The Assassination of a Buttercup and Other Tales

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The murder of a buttercup and other stories is an anthology with 12 stories by Alfred Döblin , which were written between 1903 and 1905 and published in 1913 by Georg Müller Verlag. Most of the texts were published in 1910/1911 in the magazine Der Sturm . They differ greatly in content and form, but all deal with topics of the time: Eros and the war between the sexes, the fragility of bourgeois role models and social conventions, surreal processes in personal perception and the "dismantling of the individual". The eponymous novel The Murder of a Buttercup in particular fulfills this modernist claim and is considered a key text of expressionism and literary modernism.

Content of the individual stories

The sailing trip

The short story is a deep-psychological sketch designed with motifs from neo-romanticism about the spiritual underworld slumbering in humans. As a natural power, symbolized by the stormy sea, it breaks into the endangered existence and destroys it.

The forty-eight-year-old Brazilian Copetta drove his yacht across the ocean “out of hopeless luck”, had fun in Paris for four months and then quickly took the train to Ostend . Now he is walking along the promenade and meets an elegant Frau L., perhaps in her mid-thirties, with rust-colored hair under a wide-brimmed white hat. Her gray gaze on a clever face evades him. After they met three times that afternoon, he sends his business card to their boarding house and announces his visit. In the hotel he tears up the pictures of his two children and charred the stone of his wedding ring in a candle flame. He invites L. to go sailing the next morning. On the boat, a playful love game, animated by her, quickly develops between the two of them against the backdrop of an approaching storm. She becomes more and more exuberant, he sinks against it, "shaken [-] he hears her laughter [...] he rocks [-] his head back and forth in denial." The waves get higher and Copetta falls backwards into the sea. She will be saved because he has informed the port authorities about his plans by telegram before leaving.

Ls. Tragedy throws life out of joint. She leaves her old mother alone in the pension and travels to Paris. There she puts on make-up and dresses in sophisticated clothes, lives dissolute for a year “with indifferent laughter and shaking her head”, dances at balls in an idiosyncratic, ecstatic manner with atropine- dilated pupils and randomly sleeps with young men whom she call the “hyena”. When she is sent a bouquet of flowers with a letter, she immediately leaves the city and finally takes refuge in a dream world: she announces her arrival to Copetta. In Ostend she ignores the information about his death and takes a boat to the place of the accident at night when the moon is full to look for her lover. A storm is approaching, she panics and is about to despair when the black figure of the Brazilian gets into the boat. "Slowly he raised his right arm and fended off the woman who rose from the ground cheering" and dropped into the sea. She rushes after him, and their youthfully transformed bodies are entwined with one another. “The purple darkness fell over them. They whirled down into the raging sea. "

The dancer and the body

The theme is the struggle of the will to art against the disobedient, autonomous body, which is also dealt with in other works by the author. The protagonist Ella already learns to dance at the age of eleven, at eighteen her graceful athletic figure, her technique and her disciplined demeanor are perfect for her job and she approaches the ideal of coolly putting the body at the service of her art. But just a year later she was afflicted with a "pale disease" and her limbs became heavy. She threatens her body, but it no longer obeys her as a toy.

After she went to the hospital at the urging of her mother, she only felt disgust for her own body and the helpful doctors with disgust, because they only wanted to take care of her body and heal it. The condition of the dancer changes in the sick bed. She forgot to speak and give orders. The whole treatment is done without her will. To her mother, “the decrepit one” seems faint-hearted and in need of help and repeats her comforting words: “We are all in God's hands.” After a brief reassurance, her dislike flares up again. She feels relegated to the sick body, which is treated with awe by the nursing staff, but which she regards as her sole possession. So she refuses the doctors a truthful statement about her complaints and hides her pain. Later she gives up the defensive stance, lets everything happen to her indifferently, feels no more responsibility and refers her complaining body to the doctors: “'Be quiet until tomorrow for the round; tell the doctors, your doctors, leave me satisfied. ' They ran separate businesses. ”Now she answers the doctors again, but at the same time the dancer notices with irony their failure. She watches the constant decay of her body with glee.

When marching music can be heard from outside one lunchtime, the dancer feels stimulated and symbolically embroidered her situation on a white cloth: a spherical body without a head, treated on one side by a doctor and on the other by a dancing girl is pierced with scissors so that it runs out. Ella wishes to dance as before, to reverse the balance of power and to submit the limbs to her will. She calls for the doctor and when he bends over her and looks at the embroidery, she says to him: "You, - you monkey, - you monkey, you wimp." Then the protagonist pokes her sewing scissors, as in the picture, in the left breast. "Even in death the dancer had the cold, contemptuous expression around her mouth."

Astralia

The satire is an example that the author is dealing with the same subjects, e.g. B. surreal phenomena, sometimes with tragic seriousness, as in fairy tales and legends as well as psychiatric studies, at other times, as in Götting's transformation from narrow-mindedness into madness, as funny-cheeky rascals and parodies.

