The exercise cartridge

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The exercise cartridge is an original radio play by Otto Heinrich Kühner , which was first broadcast on SDR in 1950 under the direction of Helmut Jedele . The piece, which was later produced by other radio stations and was even made into a film, is the author's most broadcast and is one of the most successful German-language radio plays of the post-war period . Based on the conflicts of conscience of the soldiers assigned to a firing squad in World War II, it addresses "the problem of the death penalty and [...] being a fellow traveler" (Kühner).

The radio play

Emergence

An autobiographical influence on the creation of the radio play is obvious. Kühner, who grew up as the son of a pastor in a farming village in southern Baden, was a soldier in the Wehrmacht from the beginning to the end of the Second World War after high school ; he last commanded a Cossack squadron as a lieutenant and was badly damaged by the war. While he was a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union , Kühner wrote a diary which formed the basis of his later thematically related novel Nikolskoje .

His undated radio play The Exercise Cartridge was written before 1950 and is one of his first literary works. He processed his war experiences in it, as well as in several later works. In the audio piece, the young author examines the questions of responsibility, guilt and conscience as well as self-deception of the members of a firing squad ("executioners") assigned to kill a delinquent and puts them in "an extreme situation" ( Die Zeit ).

Content, form

Artist's impression of an execution by a firing squad

The story, set up towards the end of the war, tells of a ten-man firing squad who are supposed to execute a deserter . A so-called exercise cartridge prevents the group from refusing orders for reasons of conscience: Nobody knows whose weapon the non-fatal blank cartridge is hidden in; after the joint execution, everyone can assume that they did not take part in the execution.

But in the end this "conscience fraud" ( Heinz Schwitzke ) is made impossible by a surprising event. One of the soldiers did not pull the trigger due to weak nerves and later reported this to his superiors. Since the body of the dead had nine smooth heart shots, it was clear to the nine shooters that they had all shot with live ammunition.

The radio play begins formally with the internal monologues of those ordered to be shot, which make up a large part of the text, and who are initially on their early morning march to the execution site (one of the speakers also acts as a narrator). After arrival, all the procedures related to the shooting take place in contrast to a rapid game action. The inner monologues accompanying the march back are finally interrupted by the narrator's column neighbor, which initiates the surprising final turn of the story.

Kühner names the actual drama of his radio play "The reproduction of the soul in the unspoken", which, "made audible by means of the radio, takes place inside, in people's thoughts". According to its author, the parable of the exercise cartridge is unmistakable: "These ten men - we all are, and the exercise cartridge symbolizes the compromise of humans, but also for the untrue concession of those in power to human conscience."

Publications

The practice cartridge appeared in print in radio play book III of the European Publishing House (1952); later in a publication by the author at Langen Müller Verlag ( My room borders on Babylon , 1954). A production by NDR from 1962 (director: Fritz Schröder-Jahn ) appeared in 1965 on a Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft record in memory of the actor Klaus Kammer who died .

Productions in detail

The ARD radio play archive lists a total of five different productions of this radio novella between 1950 and 1964, which indicates its particular success in the post-war period. All are preserved.

effect

The radio play was u. a. Filmed with Ernst Jacobi , Herbert Stass and Wolfgang Spier in 1963/1964 by the Sender Freies Berlin for German television (director: Hanns Korngiebel ). Reclam's radio play guide , an early attempt by Heinz Schwitzke and Werner Klippert to create a radio play canon, takes Kühner's exercise cartridge into account in 1969 along with another piece by the author ( Pastorale 67 ) with a work article. The number of programs and the release of a record is emphasized. For Walther Killy's literary lexicon, however , the “parable on the conflict between conscience and soldiery obedience” in 1990 alone marks the beginning of Kühner's own success as a radio play author. Other literary and author encyclopedias even suppress the early radiophonic work in favor of the rest of the author's oeuvre.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Cf. Otto Heinrich Kühner : Introductory text for the record edition . DG 43 064, Hamburg 1965.
  2. ↑ a b c Heinz Schwitzke (Ed.): Reclam's radio play guide . Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1969, p. 363ff.
  3. ↑ a b From the farming village of Nimburg to the world of literature , article in the Badische Zeitung of March 30, 2009 (last accessed: May 6, 2009).
  4. ↑ Otto Heinrich Kühner. Literary works ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Listed by the Brückner-Kühner Foundation (last accessed: May 6, 2009).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.brueckner-kuehner.de
  5. ↑ Short report in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , No. 28, July 14, 1955.
  6. ↑ Thomas Bräutigam: Hörspiel-Lexikon , 2005, p. 481
  7. ^ Killy: Literature Lexicon: Authors and Works in the German Language , 1990, p. 73.