The bucket rider

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Der Kübelreiter is a story by Franz Kafka from 1917, the background of which is the extreme war winter of 1917. It should actually be part of the collection of stories A Country Doctor . Kafka decided otherwise, however, and it then appeared in the Christmas supplement of the Prague press in 1921 .

content

This is where “The Bucket Rider” was created in Golden Lane No. 22 in Prague

The narrator laments at the beginning of his hopeless situation, since he has no speck of coal more and will probably freeze. He hopes, however, that the coal dealer will give him some more coal if he comes up with something special. So he rides up to him on a coal bucket, floating up and down the streets.

The dealer would also be inclined to borrow something from the narrator, but his wife holds him back. After several attempts by the narrator to get hold of coal, the woman manages to drive it away with her apron ribbon. The unusual mount, the coal bucket, doesn't help either. The narrator rises and loses himself in the regions of the Ice Mountains, never to be seen again.

Form and language design

Not only in terms of content, but also formally, the bucket rider is permeated by states of suspension. He also hovers between apparently unbelievable events, such as the bucket ride, and descriptions of reality. This creates a surreal image. One could even think of a pure cold delirium. The bucket rider's sudden idea of ​​camels, animals with which one can associate exactly the opposite, namely heat, could refer to a pure dream world.

The opening sentence with the stringing together of seven ellipses (incomplete sentences) encloses the small, material (coal, bucket, stove) and leads to the comprehensive (sky). Heaven is just as ruthlessly inaccessible to the requests of the freezing man as the stove is cold. The bucket rider resolves to portray the supplicant to the point of humiliation, and then he does the same to the coal dealer, but in vain. She thinks it is nothing, she sees nothing and hears nothing, and with this three times "nothing" attests to the bucket rider that it is nothing.

Personality characteristics

The bucket rider
The telling bucket rider is portrayed as a childlike, naive personality. He got caught up in the idea of ​​softening the coal dealer with a certain staging and imagines exactly the desired process. However, the whole thing does not work because there is no direct contact with the coal dealer at all. He even does not manage to break through the shell of ignorance at the coal dealer. The words that he addressed to her at the end, beginning with “You Böse, ...”, testify to great helpless frustration, after there had only been hope.
Failure and failure are represented. One wonders - in the figurative sense - whether no other coal dealer or other fuel is conceivable when it comes to existence? For the bucket rider, in any case, there is only one dream imagination, he cannot adapt to the circumstances of this difficult time.
The coal dealer
He seems rather good-natured, but dumb. He hears hard and is probably ailing. The call of the customers, which he hears vaguely, goes to his heart, but he is a businessman who wants to convey his entire range and prices to his customers. He would have had mercy on the bucket rider. (That means that the conception of the bucket rider would have been almost successful). But the coal merchant is dominated by his wife and she prevents contact between the two, as she probably knows her husband's more indulgent nature.
The coal dealer
She is portrayed as hard-hearted and insidious. The fact that she cannot hear or see the bucket rider is just a pretext. She shooed his "horse" away and made a final movement in the air, so she was very well aware of the supplicant. But she neither wants to recognize his need, nor openly reject him, so she ignores him and makes her husband do the same. She doesn't want to be disturbed when she sits quietly in the heated cellar and warms her back.

Biographical approaches to interpretation

Seen superficially, the story is an examination of the war winter in the year of its creation, 1917, with its extremely harsh climatic conditions.

But the descriptions also have references to literary work. The movement of riding, which is described as floating rising and falling, could represent writing that fills the page and turns the page. One interpretation goes that the search for warming artistic inspiration is meant. That would mean that inspiration is sought in the lowlands (cellar vaults) of the staid normal people. In fact, the people described by Kafka's are mostly simple (often deplorable) people without any intellectual background. In his main job as an insurance lawyer, Kafka often had to deal with such people. His description of the human race in Der Heizer gives intensive insights and the lines of conflict. The woman in this story is portrayed as very negative in the manner described above. Here this can be interpreted as the lack of understanding of the fiancée Felice Bauer at the time for Kafka's writing.

How much Kafka reveals about himself with this story emerges from an entry in his diary on December 5, 1914. He feels separated from his family, maybe from the whole world. "A picture of my existence in this respect gives a useless pole, covered with snow and frost, slightly drilled into the ground at an angle, on a deeply churned up field on the edge of a large plain on a dark winter night." The bucket rider, however, is not found in a wintry, barren field, but he loses himself in the sublime imagination of the ice mountains.

So the bucket rider can stand as an example of a literary existence alien to life, with which Kafka identifies, in contrast to the honest, self-righteous but viable coal merchant couple, who reflect his father's satiated merchant personality.

Quotes

  • [...] I mustn't freeze to death; behind me the merciless stove, in front of me the sky as well; as a result I have to ride hard every now and then and seek help from the coal merchant in the middle.
  • [...] but below my bucket rises, splendid, splendid; Camels, lying low on the ground, rise, shaking themselves under the Fuehrer's stick, no more beautiful.
  • My bucket has all the advantages of a good mount; He has no resilience; he is too light; a woman's apron drives his legs off the floor.

reception

  • Sudau (p. 94/95) explains that the story hovers between tragedy and bizarre, realism and fantasy, between everyday life and the diagnosis of existence. The central symbol of the story is the floating bucket. On the one hand it refers to the lack of coal - existential need - on the other hand to the dwindling down-to-earthness - suitability for reality - of his “desperate rider”.
  • Stach (p. 174) points out the parallel between the final sentence and the end of the story Ein Landarzt . "Naked, exposed to the frost of this unfortunate age, with earthly chariots, unearthly horses, old man I hang around."

expenditure

  • Diaries 1909–1923. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main, ISBN 3-10-038160-2 .
  • All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • The stories. Ed .: Roger Hermes. Original version from Fischer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Prints in lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 444-447.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: Der Kübelreiter  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Raabe: Epilogue and to the texts . In: Franz Kafka: Complete stories. Fischer Verlag, 1970, ISBN 3-436-01062-6 , p. 399
  2. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 441
  3. ^ Ralf Sudau Franz, Kafka: Short prose / stories , Klett Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 94 ff.
  4. ↑ Reiner Stach, Kafka. The years of knowledge. S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5 , p. 174
  5. ↑ Alt p. 620
  6. ↑ Alt p. 442
  7. ^ "Franz Kafka Diaries" u. a. Malcolm Pasley Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag ISBN 3-596-15700-5 p. 705
  8. ↑ Sudau p. 94