Adolf Götting, thinker and private scholar, member of several pious associations and founder of the Astralia Brotherhood, is “a depressed little man with a wrinkled face, yellowish, inflamed eyes and a soft voice”. He has written a “History of the Main Mistakes in Human Action from the Fall to the Present” and is currently writing a book on “Inner Life and Its Physical Representation”. His caring and thrifty wife Elfride, "a pale, pleasant creature", ties a brown, black-stuffed stocking around his neck so that her catarrhal husband does not catch a cold in the damp autumn weather, and admonishes him to take care of himself , is constantly taught by him with his absurd theories of health and transformation. Such conversations with her are too challenging for him and he admonishes her: “I shouldn't listen to you, Elfriede. You don't know what you are talking about. Today is new moon. […] The mind, the mind. [...] From the inside I will overcome everything. "Adolf leaves the house and" goes for a walk because he is a thinker. He knows he is a thinker. His wife doesn't know. ”But he also feels like“ a herald, a seer who waits for his time. […] But one day a miracle will happen. [...] when the mind has accumulated high enough; it will transform him. ”Afterwards, attend the nightly meeting of his brotherhood. The small group drinks cider and smokes a lot. They praise the immortal soul, demand equality of goods and the prohibition on killing animals. Götting predicts the impending end of the world. Strange things “happen” on the night of the new moon.

The next morning a half-naked man, Adolf Götting, stumbles out of the door of the restaurant and ponders. “If it had happened, the unbelievable, the transformation, tonight overnight!” He excites the strange looks of passers-by. He is laughed at by wheelboys, bakers and barbers and harassed by a group of students, but he only feels gratitude: “It has happened. The miracle has taken place, the Lord has done it. ”He sings:“ The suffering of all years is forgotten. [...] Hosanna, sir. ”When she returned to his apartment, Elfriede was shocked by her confused husband. While he happily tells her about his transformation, he is only interested in his clothes. Thereupon he insults her: “Are you also from the Korah group ? Get away from me so that I don't become unclean with you. "When he heard the neighbors laughing on the staircase, he yelled:" Don't laugh, don't laugh! There's nothing to laugh about here! ”Finally he crawls into bed and begs that they stop laughing, and Elfriede has to comfort her trembling little man.

Immaculate conception

The short story is assigned to the author's romantic phase, in which he dresses the protagonists' emotional adventure in the style costume of the fairy tale or the Catholic legend.

At the beginning the narrator describes Mary in harmony with nature. She walks “pale and silent-eyed” through a damp meadow and looks up at the leaves of a broad-branched tree that stands in a forest that men have avoided. During the rain she sits among the playmates in the hall and together they sing to conjure up the rain god. She longs for a child, looks up forebodingly at the “dark blue sky” and “suddenly shudders”, but she rejects her friend Josef who is courting her virginally.

“When the girls once [enjoying] their youth with kisses and hugging in gentle happiness under that broad-branched tree”, a thunderstorm draws in, and they see a “black, immeasurably broad and gigantic hand of cloud, inescapable of will like a hand of God” and a bright light looks upon them like an eye. The girls flee, Maria's friend rushes over and she sinks into his arms, seeking protection. "In the dense darkness, hands ran over her face and hair, after the imperiously commanding clap of thunder, she heard hot whispers."

The next day Maria is found "rigid with open lips on her bed" by the playmates. She is disturbed, stuffs her handkerchief into her mouth or groans loudly. "Nobody knew what had happened during the night, but it was soon suggested that the horror of the thunderstorm had disturbed her soul." After the care, her condition improved, she was walking through the wet grass again. But it now looks solemn and often looks searchingly at the sky. Gradually she becomes “kinder, more pensive” and no longer rejects her boyfriend, but instead strokes his hand. When Maria then sits with the small child “in the blue air” in front of the hall, “with eyes lit from within”, Josef looks at her “speechless”. "Maria lifts her tender face smiling to the deep blue sky, from which the gloomy hand of God had reached down to the virginal one, opens [-] her lips slightly to the light to kiss" and speaks to her "innocent child": "Me love you, I love you, you pledge of God. "

The transformation

In the melancholy art fairy tale dedicated to his later wife Erna Reiss, the author tells the melancholy love of a narcissistic queen, which fluctuates between attraction and repulsion, in the style of neo-romantic decadence and erotic aestheticism .

The first years of marriage of the queen and the prince consort were "peaceful", but after the birth of their son the situation worsened. The mother cannot bear the screaming of her child and rides wildly with her entourage through forests and fields, gives splendid celebrations in the reserved adjoining rooms of village inns and meets with her lover, a "quiet, sick gentleman", later called Graf Hagen and described as a premarital friend of the princess. Her husband, the fat and sad prince consort, is now seeking consolation from a "thin black court maid [-] with shining eyes". Outwardly, the court ceremony continues for both of them, but one lunchtime the queen breaks off the initially cheerful conversation with her husband, leaves the dining room and locks the doors of her apartments behind her. You are now ignoring yourself at the blackboard. Only on the third day, when they meet in the corridor, they shake hands and look at each other for a long time, but she begs him to leave. He correctly understands this as a desire and an invitation to come to her, and disguises himself as her blond gentleman, while his wife, like the maid of honor, wears a black silk dress. In this costume they walk through the castle to their apartments. The next lunchtime they sit reconciled at the table, suddenly she rushes away, the child's screaming disturbs her, she should be housed in another part of the castle and taken to the sea to relax. In the evening she has her pale lover, the poet Count Hagen, brought into her room, deliberately provoking a scandal. Before their marriage, she had a passionate affair with him, which she ended two days before the wedding. When he arrives at night, she has a brief conversation with him, asks him about his military career and says goodbye to him. The next day the Count enters her room unannounced and swears her love. She hits him in the face with a whip and throws him out. He leaves the residence immediately, she asks the court marshal if he is still alive, laughs scornfully when the latter answers in the affirmative, and mocks that servants should be changed more often. The prince also ends his love affair. The maid of honor sets her room on fire and is thought to be mad. She travels to her father's estate, and after two days she is found drowned in the pond.

