The blouses of Bohemia

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Die Blousen des Böhmen (full title: Die Blousen des Böhmen. Stories, Pictures, Stories in Pictures and Pictures from History ) is a collection of nonsense stories by German writer Robert Gernhardt from 1977.

Content and form

The book, with more than a hundred picture stories and photo novels , caricatures and short stories , crime stories and fairy tales, is one of the book trade company Zweiausendeins ' own book publications , which exclusively sell their products directly through mail order companies and their own stores. The collection of stories covers "the broad spectrum of the comedy that life writes, and leaves hardly any facts unscathed, hardly anything untouched". It reports, among other things, "how reading the Otto catalog changed the life of the 'relief drinker' Ralf from the ground up"; of the "dear God who walks the earth and spends a really nice evening with the rich man"; about "marriages in the storm or the 'sensational super mess'".

The variety of topics dealt with defies any order: “Whether football or weather reports, porn wholesaling or Christmas, World War I or Belshazzar's death - no topic is horrible enough for Robert Gernhardt not to find a funny side to it - mostly a horribly funny one ". Among other things, his satirical Christmas story The Trap is included, which is now considered a classic of "anti-Christmas literature".

In terms of design, the narratives partly work with the dialogue and the situation comedy that is revealed to the reader from this , whereby the narrator usually behaves neutrally . Most of the picture and short stories, stories and fairy tales, however, work with a regularly operated denial of meaning according to the own laws and stylistic devices of nonsense literature .

Origin and reception

In the 1960s, the writer, caricaturist, draftsman and painter Robert Gernhardt was one of the founders of the New Frankfurt School , the members of which influenced and shaped modern humorous literature considerably. At the end of the 1970s, Gernhardt developed into a “master of wordplay and corruption ”: In 1977 he formed the shaking rhyme Die from the traditional German title of the well-known volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), The Flowers of Evil Blouses of Bohemia as the title of his collection of nonsense stories. Such a witty joke earned him the special price Reif & Kloppt at the Prix ​​Pantheon in 2000 , where he interpreted the award category as “No longer the youngest, but still blessed with a childlike disposition” .

In contrast to Baudelaire's Die Blumen des Evil , Gernhardt's Die Blousen des Böhmen does not rhyme with another word. The cohesion arises from the “new reality”, which is created or simulated according to its own laws and rules of nonsense and which is coherent in itself. In his early works gathered here, Gernhardt was not concerned with developing a personal style, but rather with criticism of the zeitgeist and the parody of familiar forms.

Some of the works gathered in the Blouses of Bohemia , created between 1962 and 1977, had previously appeared in anthologies that were already out of print at the time or in magazines, such as, in particular, concrete or pardon, as well as in their supplement Welt im Spiegel . Two stories, Another picture and its story and The Binder case , as well as the photo novel Der Biber von Eschnapur , the title of which is a famous film and is about Abel and Bebel , was created in collaboration with FW Bernstein ; on the fairy tale by the loving God who walked on the earth , was Peter Knorr mitbeteiligt as an author.

Like some of the other books by Gernhardt, the collection of stories Die Blousen des Böhmen was not initially sold through regular bookshops, but as their own publication via the two-thousand-one mail order. Although these books were not recognized by the institutionalized literary criticism , they were nevertheless able to assert themselves successfully with the public. For example, the anthology Die Drei (1981), which, in addition to Gernhardt's Die Blousen des Böhmen, contains the biographical anthology The Truth about Arnold Hau von Gernhardt, FW Bernstein and FK Waechter, as well as the collection of poems Besternte Harvest by Gernhardt and FW Bernstein, is included Two thousand and one is now available as the 18th edition. In terms of the history of reception, this meant that there was almost no literary criticism of The Blouses of Bohemia in a contemporary historical context.

In 1997 a new edition of the successful book was published by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

expenditure

  • Robert Gernhardt: The blouses of Bohemia. Stories, pictures, stories in pictures and pictures from history . Zweiausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1977; New edition Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13228-2 .
  • Robert Gernhardt: The blouses of Bohemia . In: the other together with FW Bernstein and FK Waechter: Die Drei . 1st edition, Zweausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981; 18th edition, Zweausendeins Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-86150-022-3 .
  • Robert Gernhardt: The blouses of Bohemia. Stories, pictures, stories in pictures and pictures from history . 3rd edition, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-596-13228-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Klaus Pommerening (University of Mainz): Pommerening's collection of letters . [1]
  2. ↑ a b God the Father of Humor . Obituary by Volker Albers in the Hamburger Abendblatt from June 1, 2006.
  3. ↑ a b c Essay by Lutz Hagestedt about Robert Gernhardt and his work ( memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) in the literary criticism network .
  4. ↑ The Blouses of Bohemia , two thousand and one 1977; P. 268 ("Bibliographical Note")