Mr. Budget Council
The Mr. Etatsrat is a novella written in 1881 by Theodor Storm , in which the tragic fate of the children of an official is described.
content
At the center of the plot is the tragic fate of the Sternow family, which consists of their authoritarian head, the title character, and the children Archimedes and Sophie, "Phia". The narrator is a friend and fellow student of Archimedes, who tells a young friend about the events of his "youth". The budget councilor, who holds a position in hydraulic engineering and was responsible for the construction of dikes, is a curious eccentric who mercilessly exploits his children and his assistants, who go by the eloquent name "Beetles", and who fascinates his neighbors with his strange customs how scared. Among other things, he celebrates a kind of “black mass” in his gazebo by playing harmonica at an altar with a skull and leg bones, shouting student songs and getting drunk until he has to be carried to bed by his relatives, or he takes one of his invented cure, the “earth bath”, in which he lets himself be buried in sand. He expects unconditional obedience from his children, without treating them well, supporting them or even loving them in any way. Although he has great mathematical talent, he does not allow his son Archimedes to go to university after high school, but keeps him with him for years as an assistant, so that he wastes many years as a tutor and has to mourn his schoolmates and students as soon as they do Leaving town to start studying. Neither his own requests nor those of his friend, the narrator, can induce the father to let the son go. Only when Käfer (for dubious reasons) campaigns for the son to leave the house does the father agree. He snubs his lonely and melancholy daughter Sophie in front of her friends when she finally found some. Both children perish in their upbringing: Archimedes gets into bad company, drinks and goes into debt. His excessive lifestyle costs him his life: he falls ill and dies. Sophie has lost the last confidante at home with her brother and is impregnated by Käfer. Desperate, she kills herself and the newborn. The father, who outlived his children by a few years, does not seem sad about their death: he neither visits his terminally ill son, nor does he attend his daughter's funeral, which he comments with the words: “But the weather is still pretty nice selected for her last course! "
Biographical background
Storm himself suffered from a father-son conflict: his eldest son, Hans, was an alcoholic, barely passed his medical exam and, as a grown man, was always dependent on his father's support. Storm suffered greatly from his son's problems and, as contemporaries report, also blamed himself, his dispositions and his upbringing. Similar conflicts between a “depraved son” and a strict father are the focus of other novels by Storm, which were written at the same time: In Carsten Curator (1878) and Hans and Heinz Kirch (1882). While in these the fathers are more or less to blame for the misfortune of their sons, in this novella the father is almost exclusively responsible for the misfortune of his son Archimedes.
Impact history
Kafka seems to have taken up motifs from "Der Herr Etatsrat", transformed them and used them for The Metamorphosis (cf. Detering 2000, pp. 349–361).
Primary literature
Theodor Storm: The Mr. Budget Council. In: Theodor Storm: Stories. Edited by Rüdiger Frommholz. Stuttgart: Reclam (1988).
Secondary literature
Heinrich Detering: Entomological Metamorphoses: Kafka as a reader of Storm's "Der Herr Etatsrat". In: Gerd Eversberg, David Jackson u. Eckart Pastor (ed.): Stormlektüren. Festschrift for Karl-Ernst Laage on his 80th birthday. Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann (2000), pp. 349-361.