The green Heinrich

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Green Henry by Gottfried Keller is a partly autobiographical novel , in addition to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and founder late summer as one of the most important educational novels of German literature is considered the 19th century. It was filmed in Switzerland in 1993.

The green Heinrich, first printing

Emergence

Gottfried Keller began planning his novel after he had returned to Zurich from Munich in 1842, having failed as a painter . He did not begin writing until seven years later, when a scholarship enabled him to stay in Heidelberg and Berlin . The first three volumes (396, 456 and 359 pages) were published in 1854, the fourth volume (483 pages) in 1855, all by the Braunschweig publishing house Vieweg . Keller was never happy with his novel; he complained about his "informality" and wanted to stamp it out. Therefore, at the end of the 1870s, he developed a second version of the novel; it was published in 1879/80 by the Göschen publishing house in Stuttgart . The original version has since been referred to as the first version of Green Heinrich .

Creation of the second version

Gottfried Keller's creative process at the Green Heinrich was so lengthy that the prose work accompanied the author for decades. The chronology of the historical-critical edition makes it clear how much longer than planned Keller worked on both the first version and the second version and was therefore in constant conflict with his publisher Vieweg, who was forced to publish further chapters long before the Publish completion of the novel. At the same time, the author initiated various correspondence with u. a. the literary historian friend Hermann Hettner on constant questioning of his novel and on plans for a future revision in a second version while he was writing the first.

Keller wrote the first manuscript on the Green Heinrich in 1849 and thus also received the approval of the publisher Eduard Vieweg for the publication of three volumes. You agree that the first volume will be printed at the end of 1850, with volumes two and three to follow in early 1851. A fourth volume was not planned at this time. In the years that followed, Vieweg repeatedly asked for further pieces of manuscript to be sent, Keller only complied with this with a very delay and the publication of the novel was constantly delayed. On November 5, 1853, Keller promised that he would have written Green Heinrich by the New Year. This goal of about two months seems downright ridiculous, considering that the first version should have been finished two years ago and will ultimately not really be published until two years later.

The revision of GH I is also slow. As early as 1855 there were concrete considerations about changes, but Keller did not take them up again until around twenty years later.

Action in the first version

In its first version, the novel begins with Heinrich's exodus from Switzerland. His mother packs his suitcase, he bids farewell to the craftsmen who live in the widowed mother's house; it becomes clear that she is single. On the trip Heinrich meets a count with his wife and daughter in southern Germany, "over-bourgeois beings" who fascinate him. In Munich he finds a room, unpacks his suitcase - and in it there is a manuscript in which Heinrich recorded his childhood memories, and these are now faded in (de facto, as in almost every film biography today ).

Heinrich's youth story

The protagonist, Heinrich Lee, is nicknamed "Green Heinrich" because his children's clothes were tailored from the green uniforms of his father, who died young. He grew up with his mother in humble circumstances, attended several schools and was expelled from school at the age of fifteen due to a student prank. His mother sends him to the country for a summer without leaving school so that he can figure out his future. This visit is marked by two events that are said to influence his later life. On the one hand he made the decision to become a landscape painter, on the other hand he met two women: Anna, the daughter of a teacher, a girl Heinrich's age, and Judith, a beautiful widow of about thirty. Young Heinrich is torn between the two women. The tender, angelic Anna fills him with romantic, transfiguring and idealizing love, while the cheerful, seductive Judith awakens his sensuality. Heinrich cannot develop a relationship with either of the two women and the episode ends without being resolved, with Anna dying two years later and Judith emigrating to America.

After returning to his hometown, Heinrich began his training as a painter in the Habersaat studio, in which pictures were produced industrially, which is why Master Habersaat showed relatively little interest in art. Only through the chance encounter with a German, once successful artist named Römer and after several months in his apprenticeship, Heinrich learns to see more closely and to paint pictures that can be sold. However, Römer suffers from delusions and lives on borrowed money that he cannot repay. He is therefore in a tense relationship with his surroundings, which is why he cannot sell pictures despite his great talent. When he did manage to do that after six months, he traveled to Paris, where he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It is worth mentioning that his disturbed relationship to money was already evident in his youth.

