The Heiterethei and their counterpart
The Heiterethei and their counterplay, From the rain into the eaves , published in 1857, is probably Otto Ludwig's most successful work , alongside the novel Between Heaven and Earth from 1856 .
content
The Heiterethei shows an emancipated single day laborer who opposes the female dignitaries of the city of Luckenbach, who try to persuade her that the master carpenter “Holder's Fritz” is planning to murder her and thereby force her to give up her self-employed.
The social criticism becomes sharpest in the passages where these dignitaries break into the hut of the Heiterethei and show the day laborer that they can afford idleness because they are economically protected by their husbands, who take turns despising them and lifting them to heaven .
When the Heiterethei unexpectedly comes across the master carpenter during a night's work and, now unsettled, pushes him preventively into a stream with her wheelbarrow, the women deny that they ever warned them about him. Since they are unwilling to accept this language regime, they boycott it and ruin it economically within a short time.
In line with his program of poetic realism , Otto Ludwig contrasts this socially critical and almost entirely satirical depiction in the drawings of the city honors, however, with an idyllic depiction of the day laborer's work, from whom it is stated at the beginning that there is “no good girl in the whole city”, and through an education from the ideal of female independence to the traditional female role. This task is - obviously - her future husband, the master carpenter. Ludwig avoids that the inner contradiction becomes too clear by assigning the Heiterethei the role of having previously guided the master carpenter, who is in love with her, from his unbridled bachelor life to a bourgeois performance orientation through sharp criticism.
The adaptation of the heroine to the prevailing bourgeois morality does not appear to be psychologically coherent, since her role conflict is reinterpreted as a sign of immaturity; Nevertheless, Ludwig managed to gain sympathy for the outsider, even if he shies away from radical criticism of the narrow bourgeois morality. It is also indicative that the Heiterethei does not raise her own child, but that of her sister, from whose immorality she distances herself to the utmost.
A well-read literary history at the beginning of the 20th century was able to describe this story as a “masterpiece and model work of a village history” ( Alfred Biese ), the people of which are of course rightly assigned to the petty bourgeois milieu by the same author . When Paul Fechter the story is finally characterized as: "History is the taming a Thuringian rebellious; the girl is pretty and neatly drawn - it lacks the vitality that should give her life. ”The formula of the taming of the stubborn is found repeatedly in later literary stories. The hidden tragedy of the woman, to whom her sexual mates and the future partner do not want to allow an independent life, symbolized in the collapse and the type of rebuilding of her house is thus ignored, as is the motive of the woman who, to protect herself from attacks, her Lover kills. (For a while the reader is left to believe that the master carpenter, who loses consciousness after falling into the water, will not survive.)
In the main character of the second story in the volume, From the rain in the eaves , the weak tailor, "who wanted to be strong or at least to appear", Paul Fechter sees a semi-unconscious self-confession of Ludwig. The tailor Hannesügel, a character from the previous story “Heiterethei”, flees from his strong mother into the arms of a violent and greedy woman. Only the intervention of his journeyman saves him from this marriage (the "eaves") so that he can marry his happy cousin Sannel. The main characters are more clichéd, the psychological description less intense.
Individual evidence
- ↑ "[...] here the women only seem to know domination or blind admiration. That one can love and encourage improvement through constructive criticism is unthinkable for the main characters." A broad field: out of the rain into the eaves , August 6, 2012
literature
- Otto Ludwig: The Heiterethei and their counterpart . Klotz Verlag, Eschborn 1999, ISBN 3-88074-741-5 .