The blond Eckbert
The blonde Eckbert is an art fairy tale of early romanticism by Ludwig Tieck . It first appeared in 1797 in a collection published by Tieck himself entitled Volksmärchen , published by Carl August Nicolai in Berlin. It includes u. a. also Tiecks Puss in Boots and Knight Bluebeard .
Sometimes the publication of the will Eckbert as the beginning of the German literary epoch of romance seen.
content
It's about a married couple, the blond Eckbert and his wife Bertha, who live in seclusion without children. Eckbert's friend Walther is her only contact with the outside world. When he visits the couple one day, as has often happened before, Bertha talks about her youth:
Treated harshly as a child by her father, a poor shepherd, she fled into the forest at the age of eight and met an old woman who she took to her hut. She learns to spin and read and has to look after the dog and a wonderfully singing bird that lays an egg with a pearl or a gemstone every day. In the course of the story, the bird varies a song that revolves around the keyword "forest loneliness". Bertha spends six years with the old woman, who is very satisfied with her. But her longing for the world of knights, which she knows from her reading, grows ever greater, and one day she escapes with a vessel full of precious stones, leaving the dog behind and strangling the bird on the way that terrified her with its song. When she found out in her home village that her parents had died, she moved to the city and later married the knight Eckbert.
Shortly after Bertha tells her story, she falls into a fever. Eckbert believes that the boyfriend is to blame for the illness, which ultimately also leads to the death of his wife. The reason for the suspicion is initially that Eckbert believes he has recognized a distant, dismissive behavior in Walther since the story and assumes that Walther would forge a plan against him and his Bertha.
When Eckbert then also learns that Walther knew from the wondrous stories from Bertha's youth that her dog was called Strohmian , without Bertha mentioning the name, his growing distrust of Walther and the poor health of his wife make him mad . On a ride he discovers Walther and shoots him. When Eckbert comes home, his wife also died of a guilty conscience about the old woman's dog.
He keeps leaving home, apparently leaving the madness behind and finding a new friend in the young knight Hugo. Ultimately suffers Eckhart, who now knows not only the mystery of history ventilated Bertha, but still the murder of Walther guilty addition, due to its bad conscience of paranoia and mixed perception of reality increasingly with his imagination. He sees in Hugo the murdered Walther and suspects that he is behaving disloyally towards him by revealing the secret. Eckbert flees in great fear and by chance comes to the place where Bertha was found as a little girl by the old woman and led through the forest. He hears the dog barking, the wondrous bird singing and finally meets the old woman who recognizes him immediately. She makes him grave allegations about Bertha's theft at the time and the subsequent escape. She reveals to him that, in a transformed form, she was Walther and Hugo at the same time and that he and Bertha are half- siblings . Shaken by this news, Eckbert goes mad and dies.
interpretation
The protagonist Bertha narrates the internal story from her own perspective in the first person. She explicitly advises the audience - Eckbert and Walther - that they shouldn't consider the story to be a fairy tale just because it “may sound strange”, so that the reader has to pay close attention to the fairytale-like nature of the story. The visual and acoustic description of nature is reflected in the narrator's emotional life. This creates a conflict between nature and man that can only be resolved through the mediation of religion. In addition to the external framework, there is also an internal narrative that describes Eckbert's emotional life, who cannot clearly distinguish between reality and delusion.
It is interesting that the typically romantic transfiguration of madness was recorded and processed by Tieck. It is true that delusion enables the knowledge of life in incest , but it ultimately also leads to death.
Paul Wührl points out that the blonde Eckbert resembles the fairy tale Frau Holle . Both fairy tales address a problematic maturation process of young girls, which is characterized by an unhappy childhood, the help of an old woman and sometimes even the failure of individuation. This “Frau Holle scheme” can be described more precisely as follows: Frau Holle (or the old woman of the forest loneliness) represents a mythical mother figure who provides security as long as one follows her rules. Both unlucky and gold marie fall into the well, that is, they take a trip to the underworld. Spindle and needle represent - as often interpreted by research into folk tales - sexual maturity. Bread and apples, on the other hand, symbolize the fact that Goldmarie can secure her existence. She takes the initiation test by the mother figure Holle, submits to the duties assigned to her and can accordingly leave Mrs. Holle's house as a woman in full bloom. Pechmarie, on the other hand, perceives female duties as unreasonable pressure to perform. Since she does not obey the norms of society, she is abandoned to ostracism. However, there are also two essential differences between the two fairy tales: The fairy tale Frau Holle supports the successful individuation of Goldmarie through the negative example of Pechmarie. In addition, Der Blonde Eckbert ends in puzzles, but Frau Holle ends with a clear ending typical of folk tales in naive morality: the “good” is rewarded, the “bad” punished.
Secondary literature
- Claudia Stockinger, Ronald Weger: Tieck Bibliography: In: Ludwig Tieck: Life - Work - Effect . Edited by Claudia Stockinger and Stefan Scherer. Berlin [including]: de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 697–807, here 770–774 [76 studies on the blond Eckbert ]. ISBN 978-3-11-018383-2 , e- ISBN 978-3-11-021747-6 .
- Winfried Freund : Ludwig Tieck: The blonde Eckbert . Reading key, Ditzingen, Reclam 2005.
- Hanne Castein: The blonde Eckbert. The rune mountain . Explanations and documents, Ditzingen, Reclam 1986.
- Thomas Neubner: Paradise has long been destroyed! The disintegration of the space-time continuum as a narrative stylistic device. A work-immanent interpretation from a socio-psychological point of view using the example of Bertha’s biography in Ludwig Tieck’s work “Der Blonde Eckbert”. In: Wall Show 1/2010. Space and time. Germanistik trade journal. Rhein-Ruhr University Press 2010.
- Sandra Schött: Epilogue. In: Ludwig Tieck: The blonde Eckbert. The rune mountain. Fairy tale. [Ed. with afterword, timetable, explanations of words and bibliography by Sandra Schött.] Husum / Nordsee 2011 [The second versions from Phantasus 1812], 39–41.
- Thomas Fries: A romantic fairy tale: "The blonde Eckbert" by Ludwig Tieck. In: Modern Language Notes 88 (1973), 1180-1211.
- Paul Wührl: The German art fairy tale: history, message and narrative structures. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer, 1984.