Heinrich uses the time of his military service to write down the history of his youth and then leaves Switzerland to seek his fortune as a painter in Munich.

Heinrich's stay in Germany and return

In Munich Heinrich found that he did not have the necessary talent and also did not find the desired art direction in order to be able to make a living from painting. As in life, painting is such that he cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. When his mother ran out of money, Heinrich ran into debts for a year, which he was able to settle by sending his mother again. After another year, his mother has to mortgage her house to pay off his new debts. Heinrich now realizes that he cannot go on living like this and, for lack of income, turns his belongings into money: First he sells his flute, then his eighty drawings, some of which were made in Switzerland, far below their value, all to a second-hand dealer, the u. a. also deals in cabaret and apparently has a good buyer for Heinrich's drawings. When these also run out, Heinrich earns his living by painting the poles of the countless flags that the second-hand dealer has commercially produced for sale on the occasion of a holiday. Ironically, Heinrich has now become the painter of flagpoles instead of a landscape painter. His survival is now getting more and more difficult, and when he receives a desperate letter from his mother asking him to return home, and he is also evicted from his apartment, he starts walking home.

Heinrich's stay in Munich lasted a total of seven years. After two days of marching home, starving and drenched, he comes across the house of the count whom he already met on his journey there. Heinrich finds out that this count bought all of his drawings. The count now pays him a high price for it retrospectively and orders two more large pictures. While Heinrich is working on this, he falls in love with Dortchen, the count's adopted daughter; but he cannot develop a relationship with her either. After a six-month stay, he arrives back in Zurich and arrives just in time to attend his mother's funeral. In the meantime she was expelled from her home and lived her existence in great poverty. Heinrich was so overwhelmed by the pain of this loss and the heartache for Dortchen that he died. “Green grass” grows on his grave, which also takes up the color motif at the end.

Differences in the second version

The second version (meaning the above-mentioned last revised version) differs from the first, among other things, in that it is narrated chronologically and that the whole novel is written from a first-person perspective, and not just Heinrich's youth story. Above all, however, the tragic ending - Keller spoke of the “cypress-dark ending” of his novel - is replaced by a more conciliatory one: After his mother's death, Heinrich gets a regular but undemanding office. Nevertheless, he suffers from his guilt and is toying with the idea of ​​parting his life when Judith unexpectedly returns from America, who has heard of his misfortune and wants to stand by him. Both spend time together, sometimes close to each other, sometimes spatially separated for a long time - until Judith's death after 20 years.

Comparison of the final chapters

If you concentrate on the differences between the two novels, the most obvious differences in content and style are clearly evident in the last chapters. In the following, the plot from the 14th chapter is considered, in both versions this is the time of Heinrich Lee's final journey home, after he had sold some pictures in Munich with the help of the Count and received the legacy of the 'junk man' Joseph Schmalhöfer. What should therefore be regarded as the end here comprises 24 and 41 pages respectively in the current editions of both versions.25 The far more extensive ending in GH II already suggests that Keller was intent on completing more storylines in the new version or to take up and solve them in more detail.

Differences in content: homecoming and death

Heinrich goes home in GH I after a total of seven years of absence, but makes a detour via Basel due to remorse towards his mother. It seems as if he doesn't know how to face her after years of travel and many months without exchanging letters, which is why he extends the delay and attends the federal rifle festival for three days. In GH II, on the other hand, he only noticed this in passing, the lengthy statements about the festival and some theoretical considerations have largely been deleted in the revision. Leppmann finds this level of detail in the first version "to a greater extent disturbing" 26. At this point in time the reader was only interested in seeing his mother again, which there was actually nothing to prevent.

