The carter of death
The Fuhrmann des Todes (original title: Körkarlen , literally: "The Fuhrmann") is a novel by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf . The novel, published in 1912 , recounts a legend from Brittany : the man who is the last to die on New Year's Eve before the New Year begins has to work as the carter of death for a year to free the souls of the dying from their bodies. Against the background of this legend, Selma Lagerlöf describes the boundless, self-sacrificing love of a woman for an unworthy man and the tough battle between good and evil.
action
The novel is set in a small Swedish town at the beginning of the 20th century. Edit, a young social worker in the service of the Salvation Army , is dying on New Year's Eve, seriously ill with tuberculosis . Before her death she would like to see David Holm, one of her protégés, one more time. She has a special relationship with David Holm: David Holm, a violent alcoholic , was the first to come to her newly opened social station a year ago on New Year's Day. Edit had contracted tuberculosis from him. Edit always wanted to help him, but he always rejected her. After all, Edit had felt a deep love for David. When Edit found out that David was married, but that his wife and children had left him to find safety, she persuaded David's wife to return to David. But Edit has taken on serious guilt, as David now treats his wife and children worse than ever and even wants to deliberately infect his children with tuberculosis. Edit now wants to try one last time to fix everything.
Meanwhile, David is sitting with drinking buddies in the cemetery and telling them the gruesome story of the wagoner of death that he once heard from his friend Georges. Georges once tempted David to drink and lead a poor lifestyle, but is said to have died on New Year's Eve last year . David gets into a fight with his cronies, hemorrhages and falls lifeless to the ground. At that moment the church clock strikes midnight, and the cart of death approaches with a terrible creak and creak. Carter is none other than David's old friend Georges. David now has to take over from Georges and serve as the driver of death for a year. Since David refuses, Georges ties him up and throws him on the death cart.
Now Georges and David go to the people who loved David the most and whom he harmed the most: First they drive to the dying Edit. When David learns that Edit loved him, he softens and falls on his knees in front of Edit. Edit can now die in peace, Georges releases her soul from her body.
Then Georges and David drive to a prison where David's younger brother is incarcerated. Seduced by David, he started drinking and committed murder while intoxicated. Now David's brother is dying. He regrets that he can no longer keep the promise he once made to a sick child. David vows to keep the promise for his brother, and so David's brother can also die in peace.
Finally, Georges and David go to see David's wife. She wants to kill herself and the children because she can no longer endure life with David and sees no way out. David feels that the loving spirit of Edits surrounds him and feels love for his children for the first time in his life. At David's request, Georges allows David's soul to return to his body. As atonement for once leading David down the bad road, Georges will serve as the wagoner of death for another year.
David gets up after the fight with his cronies, goes home and looks after his wife and children. He begins by becoming a better person and redressing the wrong he has done. Then he prays the New Year's prayer that he learned from the carter: God, let my soul ripen before it is harvested.
meaning
Selma Lagerlöf had been commissioned by the Swedish Association to Combat Tuberculosis to write a treatise on tuberculosis and how to combat it. Selma Lagerlöf herself had already come into contact with tuberculosis: Her older sister Anna and her small child had died of this disease, which was widespread and feared at the time, before the invention of antibiotics . The problem of tuberculosis played an important role in Nils Holgersson . But since Selma Lagerlöf preferred to express herself in a narrative way, the planned tuberculosis treatise became the novel Körkarlen .
Körkarlen is, although only brief - it is barely more than 100 pages - an extremely complex and cleverly constructed novel. The basic concept is very clever: although the novel takes place on New Year's Eve in just a few minutes, it encompasses a broad perspective.
The original concern can still be found in the novel, because it contains references to the fight against tuberculosis, albeit cleverly integrated into the plot. In addition, Selma Lagerlöf took up concrete, current social grievances (alcoholism, domestic violence) more clearly here than in her earlier works. The experiences she made as a young teacher in the small town of Landskrona in southern Sweden with the social impoverishment in the wake of industrialization, she was able to process literarily here. However, Selma Lagerlöf dispenses with socially critical realism and works with allusions and indirect forms of representation. David Holm is also less of a realistic portrait of a de-socialized alcoholic than an embodiment of evil itself.
The haunted story of the wagoner of death appears to be in contradiction to the concrete social problems addressed. In none of Selma Lagerlöf's works does the supernatural play such a dominant role as in Körkarlen . In a letter to Sophie Elkan from the time she was working on Körkarlen , Selma Lagerlöf wrote that in the evening, when she was sitting alone in her room, she sometimes had the feeling that only a thin curtain separates her from the otherworldly world. This feeling is a basic motif of Körkarlen . At the same time, the thought that the soul is trapped in the human body and becomes free after death is a motif that is deeply rooted in Western intellectual history and ultimately goes back to Plato . However, the whole story of the carter can also be read as a nightmare of David during his impotence and thus explained rationally.
Ultimately, Körkarlen is about the struggle of good, embodied by Edit, with evil, embodied by David. Edit's fight with David becomes a confrontation between the feminine and the masculine: As is so often the case with Selma Lagerlöf, it is the love of a woman that redeems the man.
expenditure
Swedish
German
Film adaptations
The novel was filmed a total of three times. Despite its age, the film adaptation of the same name , directed by Victor Sjöström , who also played the leading role, is probably the best known. The silent film classic from 1921 was voted the greatest Swedish film of all time by critics in 2012. During the production of the film, Sjöström was also advised by Lagerlöf. In 1939 Julien Duvivier made a second film adaptation in France under the title La charrette fantôme . The so far last film adaptation of Fuhrmann des Todes directed by Arne Mattsson was released in Sweden in 1958.
literature
- Vivi Edström, Selma Lagerlöf , Stockholm 1991