The poor spendthrift

The poor spendthrift is an exile novel by Ernst Weiß , which, written in Paris, was published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1936 . After the war , the work was published by Claassen in Hamburg in 1965, in 1967 in the Vienna Book Community and by Aufbau-Verlag in Berlin, and in 1980 by Rowohlt in Reinbek .

time and place

The first-person narrator was born around 1892 and describes his life until 1927. The plot takes us to Austria-Hungary and Austria after the First World War . The places of the action are a large city, the Tyrolean mountain farming village of Puschberg , which is more than twelve hours away by train, near the two spots Erdbergsweg and Goigel, as well as some Austro-Russian theaters of war - e.g. B. in the Carpathian Mountains .

The poor spendthrift

The father scolds the narrator as a “substitute Christ” and a “great wasteful”. The father, this old curmudgeon, who works as an ophthalmologist ostensibly for the sake of money, repeatedly accuses the boy of his humanity. There are z. B. the two scientific achievements of the narrator. He had already discovered the carotid gland as a medical student and later invented and developed an apparatus for measuring intraocular pressure as a young doctor . Both times the narrator had allowed others to reap the credit. Of course, in one of the two cases even the unscrupulous father was one of the others.

And the narrator remains poor until the end. While the father gives generous gifts to his daughter Judith at the wedding, the narrator hardly has any money for a bouquet. So he makes a poem. That also rhymed badly.

action

Throughout the entire text, the narrator cannot and does not want to deny his love for his father, the sought-after ophthalmologist Maximilian K. The hard-working, greedy father, who rose from a small family from a simple doctor to an ophthalmologist to lecturer and professor, is by no means satisfied with the inadequate academic performance of the first-person narrator. That doesn't change either when the first-person narrator pulls himself together, improves himself and even tells the Polish boy Jagiello von Cz. May give tutoring in German. From the proceeds of the well-paid sideline job, the son gives his “idolatrously” beloved father a birthday present. The recipient partially rejects the gifts of love. Up until almost the end of the novel, the father imposes his will on the first-person narrator. The text can almost be read as the record of the narrator's unsuccessful attempts to escape the rule of his father. Ultimately, the narrator always does what the father wants. When the mother Stefanie becomes pregnant a second time after fifteen years, the boy goes "voluntarily" to a boys' home (grammar school) because the pregnant woman is ashamed of the son. The parents do not care about the narrator at all during his stay in the boys' home, but he still receives three Christmas packages. In addition to Vally (Walpurgis Eschenober), the family's Tyrolean maid, he is also given presents by his friend Jagiello and the boy he nicknamed Perikles , an adjunct son and budding young philosopher. After his sister Judith is born, the narrator has to return home. The narrator definitely wants to be a doctor, but not a surgeon like his father. The son intended to heal the mentally ill for later . As a multiple homeowner and landlord, the father needs the boy as his right hand. This is how the narrator ends up in industrial circles at the commercial college. Although his father now considers him a financial expert, the narrator is not interested in the mercantile. Rather, the first-person narrator believes he was born to be a doctor - as Pericles thinks he is a born philosopher.

The narrator impregnates Vally, who is six years older than him, marries her against her father's will and separates from her after a serious falling out. The narrator has long since left home. As a student of medicine, he made it through to the eighth semester. When the war broke out in 1914, the son is supposed to illegally transfer the father's capital to a branch of the English bank in Christiania . Vally wants to have the narrator brought to Italy so that he can escape the " mobilization ". But even in this case the son follows the instructions of the beloved father. The opportunistic homeowner sends the son to war. In Radautz and Chernivtsi in the crown land of Bukowina , the officer aspirant became a cadet in a dragoon regiment in the spring of 1915 and took to the field with Colonel Joseph von Cz., The father of his friend Jagiello, against the Tsar's troops . The colonel falls during the attack. The narrator loves Eveline (Mrs. Major Baroness von Cz.), The married daughter of the fallen colonel. After the third "Russian offensive", the narrator is promoted to lieutenant. In the summer of 1916 he was seriously wounded. The war is over for him. He visits his wife Vally and their son Max (Maximilian Franz Karl), but loves Eveline. In the spring of 1917 the narrator - he moves into a pension as a "seriously injured person" - resumes studying medicine and dedicates himself to his favorite subject, mental illness. In the lecture, the professorship presents patients and lets the students diagnose . Pericles is presented. Diagnosis: progressive paralysis . The narrator becomes a doctor of medicine and is offered a job as an insane doctor . As a good son, he renounces his career and submits to his father; works in a subordinate position under unworthy conditions at home for the professor. However, the father passes on tricks to the son during operations. Nevertheless, at the end of August 1918 the time had come. The son breaks away from his father, leaves Vally, the "unloved" woman and takes the job in the insane asylum in which Pericles is interned. Eveline has lung tuberculosis . The patient would like to live with the narrator without marriage. Said and done. The lady arrives and lives with the narrator in an outbuilding of the institution. Eveline, adorable as she is, soon turns out to be a liar, a beast. The spouses have to go. So she plans a double poisoning . Nothing comes of this and Eveline escapes, returns pregnant from her husband, gives birth to a girl and dies of her lung disease. The narrator calls the newborn Eveline. He is planning suicide. After that, Pericles would then be alone. The narrator also finds an amazing solution to this problem. For he puts a lung patient in the confused man's room and hopes for a fatal infection. Curiously, Pericles does not die of it, but is cured by the extraordinary measure, feverish and contrary to expectations. This is the third “scientific” achievement that the spendthrift is giving away. “Professor Hofrat v. Wagner-Jauregg ”anticipates him with the publication of the effect and is proposed for the Nobel Prize for it. The narrator's father suffers a stroke . The narrator has to return to his own as the new head of the family. The newborn must be cared for beforehand. The narrator shows courage. Either, as he means Vally, she makes herself available as a surrogate mother for "his" child or he separates from her. The surprised one plays along and takes pleasure in the role. The narrator is not the birth father of the child. While living closely with Eveline, the narrator got infected. But he only suffers from a mild pulmonary phthisis . That's why he makes the decision to avoid contact with Eveline's child. He is taking care of his sister Judith. She married Jagiello and had twins - two boys - from him. The narrator does what his father taught him from scratch: eye surgery. In leisure hours he researches glaucoma .

