The island of the great mother

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The island of the great mother or The Miracle of Île des Dames is the third novel by the German Nobel Prize winner for literature Gerhart Hauptmann , which was published in 1924 by S. Fischer in Berlin.

Gerhart Hauptmann on a painting by Lovis Corinth from 1900

Emergence

Gerhart Hauptmann wrote the island novel from 1916 to 1924 mostly on the island of Hiddensee . According to his own statements, he was inspired firstly by Bachofen's mother law , secondly by “the many beautiful, often very naked female bodies” on his island of Hiddensee, and thirdly by reading a book again - devoured in childhood: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe .

Samuel Fischer was able to sell the novel fairly well, despite cautious to negative reviews.

overview

The "Kormoran" sets sail with hundreds of people on board from Cuxhaven for a circumnavigation of the world. After eight thousand nautical miles it happens. The proud ship leaks in the equatorial Pacific and sinks. However, the men on board still have enough time to move the women, children, axes, ropes, nails and all kinds of tools into lifeboats before they die from drowning. Besides the hundred or so women, only one “man”, the 12-year-old Phaon Stradmann, can save himself to the uninhabited tropical island, the almost four square miles of the action, on February 2nd. Phaon's mother Rita Stradmann dies soon.

Great-tasting drinking water is sufficiently available on the Île des Dames - as the beautiful place is called by the strong-willed Berlin painter Anni Prächtel, who has risen to become the president of the women's society. The paradisiacal climate and the lush vegetation allow survival in the shade under the tropical heat. Bananas and durians grow into the mouths of the castaways. Returning to Finstermannland - that is what Europe is called in the novel - will soon be hardly wasted after the initial wailing and chattering of teeth.

The 27-year-old Anglo-Dutch Miss Laurence Hobbema becomes the high priestess of a matriarchal cult which - due to the lack of men on this manageable island - culminates in something like the canonization of the immaculate conception . The lonely ladies sorely need such ideology when the somewhat exaggerated Fraulein Babette Lindemann - she has an aunt in Lübeck and got on board in Bombay - feels pregnant after a long year on the island and on August 7th of the year two on the island feels pregnant Osiris gives life. When asked, the happy mother stiffly and firmly claims that she received the child from the snake god Mukalinda. Anni Prachtel the mystical generation can not accept, and musing: Could one of the apes from the interior of the island's father be? But Osiris is only a little hairy on the head. The island ideologist Laurence Hobbema developed the postulate of extraterrestrial copulation. A temple is being cobbled together. In it, younger shipwrecked women can easily mate in the temple and give birth to a boy or a girl after nine months. The novel runs for more than a decade. As soon as the boys have fledged, they should be killed. The President Anni and her inner circle prevent that. The boys are banished from the motherland across the river into Wildermannland.

Years go by. Anni Prächtel not only presides over the island, but also heads the Wildermannland Commission. At the head of the commission, she inspects this manly country across the river. Jemine, while the heads of women's society on this side philosophized for years, the grown, exiled boys - well-formed, strong men, all of them practitioners - have installed a thoroughly engineered, manufactory-based men's world on their terrain on the island. For example, the enterprising Phaon can set off into the open sea with Dagmar-Diodata on board a self-made sailboat - presumably it's off to civilization. Dagmar-Diodata, a passenger of the cormorant and former foster child of the priestess Laurence Hobbema, has done it to Phaon.

Before the two of them make their sea voyage into the unknown, something very surprising happens: Suddenly, the long sleep in the temple no longer brings the young women willing to conceive any more pregnancy. Has the snake god Mukalinda lost its potency? No matter - an unmistakable herd of male young girls cannot be held back and penetrates to the young men who are also rushing forward. Both sexes mix and the concept of the aging philosophers around Anni Prächtel thus ultimately turns out to be outdated and rotten.

reception

Contemporaries
  • 1928, Döblin cannot hide his degout and calls Gerhart Hauptmann with a view to his work from 1908 "a" immensely overrated, artificially inflated "poet".
  • 1946, Hermann Schreiber expresses in Gerhart Hauptmann and the irrational in connection with the above-mentioned mystical procreation that the author built one of his buildings for psychoanalysis based on Freud .
Newer
  • 1980, Karl S. Guthke writes that the author rides one of his hobbies: Man only lives in myth .
  • 1991, Joanna Jabłkowska takes the text as a satire on matriarchy .
  • 1996, Leppmann's verdict loudly without ifs and buts: "... it is not a good novel ... This is an Anselm-Feuerbach literary editing, but not prose." In other words: The puzzle with this central novel is neither poetic nor convincing. When compared with Thomas Mann's Zauberberg , also published in 1924, The Island of the Great Mother comes off very badly. While the former gained worldwide recognition, the latter only attracted selective interest from the valued reading public.
  • 1998, Marx: With his utopia Gerhart Hauptmann wanted to distract from the misery of the war . The symbolism at the beginning of the novel goes well with this - the "(ship) sinking of the West", combined with a serious surplus of women. The author exemplifies an almost existential importance of motherhood for women.
  • 2012, Sprengel: Laurence Alma-Tadema could be taken as a role model for Laurence Hobbema . Two ladies from Anni Prächtel's presidium not mentioned in the article also have well-known role models: Rodberte Kalb is modeled on Annette Kolb and Tison Page is adopted as the real name .

