The Hermannsschlacht (Kleist)

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Data
Title: The Hermann Battle
Original language: German
Author: Heinrich von Kleist
Publishing year: 1821
Premiere: 1839
Place of premiere: Pyrmont
people
  • Hermann ; the prince of the Cherusci
  • Thusnelda ; his wife
  • Rinold and Adelhart ; his boys
  • Eginhardt ; his advice
  • Luitgar , Astolf and Winfried ; his sons, his captains
  • Egbert ; another Cheruscan leader
  • Gertrud and Bertha ; Thusnelda women
  • Marbod ; Prince of Sueven , Hermann's ally
  • Attrian ; his advice
  • Komar ; a Suevian captain
  • Wolf ; Prince of the Katten
  • Thuiskomar ; Prince of Sciambrians
  • Dagobert ; Prince of Mars and
  • Selgar ; Prince the Brukterer , displeased
  • Fist ; Prince of the Cimbri
  • Gueltar ; Prince the Nervier and
  • Aristan ; Prince of the Ubians , ally of Varus
  • Quintilius Varus ; Roman general
  • Ventidius ; Legate of Rome
  • Scapio ; his secretary
  • Septimius and Crassus ; Roman leader
  • Teuthold ; an armorer
  • Childerich ; a kennel keeper
  • A mandrake
  • Two elders from Teutoburg
  • Three Cheruscan captains
  • Three Cheruscan messengers
  • Generals , captains , warriors , people

The Hermann Battle is a five-act drama. Heinrich von Kleist wrote it in 1808, after the Prussian defeat by France . The play shows a first surge of nationalism among German poets after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation by Napoleon in 1806. It was printed in 1821 and first performed in 1839.

action

Hermann , the prince of the Cherusci, is harassed from two sides. The Suebi prince Marbod stands in the southeast of his country and demands tribute from him. The Roman general Varus threatens him with three legions from the west and offers his help against Marbod, to whom he secretly offered to take action against Hermann. The Germanic princes gathered at Hermann's urged him to go to war against the Romans, which he refused, citing the Germanic tribes' military inferiority.

Hermann's wife Thusnelda is courted by the Roman legate Ventidius, who secretly cuts off a lock of her blond hair. Ventidius brings an ultimate offer of help from the Romans, which Hermann finally accepts for a pretense. At the same time, however, he gets in touch with Marbod, whom he informs about the double game by Varus and whom he offers to go into battle against him together.

The Romans invade the Cheruscan land and devastate it. Hermann uses the behavior of the Romans to stir up popular hatred against them. In Teutoburg he meets Varus, who is deceived by him.

Marbod initially hesitates to ally himself with the Cheruscans, but on the one hand he is convinced by the flight of his Roman advisers, on the other hand Hermann places the lives of his two sons in the hands of the Sueb prince to prove his loyalty. Hermann uses the rape of a Germanic girl as an opportunity to call on the people to revolt against the Romans. He shows Thusnelda a letter from Ventidius in which he promises his Empress Livia the blond hair of Thusnelda.

The Romans wander through the Teutoburg Forest and are abandoned by their Germanic allies. Thusnelda takes revenge on Ventidius by luring him into the enclosure of a female bear who tears him apart. In the battle in the Teutoburg Forest, the Roman legions are defeated and their general Varus is killed. The princes appoint Hermann as king, and it is even decided to " brave the journey to Rome ".

Historical context

The Hermannsschlacht arose after the defeat against France in 1807 and before the start of the wars of liberation . Kleist started from the historical figure of Arminius and the Hermann myth linked to it in order to develop a system of contemporary references in which the reader or viewer can still recognize Rome as France, the Cheruscans as Prussians and the Suebi as Austrians are. In 2011 Barbara Vinken questioned whether Kleist wanted to use the historical Varus Battle to call on the Germans to resist Napoleon. The historian and statesman Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann also placed the work in this context as early as 1840:

“I consider the least discussed Hermannsschlacht to be his best work. At the same time it has historical value; The canine spirit of the Confederation of the Rhine, as it ruled back then (you have not experienced that), cannot be described more accurately. At that time everyone understood the relationship, who was Prince Aristan, who would be led to death in the end, who would be the ones who believed they were to save the fatherland by acting important and sending messages - the pressure was out of the question in 1809. "

- (Dahlmann to Gervinus 1840)

reception

The Hermannsschlacht , theater bill from 1923

Kleist sent the play to his friend, poet Heinrich Joseph von Collin, in 1809 with the request to propose it for a performance at the Burgtheater in Vienna , but after Austria's defeat by France in the Battle of Wagram (July 5-6, 1809), Vienna was also canceled as a possible performance location. In Prussia, the Hermannsschlacht could only be distributed in copies at that time, a partial copy of the fifth act did not appear in the Zeitschwingen magazine until 1818 , the full text in 1821 in the complete edition of Kleist's works published by Ludwig Tieck . The play had its first performance in Pyrmont in 1839, where it was performed by the Detmold Court Theater under the direction of August Pichler .

In the restoration period after the Congress of Vienna , the political situation was rather unfavorable for a performance of the Hermann Battle. It was only after the revolution of 1848 that authors such as Gervinus and Heinrich von Treitschke recognized references to their own national ideas in the play.

