The birdsong files

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Die Akten des Vogelsangs is a novel by Wilhelm Raabe , which was written from June 30, 1893 to August 10, 1895 and published in 1896 by Otto Janke in Berlin.

Senior Councilor Dr. jur. Karl Krumhardt loves the place of his childhood and youth, the suburb "Zum Vogelsang". The dutiful senior civil servant, sinking into mountains of files every day, struggles in his spare time with the description of the unhappy love of his childhood friends, the two globetrotters Velten Andres and Helene Potsendorff.

content

frame

Using the example of the Vogelsang protagonists, Raabe varies a z. A well-known theme from Abu Telfan or from the stuffing cake : the tension between adventurous hikes through the world and the philistinism of close homeland. Oberregierungsrat Karl Krumhardt, as a representative of the bourgeoisie in a German “residence nest”, has turned gray on the civil service ladder. Then a letter from Helene Mungo from Berlin breaks into his orderly family life, in which the widowed multimillionaire from Chicago tells him about the death and funeral of her friend Velten Andres. This message prompts the 48-year-old to write down his memories of the three years together in the rural residential suburb of Vogelsang and the unhappy love of the neighboring children Velten and Helene.

action

Karl was asked by Helene to describe Velten's life, with ironic reference to his educational character for his children, and in fact no one knows "anything more precise" about the deceased than him, since their paths in life have crossed again and again and he has the family background knows. Nevertheless, Karl makes several attempts to write "these sheets", which for him are also a processing of his contrasting fate and a discussion of his own adapted middle-class. Although he has witnessed Velten's career, "talking about it" is more difficult for him "from side to side".

The Vogelsang children formed an exciting triangle shaped by their parents' different ideas about life. Since Velten's father, Dr. med. Valentin Andres, who had died much too early, had to raise the linguistically gifted son, who was interested in literature and philosophy, but who was averse to any systematics, the mother Amalie, who lost herself in her fairy tale dreams. Little capricious Helene (Ellen) and her mother Agathe Potsendorff lived in their neighborhood for rent at Hartleben. Agathe and her daughter were sent back home for some time after unsuccessful speculations by her husband Charles, who had emigrated to America to rake in New York dollars. Now the two were waiting for the new economic rise and the call back to their upper class life with dark-skinned service staff. A relationship between "kissing and scratching" developed between Velten and Elly. Both were in constant danger of “climbing” themselves in the tree of life, as was the case in the bird's-song bush forest. Karl was a solid friend for both of them. His father, the orderly secretary of the higher court, often had to take on the role of guardian at Velten and Elly in cases of conflict and looked, shaking his head, at their mothers who were, in his opinion, unrealistic and poorly educated. While these gave their children a lot of freedom, Krumhardt raised the son with rigor to be a successful pupil, law student and civil servant. Karl passed the Abitur exam at the first attempt, while Velten had to repeat the school year. Finally, Helene moved back to the USA with her parents and Velten studied philosophy in Berlin for a few semesters. There Karl met him with his landlady, the fencing master's widow Feucht, and his siblings Léon and Léonie des Beaux, who were friends with him. After breaking off his studies and working in the office of the tailoring workshop of the Beaux, Velten traveled to his beloved Ellen to save her from a material luxury marriage. But she decided on the millionaire Mungo. Velten then wrote to his mother, disappointed: “I have lost her; but this time it is not my fault that I missed out on happiness on earth ”. He then wandered restlessly through the world.

In the meantime, Karl had left the Vogelsang settlement with his parents and, because of his career supported by social connections, had moved to the best part of town, where the two uprooted old people died soon after. They were still happy to see Karl's professional advancement and his befitting connection with the senior civil servant's daughter Anna, for whose brother Ferdinand, when he broke into the ice in winter, Velten had dared to die. Velten returned to the royal seat for the funeral of Karl's father. and stayed there until his mother's death. The Vogelsang had changed in the meantime. The parents' houses were now surrounded by factory buildings. From the old society, only Amalie Andres lived alone in the "green childhood alley". Velten increasingly withdrew from life "terribly tired", remained silent during his stay at home and let people sit up and take notice when he stated how he would like to die: "As unassigned as possible." When Karl countered him after the birth of his son the will of his foreboding wife, who applied for sponsorship, refused the task that was overwhelming for him. He played the cheerful, optimistic son only for his mother, wrapped in her dreams. Her last request was still dying that he should pack his suitcase, because he should "fortunately not miss the train." The "property-weary" Velten stayed in Vogelsang for the following winter in order to close his parents' house. First he burned his mother's furniture. and then, before he retired to the old student dorm in Berlin, released the empty building to loot the non-combustible contents and also the doors, planks et cetera. At this grotesque farewell party, the monkey imitator German Fell from the neighboring vaudeville made a symbolic appearance and announced that, like Velten, he was someone who got out of his skin while the others just wanted to leave. Karl's “good little girl” in particular was concerned that her husband might be infected by the doom and gloom. She was terrified of the “strange friend” and was no longer able to respect him, the “dead tired from the path through life”, as a lifesaver and turned away from him for good. Their fear of his destruction of the family world carried over to Karl, when the latter wanted to stand by Velten, but was unable to. Velten, who called himself “Studiosus of world wisdom”, left his hometown and Karl saw him for the last time in his life when he said goodbye.

