The silver car

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The silver car brings together seven stories by Ernst Wiechert that were written from 1922 and published in Berlin in 1928. The war and its profound consequences form the background of all stories contained - with the exception of the first one.

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The silver car

The 45-year-old Prussian State Secretary Hermann Gieseking has a lucky day: His superior minister, tired of office, indicates an imminent career leap and is happy about Gieseking's vacation trip to the old East German forest home. Gieseking takes the train with his fiancée Fraulein Hortensie. The minister on the platform advises his departing subordinate that he should only drive up there in a silver car. This is the only way to increase the number on the next trip home.

Gieseking does not find the peace and quiet he had hoped for in the seemingly endless forest loneliness and wants to spend the rest of the holiday on the Riviera. On the way back he stops by the widow Lisa. The young woman has three children - two girls from her deceased husband and the third and oldest child, the boy, is Gieseking's son. The State Secretary, at that time still district administrator at home, had left Lisa sitting on the next career leap. The poor woman, who lives in poor conditions, uncompromisingly answers all attempts to justify the guest. The hostile behavior of his biological child and the boy's obvious resemblance to Gieseking do not force the deeply impressed father to turn back, but to stop: The State Secretary leaves his wife and child for the second time. While he continues his return journey, he takes the first step to turn back: Gieseking dismembers the photo of his fiancée.

Story of a boy

The mother when Percy Schurmann in dies, Javanese Weltevreden was born on Tjiliwoengfluss. The father, Magnus Schurmann, second boss of the English export house Walker & Sons, Ltd., lost his position and fortune during the war . Percy, raised by the Malayin Sawah, has to return to East Prussia with his father in 1918 to see Magnus Schurmann Sr., the mocking-looking grandfather. In the grammar school, Count Holger Einsiedel befriends the reserved Percy. At the Einsiedel house, Percy made the acquaintance of the 55-year-old world traveler Count Manfred Einsiedel. The latter had a tropical house built in the family's confusing park . Count Manfred is impressed when the poisonous snakes in the boxes react to Percy's flute playing during a tour of the house. In relation to the two Einsiedels, Percy lets go of his reluctance. Count Manfred sums up that Percy speaks like an Asian smiles.

Bad times are coming. During inflation , the value of the mark falls “like an avalanche”. The grandfather has to rent two rooms in his house to the piano teacher Lida Winckler. Percy noticed his father's advances to the young lady with astonishment. As Percy gets closer to the piano teacher, he feels that her kindness, her love, is not motherly like the sawahs, but something new, deeply disturbing. Lida, sensitive, reassured: friendship should remain.

After an examination, the school doctor diagnoses Percy as having a life-threatening illness. The patient wants to go back to the tropics. The doctor strongly advises against it. Lida leaves the small town never to be seen again. Before that, she confesses her love to Percy. She had turned down Percy's father's proposal.

Percy is killing himself. Count Holger finds his friend in the tropical house, killed by a snake bite.

The legend of the last forest

The loggers have a reason to celebrate. After the war, the last German forest is to be felled. A hiker comes along and disturbs the celebration with inappropriate comments. So one of the already drunk hits the newcomer in the face with a punch. The mistreated man replied with vision : “Whoever sheds human blood, the blood shall be shed again; but whoever sheds God's blood, the blood shall never be dried. ”Then the stranger disappears into the darkness of the forest.

And indeed, when the forest is felled, the wicked lumberjacks wade in blood. Mad during the incessant felling, the woodcutters marvel at the above-mentioned hiker who reappears. The wanderer walks barefoot through the blood. His feet remain white and unsullied like the feet of all forest animals. The lumberjacks' complaint cannot restrain the walk of the walker. With his continuous stride towards sunset, life in the vicinity of the lumberjacks dies.

The painful

Irene, “passionately closed to the dark dreams of childhood”, grows up in a lonely forest and follows her husband Günther after marriage. The marriage remains childless after the first few years. Irene cannot understand why Günther goes to war for the fatherland. After a year and a half of war, the woman only meets her husband for one night in a strange city. Later, after Irene has noticed her pregnancy, she becomes increasingly certain with time that the child will remain “strange and unloved” to her because two worries - the life of the child and the husband - are one too many worries for her . Irene can only love Günther; worry about Günther's life during the war. Logically, the child is stillborn. Günther, only at home for a few days on Christmas vacation, takes on the guilt: "We kill everything ... man, woman and child."

