Man is good

Man is good is a collection of five stories by Leonhard Frank . Frank advocates radical pacifism .

content

The stories deal in a drastic way with the atrocities of the First World War . The authoritarian, capitalist societies of European nations are repeatedly portrayed as the cause of the war. The storylines are linked as the main characters all end up joining the same protest march for peace.

The father

Robert is a waiter in a hotel restaurant. He saves all his money for his son. When his son was called up at the age of twenty and died in the war, Robert fell into bitterness and indifference until one day the annual meeting of a construction workers' association took place in the hotel. Driven by a sudden inner impulse, Robert steps onto the podium and speaks to the crowd: He condemns the war and makes the audience aware of the extent of suffering and death on the front lines. Then he leads the crowd out into the street and more and more people join the protest march.

The war widow

A young woman desperate that her husband was killed in the war. The usual appeasement formulas such as “Millions of other women feel the same way”, “He fell on the field of honor” or “He died for the fatherland” can no longer comfort her. Therefore, in a grocery store, she clashes with the patriotically minded shopkeeper. She notices the crowd on the street and hears the waiter speaking to the crowd. She expresses her anger at the warmongers, but the waiter tries to make it clear to her and all the audience that everyone is complicit in the war: the people have forgotten love and let themselves be turned into mindless machines, which was what made the war possible. He calls for a strike.

The mother

A mother waits longingly for a letter from her son who is at the front. When the letter arrives, he is already dead. When the news of his death arrives, she runs first in silence, then screaming loudly through the streets to a church where the priest is just thanking God for “having blessed our weapons and with victory crowned “. She shouts “Lie!” And falls down at the altar, the figure of Christ falls into her hands. She leads the congregation out of the church with the figure. A protest march is formed, which joins the waiter's protest march at an intersection.

The lovers

In a morgue, a couple who apparently took their own life with gas suddenly wakes up again. At home, the man awaits a position order. He explains why he has to refuse for reasons of conscience. The couple left the apartment and found themselves in a protesting crowd that was shot at by soldiers. Both of them deliberately oppose the bullets and are back in the morgue the next day.

The war cripples

A medical officer in a crowded field hospital is busy amputating limbs all day. He took leave of absence to agitate against the war at home. He travels in a hospital train towards Berlin and treats soldiers with all kinds of wounds and mental disorders. In the villages through which the train travels, he sees more and more groups of farmers gathering on the streets. The wounded find no work and no recognition in Berlin. Strikes and protest marches are forming again, this time covering the whole country. Nobody stops the masses who, led by Karl Liebknecht , move to a government building. Liebknecht enters the building and appears at a window with the former rulers. The news of the revolution's success spread across the country.

Edition history

The story Der Vater was published in November 1916 under the title Der Kellner in the magazine Die Weiße Blätter, edited by René Schickele . In June 1917, The War Widow appeared in the same place . The whole collection was published as a book in 1917 by Max Rascher Verlag in Zurich in the European Books series . This edition was banned in the German Reich and Austria-Hungary, but was distributed illegally. The book was only published in Germany after the end of the war, in 1919 by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam. For this edition, Frank revised the text, so the Liebknecht's name only appears in the last story from this edition. In 1936 an edition of the Amsterdam Querido Verlag followed and in 1959 Frank revised the text again for the six-volume edition of his complete works in the East Berlin construction publishing house .

reception

In the afterword to the Reclam edition, the East Berlin German scholar Ulrich Dietzel assesses the work from a socialist perspective: He credits Frank's commitment to socialism and his rejection of militarism, but criticizes his radical pacifism: Frank's advocacy of love and brotherhood and his demand that everyone must Looking for complicity in the war in oneself too, Dietzel ultimately considers naive and impracticable.

literature

• Leonhard Frank: People are good. Novellas . Afterword by Ulrich Dietzel. 2nd edition, Reclam, Leipzig 1974 ( RUB 357).