When Helene's letter arrived in Berlin, she had already buried her friend. He learned from the landlady on Dorotheenstrasse that Velten had lived there for six months and had died with her. He met Helene, the "widowed Mistress Mungo", sitting on her deathbed. She remembered the “grins and laughs” of her two friends when she was young and thought back to how she, the multimillionaire, had met the interpreter Velten again in Alexandria, London, Paris and Rome. They have always passed each other in life and only found each other shortly before his death. Velten and she should have looked for each other, as much as they resisted - to the point of death. He thought he was strong, but she knew him in his weakness. On the wall behind his bed, Velten had written four lines from a Goethe poem: Be numb! / A slightly moved heart / Is a miserable good / On the shaking earth. While Helene stayed in Berlin, Karl returned home the next day, “a deep breath! The house, the wife and the children! ... ”and began to write.

Quotes

  • "It is no greater miracle than when people wonder about themselves."
  • "What clouds the eye more than the faded glare of the sun and youth?"
  • “The existence of mankind on earth is constantly being rebuilt. "

reception

  • Finck and Meinerts discuss the inclusion of the text shortly after it was published.
  • In 1907, the Raabe admirer Hesse praised this “image of life”, which “extends from the small, narrow-bourgeois limited to the great”.
  • Oppermann cannot find Raabe's otherwise characteristic humor as a life-affirming prose element in the novel.
  • According to Fuld, this late work has Raabe's autobiographical features.
  • Sprengel sees Velten Andres as the “main character of the novel”. While reading, the narrator and reader would become increasingly insecure - regarding the assessment of the material and its presentation in the form of files.
  • Schwanenberg-Liebert, on the other hand, finally recognizes the “actuary” Karl as the “main hero” in her dissertation. Before that, however, she had also seen the hero Velten, who opposed the narrator, in the center of the jumble of files. The structure of the novel is closed according to the chosen framework (see above). What they had in common, marked at the beginning and end of the novel with Helene's letter and Karl's journey to the room in which he died in Berlin, encompassed Karl's laborious digging into the past. Raabe emphasizes: Karl is brought up by his father and Velten can develop freely. The Idyll Vogelsang - a synonym for the unsuccessful attempt to escape into solitude, is an illusion. Raabe's achievement is the exposure of this illusion. Karl is successful because he adapts. On the other hand, for the “dreamer” Velten, a bourgeois profession is not within reach. Raabe's narrator, Karl, asks questions while digging through the past, but can't find an answer. According to the title of their discussion, Schwanenberg-Liebert comes to the conclusion that Velten's path leads to loneliness. This loser - in the bourgeois sense - told the world valet. Velten has climbed himself in the world tree Yggdrasil and is sitting on a dead branch.
  • Jakob examines the title-giving work of the narrator in papers and goes into the repeated quoting of the beginning of the third ode by 18-year-old Goethe "To my friend Behrisch" in the text:
Be callous!
A lightly moving heart
Is a wretched good
On the shaking earth.
  • Böhme sees “Die Akten des Vogelsang” in context with Fontane's wife Jenny Treibel .
  • Thielking has the impression that the narrator Karl goes well with “Raabe's meticulously registering poetology”.
  • Meyen names 35 reviews from 1896 onwards. The more recent literary historiography has also dealt intensively with the "files". For example, in Schwanenberg-Liebert there are some references to such further leading work: Hermann Helmers (1964), Wolfgang Jehmüller (Munich 1975), Michael Stoffels (Diss. Freiburg 1974), Hubert Ohl (1979), Günther Matschke (Bonn 1975) , William T. Webster (1982), Dieter Kafitz (Kronberg / Taunus 1978), Peter Sprengel (1974), Eberhard Geister (Braunschweig 1981), Gernot Folkers (Kronberg / Taunus 1976) and Wilhelm Emrich (1982).