The arrival of the protagonist in his hometown is also drawn very differently: In GH I, Keller allows the returnees to take another look at the city, obviously from the same mountain on which he was standing before his journey: "Now he had arrived on the mountain, which was opposite the city ”(GH I, 890). Unsuspecting, Keller then lets him live at his mother's funeral, when he "went into the little church with the people who did not know him and (...) clearly heard the clergy (...) proclaim his mother's name" (GH I , 890). The funeral makes the trip home, delayed by three days, all the more tragic, because Heinrich is only too late by just these few days. In GH II, Keller doesn't seem to be delaying Heinrich's journey home, he arrives in Zurich just as unsuspecting, but finds his mother seriously ill but alive and can accompany her on her last breaths: “She (...) gave a long, questioning look on me (…); but the word, (…) no longer produced it. ”(GH II, 875). He's late, but not too late. The fact that the son can still share a few last moments with his mother seems to be the reason and starting point for the further course of the plot, in which Heinrich's character experiences solution and satisfaction. In the first version, Heinrich Lee dies very quickly and suddenly after the death of his mother, there is only time left for a short visit to the relatives; a letter to the count remains unanswered by him. Heinrich's feelings of guilt rub him so that “his life and limb broke” (GH I, 897) and he dies within a few days. The novel ends with the funeral of the protagonist: “It was a beautiful and friendly summer evening when he was buried with amazement and participation, and a rather fresh and green grass grew on his grave.” (GH I, 898) Kaiser analyzes aptly in this regard: “The mother lies with the long deceased father; the son with the dead mother, whom he is in such a hurry to follow, as he wasted away returning to the living one. ”27

All these occurrences, which seem very random and come close to one another in time, are changed in the second version, although they are no less constructed and random. It becomes clear that Heinrich Lee deals with the death of his mother in GH II much more emotionally and mourns, for example by spending a night on his mother's deathbed. He also rummages through her estate and discovers facets of his mother that are unknown to him when he finds books, jewelry and a letter that has not been sent. The letter in particular is an important moment for the further action, as the mother reflects in it whether, why and in what form she made mistakes in raising her son. She considers "whether it is not me, the mother, who are in debt, insofar as I (...) have left the child to an unlimited freedom and arbitrariness" (GH II, 881) and whether she should not have "sought that (...) the son was turned to a secure occupation instead of leaving him, who did not know the world, to unjustified hobbies, which are only money-consuming and aimless ”(GH II, 881). After her death Heinrich finds out what suffering he did to his mother with his lifestyle. Even if the two family members cannot exchange a word with each other, the son receives the mother's self-reproach through the letter.

It is also of great importance that Heinrich Lee not only takes up a civil profession in GH II by taking over a senior office in the municipal administration and later "without [his] action and against [his] wish, to become head of the district" (GHII, 888) is promoted, but also that he meets Judith again. Judith, who represents a figure of the erotic childhood love in the last chapter of the second version, returns to Switzerland after ten years from America and thereby tears Heinrich out of a depressive phase of life in which he is worried about suicidal thoughts: “Sometimes it stirred, and more and more audible, the wish not to be there anymore [sic.]. ”(GH II, 889). The story about Dortchen, resolved shortly before in a letter from the Count, lets Heinrich banish "the spirits of passion" (GH II, 886) in him and he finally gets rid of his unhappy love for the girl. Judith comes just at the right moment and, with her return and the subsequent closeness, brings him “youthful happiness, home, contentment” (GH II, 892). Both establish the never-broken connection to each other, Judith proclaims: "You are in my blood for once, and I have never forgotten you, because everyone must have something to which they are seriously attached!" (GH II, 896) And Heinrich explains: “You have redeemed me, Judith, and I thank you for it (…); for that I am yours as long as I live! ”(GH II, 898) Nevertheless, in the end the two do not enter into a firm bond, the two figures do not marry. On the other hand, they spend another twenty years together, seeing each other “sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes only once a year, as the course of the world brought with it” (GH II, 901), until Judith dies of a childhood disease. The novel in the second version does not end with the death of Heinrich, but with the death of Judith and the meta-narrative report that Heinrich pursued the continuation of his life story after the already written youth story because of her, "in order to once again walk the old green paths of memory" (GH II, 902).

