The kitchen clock

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The kitchen clock is a short story by the German writer Wolfgang Borchert . It was written at the beginning of 1947 and published on August 27, 1947 in the Hamburger Allgemeine Zeitung . It first appeared in book form in December 1947 in Borchert's second collection of prose On This Tuesday .

The short story is about a young man who lost his parents and home in a bomb attack . With a remaining kitchen clock, he remembers his mother's care and understands the lost family life as a paradisiacal state. The kitchen clock is one of the most famous works by Wolfgang Borchert, is a typical example of rubble literature and is often dealt with in school lessons.

Destruction in Borchert's hometown Hamburg after a British air raid in World War II

content

A twenty-year-old man, whose face already looks very old, sits down on a bench with other people. His parents were killed and his home was destroyed in a bomb attack. All he has left is a broken kitchen clock that he shows the others. A man with the pressure wave of the explosions explains that she stopped at half past two . However, the time reminds the young man of his nightly return home. His mother would get up regularly when he came home at this time, prepare dinner for him, and wait in the kitchen while he ate. What seemed natural to him at the time, he only recognizes in retrospect as paradise . After the report of the death of his parents, he falls silent. But the word "paradise" is now floating around in the head of his neighbor.

shape

According to Werner Zimmermann, Borchert's language indicates a "low level of speech". In the limited vocabulary, everyday language predominates, the sentence structure is often careless and "fragmented". Frequently used stylistic devices are the antithetical linking of opposites and the repetition of linguistic expressions through which the inner workings of the characters are revealed. The sentences are short and simple; they are in the past tense . There is no distinction between narrative prose and direct speech , all quotation marks are missing, but the report is repeatedly interrupted by questions. The situation itself is drawn as briefly as possible without the story being influenced by an external reality. In this way, according to Hans Graßl, their inner content should "appear closed and clear".

Typical of the genre of the short story is the sudden start, to which Graßl described: “With a few, almost pale lines, a situation arises immediately.” Another factor contributing to this technique is that Borchert includes the characters in the plot with pronouns before they do be introduced. Until the end of the story they hardly develop any personal individuality, but remain time-related and general types . This nameless typing of the figures is characteristic of Borchert's best-known works such as Outside the Door , The Bread or The Cherries . The location of the action is reminiscent of a backdrop, the narrator remains hidden behind the characters, the action is dominated by the dialogue.

interpretation

The kitchen clock

Old kitchen clock

The central image of the short story is the kitchen clock. It is the focus of numerous contradicting statements that contrast the low objective value with its high ideal value. The importance of the clock for the young man is shown in frequent repetitions, for example in the repeated mention of the time at which it stopped. It is precisely their unsuitability for everyday use - the broken clock is no longer able to show the passing time - opens up a view of a higher reality that is obscured by the usual passage of time. Werner Zimmermann saw the meaning of the kitchen clock exceeding a memento or a thing symbol . It becomes a relic , an “object of magical healing power” for the protagonist and a symbolic cipher for the higher meaning of the story , precisely in the contrast between external worthlessness and hidden value .

Hans Graßl saw in the kitchen clock a sign of the times that had passed unrepeatable. At the same time, their cycle, which the young man traces with his finger, is also a symbol of his life situation after he is alone and defenseless in the world without parents and home. Rejected by the community of others, the young man directs his self-talk to the watch that is given a "face" for him, personified by him . The plate shape of the clock also stands for the communal meal that the young man once experienced in the family. Even after the death of the parents, the plate clock indicates the continued existence and continued work of the family.

The paradise

The clock refers to the second central image of the story, the so-called “paradise”. The young man uses this word to describe a state of the past that the watch has preserved by stopping. Every night at two-thirty something took place that was taken for granted at the time of the incident: an act of motherly love in which the mother prepared her son's meal and kept him company. According to Wilhelm Große, this act, accepted without comment, shows “a very deep, simple, unquestioned love” and becomes a symbol of humanity . This humanity was destroyed by the war, the nocturnal get-together is transformed into a paradisiacal state that is now unattainable. The short story takes up the biblical theme of expulsion from paradise .

