The woman in the pillory

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The woman in the pillory is a story by Brigitte Reimann that was published in 1956 by Neues Leben in Berlin. The author wrote the text when she was 22 years old.

content

In March 1943, the local farmer's leader Horst Lange assigned the 27-year-old farmer Kathrin Marten to the prisoners of war Alexej Ivanovich Lunjew. Kathrin runs the Martenhof together with her active sister-in-law Frieda Marten, an older, single, noisy trampoline. The Ukrainian is supposed to help the two women with the spring order. The head of the house, Heinrich Marten, promoted to private on the Eastern Front , had come home on leave for three days and arranged for the billeting. At the behest of Frieda, the self-appointed landlady, Alexej has to spend the night locked in the barn and - against Kathrin's will - is not allowed to eat at the table. Alexej - a farmer by nature - works for three. Kathrin reacts surprisingly to a letter from Heinrich from Russia, in which it is written that he shot women and children on orders while fighting partisans. Suddenly she finally asserts herself against her sister-in-law Frieda. She brings Alexej into the house at the dining table. However, he is still locked in the barn in the evening. But Kathrin sometimes visits Alexej at his sleeping place - for example during the bomber approaches to Berlin. She tells the prisoner about the five years of their childless marriage. It had been sold to Heinrich for a few acres of farmland. The husband has a chance with the village girls. The young Grete Anders from the immediate neighborhood would like to have the strong farmer, but cannot get him.

Kathrin and Alexej get closer to each other. It does not stay hidden. Grete's grandfather, the old farmer Anders, a bad rumor maker in the village, likes to tease when he exchanges a few words with Kathrin over the garden fence. The young woman knows from the newspaper how so-called German "Russian whores" are punished. Even so, affection becomes love.

When Heinrich, after another four months on the Eastern Front, highly decorated with the EK I , appears on his next short vacation, old Anders tells him the rumor about Kathrin.

Anders has worries with his granddaughter Grete. The bitch is hanging around in the district town with young guys from the SS . In the village pub, Heinrich defends his wife Kathrin against the shipping companies and then beats Kathrin at home. Everything is over between the couple. Heinrich has to go back to the Eastern Front.

The love for Alexei is not without consequences. Kathrin becomes pregnant.

Grete Anders, impregnated by an SS officer, returns to the village. The old Anders, who against the local farmer leader Lange morally condemned the SS with clear words, was taken away and after a few days he returned from custody as a broken man.

Frieda denounced Kathrin to Horst Lange. The pregnant woman is interrogated by the SS, beaten and pilloried in the district town with the sign "I am a Russian whore" hanging around her neck. Kathrin's head is shaved in public, three stones fly - one hits - and Grete Anders spits in Kathrin's face.

Heinrich is allowed to visit Kathrin in the prison for ten minutes. He lost her forever and ever. He blames his sister Frieda for the loss. She does not get over the reproach of the brother who is loved above all and kills herself. Heinrich fell on the Eastern Front almost two weeks later. An SS man shoots Alexej in the Buchenwald concentration camp in the spring of 1944 .

As a prisoner in a women's camp, Kathrin gave birth to a boy in April 1944. The child looks like Alexei. Both are liberated by the Allies in the spring of 1945 . Kathrin, with the boy in her arms, goes to the Martenhof. She wants to start again.

Form and interpretation

Brigitte Reimann, the omniscient narrator, makes it easy for herself. A little too many characters are allowed to think.

Some readers from the 21st century may simply be overwhelmed by the ideology inherent in this narrative. For example, there is talk of the lessons Alexej kept in the back of his mind from his youth, "that there were workers in that Germany and that there were comrades among these workers." But it should be remembered that the story was only two years later Stalin's death was written - in a GDR, which among other things had written two guiding principles on the flag. Atonement for guilt and a new beginning in East Germany after the fall of the German Reich in May 1945.

Two places in the text above reflect those two intentions. First, there is the point at which Kathrin distances herself from the murder of civilians in the Soviet Union . And secondly, Kathrin's intended new beginning in 1945 at the Martenhof must be mentioned.

reception

  • The author succeeds in creating poetic images in several places - for example "green dots sprayed in her [Kathrin's] water-white eyes" - which Dohms sometimes dismisses as sentimental.
  • The text is full of communist-anti-fascist imagery, mostly based on the Christian myth of the Bible .
  • In 1956, it was completely out of place in the GDR public to let someone - like some residents of the village in which the story takes place in 1943/44 - talk constantly about their Soviet - now - friends. The courage of the author and the publisher is all the more noteworthy today in the now free time.

filming

The film by Werner Schulz-Wittan based on the script by the author (co-author, her husband Siegfried Pitschmann ) was broadcast on January 21, 1962 on the DFF . Karla Runkehl played Kathrin, Hilmar Thate played Alexej, Helmut Müller-Lankow played Heinrich Marten, Hanna Rieger played Frieda Marten, Hans-Dieter Schlegel played Horst Lange, Fritz Schlegel played Anders and Anne Dessau played his granddaughter Grete.

The film was made into a film again in 1990 under the title First Loss by Maxim Dessau , who wrote the script together with Peter Badel .

literature

Text output

First edition
  • Brigitte Reimann: The woman in the pillory . New life publishing house, Berlin 1956. 150 pages, linen
Used edition
  • The woman in the pillory. P. 5–132 in: Brigitte Reimann: The woman in the pillory. The confession . The siblings . 352 pages. New life publishing house, Berlin 1969, linen

Secondary literature

  • Barbara Wiesener: About the pale princess who kidnapped a purple horse across the sky - the utopian in Brigitte Reimann's work. Univ. Diss. Dr. phil., Potsdam 2003, 236 pages

annotation

  1. ↑ For example think Kathrin (used edition, p. 21, 16. Zvo), Frieda (used edition, p. 46, 7. Zvo), Alexej (used edition, p. 53, 11. Zvo), Heinrich Marten (used Edition, p. 118, 2nd Zvu) and even a minor character like the farmer Anders (used edition, p. 109, 7th Zvo).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wiesener, p. 87, 9. Zvo
  2. ↑ Wiesener, p. 87, 8. Zvo
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 61, 21. Zvo
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 71, 10. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 106 below
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 120, 13. Zvu
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 43, 14. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 47, 2nd Zvu
  9. ↑ Dohms (1957), quoted in Wiesener, p. 91, footnote 412
  10. ↑ Wiesener, pp. 92–95
  11. ↑ German IMDb