The wardrobe

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The wardrobe is a story by Thomas Mann from 1899.

content

Albrecht van der Qualen , who the doctors only gave a few months to live, is traveling south on the Berlin - Rome express train . He has neither a clock nor a calendar with him; "He has long since given up the habit of knowing which day of the month, or even which month, even which season one is writing". "Everything has to be in the air."

He gets off at an unknown train station and strolls into the city center. It is "evening [...] in every respect autumn". On the way, van der Qualen “crosses a bridge (…) under which the water rolls, cloudy and sluggish [e]. A long, rotten boat [...] with a man with a long pole rowing at the rear of the boat passes by. Under arc lamps glowing in the fog, "over the black, wet sidewalk" we go to the Hotel zum Braven Mann . A skinny old lady in an “old-fashioned, fancy, black dress” with a “sunken bird's face” and a “moss-like growth” on her forehead, “like a figure by Hoffmann ”, rents him a room, “pitifully bare, with naked white Walls ”.

There he discovered next to "three bright red lacquered cane chairs" that stand out from the wall "like strawberries from whipped cream", in particular a wardrobe , "a square, brown-stained, a little wobbly thing with a simple ornamented crown". It's empty, the gray plucked back wall has come loose at one corner. In the evening, over cognac , he meets a naked little girl, "a figure, a being so lovely" that his heart stands still, with "narrow, delicate arms", "slender legs" and "eyes [...] black and elongated ". In the candlelight it tells him sad stories “without consolation”, stories about lovers walking across the heathland. They rhyme "in such an incomparably sweet and easy way [...], as it happens to us here and there on fever nights half asleep", but end sadly, with a "knife [stab] above the belt [...], for good ones." Establish".

Every evening the little one appears in the closet and talks, but disappears as soon as van der Qualen reaches out to her. Every now and then he forgets himself and then has to wait some time before the girl appears in the closet again. How many days it goes like this remains unanswered, as does the question of whether the seriously ill van der Qualen really got off the train at the time and went into town - or "did not rather stay asleep in his first-class coupé and get off the Berlin express train - Rome was carried over all mountains with tremendous speed ”. Everything has to be in the air.

interpretation

Mysteriousness

A story full of puzzles is the subtitle of the story. And indeed, much remains in the indefinite. The reader is left in the dark about the time of the event, as is van der Qualen, who deliberately traveled without a clock and calendar. The place of the action is also not specified, not even whether the city is “in Germany? [...] in Northern Germany? "Is mentioned. Various allusions, however, refer to Mann's hometown Lübeck , for example when speaking of "a squat wall [...], an old gate with two massive towers" ( Holstentor ) or a "bridge with statues on the railing" ( doll's bridge ). Who the unknown girl in the closet is and where she comes from remains unclear, as does the question of whether van der Qualen is subject to a daydream , feverish fantasies , a near-death experience or simply an intoxication caused by cognac . It even appears uncertain whether the trip to the city and the stay in the hotel itself are real or also part of the vision actually taking place in the train coupé. This corresponds to Albrecht's leitmotif, that everything must be in the air.

Death symbolism

The death is diverse presence in the story from the beginning:

“In the serious and open conversations between two men” that the doctors had with van der Qualen, in his “yellowish complexion” and his “deeply shadowed eyes” and of course also in his speaking name. In the “evening”, in the “autumn” that prevails in the city during the journey, in the misty arc lamps and the black-wet sidewalk, finally in the river (“Look there, he thought, a river; the river”) that the Protagonist crosses and reminds of the Styx , the border to the underworld with the mythical ferryman Charon . The Hoffmannesque landlady, with her bird's face and the “moss-like growth” on her forehead, offers a picture of decay, as does the ailing wardrobe. Even the youthful figure of the girl cannot hide the omnipresence of death, since she brings no consolation from the agony, but leads him to ruin.

Literary role models

The young woman from Dostoyevsky's landlady from 1847 and the ghostly Donna Anna in ETA Hoffmann's story Don Juan are named as models for the mysterious appearance in the wardrobe . Arthur Schopenhauer , whom Mann liked to read at the time, also exerted an influence and made phenomena such as clairvoyance , telepathy and somnambulia integral parts of his philosophy.

Autobiographical

Even The wardrobe contains autobiographical elements: In the room with the strawberry-red cane chairs in front of bare white walls immortalized man about his bachelor pad in the market street 5 in Munich - Schwabing , even a wardrobe, the missing back wall was replaced with a fabric covering, there was. The description of the topography fits in well with the immediate vicinity of Roeckstrasse , where Thomas Mann's widowed mother temporarily lived with her children. He himself also reports that The Wardrobe is the only one of his works in whose creation the cognac mentioned in the story played a certain role.

In the unknown girl in the wardrobe, he first draws the type of woman he prefers: “The girlish and chaste, the bridal and elvenish, the childish and innocent, the narrow and long-legged” (Kurzke) is what attracts the poet. Not only the female figures in Thomas Mann's later work were later to pick up on this type, but his wife Katia in particular is said to have corresponded to it.

filming

In 2009 Michael Blume filmed the story in a short film with Hanna Schygulla in the lead role.

expenditure

  • Thomas Mann: All the stories. Volume 1. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1987, ISBN 3-10-348115-2

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So the memory of his brother Viktor : Viktor Mann: We were five, Frankfurt 1994, pp. 132-134
  2. ↑ Schygulla plays in a short film based on a Mann story . In: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung from August 16, 2009.