According to Hans Graßl, the young man only perceives paradise when it has already been irretrievably lost and only realizes maternal care after her death. Nevertheless, his cheerfulness shows that the memory of an obsessed but lost paradise is better than the previous blind self-evident. Previously, the indifferently accepted token of love was always accompanied by the mother's coldness and silence. Her feeling of cold was due not only to the kitchen tiles, but also to the emptiness that the estranged son brought home every night. By not recognizing the loyalty and love that was offered and reducing it to the mere satisfaction of the physical need for hunger, the son betrayed his paradise himself. The horror of this realization let him age prematurely, in the end all that remains for him in his guilt is the great silence.

The young man

The main character of the short story is characterized by contradicting characteristics: young in his walk, he has a "very old face". The contradiction continues in his behavior and speech. For Wilhelm Große, the man was shocked by the death of his parents and had gone crazy. The madness is engraved in his face, but is only shown indirectly by the embarrassment with which the others react to the young man, for example by avoiding eye contact. At the same time, Grosse saw the man see many things more clearly from his position of madness. He, as someone who has fallen out of the norm, shows others how the world can be brought back into balance. For Dieter Schrey, however, the knowledge of paradise through the hell of war had permanently destroyed the young man. Fixated on the clock, like this, he stopped at half past two and was no longer able to accept any other reality than the memories conveyed by the clock.

Werner Zimmermann turned against a " naturalistic - nihilistic interpretation", which explains the contradiction between the man's cheerful behavior and his depressing experiences through symptoms of erupting madness. Rather, he recognized a feeling of being withdrawn rather than a madness, even though the states merged into one another. Out of his painful experience, the young man had an enlightenment that filled him with inner serenity and led him out of his loneliness. He also saw the young man's “old” face not merely as a result of the war he had suffered. When at the end it says: “Then he said nothing more. But he had a very old face. ”, Then the combination“ but ”suggests a different meaning of age: an age wisdom developed through the proximity of death, which taught the young man to see the essence behind the externality, behind the Things the higher reality.

The others

Only two characters are exposed in more detail besides the protagonist: a man and a woman with a stroller. The other people on or next to the bench remain silent observers and listeners. Although they are just as affected by the war as the young man, there is no community of fate. All are busy with themselves, remain strangers to each other. Despite the young man's intimate confessions, the conversation remains impersonal. Significantly, the first question does not ask any of the introduced characters, but “someone”. The others turn away from the young man when he tells them his life story, so that he starts a self-talk with his watch. According to Hans Graßl, the story creates a feeling of loneliness and homelessness in the ruins of the war.

Only at the end does the young man manage to reach a fellow fate. While the man on the bench had previously given an important lecture on how the bomb worked and looked evasively at his shoes, he has now been gripped by the boy's story. In spiritual harmony, both remain deeply absorbed in themselves in the end.

The end

Werner Zimmermann related the open end of the story not only to the plot itself, but also to its effect on the reader. Just as the young man told his environment something of the meaning that lies in his kitchen clock for him and his neighbor now constantly thinks of the word “paradise”, the story also leaves an effect on the reader who “has become pensive and inwardly set in motion ”.

For Wilhelm Große, a bygone paradisiacal state survived in the kitchen clock, which lights up at the end of the story. The destruction that was omnipresent during the Second World War - both externally and mentally - will be overcome and the possibility of shaping the future will be shown. By not presenting humanity in history as something aloof, inaccessible, but tracing it back to small, everyday actions, a new, humane society could form on their basis.

