The Golden (Bruno Frank)

The Golden is a story by Bruno Frank that first appeared in June 1921 in the magazine Die neue Rundschau . The first independent publication took place in 1937 in the collection From many years in the German-language exile publisher Querido in Amsterdam .

A young man is sentenced to two years in prison for rape. In prison he endures the harassment of the guard, who ultimately kills a little gold beetle, his only joy. The young man vows to take revenge. Back in freedom, he assaults the guard and almost chokes him to death, but thinks back when he realizes that the guard is a living being like any other and how questionable the distinction between good and bad is.

Note: Numbers in parentheses, for example (5), refer to the 18 chapters of the story.

content

The rape

(1) The young surveyor Johannes Abrecht is out on business on a hot summer day. The scorching heat weighs down on him: “The blood boiled and pressed in the body of the young man.” In a field he saw “a very young thing, but already woman, brown, firm and exciting”. There was flirtation, and driven by long unsatisfied desire, he fell upon the girl, who fiercely resisted. "He no longer knew where he was, not what he was doing, not who he owned."

In prison

(2) Johannes is sentenced to two years in prison for rape. (3) He humbly accepts his punishment “as a just, not too harsh atonement”. He has lost his unloved job, but his dream of a future as a ranching overseas keeps him going. (4) He closes himself off from the other prisoners and suffers from loneliness. (5) He hated his guard, who hates him, but is submissive, as is expected of him, but his composure turns the guard even more against him. One day when he was listening to the birds chirping again with joy, the guard caught him in his little joy and had him moved to another cell.

The golden one

(6) Six months before his release, "his sentence truly began to torment him." Despair and hatred of his "devilish turnkey" mix in his longing for freedom. He longs “for the woman”, for any living being, a dog or a bird: “Only the smallest heart that beats kindly and believingly near him.” (7–8) One evening he discovers a golden beetle on his cot , a living being in the middle of its loneliness! From now on all his love and tenderness is for the little "golden one" he cherishes like the apple of his eye. (10) One day the overseer surprises him, crushes the beetle under his foot and forces Johannes to clean up the remains. (11) “How can a person do that?” He wonders. “Such a person must not live. Such a person pollutes the world! ”And he decides to kill his guardian.

Vengeance and purification

(11–12) After his release, he slowly returns to life. (13) He carefully studies his victim's lifestyle. (14) Before the planned execution of his revenge, he visits the father of the abused girl. It has already been promised, so he withholds his offer of marriage and instead hands over a sum of money. (15–16) Now he proceeds to the long planned deed. He lies in wait for his victim, assaults them and clasps the “throat of evil” with his “marble fists”.

“Suddenly, however, in the midst of the thunder and haze of his vengeance, the great happened to Johannes Abrecht, the divine happened to him. He saw the man below him in his agony weak, unconscious, sinking, moving his two arms. He saw these two short arms begging for help, pleading for mercy, moving with uncertain, pathetic movements, two buttons of a passing being. "

Johannes lets go of him, brings him back to consciousness and leaves him alone. (17) The guard drags himself home. Fear drives him, he will not report the wrongdoer. Unable to do his job, he was transferred to a museum as an overseer, where a joyless life awaited him. (18) John cannot understand what happened to him: "I hated him and wanted to kill him, so he raised his arms and moved like this ..." Like the golden one, like a little child that he once was . “We're all not as separated from each other as we always think, where is the limit? Who wants to measure himself there, to separate and separate and to say: so is this and so is this and this is good and Jen's is bad? "

Emergence

Bruno Frank had already dealt with the topic of “unnameable evil” (13) in 1911 in the novel Das Böse . A raw person tortures a small dog out of sadistic lust. This arouses unspeakable hatred and lust for Rachel in an uninvolved young man. Unable to avenge the tortured creature, however, he judges himself out of desperation. In The Golden , "only" an insect, an even "less significant" creature than a dog, is killed, but the act of killing is not aimed at the beetle, rather the keeper wants it Meet the inmate inside him. He wants to avenge the emotional wound by killing his tormentor, but thinks back at the last moment and thereby regains his inner freedom.

Bruno Frank, who had initially studied law, immediately turned away from this course and received his doctorate with a literary thesis. However, the subject of criminal law and the prison system never left him. In the story Days of the King from 1924, Frederick the Great appoints a Grand Chancellor, whom he entrusts with the drafting of general land law for the Prussian states . In the novella Sixteen Thousand Francs of 1940, the chief of the penal system tried to humanize the penitentiary system until he fled abroad after the Nazis came to power in 1933. In Der Goldene the penitentiary system plays only a minor role, but it becomes clear what power arbitrary officials can exercise in the penal system.

reception

While the novella Das Böse was discussed very critically a decade earlier, mainly because of its unconvincing “punch line”, Franks found “perhaps the most successful, at least the most haunting prose work of the immediate post-war period” also the applause of Thomas Mann . In his 1928 review of the Political Novella , he wrote:

"Who forgets the novella" The Golden One "? I don't; and I think the memory of it ought to ring out all the criticism that is made of the less serious that it offered."