The wild queen and the melancholy prince are now changing, they go for a walk together and are tender to each other. In the evening they dress up and appear as count and maid of honor. In the opinion of the court preacher, this is how they both process their feelings of guilt. The Queen is increasingly withdrawing from the public eye and leaving the business of government to her ministers. One morning she destroys the prince's costumes and wigs, which are reminiscent of the count, and cuts a love bite scar from her upper arm. She calls on her desperate husband to kill the child, it is not hers, a "living lie". They live on in calm melancholy. Even amusements like hunting in autumn only briefly dispel the dejected mood: “But anyone who saw them riding home in the dark recognized that the same closeness hung over their faces as the glittering, cobweb-thin robe that flows over the sea women and with the dawn of the Phosphorescent night. "

After the prince disappears without a trace for three days, this stirs the minds of the people, but he has only prepared their secret journey. One day they leave their country, wrapped in white coats, unannounced with a steamer and after five days of sailing they reach a small island inhabited by fishermen. For days they sit by the sea, "at the foot of the white limestone cliffs [...] or further back below the tall palm trees, ”hug and kiss, but their mood does not improve. One morning at sunrise, the queen and the prince, in splendid robes and with their insignia, walk towards the gently swaying waves of the "happy sea". Then the story jumps to the final sentence: "Up on the flickering water, a round rod and a golden royal crown floated next to each other."

The helper

The tale is a horror story in the style of Edgar Allan Poe's Black Romanticism . It is about a puzzling criminal case that was investigated by a New York court in the middle of the 19th century and which, in the opinion of the narrator, would have been remembered by posterity had it not been for the Civil War had not prevented this and covered it with myths: Grasso, a Italian immigrant, is the owner of a funeral home that has achieved a monopoly in the city of almost 200,000 inhabitants. His success as a businessman coincides with the fifteen-year employment of his employee Mike Bondi, whose circumstances are unknown, except that he speaks Italian with the boss. He appears very reserved, his eyes are barely visible under the heavy lids, his small figure, showing no signs of aging, moves with a smooth, creeping pace through the city and is accompanied by a white Russian greyhound. Mike often visits the sick and soothes the patients with his soft voice so that he immediately gains their great confidence. Soon after, they die painlessly. A police investigation into these events is triggered by observations made by the legal consultant Martin, Grasso's neighbor. One night after the death of his wife, he went to the undertaker in the store next to his apartment in order to transfer the laying out and burial to him. In the process, he discovers how Grasso is being pressed by two white arms stretched out of a coffin to the breast of a woman he calls "Bessie". The next day, Martin Grasso's wife reports about the incident. When she checks the story the following night, she witnesses the encounter between the being in the coffin, who turns out to be Mike Bondi, and her husband. After their complaint, Grasso and Bondi are arrested. The enigmatic Bondi is revealed to be a twenty year old woman. She testifies that her name is Bessie Bennet and that she died of consumption eighty years ago in Senn Fair near New York. She would have gladly continued to live and was appointed by an unknown power to the servant of death and thus had the chance to return and as a helper to give a "loving death" to the dying ready to leave. This is thought to be a strange excuse and she is accused of poisoning and is supposed to show the poison. She is threatened with torture, but refuses to comply and transforms into a black flame rising over the house, killing six hundred people and reducing the area to rubble. "Loving death was never seen walking through the streets." Only the "fable" of him and "of the expulsion of his assistant" remained alive in the country.

The wrong door

The story deals with the belief in fate of a superstitious officer who, in a dream, receives a message without having asked a question. Compliance with them leads to his death in a grotesque way, and this fate seems to suit his comrades basically to his person.

In honor of the Kyrias brothers there is a convivial evening in the officers' mess of a provincial garrison. A hard-drinking circle plays cards and drinks a lot. Nick Kyrias, the younger brother, is very talkative and tells us which magical tricks he used in Monte Carlo in vain to conjure up happiness, and the like. a. he played in stockings or had an ugly woman pick up the play money from the bank on a Friday morning. Now he watches the game closely and calculates his chances. Lieutenant Irfen enters the room drunk and takes a seat across from Nick. He is known for his punk visits and his unreliability. He was transferred from the capital to this garrison three years ago because he had shot his own horse and two of the commander's horses under the influence of alcohol, although he was intended for a promotion because of his hard work and ingenuity. When he saw Nick writing a probability calculation on a piece of paper for his game, he smeared his paper with the reason: " Kismet , there is only fate." He explains that happiness cannot be enforced by thinking and planning, it will come or stay away. But he would say "Kismet" in his sleep and ask about the future.

