The twenty-fourth of February

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Data
Title: The twenty-fourth of February
Genus: Fateful drama
Original language: German
Author: Zacharias Werner
Premiere: February 24, 1810
Place of premiere: Weimar Court Theater
Place and time of the action: in Schwarrbach [= Schwarenbach], a lonely Alpine inn, on the Gemmi rock and mountain pass in Switzerland between Kanderstäg and Leuk
people
  • Kunz Kuruth ; a Swiss farmer
  • Trude ; his wife
  • Kurt ; her son (unknown as a traveler)

The twenty-fourth of February is a one-act melodrama from 1808 by Zacharias Werner . Werner founded the genre of fateful drama .

Theater history environment

The then modern equipment of this piece with a realistic simultaneous stage , on which a parallel action takes place in two rooms, suggests that it is an adaptation of a current French or English original. Werner knew Switzerland as the setting as well as the Parisian theater conditions from his own experience. However, a template has not yet been found.

action

Place of action: Berghaus Schwarenbach

The former Swiss soldier Kunz Kuruth lives with his wife Trude in the "Schwarrbach" (the author probably thought of the Berghaus Schwarenbach) on the Gemmi Pass between Leukerbad and Kandersteg . Kunz threatened his father with a knife on February 24th, whereupon he allegedly died of a stroke. Since then, disasters have always occurred that day. Completely run down, Kunz has now received a court order stating that he should be brought to the Fronfeste with Trude because of his debts . He decides to kill himself on the way there. The desperate Trude suggests stealing or begging instead, which Kunz firmly refuses.

Suddenly a stranger knocks on the door. It is Kurt, the couple's missing son, who has not yet revealed himself. He got rich as a planter in the United States and is coming back to save his parents if the father has lifted his curse. It turns out that Kurt killed his sister as a child on February 24th and was therefore cursed by his father as well. Confident that everything will work out, Kurt goes to sleep. After midnight, Kunz and Trude sneak into the room and kill Kurt in order to rob him. Kurt can still identify himself as a son. The stunned parents realize that the curse has been fulfilled. As he dies, Kurt forgives his parents and thus releases the curse.

When Kurt hangs up his clothes on a nail in the room, the knife falls from the wall in his parents' living room. According to the stage direction, this should be shown by a mechanism that clarifies the causal sequence. Kunz then takes the knife.

effect

A first private performance took place in 1809 in the salon of Madame de Staël , composed of August Wilhelm Schlegel . At the public premiere on February 24, 1810 in the Hoftheater Weimar, Johann Wolfgang Goethe praised the two actors Pius Alexander Wolff and Amalie Wolff-Malcolmi in the roles of Kurt and Trude, although he criticized the “terrible” of the play. For some time it was very successful in the German-speaking area.

In 1812 Adolf Müllner wrote another successful new version, The Twenty-ninth February . There the historical background is suppressed and the drastic plot intensified.

Fateful drama

To overcome the class clause , rural figures are shown here as tragic heroes. The genre of fateful drama deals with a major theme of the 19th century: the trauma of lost authority. According to monarchists , regicide is equated with parricide. The French people, who killed their king in the French Revolution , took a “curse” on themselves.

The plot alludes to the fate of the Gardes suisses as the personal protector of the king during the Tuileries storm in 1792. In the same way, the protagonist and former soldier Kunz Kuruth, who threatened his father with death, has been inescapably exposed to his father's curse ever since . The renunciation of the grace of the lost authorities has the consequence that man is exposed to the merciless laws of nature, and the voluntariness of his decisions gives way to an instinct to which he blindly obeys. - In his historical-philosophical considerations, Zacharias Werner criticized the “tyranny of unbridled passion”, which had ruled instead of the desired freedom after the French Revolution. The French Revolution had far-reaching influence on Switzerland through Helveticism and mediation .

literature

  • Roger Bauer: Fate in horror drama. From Lillo's “Fatal curiosity” to Zacharias Werner's “The twenty-fourth of February” and Pixérécourt's “Le monastère abandonné”. In the S. (Ed.): Inevitabilis vis fatorum: The triumph of fateful drama on the European stage around 1800. (Yearbook for international German studies, Vol. 27) Lang, Bern / Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-261-04112-9 .
  • Michael Schmidt: [Article] Zacharias Werner / The twenty-fourth of February. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon . 3rd, completely revised edition. 18 vols. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , vol. 17, p. 348f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Zacharias Werner: No Catholic, or from true Catholicism and false Protestantism. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1825, p. 34.