Solution or purification?

In order to come back to the question asked at the beginning, to what extent the two final versions can be classified as an open or closed conclusion, the previous findings should now be summarized. The content of this discussion remains controversial, since the death of the protagonist is apparently always the most complete form of a life story. Heinrich Lee no longer exists at the end of GH I, he leaves no family behind, has no close relationships with other friends or acquaintances who are now breaking up, and he does not even have a place to live. Its story is clearly told to the end, an argument as a closed conclusion is therefore plausible, but it should still be questioned in the following. In contrast, Heinrich's continued life in GH II. His life story could go further at the end of the novel, so one could argue for an openness of the novel. Nevertheless, the feeling remains that Heinrich won't die, but that no more adventures can be expected from his future path. With a relatively monotonous indifference, Heinrich Lee conscientiously fulfills his administrative office and is expected to continue doing so after Judith's death. The end is therefore closed to the extent that the reader gets the feeling that the coming story is no longer worth reading because nothing more exciting can be told. The adventure of Heinrich's educational journey is over, finished. What the ending in GH II assigns further, clear features of the closed end, are the numerous storylines that are told to the end: The fate of some characters is clearly shown, above all that of Dortchen. Your past story is being resolved, the next one announced. The old friend Eriksson has another word in a letter, his future life, after he and Heinrich parted ways, is explained and Judith's past ten years are also summarized. The same applies to the figure of the mother and the neighbor. All of these storylines are taken up again and summarized in the final chapters in GH II - in contrast to the first version, which leaves these storylines open. GH II is far more complete in the individual acts than GH I. Thus, the radical closing of the novel in the form of death contrasts with the small-step closing in various episodes. Both versions are therefore closed in their own way, but at the same time also open inferences.

The pace of the successive actions in the final chapters is also different. While in GH I the last reports follow one another quickly, Keller takes more time to say goodbye to Heinrich in GH II. Several decades pass after the mother's death and the story itself extends over almost twice as many pages. The rapid end of the first version hits the reader relatively unexpectedly, since “the cellar novel (...) is destined to take up the content of an entire life, (...) it is laid out so comprehensively that, on the contrary, you see the catastrophe in the first The version felt as a capricious breaking off of the poet, as a coronation that did not correspond to the broad foundations of the building. ”50 According to Leppmann, the broader ending in GH II does much more justice to the novel. This quick closing and the fact that the reader's expectations are deceived by the hero suddenly and unexpectedly dying can in turn be used as a characteristic for an open conclusion.

In both versions, the protagonist experiences both a solution and a purification: He has to bear the blame for the death of his mother, but both times he is shown a way out - in GH I this is death, in GH II his returning Childhood love. Both versions therefore have features for both types of closure.

construction

Street sign in Glattfelden

The novel The Green Heinrich tells the educational / life course of a young person. The course of life is presented as a meaningful, consecutive development. This structure is called a one-way life curve. In the first version of Green Heinrich from 1854/55, the chronological order of the actions is rearranged by the inserted youth story. The first version begins with eighteen-year-old Heinrich Lee who is leaving for Munich, and then his childhood and youth are recounted in retrospect. In the second version of Green Heinrich from 1879/80, the chronological order of the actions is consistently adhered to. Gottfried Keller does not do justice to the structure of the monotonous life curve until the second revised version.

