The cherries

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A conflict ignites over a glass of cherries.

The cherries is one of the best known short stories by Wolfgang Borchert . It is often emphasized from his work because of its model character and the linguistic and content-related scarcity. As an example of the rubble literature , she shows an everyday situation in the post-war period, from which general internal conflicts of her characters arise. The short story was written in 1947, at a time when Borchert himself was already bedridden, and is one of the few texts by Borchert that addresses his illness. Therefore it was partlyinterpreted autobiographically .

content

A boy lying in bed with a fever hears something breaking next door. He immediately suspects it is a glass of cherries that has been put in the cold to ease his fever. When he gets up, he sees his father sitting on the floor in the next room while what appears to be red cherry juice is running down his hand. When the father notices the boy, he worries and sends him back to bed. But the patient only looks at the red hand in dismay and suspects the father of having eaten some of his cherries. The father explains that he slipped when trying to rinse a cup to transfer the cherries. The cup broke, he cut himself and now can't get up in shock. He promises his son that he will bring the cherries straight away and sends him to bed again. When the father actually brings his sick son the cherries, he hides his head deep under the covers in shame.

interpretation

Peter Rühmkorf rated Die Kirschen as exemplary for short prose , "where, starting with the cleverly casual introduction ('A glass clinked next door' [...]) through the deliberate alienation and underplaying of the apex ('She just liked this cup so much' [... ]) to the barely hinted announcement of the shock, a break in existence and a change of consciousness in the seemingly inconspicuous. "

Reiner Poppe also saw Die Kirschen as "a perfect model of a short story" that presented "a maximum of communication with a minimum of set characters". Formally he described: "Two and a half pages with the most succinct process and reduced, but in the reduction extremely intense language, compelling three-bar structure with an opposing inner and outer movement of the two characters". The narrative arc extends from the sudden beginning to the boy's reproach, the father's alleged excuse as the apex, the final shame to the again sudden end. While the stereotypical sentence “Everything full of cherries” is stuck in the head of the feverish boy , in his disappointment he “only brings out fragments of language until he can no longer find any words at the end. Where shame becomes overwhelming, the voice fails. "

For Manfred Durzak, Die Kirschen looked like a variation on Das Brot . But in a reversal of this earlier short story, it is not the actor who is exposed, but the observer. The boy sees in the caring father "only the competitor who wants to deprive him of the enjoyment of the coveted fruits." Durzak emphasized that Borchert "nowhere in the story explains moralizing or psychologizing the relationship between father and son in the spectrum of interpretation." the everyday individual case becomes "clear the historical climate in which the egoistic urge of the individual overplayed traditional human behavior, including morality, and everyone became a competitor of the other, including in the family."

Rühmkorf made a biographical interpretation in his monograph on Wolfgang Borchert by relating the short story to Borchert's problematic relationship with his father. In general, he saw a weak father figure predominating in Borchert's work, with “a touching helplessness and a noticeable inability to act”. The episode described in Die Kirschen showed for him "in its course of suspicion and utter shame, of mistrust and self-reproach, the extraordinary feelings of guilt of a son who presumably indulged in secret accusations for a whole youth", which were inflamed by the fact that "this Father rarely resisted his child's extraordinary inclinations. "

Also Bettina Clausen saw where, in their view already adult boys, "which covers the loan granted to him on childishness hardly retrievable", a possible self-portrait Borchert. In the end, the author lets his hero "fail completely, that is, he lets the sick but adult choose the most childlike way of coping with guilt" by simply tucking his head under the covers. She connects the story with a line from Borchert's story Generation Without Farewell : “We are the generation without […] protection, cast out of the playpen of childhood”.

reception

Peter Rühmkorf praised the cherries as "exemplary and masterful"

Wolfgang Borchert wrote Die Kirschen in 1947 after his play Out in front of the door and before leaving in September of the same year for the St. Clara Hospital in Basel , where he died two months later. The short story was first on 1 August 1948 in the journal For you published, but not in the 1949 by Rowohlt published oeuvre added. It was not until 1961 that Die Kirschen was published in book form together with other stories from the estate in the collection The Sad Geraniums and other stories from the estate .

Nevertheless, the story is considered by some reviewers to be "Borchert's best short stories". Reiner Poppe speaks of a “masterful narrative” which is one of the “favorites” in the classroom, as it is “perfect in terms of language and form-content relationships”. For Bettina Clausen it was “one of Borchert's psychologically finely motivated stories”.

Peter Rühmkorf named The Cherries as an example of some of the stories from the estate, which are “simply exemplary and masterful” in the sense that “they only make little of themselves on the outside, that everything that actually happens is turned inward and that there is a hint of action often enough to meet and move us. "Borchert reveals" [j] ene special sensitivity, able to indicate the emotional high tension in capillary rashes and to deal with the last things on the slightest. "

literature

  • Wolfgang Borchert: The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967, ISBN 3-499-10975-1 , pp. 13-15

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Wolfgang Borchert: The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate . Afterword by Peter Rühmkorf, pp. 123–124
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: The sad geraniums and other stories from the estate , p. 13
  3. ↑ a b Reiner Poppe: Wolfgang Borchert - Outside the door . King's explanations and materials, Vol. 299. Bange, Hollfeld 2007, ISBN 3-8044-1804-X , pp. 49–52
  4. ↑ Manfred Durzak: The German short story of the present . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2074-X , p. 120
  5. ^ Peter Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1961, ISBN 3-499-50058-2 , p. 11
  6. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 13
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Borchert: Generation without parting . In: The Complete Works . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1949, ISBN 3-498-09027-5 , p. 59
  8. ↑ a b Bettina Clausen: Declining youth. Comments on Borchert and the early Borchert success . 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. 235-236
  9. ^ Rühmkorf: Wolfgang Borchert , p. 133
  10. ↑ Gordon JA Burgess (Ed.): Wolfgang Borchert . Christians, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-7672-0868-7 , p. 140
  11. ^ Theo Elm : "Outside 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 , p. 267