The children's crusade

The infantryman Peter Hamborn, who was a miner in peacetime, knocked on his father, a farmer, during a short leave from the front towards the end of the war and asked for food for his starving children. The father refuses because the son ran away from home to town and there married a woman who did not suit the father. Jürgen Hamborn, the eldest son of a miner, learns from the speech of the priest in the confirmation class from the kids Crusades in the Holy Land . For Jürgen the latter is around the grandfather's yard, "where there are six cows in the barn." The father has long since gone back to war. The mother sews outside the home for strangers all day long. Jürgen writes to her that he and his younger siblings are going to “get bread” to see grandfather for about two weeks. A few starved city children join the march into the last days of October: The son of a boiler maker who died in Belgium with his two siblings, another miner's son and the son of a tram conductor whose father is on the Eastern Front . The smaller children are driven in carts and have armed themselves with wooden swords. Not all peasants along the way of the twelve little beggars show themselves to be merciful; certainly not Jürgen's grandfather at the end of the arduous journey on foot. With the repeated exclamation "Vagabonds!" He rejects the half-starved.

The children realize that there is no such thing as a promised land and that they have to repent. The farmer's shepherd, a crippled soldier in dirty gray war dress, saw the repudiation and secretly leads the children to a sheepfold away from the grandfather's farm in the woods. There is a meal and a place to sleep in the hay. The children are also looked after by the soldier in the following days. The shepherd slaughters extra. Meat comes on the table. The war disabled wanted to leave the church. Now he goes back to his pastor and asks for help for the children. The pastor doesn't ask much and arranges for them to return.

Jürgen tells his mother, laughing and crying at home, that he has seen the promised land.

The wolf and his brother

A few years after the war in an East Prussian village: Every now and then a wolf tears one of the animals from one of the large herds of cattle. Despite the utmost vigilance, the peasantry cannot catch the robber.

Parallel to this incident, Ernst Wiechert tells the story of the death of the 40-year-old widower Wander. After three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia , the war-disabled Wanderer got stuck in the village and became unpopular with local farmers through thefts. That is not enough. The alleged poacher's house is searched. Wander, who grew up in the forest, was supposed to be a forester before the war and speaks the language of animals. Over time, the outlaw's hatred drives Wander near the wolf. Finally, the godforsaken wanderer howls with the predator and feels profound satisfaction.

The villagers don't miss anything in their vicinity. So the reaction is inevitable. A bullet strikes through Wanders window at night. From outside the call can be heard: “ Werewolf !” After the farmers have shot the wolf, Wander buries his dead brother and shoots himself. The pastor buried Wander in a corner of the cemetery. The body is looted and buried in the forest.

The escape into eternity

After one of the Flanders battles have on the tenth mortar battery only Gunner Michael Anders - survived and the horse of the captain - a German farmer. The exhausted soldier rides out of the smoking battle area and is finally nursed to health by the young Flemish farmer's wife Charlot. Charlot has an infant. Her brother has fallen and the husband is stuck in captivity. So Michael plows the field and makes himself useful on Charlot's farm. The two get to know and love each other. Charlot gives birth to Michael's child. The boy is called Oogst - Dutch : harvest. In November 1918, when Michael found out about the armistice , he and Oogst moved to the Rhine. There, in a cathedral city, a German major dispels Michael's concerns about his desertion : the court martial is now a thing of the past. Father and son move home.

literature

First edition

Spends used

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ On the weakness of shape of the silver wagon : The hydrangea that was traveling with him was forgotten by Ernst Wiechert when Gieseking penetrated the lonely forest.
  2. ↑ These battles are called First Battle of Flanders , Second Battle of Flanders and Third Battle of Flanders . Ernst Wiechert names the month of October. So it couldn't have been the second. Since the protagonist Michael Anders stays with Charlot for a year - until the end of the war - it can only be about the Third Battle of Flanders.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dutch Tjiliwoeng
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 77, 4th Zvu (see also ( 1 Mos 9,6  EU ))
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 107, 15. Zvo