The ogre

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The Ogre is a novel by the German writer Oskar Loerke , published in 1921. The plot focuses on the main character Martin Wendenich, who is writing the story of his family.

action

The novel The Ogre reflects strongly the problem that prevailed around 1921. The individuality of the people was hardly present at this time. The children almost always took over the professions of their parents and were so strongly influenced by their parents that they could hardly go their own way and develop according to their own will.

The main character of the novel, Martin Wendenich, leaves home because of his father, who suffers from epilepsy and is mentally broken. Like his brother before him, he works as a machinist on a fishing cutter that catches fish in the North Sea to distract himself from his family. But the constant fish killing doesn't get him at all and on the next upcoming trip he takes a break and instead writes down the history of his family.

Grandfather Leonhard Wendenich is one of the few people who think more about their lives. Since he is mentally above the average of his Pomeranian peasant neighbors, he leads his sex out of the peasant existence. But his sublime late love for his daughter-in-law, who is also of a different kind than the neighbors, shows the increasing spirituality of the whole family. Leonhard's son, Andreas Wendenich, is of course completely in the shadow of his father. As already described, his wife is very noble and glorified. Andreas is not up to her. His son Johann is still a child when the strange illness manifests itself in a violent attack. Johann is the mentally troubled father of the protagonist Martin, who was told about at the beginning. In this illness, the child torments waking dreams and feverish dreams in which he sees a terrible figure, an "ogre", who pursues him. The child imagines this ogre in a patch of crumbled mortar on the church wall opposite the house of the Wendenich family, and although the father plastered this place again so that the son can no longer imagine the ogre, the ogre does not disappear, but pursues in a different form the family and especially Johann. As soon as he awakens from these seizures, the disease seems to be gone, but it still rests deep within him. Johann is found unsuitable for the farming profession and is supposed to go to grammar school, but he also has to drop out of school because of new attacks during puberty. Despite the illness and against the advice of his grandfather, Johann married and fathered five children. Martin sees this, although he is his son, as the real fault of his father. But while he is writing his story and this time busy himself with it more intensively than before and tries to analyze his life, he realizes that his origin is not as random and irrational as he always thought. At the end of his notes, the analytical consideration of his life, he sums up the past in a single sentence: There is no disease. The son Martin, like his grandfather Leonhard, now realizes that the sick person is part of his identity. The ogre that haunts the child is a special figure in the world and belongs to it as much as everything else.

Finger constellation

  • Martin Wendenich = protagonist
  • Leonhard Wendenich = grandfather
  • Andreas Wendenich = son of Leonhard Wendenich
  • Johann Wendenich = son of Andreas Wendenich and father of Martin Wendenich

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jan Röhnert: Oskar Loerke In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon 3rd, completely revised edition. 18 volumes. JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , Volume 10, p. 254.
  2. ↑ Article is based on: Jan Röhnert: Oskar Loerke In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon 3rd, completely revised edition. 18 volumes. JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , Volume 10, p. 254.