The next day everyone meets again in the casino. There is a lot of drinking. Suddenly Irfen gets up and shouts: "Number 6" and "Perastraße [...] That's where she lives." He says the fate has spoken. Nick and his comrades mock him and want to check the prophecy of the " Pythia ". You go to Perastraße, Irfen ahead "with a pulling step" and "with unbelievable regularity". It gets creepy for Nick and he thinks: "He's wronging himself." It seems to him as if the first lieutenant was going ahead with "his eyes shut tight" and an "unswerving security on his face". Irfen knocks on the door of house number 6. He explains to the Croatian servant Kari that he must “see something here in the house” and that he has “a mission that cannot be postponed”. The owner Kastelli, who has joined him, tells him he cannot come in now, the ladies were sleeping upstairs, and the Croat throws him out when he tries to climb the stairs. Irfen then knocks in the door and draws his sword. Kari then shoots the lieutenant twice. Nick Kyrias, injured in the arm, comments on his death: "Kismet". "In the casino, in occasional discussions of the case, it was said that the course of the matter was basically foreseeable."

The murder of a buttercup

In this story of psychosis, Michael Fischer, head of a company, atone for a mysterious guilt in a grotesque way. Every day the merchant goes for a walk from Immenthal to St. Ottilien, counting the steps and swinging his arms. Apparently he wants to relax and train his body, which has been cramped from office work: "You get nervous in the city". When he gets caught on weeds with his walking stick and tries in vain to loosen them, he gets very angry and hits the green wildly. Then he asks obedience as he does from his employees and apprentices: "One must definitely face this people". He chops off the head of a buttercup and looks out of the "stump of the body [...] white blood [...] in a thick stream", which develops into a grotesque apocalyptic image of a flood running down on itself. He is afraid of nature's revenge and tries to control it mentally first. But although he wants to have the appearance, like in the company a disobedient employee, thrown out and he mocks his fearfulness about the murder of an "adult buttercup", he does not manage to calm down. In disgust, he turns away from the decaying head of the plant and searches for the distance. Since his feet evidently unwillingly carry him away, he wants to prevent her from doing so with a pocket knife. But exhausted, he thrusts the knife into a tree and decides to return to the scene of the crime to bandage the perhaps injured plant and save her life. But he cannot find the flower, now humanely christened “Ellen”. He calls for her and demands that the forest hand her over. He sees a weeping tree drop of resin and, believing that the trees will hold judgment over him, tears himself away from the place, and escapes through a narrowing path. A fir tree knocks him down and he arrives in the village at night bleeding in streams, while behind him the mountain shakes its fists and the trees abuse him.

The next day the merchant harassed his apprentices. On the second day he tries to relieve his conscience through compensation. As atonement, he sets up an account for Ellen and credits her with 10 marks, then he offers food and drink. Ellen receives part of his meal on her own plate. His behavior takes on religious traits, the flower is part of his everyday life: Ellen monitors his actions like a conscience and he loses pleasure in the beauty of the world because all this and the "bridal happiness of summer" has failed Ellen. He feels sorry for her and at the same time hates her because he has to mourn her. This guerrilla war between "agony and delight" even makes him think of suicide. “[E] r feasted fearfully on her angry screams that he sometimes thought he heard. Every day he thought of new pitfalls. "

One day, Fischer passed the place of death on his way to St. Ottilien and had the idea of ​​digging up a sister or daughter of Ellen's, putting her in a “gold-splendid porcelain pot” in his bedroom, cherishing and caring for her and thus the deed to atone: He could save the life of this flower and thus compensate for the death of the mother. At the same time, “the old woman” would have a “rival” and he could “annoy her, ignore her”. In addition, he was spared the compensation. He immediately carried out the idea: "Every day the lucky man watered the plant with malicious devotion and sacrificed the dead, Ellen." When he hears her whimpering, his self-confidence increases. One evening the housekeeper explains to him that she broke the pot while cleaning and disposed of the plant and its broken pieces. Fischer can hardly believe his luck: “Now he was rid of the whole buttercup clan. Law and luck were on his side. It wasn't a question. He had duped the forest. "Suddenly he gets up from his chaise longue and takes the path towards St. Ottilien and disappears" into the darkness of the mountain forest ":" In his mind he was already swinging his black stick. [...] He could murder as much as he wanted. He whistled on all buttercups. "

The Knight Bluebeard

In the style of neo-romantic decadence, the story takes up the story of the woman-murdering Bluebeard , which is often adapted and varied in literature, with motifs from the art fairy tale and the Catholic legend, and tries to reveal the secret of gender love. The story begins with a detailed description of nature of a barren plain, once flooded by the sea, between a city and the sea. This is where Baron Paolo di Selvi lands after a trip around the world. The broad-shouldered knight enters the city, "sparkling with humor, dreamy, sure of conquest". His clear eyes don't seem to match the girlish, soft mouth. He has come to hand over the last belongings of a dead boatswain to his father. On the way back to his ship the next morning, he was found unconscious, swollen with skin rashes on the beach. He shows signs of a traumatic experience. The injured person is taken to the city and treated. After a week he recovered. He then dismisses his team and settles in the city.

