The woman of good advice
The woman of good advice. A story from the late summer of 1947 is a story by Hans Carossa . The title alludes to the invocation of Mary as the mother of good advice .
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An elderly couple lives in their small house outside of a larger Bavarian town: the myth and legend researcher Doctor Kassian and his wife Martina Kassian. Her son is missing in the war, her daughter Elisabeth is studying science in another city. 14-year-old Heidi, who lost her left arm in a bomb attack that killed her parents, also lives with the couple. Despite this handicap, she helps the Kassians a lot in the household. While Doctor Kassian spends a lot of time in the library, Martina spends her days helping and advising other (often strangers) people who are in need. She keeps a card index in which she notes down all the problems she has already solved for others.
One day, on the way back from the library, Doctor Kassian meets an old friend, Colonel Sutor. He was recently released from captivity. In his large house, however, he and his wife are only allowed to live in two small rooms; the rest was confiscated to accommodate refugees. Kassian accompanies Sutor home, where he has set up a room as a workshop and earns some money by turning buttons, boxes and other objects. His wife Paula gives violin lessons. In the stairwell they meet Priscilla, called Priska, a young teacher from the Sudetenland who is on her way to a school where she will start a new job.
Sutor wants to accompany Kassian home, they are on their way out of town. Priska, who followed them, tells them about an accident that just happened in the city: A young woman fell through a hole on a bridge that had not yet been built and drowned in the river. As the three of them run through a forest, they notice two boys on a high seat who are hiding from them. They seem to be afraid, but then they follow them. Priska tells the others their story, which is rumored to have spread in the city: Their names are Peter and Giselbert, they are also refugees, and their parents died of typhus. They first went to a boarding school and were then taken in by four women farmers. The four peasant women are sisters, and since none of them is married, they run their farm together. However, when officials from the boys' country of origin ask about them at the boarding school in order to bring them back to their country, the head of the school warns the women farmers so that they can hide the boys. And so the boys have to spend the whole day in the forest and are only picked up by their foster mothers in the evening.
So the five of them hike on and rest at the lake where Peter and Giselbert are to be picked up. There they meet an impoverished Slovak family who, together with the Germans, were driven out of their country because their father had worked as an estate manager for Germans. The parents still hope to return home soon. The 19-year-old son is a talented musician, but had to leave his cello behind. He is traumatized by the escape, a temporary separation from his parents and detention and is very shy towards the others. Everyone offers them consolation and help, even the children give them porcini mushrooms that they have collected in the forest.
The four peasant women arrive at the lake excited and announce that their attempt to adopt Peter and Giselbert has been successful and that no one can take them away from them. A woman helped them with the necessary administrative procedures, whose name they have forgotten, but who is known to everyone in the city as the woman of good advice. Kassian realizes that this is his wife. Although the women farmers don't even know the other people present, they invite everyone to celebrate the adoption with them later on their farm. Everyone is leaving now, and when Kassian returns home, Martina has good news: the son wrote a postcard from a hospital, so he survived the war. She says that she has something to do in town tomorrow because of an adoption matter, and seems disappointed not to be able to mark this "case" as settled in her file. She is all the more surprised that her husband knows about the case and can tell her that the adoption has already been successful.
In addition, a large package arrived from Chile containing food, bandages and many other useful items. It comes from a doctor whom Kassian helped once many years ago, and who has since settled in Chile while fleeing the Nazis. While they are unpacking the package, they hear noises in the kitchen downstairs and suspect a burglar. They let him do it for the time being, as they have no valuables anyway and they don't care about property. But when he groans in pain, they go downstairs and discover that he has injured his leg on the fence and is bleeding profusely. They don't call the police, but bandage the wound, give him food and let him rest in the kitchen. You trust him because he doesn't seem like a professional burglar. While they look back on an eventful day and a life together, they hear the burglar leaving the house below.
Subject
The historical context of the story is formed by the post-war period in Germany and the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945/46. Charity can be seen as the main theme of the story : all people in the story help each other to cope with problems and emergency situations.
Edition history
According to a review in Die Zeit , Carossa published the story under the title A Day in Late Summer 1947 as early as 1951 as an appendix to his autobiography Uneven Worlds . The first individual publication, now under the title The woman of good advice , took place in 1956 by Insel-Verlag . The second (11th – 20th thousand) and third editions (21st – 27th thousand) appeared in 1957 and 1960.
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- Hans Carossa: The wife of good advice. A story from the late summer of 1947. Insel-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1957 ( Insel-Bücherei Nr. 640).