Towards the sun

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Towards the Sun is a story by the German writer Arno Schmidt (1914–1979), which was first published in 1961 in the student magazine specifically , in 1964 in the anthology Kühe in Halbtrauer and in 1987 in the edition of Schmidt's works by Haffmans Verlag (series I, volume 3 , Ländliche Erzählungen pp. 293–2139).

content

Three men, the actuary Fritz Voss ("Friedrich ô Feral"), the poet Peter Landorf and the narrator, a textile dealer who has traveled from the city, are talking by a garden fire in which rubbish and other objects are burned, while their three wives are in the At home with the cosmetic preparations for a festive evening get-together, at which a veterinarian is expected. The women only come out occasionally and are perceived by the men as a nuisance. They drink hard liquor from their pocket bottles, to which they repeatedly encourage each other with the formula “We can still do one thing!”. The main topic of their discussions is the planning of a cross-country march following the course of the sun and the resulting hiking curve to be drawn on a map. Just before the men go into the house for the festive evening, they have to discover that the women have recorded their conversations with a hidden microphone. The men, on the other hand, had hidden a microphone and tape recorder in the house near a mirror and recorded the women's conversations. The narrative ends without describing the mutual unmasking accounts with an epilogue in which the reader is given the task of drawing the hiking curves on a "hundred thousand map", which would result on different days in the course of the year, starting in Bargfeld , if one without distraction and Interruptions at a fixed cruising speed towards the sun.

Themes and motifs

Other topics of conversation are the relationship with women, which becomes more problematic with age, questions of the usefulness and necessity of colportal literature , the advantages that a double could bring to the writer, the use of contemporary symbols, the memory of a Diana scene and the visit of the veterinarian, who had vaccinated not only the cats but also the teddy bear of a neighboring child against distemper , as well as the unusual growth of an acanthus plant near the house for a northern climate . Anecdotally incorporated are the narrator's memories of the wanderings of a pair of lighter lighter in a small town of their youth and the description of the project of transporting a boulder into the garden in winter .

The fire is centrally positioned and functions as a cleansing eater of superfluous things, as a light donor and symbol of the free spirit, but also as a threatening destructive thing, since its smoke can devour whole people.

people

The characters acting and speaking in the story are designed as mixed characters. They are contaminated with various individualities through quotations and allusions.

  • The narrator as a textile merchant who is concerned about an order for military uniforms appears realistic, cold and distanced and critical. His name is not mentioned, but his closeness to the author is indicated by the uniform order that he would like, because Arno Schmidt's brother-in-law Rudi Kiesler acquired his fortune from deliveries of this kind in the USA.
  • Fritz Voß (Friedrich ô Feral) is an actuary. His hobby, the log tables, is something he shares with Arno Schmidt. The name "ô Feral", which a friend and fellow student of Goethe also carried in Leipzig , gave it another dimension. The reference to Goethe is reinforced by a quote that is intended to characterize Fritz Voss as an actuary: "You grin calmly at the fate of thousands". Faust says these words in anger to Mephistopheles when he coldly remarks about Gretchen's suffering in prison. This brings the Friedrich figure closer to Goethean Mephistopheles . The "groats bag" at the top could therefore be interpreted as a variation of a devil's squirrel.
  • The poet Peter Landorf is portrayed as corpulent, thick-lipped and short of breath, he has not yet a single gray hair, he "drinks strategically" and can best present his poems in the "illuminated" (ie alcohol-fueled) state, he loves colportal literature and belongs “to the subtle who loathes technology as passionately as it uses it!” Arno Schmidt also applies the latter characterization to the characters in Kreuder's novels in his review of Ernst Kreuder's novel AGIMOS or Die Weltgehilfen . The poet Ernst Kreuder (1903–1972) can already be recognized in the description of Peter Landorf's external appearance, and this relationship is emphasized even more by Schmidt's self-citation. Another personal background relationship arises from a quote from Schiller , which the poet performs with passion. This Schiller passage is also used by Karl Immermann (1796–1840) in his novel Münchhausen . In Immermann's work, Schiller's words serve to mock the playwright Ernst Raupach (1784–1852), who is portrayed as a leather and shallow bore. This derogatory characterization is thus also transferred to Ernst Kreuder. Ernst Kreuder saw himself belittled by the AGIMOS review and broke off friendly relations with Arno Schmidt.