After moving house, he hires a master builder to build a castle in the middle of the heather between the sea and the city on a rocky cliff. After completion, the baron wives a Portuguese woman, "a brown childish being" who, apart from a ball in the theater, does not take part in public life. A week later she lies dead in the corridor outside her room. The doctor called for help diagnoses a pulmonary embolism. A maid tells him "about an old heartache of the strange woman". The widower has apparently recovered from the blow after three weeks and passes the time in town with social invitations, fighting games and telling stories of his travel adventures on funny wine evenings.

He then goes back to sea and after eight months returns with a strange woman to the rooms of his castle, which have now been painted green. She never shows up in town and one morning she lies dead in the yard in a black riding dress. This time the events cause confusion among the population. The baron is insulted. Only the slender, light-blonde daughter of a councilor falls in love with him and, despite warnings from her relatives, moves to his palace. Less than a month later, her body is found on a wall breach. Now the baron is arrested, but the exhumation of the two dead and all further investigations cannot confirm the suspicion of a violent death, which is why he is released again. He can escape the angry people with a scornful laugh with a revolver, but from now on he avoids the city.

The main plot of the story begins with the arrival of Miss Ilsebill. A small yacht drops them off at the stand and a horse-drawn team drives them into town. She asks about the baron at the inn and is referred to the horse race the next day. There she draws Paolo di Selvi's attention to herself in her flowing blue velvet dress and a white feather in her hair. He invites her to a carriage ride to his castle, and she stays with him in the ladies' wing. The next day they ride out together, make music together, she sings and dances for him. Suddenly he begins to cry, whispers a prayer, screams incomprehensible words for her and brings her into her room. On the first night she sneaks “alone, defiant and gloomy” to the door of a locked room, which she can open with the help of her golden cross, and is in the “most secret room”. It is a quiet and gentle woman's room, bounded by a jagged rock wall and playfully and imaginatively furnished with tender women, green silk covering and the scent of flowers. Here she dreams for hours on the green-covered night camp and slips back into the ladies' wing in the morning. This double life is repeated in the following time: "During the day Miss Ilsebill found no end to chatting, singing and curling in front of the sunken man". As she dances in front of him with rustling veils and assures him, "I am your own, Paolo", he asks sadly: "Is that you, Miss Ilsebill?"

One day she complains of pain and asks to send for a doctor. She heard a noise, “a steady stripe, trickling and scratching, as if an animal were running over sand and stopped puffing.” But the baron replied roughly that she should rather disperse or leave here, “he doesn't want women or people and nothing; he hates them all, the scornful and senseless creatures. ”She should peel her illness from her heart with a knife. He staggers and looks “sad and without consolation”. Now Ilsebill goes for a walk alone and brings him small presents, e.g. B. rare shells or blue stones from the beach. On the way, a farmer tells her that the baron sold his soul to an evil monster on the heath that needs a human as a sacrifice every few years. Apparently, however, no woman is ready to redeem the knight.

To cheer Ilsebill, the baron invites a poet. The slim young man looks at her with “imperious looks” and dances with her lustfully under her “last veil”. From the balcony, “the unleashed […] laughs at the castle and the swamp and the scraping animals.” She screams into the heather that she is insane, “a corpse alive. May all dragons break out and kill Paolo's luck: she only knows one animal that wants to break out and that is herself ”. She decides to flee and wants to burn the castle down. Paolo prevents her by kissing her tenderly for the first time and telling her that he is going to town with the “calm open-mindedness of his cheerful face” and with eyes “full of sympathy” that are “a terrifying comfort” go She takes refuge in the secret chamber, falls asleep on the carpet and dreams that water gushes from the rock and that a sea monster, a multi-armed medusa, is following her.

The next day, Ilsebill hikes across the plain and experiences how a flood breaks through the dams, floods the castle and its surroundings and pulls many people with it. She saves herself on a mountain, prays at a tree, in whose branches she hangs her cross: "I want to live [...] Oh, dear Mother of God, be good to me". Mist, Mary's coat, envelops her. Ilsebill is getting thinner and thinner and dissolves in the fog. While riding over the mountain on his black horse, the baron discovers the cross on a tree and also prays to Mary, who has given them great fear and great love. After many years, it is said that he and his troops in Central America were killed in an “insidious attack” in the fight against the “pagan Indians”.

The third

In this satire , the author parodies the facade of social conventions as well as the standardized gender role expectation and the double standards of people resulting from both.