History of origin

The kitchen clock was made at the beginning of 1947. At that time, the seriously ill Borchert was already bedridden and wrote a few dozen short stories and the drama Outside the Door from his sick bed . He died on November 20th in the St. Clara Hospital in Basel at the age of 26. The kitchen clock was first published in the Hamburger Allgemeine Zeitung on August 27, 1947 . In December of the same year it was included in Borchert's second collection of prose This Tuesday . The posthumously published volume was published by Rowohlt , the first edition of 5,000 copies was followed by a second edition of the same amount in the following month. In 1949, The Kitchen Clock was included in the complete works of Wolfgang Borchert, also published by Rowohlt .

reception

The short story The kitchen clock is one of the most famous short stories by Wolfgang Borchert and Theo Elm counts it as one of his best short stories. Dieter Hoffmann saw it as one of the most famous examples of a thing story in which an object becomes an expression of the protagonist's experiences, life situation or feeling of existence. The kitchen clock is often dealt with in German lessons and is a typical example of rubble literature . According to Franz-Rudolf Weller, the short story ends with a "famous final sentence": "He kept thinking of the word paradise."

literature

Text output

  • Wolfgang Borchert: This Tuesday. Nineteen stories . Rowohlt, Hamburg / Stuttgart 1947, pp. 52–54.
  • Wolfgang Borchert: The Complete Works . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-00652-5 , pp. 237-239.

Secondary literature

  • Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock . In: Rupert Hirschenauer, Albrecht Weber (ed.): Interpretations of Wolfgang Borchert . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-01909-0 , pp. 82-88.
  • Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short stories . Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 978-3-637-88629-2 , pp. 54-57.
  • Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II . Schwann, Dusseldorf, 1962, pp. 129-134.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II , p. 129.
  2. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , pp. 87-88.
  3. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , p. 82.
  4. ↑ Kåre Eirek Gullvåg: The man from the rubble. Wolfgang Borchert and his poetry . K. Fischer, Aachen 1997, ISBN 3-89514-103-8 , p. 107.
  5. ↑ a b Theo Elm : "Outside in front of the door": Historicity and topicality Wolfgang Borchert . In: Gordon Burgess, Hans-Gerd Winter (ed.): "Pack life by the hair". Wolfgang Borchert in a new perspective . Dölling and Gallitz, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930802-33-3 , pp. 267-268.
  6. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II , pp. 130-132.
  7. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , pp. 83–86.
  8. ^ Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , p. 56.
  9. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , p. 87.
  10. ^ Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , p. 55.
  11. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , pp. 85–87.
  12. ↑ a b Wilhelm Große: Wolfgang Borchert. Short Stories , pp. 56–57.
  13. ↑ Interpretation graphic by Dieter Schrey.
  14. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II , pp. 131, 133.
  15. ↑ a b Wolfgang Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 239.
  16. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II , p. 133.
  17. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , p. 82, 84–85.
  18. ↑ Hans Graßl: The kitchen clock , p. 87.
  19. ↑ Werner Zimmermann: German prose poetry of the present. Part II , p. 134.
  20. ^ Peter Rühmkorf : Wolfgang Borchert . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1961, ISBN 3-499-50058-2 , p. 133.
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Das Gesamtwerk (2007), p. 537.
  22. ↑ Post-war literature 1945 - 1950 in König's explanations .
  23. ↑ Dieter Hoffmann : Arbeitsbuch Deutschsprachige Prosa since 1945 . Volume 1. Francke (UTB), Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-8252-2729-4 , p. 86.
  24. ↑ For example, a study from Hesse about the 1960/1961 school year found the kitchen clock in 66th place among the most frequently discussed reading material in upper school. See Helmut Fuhrmann: The Fury of Disappearance: Literature Lessons and Literature Tradition . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-742-5 , p. 89.
  25. ↑ Beate Brenner: "When the war was over ..." approximation of the German state of mind after the end of the war in 1945. Herbert Utz, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-89675-411-4 , p. 46.
  26. ^ Franz-Rudolf Weller: "Nouvelle Nouvelle" or "Récit court"? On the importance of short prose fiction in contemporary French literature - with references to the literary didactic potential of short prose texts in French lessons . In: The Newer Languages . Volume 94, year 1995. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 280.