reception

The first investigations by Der Sonn 'gegen dealt with the mathematical aspects of the narrative and provided formulas and curve drawings that showed solutions to the problem posed by Arno Schmidt in the afterword. Ralf Georg Czapla dealt in his Bonn dissertation (1993) with “Myth, Sex and Dream Play” and other aspects of the narrative. Czapla uncovered the homoerotic tendency hidden in the sun wandering by establishing the relationship with Karl May's “highlands boldly striving towards the sun”, which Arno Schmidt had analyzed in his Karl May study Sitara as May's dream land of the same sex . Furthermore, Czapla tries to trace traces of Egyptian-Greco-Roman mythology in the story, such as the “Ancient Egyptian Festival of Lights” and “Greco-Roman Hades motif”. He derives the title of the story from Emanuel Geibel's wandering song Who really wants to wander in joy and discusses various sun and moon mythologies, including "depth psychological structures" and the "concept of freedom", as used in numerous literary uses of the sun-against-sun motif comes.

In 2011, Ulrich Goerdten drew attention to the life-history references of the story by using the opening scene, in which he recognizes a kind of “Last Judgment”, to emphasize the “final settlement” with Ernst Kreuder and at the same time a “cash fall from a life perspective” as leading motifs Has. In the suffering of monogamous everyday life, the way out is resignedly sought out in the mathematically costumed homoerotic thought game. Goerdten examines the distribution of vowels and diphthongs in the text, which appear in sound formations such as “little paper corpse”, “be an egg”, “Ah-hay: ahoy!” And in the discussions about the “faithful boiler”, its symbolic content “through the diphthong should be secured ”. Goerdten also points out passages in which he recognizes dream elements, details that are absurd in the text like "errant sprinkles" such as the mattress thrown on the garden fire and the "stump" that Friedrich ô Feral "pressed between his fingers in such a way that that the smoke oozed out in at least 5 places ”. According to Goerdten, the narrative has not yet been fully developed and understood and, as with all rural narrations, further investigations are necessary.

literature

  • Berthold Schupper: 'Towards the Sun' - a mathematical-astronomical problem posed by Arno Schmidt . In: Didactics of Mathematics . 20th year, 1992, issue 2, 2nd quarter, pp. 89–111.
  • Wolfgang Müller: Towards the solution - Arno Schmidt's »Wanderkurve« as a first approximation . In: Bargfelder Bote , Liefer 89/90, 1985, pp. 12-23.
  • Ralf Georg Czapla : Solar and lunar myths in Der Sonn 'against . In: Ralf Georg Czapla: Myth, Sex and Dream Game. Arno Schmidt's prose cycle “Cows in Half Mourning” . Igel-Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1993, pp. 88-110.
  • Ulrich Goerdten : More than meets the eye. Comments on Arno Schmidt's story Der Sonn 'gegen… . In: Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidt's "Rural Stories". Six interpretations . Bangert & Metzler, Wiesenbach 2011, pp. 105-136.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bernd Rauschenbach : Brother-in-law Levy . In: Robert Weninger (ed.): Repeated reflections. Eleven essays on the work of Arno Schmidt . Edition Text + Critique, München 2003, pp. 20–34.
  2. ↑ Erich Schmidt : Goethe and ô Feral . In: Goethe-Jahrbuch 9 (1888), p. 242 ff.
  3. ^ Goethe: Works, Hamburg Edition , Volume 3, p. 138
  4. ^ Arno Schmidt: Ländliche Erzählungen , p. 308.
  5. ^ Arno Schmidt; Significant; but . . . In: Bargfelder Edition , Werkgruppe III, Volume 4, pp. 495–500
  6. ^ Karl Immermann: Münchhausen . In: Immermanns Werke , ed. by Robert Boxberger . First part. Hempel, Berlin 1883, p. 29.

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