literature

First edition

  • The island of the great mother or The miracle of Île des Dames. A story from the utopian Archipelagus. 273 pages. S. Fischer, Berlin 1924

expenditure

  • The island of the great mother or The miracle of Île des Dames. A story from the utopian Archipelagus. P. 391–569 in Gerhard Stenzel (Ed.): Gerhart Hauptmann's works in two volumes. Volume II. 1072 pages. Verlag Das Bergland-Buch, Salzburg 1956 (thin print)
Output used:
  • The island of the great mother or The miracle of Île des Dames. A story from the utopian Archipelagus. P. 413–634 in: Gerhart Hauptmann: The great novels. 814 pages. Propylaea Verlag , Berlin 1968

Secondary literature

  • Wolfgang Leppmann : Gerhart Hauptmann. A biography. Ullstein, Berlin 1996 (Ullstein-Buch 35608), 415 pages, ISBN 3-548-35608-7 (identical text with ISBN 3-549-05469-6 , Propylaen, Berlin 1995, subtitled with Die Biographie )
  • The island of the great mother or The miracle of Île des Dames. A story from the utopian Archipelagus . Pp. 309-317 in: Friedhelm Marx : Gerhart Hauptmann . Reclam, Stuttgart 1998 (RUB 17608, Literature Studies series). 403 pages, ISBN 3-15-017608-5
  • Peter Sprengel : Gerhart Hauptmann. Bourgeoisie and big dream. A biography. 848 pages. CH Beck, Munich 2012 (1st edition), ISBN 978-3-406-64045-2

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Gerhart Hauptmann, reader of the Neue Zeit , came across Bachofen's work through Lafargue's article from the summer of 1886. (Sprengel, p. 126, 2nd Zvu)
  2. ↑ Gerhart Hauptmann wrote for the educated classes and gives him every now and then help: "There is a Phaon, by the poetess Sappho was famous ...". (Edition used, S, 530, 3rd Zvu)
  3. ↑ Frappant: Babette claims that she gave birth to " Krishna herself" as Bihari Lal (Eng. Bihari Lal , playing darling ) (Edition used, S, 571, 16. Zvu).
  4. ↑ The handle researcher (manufacturologist) Friedrich Herig welcomed Gerhart Hauptmann's idea of ​​handwork (the work of the holy hand) at the time. The author appeared briefly as a specialist - concerning the connection between technology and art. (Sprengel, p. 574 above and p. 575 middle).
  5. ↑ Sprengel speaks of a final sexual revolt (Sprengel, p. 573 middle).
  6. ↑ The Hauptmanns stayed in Portofino at the Castello Paraggi ( Santa Margherita Ligure ), where they communicated with Tison Page. A photograph of the lady from New York, taken in 1910, can be found at Sprengel. P. 525.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marx, p. 312, 6th Zvu
  2. ^ Sprengel, p. 573, 12. Zvo
  3. ^ Bachofen: Das Mutterrecht , Stuttgart 1861 in the Internet Archive
  4. ↑ see also Gerhart Hauptmann, quoted in Leppmann, p. 342, 14. Zvo
  5. ^ Marx, p. 314, 6. Zvo
  6. ↑ Marx, p. 313 below
  7. ↑ eng. Mucalinda
  8. ↑ Döblin, cited in Leppmann, p. 330, 17. Zvu and footnote 202, p. 401 ( Martin Machatzke (Ed.), Diarium 1917–1933 )
  9. ↑ Hermann Schreiber, cited in Leppmann, p. 329, 19. Zvu and footnote 200 on p. 401, 15. Zvu
  10. ↑ Guthke bei Marx, p. 317, 6th Zvu
  11. ↑ Joanna Jabłkowska , University of Lodz
  12. ↑ Jabłkowska, quoted in Marx, p. 317, 10th Zvu
  13. ↑ Leppmann, p. 330, 6. Zvu and p. 331, 15. Zvu
  14. ↑ Leppmann, p. 331, 12. Zvu
  15. ↑ Leppmann, p. 331 below
  16. ↑ Marx, p. 317, 11. Zvo, see also Sprengel, p. 524, 11. Zvu and p. 575, 11. Zvu
  17. ↑ eng. Laurence Alma-Tadema
  18. ^ Sprengel, p. 524, 6th Zvu