The famous Boston gynecologist Dr. William Converdon posts an ad for a secretary. Four days later, from two applicants, he chose not the “sharp-tempered [-]”, black, intelligent young lady, but rather the full-cheeked, shy Mary Walter with the blond plaited braids, without looking at her certificates. His justification is to get tired of her quickly and send her away. The next morning he feels disturbed in his train of thought while he is dictating from her. He approaches her, kisses her on the neck and, to his surprise, she kisses him. He makes her a declaration of love appropriate to the situation and invites her to the theater and to dinner. After a week she stayed with him and her virgin sexual behavior bothers him. The next morning he reproaches her seriously, accuses her of “bad lifestyle” and “misunderstanding his person”, but promises her a three-month hiatus. Then he replaces her with an office clerk, rents her an apartment in the neighboring house and assigns her the job of a socialite who has to be available to him if necessary. He treats her moodily and arbitrarily, sometimes she has to have dinner with him, sometimes he wants to be alone and roughly shows her out of the room. But when she offers him to leave, he forbids her. The next day he is gallant, complains with desperate, tortured humility and wants to be comforted by her. Mary moves into his house and Converdon instructs his housekeeper to treat her like his daughter or wife. She also accompanies him in the car on his visits, but with a white veil so that one cannot look at her face. Mary endures his moods patiently. If she does not contradict him and wants to please him, he accuses her of a childish, "unreal, idealistic" view. Her chaste behavior in love disturbs him and he teaches her obscene practices from his brothel experiences. The next day he explains to her that she should be trained as an actress in the variety theater. “It belonged to everyone, anyone could take it.” Now Converdon happily enjoys as a voyeur the way the audience stare at his beautiful wife lustfully and lustfully. When Mary does not come home excitedly until the next afternoon after her dance performance, he asks her not to show herself anymore and marries her.

During their honeymoon in a seaside resort, Converdon received a polite letter from an acrobat, a so-called parterregymnasiker named Paul Wheatstren. He informs him, the husband, that he wants to woo his beautiful Mary, and asks him to clear his way and kill himself on the 25th of the month in Charles Park. Converdon then visits the rival personally, discusses the matter with him in the social form of a gentleman and threatens to shoot him. Wheatstren replies with a superior smile that this is pointless as a new man is courting his wife the next month. Converdon makes sense and he gives up. Then, since he is not a psychologist as a gynecologist, he seeks advice from a priest. The latter notes in him “a certain darkness and narrow-mindedness”, “an innate quality, cultivated through upbringing and way of life, can hardly be remedied. The situation is good for Mrs. Mary. ”He comforts him with the“ insignificance of his existence ”. Converdon accepts his fate, experiences a few more beautiful harmonious days with his wife, visits with her the variety shows of his agile successor and hangs himself on the twenty-fifth with the tie. Wheatstren visits the widow and pretends to be a friend of the deceased. Eventually he marries Mary, manages her fortune, and leads her to the theater and racing fields. However, he is bothered by her routine in the “pleasures of enjoyment” and realizes that she “does not seem to be made for a single man like him in terms of her whole nature, and the talents shown indicate this. And so he urged her to make use of her talent; even the greatest capital would eventually be consumed. She did not shut herself off from his explanations. ”Wheatstren“ treated her roughly and with calculation. But she praised him every step of the way, because he offered her the highest thing there was on earth, namely considerable variety. "

The blasé's memoir

In his memoir, a skeptic cynically analyzes the magic of love. The first-person narrator, referred to as the "blasé" in the headline, i.e. H. The dull and incapable of deep feelings actually considers records of his own life to be unnecessary, because the most diverse actions are equally unimportant, whether it is about conquering, praying or hugging women. But the enlightenment of mankind requires it in this case. So he wrote a lament and warning about love from his experiences:

Even as a young person, the narrator wanted to know what the real essence of loved ones is besides the “natural instinct”. He has always had a natural inclination towards women, sympathy for their motherhood and the subsequent physical wear and tear and aging process and also viewed objects as feminine, etc. a. a green table lamp, in front of which he was so ashamed when undressing that he threw a linen cloth over it. But he didn't know what love is. In exploring them, he went from theory to practice. First he researched fiction and poetry, philosophical writings and newspaper texts, e.g. B. Suicide reports. But for him it was definitions and descriptions from another world. After this disappointment, he sought out men in managerial positions who saw “love” as an empty word or as a leisure activity for idlers. His friends laughed at him and talked about internal processes and feelings, but without specifying them. So he decided to explore the field himself. He proceeded according to plan, observed passers-by in cities and countries where love should be strong. He took a distant view of the alleged lovers' dealings with one another, their stereotypical idioms and gender-specific advertising gestures, and their contact with "the opponent". Everything seemed like staged games and mechanical social rituals. He imitated them and noticed that the women responded and had expectations of a firm bond with him, but he did not develop feelings of love, rather disgust. To be more honest he looked at a “well-trained tribe of prostitutes”. “Infinite masses of energy in men would thus be free for other, culture-promoting activities; the art of pleasure, carefully cultivated by a community of select people, would show an unheard-of bloom in a short time. ”Although he repeatedly had sexual intercourse, he combined his drive with aversion to women. So, out of frustration and hatred, he dragged a hunchbacked washing-up girl from the hotel, who had smiled at him, to his room and thus desecrated all women who challenged him. He justified this with the poisoning of the man by the woman. His hatred also included female animals. He called mothers miserable creatures. “It is not only shameless to expose the body; every word, every movement gives us away. And so the shame pushes us into the ground; there is no salvation from shame but death. "When the kitchen maid misinterpreted his violence as affection and became trusting in him, he fell into" an immeasurable, very terrible rage ", she suggested" without feeling any joy or relief " , but kept bringing her to him and "cried [...] for hours at night in a way, without tears, on her chest". At the same time he asserts his purity: “Oh, how pious I am; I am very pious. [...] My blood is pure, is pure "

After this confession, the narrator wanders through a mountain landscape in the morning light. He repeats his hatred of "the women" who poisoned him. He knows that he's lost in the deep snow: “Am I coming down, am I not coming down? [...] My God, help my sick soul soon. "

The nuns and death

In this story, the author transfers the atmospheric magic of symbolism or the neo-romantic decadence with the thematic chain nature-transience-eros-death similar to the poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Rainer Maria Rilkes and Thomas Mann from this epoch to the last months of a nun's life .