The writer Herbert Günther found in 1930:

“In the novella“ The Golden ”, a beetle gives the prisoner the only joy in life, until brutality and malice also rob him of this consolation, and“ what happened there is not a big event. But this event means everything that is hateful, despicable, despicable on earth. Never has anything lesser, more insignificant happened on earth and never anything greater and evil and more terrifying ”. Schopenhauer, a resident of Bruno Frank, the dark, delicious pearl in the headband of wisdom, as he called it, finds a late pupil and descendant in the blood here. "

In a tribute to Bruno Frank's 50th birthday, Thomas Mann recalls in 1937:

“[...] there was the lucid pain of requiem punches, refined to a noble form; there were the nobly crafted pages, the soul of which is the goodness, the love of this clear but not mystical man of reason and culture for the creature, his poetic sympathy with organic life: the end of the »princess«, the novella »the golden«. "

Erika Mann and Klaus Mann write in their depiction of the German exile "Escape to life" from 1939: "... the artistically perfect novella Der Goldene - one of the dearest of all - was written by the young man ..."

The Weimar Germanist Konrad Paul wrote in 1982 in the afterword to a selection of stories by Bruno Frank: “Regardless of his demand for humane penal execution [...] the story of the surveyor who renounces vigilante justice is an homage to life:“ Welcome evil and good «." Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner judged in 2009:

“In this text, the style of which also reflects the suffering of the previous war, Frank continued, narrative, far more convincingly a motif that was already heard in the 1910 story Das Böse . If the protagonist judges himself there because he is unable to tame his thirst for revenge in any other way in the face of the tortured creature, Johannes Abrecht gains a perspective from the murder attempt that has shaped his existence that allows him to return to life. "

details

Hatred and vengeance

The motives of hatred and vengeance, which are often closely interwoven, are discussed several times in the story The Golden .

The farmer

The father of the abused girl uses all his might to punish the perpetrator, regardless of his daughter's reputation. "Sensible persuasion did not help", nor did Johannes' promise to "make amends" for his mistake and to marry the girl. The reason for the stubborn stubbornness of the farmer is based on his hatred of the land surveying authority: “The farmer had recently been wronged by the land surveying authority in a border dispute, and no offer, much less but any emotional reason, could have prevented him, this unexpected one To savor vengeance. "(2)

The guards

The malicious prison attendant is described as a man whose character is reflected in his external ugliness. He is repugnant to Johannes Abrecht, and the guard, too, “seemed to be filled with active aversion to him”. (5) Several harassments by the guard increase Johannes' disgust until the killing of the only living being that illuminates his solitude arouses in him an unspeakable thirst for revenge. After his release, he is about to kill his enemy when fate comes to his aid. While he is choking him, he realizes that the guard is also a living being, his hatred falls away and he escapes the vicious circle of vengeance: “The guard was once a small child and was there at the moment when he was about to die if he did it again, and for what lies in between, he can’t do anything. He probably does not even know that he is bad and cruel and thinks he is doing what is right. "(18)

Racial hatred

As if casually, Bruno Frank puts words in the mouth of his protagonist that come from the heart of the author after the experience of the First World War and the enmity between France and Germany:

"The guard had taken a prisoner from a pastime, dutifully, that's it." John recognizes: “The best pastime on this earth is hatred. Who doesn't know! The fools of all nations have known this for ages, who fill their dreary leisure by hating and reviling other nations. "(10)

Frank also turned against national hatred when he broached Franco-German reconciliation in his political novella in 1928 .

Good and evil

A “miracle” prevents John from completing his vengeance. In the middle of the act of killing he pauses without understanding why. This why drives him: "What was it?" He asks himself:

“And I, who am I to judge: this is good and this is evil and make me a judge and make me an avenger? I attacked a girl in the field on a hot day, and today I wanted to commit murder. I didn't do it, but what kept me from doing it? A miracle, grace. "

The purified Johannes also asks himself, “Do I now better know my little place in the big plan?” And: “Do I know his? Why was he created like this, he whom I wanted to kill, why does he have this mouth and this chin and this eye, who is he, what is he supposed to do here? He lives and acts and knows nothing about himself and disappears, what was it then? - It was life then, life! Welcome bad and good! "(18)

Real estate

Johannes Abrecht loses his office, but is not so unhappy about it. He did enjoy working in the open air, but office work “was not after his heart”. The narrator reports: “Using the measuring instruments to draw nooks and crannies between petty, jealous quarrels, was not his job.” And further: “Everyone owned the steaming, nourishing earth, it was presumptuous and ridiculous to cut it into pieces and these pieces to be named with numbers and letters. "(3)