Pericles - recovered, let loose on humanity - appears in the company of “Herculean young people” in the narrator's ophthalmological practice “as heralds of the new national genders”. The happy ending: It looks as if the narrator, this ophthalmologist who is recovering from his mild lung disease and who is operating more and more successfully, finds peace in his family's lap: Vally and his biological son Max nurse him up in the snow-covered Puschberg, and it will soon be Spring in Tyrol.

shape

The form of the first-person narration and the skill of the author guarantee permanent reading tension. The narrator stumbles at almost every next step, sometimes falls, but he keeps pulling himself up. The first-person narrator hides both his first name and the name of his hometown. For him, writing has "always been a great, unauthorized joy". He estimates his life story to be at least thirteen chapters. Seven were released.

Although the educational influence of the father on the narrator is the deeply effective element in the text, this deeply pessimistic work is not an educational novel . A desirable positive effect on the narrator "raised" by the father is not in sight after the lost war in Austria. Rather, the attributes of the development novel apply to the poor spendthrift. “Irritable”, as the narrator is, he frees himself from his dependency on his father in decades of struggle. The narrator describes this struggle meticulously - how can it be otherwise with Ernst Weiß. The work is a modern Bildungsroman : hero and world stand in stark contrast, the hero is formed through experience (he goes through the school of the father and the war) and in the end the hero might want to be reconciled with the world.

Quotes

• The author writes about Austria before 1928, but it could be that while writing in 1936 he glanced sideways at Germany: "World history is made by manic lunatics for idiots"
• About the new politician Pericles: "The madmen are powerful, because who should stop them?"

Self-testimony

The author in a letter dated November 10, 1935 about the work: It is a "very simple book, not dramatic, not exciting, but I strove to be true and forgiving"

reception

• The narrator "wastes love and devotion"
• Pazi closely observes a "opposite movement of the father's strengthening and the decay of the son through a vampyric withdrawal of strength"
• Albert Ehrenstein in the Prague press on June 7, 1936: "The fate of the first-person narrator is an Austrian fate "
• The Christ motif is applied to the hero.
• Alfred Döblin on May 17, 1936 in Pariser Tageblatt : “It is the one hundred percent opposite of pathos and sophistication. The author never strains his voice "
• Ernst Ottwalt saw the story of Pericles in Moscow in 1936 while reading the novel as having “external characteristics of fascism ”.

Inconsistent

• On August 11, 1909, the narrator was declared of age prematurely at the age of nineteen so that he could marry Vally. So he would be born in 1890. On the other hand, he could also have been born in 1892: In the source, the year of birth of little Eveline is mentioned as 1923. Towards the end of the novel, the child is three years old. At the end of the novel, the first-person narrator mentions his 35th birthday the following year.
• Eveline disappears from the insane asylum in the fall of 1920 and returns there in the first few months of the same year.

filming

Michael Kreihsl filmed the novel under the title "My Father, My Wife and My Beloved" (with Birgit Doll , Gerti Drassl (Vally), Julia Edtmeier , Heinrich Herki , Marek Kondrat , Erika Marozsán (Eveline), Erol Nowak , Johannes Silberschneider , Florian Stetter (narrator), Friedrich von Thun (father Maximilian K.), Ulrich Tukur and Emmy Werner ) for television. The work was broadcast in Austria on October 16, 2004. 3sat did a rerun on July 28, 2010.

literature

source

• Ernst Weiss: The poor spendthrift. Novel . With an afterword by Peter Engel. (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 3004). 1999, ISBN 3-518-39504-1 .

Secondary literature

• Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Ernst White . (= Text + criticism. Issue 76). Munich 1982, ISBN 3-88377-117-1 .
• Margarita Pazi : Ernst Weiss. Fate and Work of a Jewish Central European Author in the First Half of the 20th Century. (= Würzburg university writings on modern German literary history. Volume 14). Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-631-45475-9 , pp. 91-98.
• Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German authors A - Z. Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 658.

Web links

• The text at Gutenberg-DE

Individual evidence

1. ^ Arnold, p. 18.
2. ^ Pazi p. 141.
3. ↑ Source p. 217.
4. ↑ Source p. 312.
5. ↑ Source pp. 329, 330.
6. ↑ Source p. 7.
7. ↑ Source p. 453, 8. Zvu
8. ↑ Source p. 480, 4. Zvo
9. ↑ Source p. 485, 4th Zvu
10. ↑ Source p. 455, 11. Zvu
11. ↑ Source p. 345, 14th Zvu
12. ↑ Source p. 450, 13th Zvu
13. ↑ quoted by Engel in the afterword of the source, p. 490.
14. ^ Pazi p. 94.
15. ^ Pazi p. 95.
16. ↑ cited Pazi p. 98.
17. ^ Arnold p. 29.
18. ↑ quoted by Engel in the afterword of the source, p. 490.
19. ↑ quoted by Engel in the afterword of the source, p. 491.
20. ↑ Source p. 203, 3. Zvo
21. ↑ Source p. 453, 5th Zvu
22. ↑ Source p. 468, 5th Zvu
23. ↑ Source p. 477, 15. Zvo
24. ↑ Source p. 371.
25. ↑ Source p. 381.
26. ↑ The film in the IMDb