expenditure

First edition

Used edition

  • The birdsong files . In: Hans-Heinrich Reuter (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe: Erzählungen . Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1962, pp. 599–776. (The edition follows: Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. The selected work. Critically reviewed edition. 4 volumes. Freiburg im Breisgau 1955)

Further editions

  • The birdsong files . In: Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. The selected work . Fourth volume. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin 1954. pp. 549–720 (Licensor: Hermann Klemm Publishing House, Freiburg im Breisgau).
  • The birdsong files . Pp. 211-408. With an appendix, pp. 447-482. In: Hans Finck (arrangement), Hans Jürgen Meinerts (arrangement): Lugau monastery . The birdsong files. 2nd Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1970, vol. 19, without ISBN. In: Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
  • Meyen names twelve issues.

literature

  • Hans Oppermann : Wilhelm Raabe. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1970 (1988 edition), ISBN 3-499-50165-1 (rowohlt's monographs).
  • Fritz Meyen : Wilhelm Raabe. Bibliography. 2nd edition Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973, supplementary volume. 1, ISBN 3-525-20144-3 . In: Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
  • Claudia Schwanenberg-Liebert: From community to loneliness. Studies on the occurrence of a literary sociological phenomenon in the work of Wilhelm Raabe. Diss. Univ. Düsseldorf 1992. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 3-631-45030-3
  • Werner Fuld : Wilhelm Raabe. A biography. Hanser, Munich 1993 (dtv edition in July 2006), ISBN 3-423-34324-9 .
  • Peter Sprengel : History of German-Language Literature 1870–1900. From the founding of the empire to the turn of the century . CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-44104-1 .
  • Hans-Joachim Jakob: "But that's a terrible letter". Lettered and printed paper in Wilhelm Raabe's story 'Die Akten des Vogelsangs'. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe . Richard Boorberg Verlag Munich, October 2006, ISBN 3-88377-849-4 , pp. 51–60 (issue 172 of edition text + kritik ).
  • Sigrid Thielking: File loneliness. Archive and recording fiction with Wilhelm Raabe. ibid, pp. 39-50
  • John Walker: Wilhelm Raabe: Die Akten des Vogelsangs - The End of Inwardness . In: Ders .: The truth of Realism. A reassessment of the German novel 1830-1900 . Legenda, London 2011, pp. 89-109, entry DNB.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hoppe, Vol. 4, p. 739 above
  2. ↑ Braunschweiger Edition, Vol. 19, p. 457 middle
  3. ^ Edition Reuter 1962, p. 681, p. 18. Zvo
  4. ^ Edition Reuter 1962, p. 693, p. 14. Zvu
  5. ^ Edition Reuter 1962, p. 772, p. 14. Zvu
  6. ↑ Braunschweiger Edition, Vol. 19, pp. 453–457
  7. ^ Hesse, quoted by Volker Michels (ed.): Hermann Hesse. A literary history in reviews and essays. Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main 1970 (paperback edition 1975), ISBN 3-518-36752-8 , p. 353, 4. Zvo
  8. ↑ Oppermann, p. 119, 7. Zvo
  9. ↑ Fuld, p. 337 below
  10. ↑ Sprengel, p. 336, 4th Zvu
  11. ↑ Sprengel, p. 336, 10th Zvu
  12. ↑ Schwanenberg-Liebert, pp. 307–339
  13. ↑ Jakob, p. 58, 13. Zvu
  14. ^ Edition Reuter 1962, p. 725, 13. Zvo
  15. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Poetic works . Volume 1. Poems . Phaidon Verlag Essen 1999, ISBN 3-89350-448-6 , p. 770, 2. Zvo
  16. ↑ "The resemblance of the female main character and the constancy with which verses run through the novel and say the opposite of what the female main character feels suggest that Raabe conceives his novel as a counter-image to Frau Jenny Treibel Has. Incidentally, Lieutenant Vogelsang is also the name of the strange election assistant with whom the Kommerzienrat Treibel hopes to fulfill his ambitions for a Reichstag mandate. "(Weites Feld, " Frau Jenny Treibel "and" Die Akten des Vogelsangs " May 3, 2012)
  17. ↑ Thielking, p. 42, 14. Zvo
  18. ↑ Meyen, pp. 311-314
  19. ↑ Meyen, pp. 38-40