mertens: Gregorius Eremita. A way of life of the nobility at Hartmann von Aue in its problematic and its change in reception. Zurich / Munich 1978.
• Andreas Urs Sommer: Neutralization of religious impositions. On the enlightenment potential of Thomas Mann's novel “The Chosen”. In: Rüdiger Görner (Ed.): Traces of Transcendency. Traces of the transcendent. Religious Motifs in German Literature and Thought . (= Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, School of Advanced Study, Volume 77), Munich 2001, pp. 215-233.
• Ruprecht Wimmer : The very great Pope. Myth and Religion in the Chosen. In: Thomas Mann Yearbook. Volume 11 (1998), pp. 91-107.
• Hans Wysling : Thomas Mann's relationship to the sources. Observations on the "chosen one". In: Paul Scherrer, Hans Wysling: Source-critical studies on the work of Thomas Mann. Bern / Munich 1967 (= Thomas Mann Studies, Volume 1), pp. 258-324.
• Christian Tanzmann: The Chosen One - A Parody of Freud's Oedipus Complex. In: Wirkendes Wort, issue 3, November 2014.

Web links

Wikiversity: Thomas Mann's self-comments on «The Chosen One».  - course materials

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anni Carlsson , Volker Michels (ed.): Hermann Hesse - Thomas Mann. Correspondence . Frankfurt a. M. 1999, ISBN 3-518-41038-5 , pp. 283 (November 8, 1950 to Thomas Mann).