The death row inmate (Ernst Wiechert)
The death row inmate brought together three short anti-war stories by Ernst Wiechert , which were published in Munich in 1934.
action
The First World War on the Franco-German front .
The death row inmate
The first-person narrator mourns the loss of his teacher, Lieutenant Heinrich Georgesohn, who died on October 17, 1918 outside Le Cateau . In 1899, the pupils of a high school in a small town in Memelland had called him a "death candidate". Georgesohn could not or better did not want to assert himself against his rebellious students, had given up the teaching profession and - no longer very young in years - started studying theology.
In 1916 the first-person narrator and three of his former classmates met George's son as non-commissioned officers on the Somme . He is her military superior in the company. When words are exchanged and names, hometown, et cetera have to be mentioned, the teacher, who was once tormented to the core by the newcomers, does not show anything. Although the events on the Memel were 17 years ago, everyone involved is well informed.
The first lieutenant did not use his position in the following two years of war; does not take revenge. On the contrary - the officer prays the Lord's Prayer for one of his fallen, formerly unruly students. Even in the autumn of 1918 death is omnipresent on the Scheldt . Another classmate of the first-person narrator falls, Georgesohn is wounded and dies.
The father
In 1918 the 70-year-old Prussian Colonel Freiherr Agidius - commander of a prison camp - was retired by the doctors against his will. Nobody is waiting at home. The wife died in 1914, the two daughters work in a hospital and the 20-year-old son Baron Erasmus serves as a lieutenant on the Western Front.
While looking through a packet of letters from the pen of his only son, the father comes across a letter from the first year of the war. When the German advance on the Marne had stalled for the first time, Erasmus had addressed the colonel in that letter as "my dear father". Baron Aegidius then put the son in his place. Servants of the fatherland address each other differently - especially in times of war. From then on Erasmus had completely suppressed the personal.
Well, at the beginning of the summer of 1918, the father received an unopened letter back to the son with the note “Missing”. What could the word mean? The veteran, wounded in January 1871 , ponders. Is it trapped, buried or dead? After a lieutenant of an artillery regiment sent the son's sealed diary, the colonel breaks the seal, declares Erasmus to have fallen in front of the servants of the manor house and prays for the supposedly dead person in the hereditary crypt of his estate. Aegidius reads the diary and finds no heroic line.
Fled from captivity and found his way back to his regiment, Lieutenant Erasmus is on home leave. When the vacationer asks the colonel about the diary, the colonel replies that he burned the property of the man who was believed to be dead and ends the conversation with the low address: "My dear son."
La Ferme Morte
Nothing is left of the Ferme morte, the extinct farm. Before the war the French farm stood on a limestone hill. From the train of the first-person narrator, one group after the other is sent into the fire where the farm stood. Few of them, all of their faces powdered with lime, return from the area around the former farm.
"My God", the 19-year-old theology student Bardeleben complains from the waiting group of the first-person narrator about the dead in a funnel. The “cold horror” speaks in his voice. During the subsequent fire attack, a heavy mine hit the shelter. The soldiers are thrown against the wall and “scream, loudly, wordlessly, screaming like animals under a knife.” Bardeleben, hit by a stone in the heart area, dies. He had foreseen its end. Because before the group started working at the former farm, the prospective clergyman gave his Bible to the first-person narrator with the words: "I'm not coming back."
Text output
- Ernst Wiechert: The death row inmate. La Ferme morte. The father. Three stories. (= The small library. 37). Langen-Müller, Munich 1934. (Wilpert / Gühring² 17) (first edition).
- Ernst Wiechert: The death row inmate. Three stories. (The death row inmate. The father. La Ferme Morte) Verlag Kurt Desch, Munich 1958. 60 pages (edition used).
Web links
- The three texts online at ernst-wiechert.de