Political

In both versions, on his return to Switzerland, the hero of the novel expresses thoughts on the mutual relationship between majority and minority in social structures in view of the denominational diversity of their cantons and the upheavals that took place in 1847/1848 :

"[...] and is eager to help hunt the noble game of the majority, of which he himself is a part, but which is therefore no more dear to him than the minority, which he defeats because it is again with the majority of the same Is flesh and blood. [...]
That large majorities can be poisoned and corrupted by a single person and, as a thank you, poison and spoil honest individuals again - that a majority who once lied to can continue to want to be lied to, and always new liars on the shield raises as if she were only one conscious and determined villain - that finally the awakening of the citizen and farmer from a majority error through which he has robbed himself is not so rosy when he is in his harmed way - all that thought about and I didn't know. "

Paralipomenon and interpretation

The author wrote in an exposé to the publisher Vieweg on May 3, 1850:

“The moral of my book is that someone who does not succeed in maintaining the balance between his person and his family is also incapable of taking an effective and honorable position in public life. In many cases the blame can lie on society, and then the material would be that of a book of socialist tendencies. In the given case, however, it lies largely in the character and the special fate of the hero and thereby determines a more ethical meaning of the novel. The undertaking and its execution are not the result of a merely theoretical tendentious intention, but the fruit of one's own intuition and experience. I have never produced anything that has not received the impetus to do so from my inner or outer life, and will continue to do so; hence the fact that I write very little, and at the moment I really don't know how to say whether I will ever write another novel or not. With the exception of my own short stories, I only have dramatic works in mind for the future.
My hero is a talented and lively young person who, raving about everything that is good and beautiful, goes out into the world in order to justify his future happiness in life. He looks at everything with open, clear eyes and comes across as a lovable, cheerful fellow among all sorts of people, makes friendships which serve to supplement a character image, and entitles him to high hopes. But when the time approaches when he is to find himself in a firm, regulated action, in practical activity and self-control, all this is lacking. It remains with the beautiful words, an adventurous vegetation, a passive, clumsy drifting around. He brings himself and his relatives into extreme misery, while less gifted but attentive natures from his environment, who stood below him, succeed and grow over his head. He finds himself in the most adventurous, saddest position, cut off from the whole world. […]
Since, as I said, the novel is a product of experience, with the exception of the unfortunate catastrophe at the end, I believe I can flatter myself that it will not be a bland book of tendencies. There is probably no side in it that has not been felt. "

The commentator of the edition from Deutscher Klassiker Verlag sets out the following causal chain for Heinrich's career:

“The fate of green Heinrich emerges from fatherlessness, so the self-interpretation of the novel, with an inner necessity: Because he has lost his father, he cannot be brought up properly. Because he cannot be brought up properly, he becomes an outsider, dreamer and fantasist. Because he doesn't learn to work because of that, his mother still has to work it out for him as an adult. "

Further:

"The work reveals in extreme sharpness the fundamental contradiction of bourgeois society, which consists in the fact that it places people under the postulate of self-realization, but at the same time denies them the means and ways to do so."

Autobiographical traits

The green Heinrich is an autobiographical novel. This means that the author Gottfried Keller deals with his own life and genesis through the writing, processes it in this way and allows certain elements from it to flow into the work. The focus here is not on telling an arbitrary story into which autobiographical elements are incorporated; the first reason to write is biographical. In the case of The Green Heinrich , the story of Heinrich Lee in the novel is not completely identical to the life story of Gottfried Keller, but in the course of the narrative, Keller creates a "second self" that deals with the first (own) self in a critical way. With the novel, he tells the youth story of a fictional hero or antihero with autobiographical references to things he has experienced himself. Through this process, Gottfried Keller has the opportunity to work through opportunities that he has not seized in his own life and problems that he has not solved or even to solve them. The aspects and decisions of his life that were unsuccessful in his eyes are the prerequisites for the success of writing in green Heinrich .

