The victim death
The Death of the Victim is a three-act play by August von Kotzebue , published as a book in 1798. The author considered it one of his best and most interesting plays. The premiere took place in Berlin as early as 1796. Translations into Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and modern Greek were available by 1805.
action
Robert Maxwell got into financial hardship through no fault of his own. His household dissolves, only one servant has remained loyal. His wife, son and old blind mother are starving. He refuses the help of his old friend Malwyn, his wife's great childhood sweetheart, as well as many offers to earn money immorally.
Ultimately, hardship and his moral ideas drive him to accept a job in East India . He plans to leave his wife and family in the care of Malwyn, to release his wife from her marriage vows, and to go to East India forever (or at least for a long time). So he would have saved his honor and his family.
His wife Arabella does not want to know about it and considers his moral concepts to be excessive. She is also moral, but she cannot accept her husband's abandonment when help is readily offered. She wants to follow him everywhere, even against his will. Robert then makes a decision: he wants to go to his death - there she cannot follow him because of her son.
Arabella and Malwyn are in the process of devising a ruse to help Robert without him noticing. Then the news arrives that Robert has thrown himself into the Thames. But he can be resuscitated and is adopted by his savior instead of his son, who drowned.
Social issues
In this text, Kotzebue takes up some social issues:
- It describes poverty and the difficulty of finding honest work.
- It shows a multitude of immoral characters who have and can earn money, apparently undisturbed by morality and justice . The protagonist's plight also stems from the fraudulent bankruptcy of a trading partner.
- A Jewish moneylender claims Robert Maxwell to pay the debt. But when he sees what condition Maxwell is in, he tears up the bill and even offers Maxwell money for food. In the midst of immoral Christians, the Jew sets a sign of charity.
Narrative
Kotzebue uses a trick, especially at the beginning, to show how far the protagonists have sunk: The blind old mother believes that the old conditions still prevail. So she sits in a now almost empty room, asking for servants who have long since left, and for goods and services that are now unaffordable.
Kotzebue inserts ambiguities : the mother demands that a servant be dismissed who never reacts to her wishes, Robert Maxwell replies that the servant is gone, along with valuables. This is true, but leads to different interpretations :
- The mother considers the servant's unreliability as the cause, and theft and dismissal as the result.
- The reader / viewer knows that the dismissal and outstanding wages were the cause of the theft and departure.
literature
- August von Kotzebue: The victim death. A play in three acts. Vienna: Johann Baptist Wallishauffer, 1798.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Hans-Gunther Klemm: The Topos of the Good Jew. Observations on the stage character of the Jew in the dramas Schröders, Ifflands and Kotzebues . In: Wolfgang Dietrich, Peter Freimark, Heinz Schreckenberg (eds.): Festgabe for Karl Heinrich Rengstorf on his 70th birthday (= Theokratia. Yearbook of the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum II, 1970–1972). Leiden: EJ Brill 1973, pp. 340-371. Here: p. 342, p. 358.
- ^ Johann Friedrich von Recke , Karl Eduard Napiersky : General writers and scholars lexicon of the provinces of Livonia, Esthland and Courland . Second volume. Mitau: Johann Friedrich Steffenhagen and Son, 1829, p. 517.