The Hermann Battle was not performed again until 1860 in a version edited by Feodor Wehl in Breslau, but without great success. Further performances of this text version in Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Graz in 1861 as well as festival performances for the fiftieth anniversary of the Leipzig Battle of Nations in 1863 in Karlsruhe and Kassel were also unsuccessful. Another version of the text by Rudolf Genée was written in 1871 after the war against France and was first performed in Munich. But it was not until the productions of the Berliner Schauspielhaus and Meininger Hoftheater in 1875 that the play caught on with the audience.

The Meiningen production had a style-defining effect due to the use of Kleist's original text, the convincing ensemble performance and the impressive crowd scenes. There were a total of 103 guest performances on 16 German-speaking stages, with the last tour in 1890 going as far as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa. 36 performances took place in Meiningen itself.

At the latest with the Berlin performance of 1912 on the centenary of the wars of liberation, in the premiere of which the imperial family also took part, the Hermann Battle was considered a patriotic drama. During the First World War , performances were interrupted by current reports from the Western Front. At the time of National Socialism , the political instrumentalisation of the Hermannsschlacht reached its climax, 146 performances can be proven for the season 1933/34 alone. That is why the play was seldom performed from 1945 onwards, only at the Harz mountain theater in Thale in the GDR was there a production in 1957 with a political tendency against the USA and its western allies.

In his internationally successful production from 1982, Claus Peymann at the Schauspielhaus Bochum highlighted the subplot between Thusnelda ( Kirsten Dene ) and Hermann ( Gert Voss ). Peymann saw the play as the “model of a war of liberation” with all its contradictions. "The final scene was particularly impressive, in which the shadow of the victorious Hermann, wearing a horned helmet for the first time, took on the shape of the Hermann monument on the back wall , while the noise and music of the war came from the loudspeakers."

Radio plays

literature

  • Heinrich von Kleist: The Herrmannsschlacht . Drama in five acts. New arrangement and introduction by Rudolf Genée . Berlin: Lipperheide 1871. - Reprint: Heilbronn: Kleist-Archiv Sembdner 2009. ISBN 978-3-940494-22-1
  • Daniel Tobias Seger: "You won't press the handle, will you?" Kleist's "Herrmannsschlacht" as part of his Grazied thinking. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft and Geistesgeschichte 78.1 (2004), pp. 426–458.
  • Otto Fraude: Heinrich von Kleist's Hermannsschlacht on the German stage. Kiel: Scientific Society for Literature and Theater 1919. (Reprint Kleist-Archiv Sembdner ISBN 3-931060-72-1 )
  • Wolf Kittler : The birth of the partisan from the spirit of poetry. Heinrich von Kleist and the strategy of the wars of liberation. Freiburg: Rombach 1987. ISBN 3-7930-9042-6
  • William C. Reeve: Kleist on stage, 1804-1987. Montreal, Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993. ISBN 0-7735-0941-0 (Chapter 6)
  • Andreas Dörner, Ludgera Vogt : Sociology of literature. Literature, society, political culture. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1994. ISBN 3-531-22170-1 (Chapter VIII, among other things, on the history of the reception of the Hermannsschlacht, with a detailed bibliography)
  • Volker Kern, Günther Emig (ed.): Kleist's Hermannsschlacht at the Meininger Hoftheater. Heilbronn: Kleist Archive Sembdner 2002. ISBN 3-931060-58-6
  • Pierre Kadi Sossou: Roman-Germanic doppelganger. A 'palimpsestuous' reading of Kleist's Hermannsschlacht. Frankfurt a. M .: Peter Lang 2003. ISBN 978-3-631-50872-5
  • Winfried Woesler: Kleist and Grabbe's literarization of the Hermann battle . In: Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 14. pp. 33–44. ISBN 3-931060-61-6
  • Petra Stuber: Kleist's "Hermannsschlacht" in the production of the Meiniger court theater from 1875 . In: Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 14. pp. 45–57. ISBN 3-931060-61-6
  • Barbara Vinken : Beasts. Kleist and the Germans . Berlin: Merve 2011. ISBN 978-3-88396-298-6
  • Franz-Josef Deiters : "Die! Get dust! And over your crypt / blow 'eternal oblivion!" The extinction of the individual in "Die Herrmannsschlacht". In: Ders .: The de-worldization of the stage. On the mediology of the theater of the classical episteme . Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2015, pp. 198–217. ISBN 978-3-503-16517-9 .
  • Stefanie Tieste: Heinrich von Kleist. His works. Kleist Archive Sembdner, Heilbronn 2009. (Heilbronner Kleist materials for school and teaching, Volume 2. Ed. Günther Emig ), ISBN 978-3-940494-15-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Vinken: Kleist and the Germans. Berlin 2011, p .__
  2. ↑ http://www.textkritik.de/bka/dokumente/dok_i/ippel.htm
  3. ^ Heinrich von Kleist: Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. The Hermann Battle. Prince Friedrich von Homburg (= dtv complete edition, Vol. 3: Dramas. Third part ). Edited by Helmut Sembdner . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1964, p. 296.
  4. ^ Claus Peymann and Hans Joachim Kreutzer : Dispute about Kleist's> Hermannsschlacht <. Kleist Yearbook 1984, p. 77
  5. ^ Barbara Wilk-Mincu: Heinrich von Kleist The Hermann battle , history and reception. in: The Hermannsschlacht by Karla Woisnitza. Heilbronn: Kleist Archive Sembdner 2002. p. 10