A nun from her window observes the happenings in nature in the light of snow: “Outside in the front garden a bright white [...] slowly melted under the midday sun; thin blackish water trickled around the trees. ”She interprets this as an announcement of her imminent death. She spent the next days and weeks under the impression of this news. At dinner she only takes one bite and leaves the dining room towards the room. Shivering, she extinguishes the lamp, undresses in the dark and gets into her bed. She cannot sleep, breathes haltingly and lies there with her eyes open. Around midnight the moon shines in her window and doesn't turn away until three thirty. The next day she hunched over in her black dress for a walk in the park. She has a laconic conversation with her friend under bare branches. The following night the moon shines again in front of her window, she feels the bed shaking and clings to the frame. On the third day, their behavior changes. In contrast to the previous days, she eats and speaks a lot and asks a friend in vain to stay with her. She then feels pushed into her room, closes doors and windows, sprinkles the walls with cologne, lays fresh flowers in front of a statue of the Virgin and weeps. At night she disturbs the ticking of the clocks, she gets up and stops the pendulum. When the clock dials seem to respond with a grin, the frail lady, in her fear, runs into the dark park to the pond under the confused black bushes. She screams “I have to die”, wades into the cold water, but flees back to her room.

Over the next few days the nun resumed her usual daily rhythm, with prayers, embroidery, card games, walks, and conversations. Her behavior has "something astonished" and "something superior" about it, which appears haughty to the other ladies. So the time goes by until spring. When the bushes get green leaves again, she cleans herself with a blue blouse for her walks and writes letters on rose paper addressed to death: "To my dear strict master, death", letters full of shameful allusions, flirtatious and joking "and buries them in the bushes. She looks at her aged body and prepares for death: In bed she is now moving against the wall. “[She] left a small space next to her, which she hesitantly covered with her arm, then she took it away again, put it over again, it was a game. Her arms pressed against her chest, her hot, lean face turned to the empty space of the pillow [...] soon her fingers felt over the pillow, pursed her lips. "She often returns from a walk with red clover, willow branches and cockatiels, her face shines, she sings, leaves the door and window open, prays to Mary and adorns her picture with green branches. One night Death rises brutally into her bed and forcibly seizes her body. “Her lips pleaded. A choke came. The tongue fell back into the throat. She stretched. Then Death got up and pulled the nun with her cold hands behind her out of the window. "

Edition history

In 1906 Döblin offered his manuscript to Bruno Cassirer Verlag . From 1908 to 1911, the short stories were published in the publications Das Magazin ( Das Stiftsfräulein und der Tod ) and Der Sturm - with the exception of the last story The Memoirs of a Blasierte . In December 1911, Döblin revised the collection and sent it to Martin Buber, the religious philosopher and editor of the publishing house Rütten & Loening . Finally, the twelve novels in the volume Die Murordung einer Butterblume and other stories were published in November 1912 by Georg Müller Verlag in Munich . The second edition appeared in 1913. The novella Das Stiftsfräulein und die Tod was published in the same year as a single edition together with five woodcuts by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by AR Meyer Verlag. The illustrations contained in the lyric leaflet are the painter's first. The story Der Ritter Blaubart appeared in 1923 as Blaubart und Miss Ilsebill in an edition of the Tillgner Verlag with stone drawings by Carl Rabus . In 2001 Christina Althen gave The Murder of a Buttercup. All the stories are published as Volume 14 in the annotated edition of the work founded by Walter Muschg at Walter Verlag . Inexpensive reading editions were published by dtv Verlagsgesellschaft in 1965 and by S. Fischer Verlag in 2013 .

reception

The volume belongs in a series of cyclical narrative prose of Expressionism, including Georg Heyms Der Dieb (1911), Heinrich Eduard Jacobs The funeral of Gemma Ebria (1912), Kasimir Edschmid's The Six Mouths (1915), Gottfried Benns Gehirne (1916), Leonard Franks Man is good (1917), Alfred Lemms Mord (1918) or Paul Zech's The Event (1919) fall.

In 1906 Döblin had sent his stories to the Bruno Cassirers publishing house , whose long-time editor, the poet Christian Morgenstern, declined to publish them. “The collection of short stories The murder of a buttercup makes an eerie, morbid impression on me - despite some strange details. At times you almost think that you are looking at someone who is mentally not entirely healthy. Sometimes the things remind of Garschin , only that the big train is missing ”, he judged. According to Ute Schneider, it was due to "Morgenstern's lack of understanding of psychopathological issues in literature and the incompatibility of expressionism with educated middle-class values".