Overlaps between the biographies of the protagonist Heinrich Lee and Gottfried Kellers himself can be found in abundance in the course of the work. For example, the story begins in Zurich, where Keller himself was born. Heinrich Lee, like Gottfried Keller, was expelled from school for improper behavior at the beginning of the novel. Heinrich Lee had the plan to become a landscape painter and therefore started an apprenticeship with the mad painter Römer. Landscape painter was also Gottfried Keller's first career aspiration; he begins an apprenticeship with a certain Rudolf Mayer. In addition to his non-existent talent, Heinrich Lee also received insufficient training in painting, which led to the failure of his professional goal in the novel. Keller himself was also poorly trained. Although both Heinrich Lee in the novel and Gottfried Keller in real life moved to Munich in the course of their lives, both eventually die in Zurich, which closes the circle.

reception

The green Heinrich was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books .

literature

First edition First version

Current issues

  • Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1981, special edition. The Library of German Classics , Volume 54, Harenberg Kommunikation, 1982, 768 pages.
  • The green Heinrich. First version. Edited by Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser . Volume 2 in: Gottfried Keller: Complete works in seven volumes. Edited by Thomas Böning, Gerhard Kaiser, Kai Kauffmann, Dominik Müller and Bettina Schulte-Böning. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-618-60920-5
  • The green Heinrich. Second version. Edited by Peter Villwock. Volume 3 in: Gottfried Keller: Complete works in seven volumes. Edited by Thomas Böning, Gerhard Kaiser, Kai Kauffmann, Dominik Müller and Peter Villwock. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-618-60930-2
  • Historical-critical Gottfried Keller edition, volume 11. The green Heinrich (1854/55) volumes 1 and 2, ed. by Walter Morgenthaler… 2005.
  • Historical-critical Gottfried Keller edition, volume 12. The green Heinrich (1854/55) volumes 3 and 4, ed. by Walter Morgenthaler… 2005.

Secondary literature

  • Gunnar Gullaksen: Gottfried Keller's novel "The Green Heinrich". Development and education in the mirror of the narrative. Bergen 1982.
  • Thomas Heckendorn: The problem of the self in Gottfried Keller's Green Heinrich. Lang, Bern a. a. 1989, ISBN 3-261-04127-7 , also dissertation University of Basel.
  • Clemens Heselhaus : Epilogue to Keller, "The Green Heinrich" ; Munich 1977
  • Georg Lukács : Gottfried Keller. In: Ders .: The Entombment of Old Germany. Reinbek 1967, pp. 21-92.
  • Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek: The prototype of the professional youth: Gottfried Keller's post-adolescent novel "Der Grüne Heinrich". In: Intermediate time, crossing borders, disturbance - images of adolescence in German-language literature. Edited by Carsten Gansel and Pawel Zimniak, Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2011, pp. 241–263.
  • F. Hunziker: Glattfelden and Gottfried Keller's Grüner Heinrich ; Zurich and Leipzig 1911.
  • H. Laufhütte: Reality and art in Gottfried Keller's novel 'Der Grüne Heinrich' ; Bonn 1969.
  • Ch. Tanzmann: In the slipstream of the mother. Relationship structures and relationship problems in Gottfried Keller's “Der Grüne Heinrich”. Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2009.
  • Gottfried Keller. Complete Works. Historical-critical edition. Edited by Walter Morgenthaler u. a. Volume 19. Stroemfeld, Basel 2006.
  • Carl Helbling , (Ed.): Gottfried Keller. Collected letters . Volume 1-4. Bentelli, Bern 1950–1953.
  • Gerhard Kaiser: Gottfried Keller. The poetic life . Frankfurt a. M .: Insel Verlag 1981.
  • Franz Leppmann: Gottfried Keller's 'Green Heinrich' from 1854/5 and 1879/80. Contributions to a comparison . Ebering, Berlin 1902.
  • Max Wehrli: Gottfried Keller's relationship to his own work . Francke, Bern 1965.

filming

  • The Green Heinrich , a film by Thomas Koerfer based on motifs from the novel by Gottfried Keller, Switzerland 1993

Web links

To the movie:

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günther Müller: Structural forms of the novel. Explained in the development novels Gottfried Kellers and Adalbert Stifters. Groningen / Djakarta 1953.
  2. ↑ The green Heinrich. 2nd edition, Volume 4. Weibert, Stuttgart 1800, pp. 347-350.
  3. ↑ a b c Taken from: Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, ISBN 978-3-618-68023-9 , pp. 905 ff.