Creature

In his loneliness Johannes Abrecht makes friends with the only living being that presents itself to him, “a poor little beetle animal” that people disregard. The little golden one, "that was now his life". He was undecided whether it was possible to “tame an insect, win it and make it a comrade”. But:

“What do we know! We do not know what is going on in the wood fibers of the branch that we break off above the knee, we do not know whether the stone, which a child's arm has thrown, shatters without fate. We don't know anything. We wash the sleep out of our eyes and conduct our business with grimace-like seriousness and heat our bodies with food and hug a woman whose blood warmth we like and who is as foreign to us as trees and stones and animals, and in the evening we lie down deeper dullness. We don't know anything. "(8)

Compassion for all kinds of living beings is a central theme in Bruno Frank's work. Deeply injured by a childhood experience of animal torturers (see Das Böse, Tierquälerei ), he found himself confirmed by Arthur Schopenhauer's ethic of compassion .

In the novella An Adventure in Venice from 1911, a man is sitting on the steps of the Verona arena and meditating on his life when suddenly a brown ground beetle crawls over the back of his hand. "Moved and generally in a very receptive state", he feels pity for the beetle, who had hardly climbed the high ranks on their own, but owed his stay to a "human boy". The desperate and hopeless attempts of the beetle to get back down from these dizzying heights stir the man, and he carries the beetle down the steps and sets it down on the floor of the arena: "Goodbye, you," he said. . and saw, bowed down, the little one rushing across the sand. "

The motif of the “poor little beetle animal” also appears in the poem “Billett am Mittag” from 1914, in which Bruno Frank writes to his lover that he almost trampled a beetle on the way home:

A ray from the east, red Indian light, Broke forward, beloved, when I came from you, And your sweet breath still on my face, In the heart of your gaze mother-of-pearl light, Taking the way home through the cold morning.

And when I pushed my feet blissfully, but a little lame , Indian light colored a beetle that came in the wheel lane, (probably also blissful, also lame), and - thanks to the east! - I didn't step on it. Are you still sleeping

rape

In the novella Die Unbekannte , which appeared as Der Goldene 1921, Frank quotes himself, so to speak. In a letter, the narrator reminds his friend Alexander of the case of “the exemplary young civil servant” he had told him about, a man “who walks across the country on a hot day and assaults a young girl somewhere who works in the grain, she who might have easily surrendered to a request. [...] Afterwards he does not know what happened to him. "The letter writer recalls this incident after he met a stranger, of whom he says:" I too, as they say so strange, were Meaning gone. "

literature

expenditure

• Bruno Frank: The golden one. In: Die neue Rundschau Volume 32, Volume 1, Issue 6, June 1921, pages 603–631.
• The golden one . In: Bruno Frank: From many years. Amsterdam: Querido, 1937, pages 9-50.
• The golden one . In: Bruno Frank: Selected Works. Prose, poetry, plays. With commemorative words by Thomas Mann as an introduction: In memoriam Bruno Frank on the 10th anniversary of his death on June 20, 1955. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957, pages 428–456.

Secondary literature

• Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887-1945). Life and work. Düsseldorf 2009, pages 113-115, 391.
• Klaus Mann : What do you work? Conversation with Bruno Frank. In: The literary world , volume 2, number 29, July 16, 1926, page 1.
• Konrad Paul: Afterword. In: Bruno Frank: The sky of the disappointed. Stories. Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, 1982, pages 381–395, here: 387–388.

swell

• Thomas Mann : Questions and Answers. About own works. Tributes and wreaths: About friends, companions and contemporaries. Afterword by Helmut Koopmann. Frankfurt am Main 1984, pages 367-382 ("Politische Novelle"), 382-386 ([Bruno Frank]).

Web links

• Bruno Frank, Digital Works, Stories

Footnotes

1. ↑ # Frank 1921.3 .
2. ↑ # Frank 1937.2 .
3. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 49–50.
4. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 123.
5. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 290–294.
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 113.
7. ^ # Mann 1984 , p. 369.
8. ↑ # Günther 1930 , page 512.
9. ^ # Mann 1984 , page 385.
10. ^ # Mann, Erika 1991 , page 315.
11. ↑ #Frank 1982.1 , page 387.
12. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 115.
13. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 83.
14. ↑ Bruno Frank # Frank 1911.1 , pp. 155–157.
15. ↑ #Frank 1937.1 , page 376. - The “Thanks to the East” is aimed at the Eastern teaching of Brahmanism , from which Schopenhauer's ethics was influenced.
16. ↑ #Frank 1926.1 , pp. 71-72.