Kurt Pinthus , editor of the expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung , said: “Döblin's collection of short stories, which he named after one of these short stories“ The Murder of a Buttercup ”, shows the transformation from Impressionism to Expressionism. In addition to this symptomatic significance for our latest literature, the book must also be taken into account because of its absolute artistic value. ”The expressionist poet Albert Ehrenstein praised the“ noble passion of the style, the glow of a language that is nevertheless hard forged, exciting - plastic plot, psychology without disgusting intimate disintegration of the soul ”. In an article published in the storm , the critic Joseph Adler emphasized the small scope of the narratives, the paratactic style and the plastic language of Doblin. The first novella is “the mighty music of the sea. It is the melodic restlessness of the element itself, it does not just reflect its appearance. It is deep and eerie, the words roll like waves ”.

According to Klaus Müller-Salget, the theme of gender love and gender struggle is particularly realized in the novella Die Segelfahrt , the art fairy tale The Knight Bluebeard and in the satire The Third . The first novella in the volume and the eponymous story, however, showed Döblin's literary mastery.

literature

Text output

  • Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories . Georg Müller Verlag, Munich 1912.
  • Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories . dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3423131993 .
  • Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-596-90459-4 .

Secondary literature

  • Benjamin Bauer, Julia Seeberger: Representation piety and imitatio christi. Christian expression of the body memory in Kafka's In der penal colony and Döblin's Die Dancer and Her Body. In: Andrea Bartl, Nils Ebert (Ed.): The other view of literature. Perspectives on the literary perception of reality. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8260-5582-9 , pp. 141–158.
  • Kobel, Erwin: Alfred Döblin. Narrative art in upheaval . Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1985, ISBN 3-11-010339-7 , pp. 7-94.
  • Kyora, Sabine: The cycle of novellas The murder of a buttercup (1912) . In: Sabina Becker (Ed.): Döblin Handbook. Life - work - effect . Metzler, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02544-9 , pp. 29-40.
  • Liede, Helmut: Stylistic tendencies of expressionist prose. Research into novellas by Alfred Döblin, Carl Sternheim, Kasimir Edschmid, Georg Heym and others. Gottfried Benn. Dissertation, Freiburg 1960.
  • Reuchlein, Georg: "You learn from psychiatry". Literature, psychology and psychopathology in Alfred Döblin's “Berlin Program” and “The Murder of a Buttercup”. In: Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 23, Heft 1 (1992), pp. 10–68.
  • Ribbat, Ernst: Autonomous prose? On the evaluation of Alfred Döblin's expressionist novels . In: Werner Stauffacher (Ed.): International Alfred Döblin Colloquia 1980-1983 . Vol. 14. Peter Lang, Bern 1986, ISBN 978-3-261-03554-7 , pp. 293-306.
  • Stegemann, Helga: Studies on Alfred Döblin's imagery. The Assassination of a Buttercup and Other Tales . Lang, Bern 1978, ISBN 978-3-261-03113-6 .
  • Hardtke, Thomas: Wahn - Glaube - Fiktion: The pathology of deviant religiosity in medical, religious and literary discourse around 1800 . Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-8467-6307-0 , pp. 117–122.

Reading aid

  • Zimmermann, Werner: German prose poems of our century. Interpretations for teachers and students. Vol. 1. Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, Düsseldorf 1966. pp. 177–188.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Klaus Müller Salget: Alfred Döblin . In German poets of the 20th century . Hartmut Steinecke (Ed.) Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-503-03073-5 , p. 215
  2. ↑ Klaus Müller Salget: Alfred Döblin . In German poets of the 20th century . Hartmut Steinecke (Ed.) Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-503-03073-5 , p. 216
  3. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 166.
  4. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  5. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 166.
  6. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  7. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  8. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  9. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 166.
  10. ↑ Allusion to the Oedipus story and the tragic prophecies for the main characters
  11. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 165.
  12. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  13. ↑ Name of the main female character in Runge's fairy tale Vom Fischer and his wife
  14. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 166.
  15. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 164.
  16. ↑ Walter Muschg: Epilogue to Alfred Döblin: The murder of a buttercup and other stories. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich, 1965, p. 163.
  17. ↑ See Peter Sprengel: History of German-language literature 1900-1918. From the turn of the century to the end of the First World War . In: History of German Literature from the Beginnings to the Present . Volume 12, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52178-9 , p. 175.
  18. ↑ Cf. Ute Schneider: The invisible second. The professional history of the lecturer in the literary publishing house . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 978-3-8353-1780-2 , p. 45.
  19. ^ Kurth Pinthus, Ingrid Schuster, Ingrid Bode (eds.): Alfred Döblin in the mirror of contemporary criticism. Francke, Bern 1973, p. 15.
  20. ↑ Albert Ehrenstein: Analytical poets of the twilight. In: Hanni Mittelmann (Ed.) Albert Ehrenstein Works. Articles and essays. Waldstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-719-5 , p. 28.
  21. ↑ Joseph Adler: A book by Döblin . In: Der Sturm, No. 170/171, July 1913, p. 71.
  22. ↑ See Klaus Müller Salget: Alfred Döblin. In: Hartmut Steinecke (ed.): German poets of the 20th century. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-503-03073-5 , p. 216.