The strength of the weak

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The Power of the Weak is a collection, consisting of nine stories by Anna Seghers , which was published in Berlin in 1965.

The stories have nothing to do with each other purely in terms of content, but the parenthesis that connects all texts was mentioned by the author in an interview: “I tell of very unheroic people who may ... seem weak ... But ... they resist and their refusal is exercised then great strength. ”A second bracket symbolizes the accompanying stories Agathe Schweigert and The homecoming of the lost people due to one theme: Mexico takes in anti-fascists - lost people - from Europe.

The title comes from the Bible. Paul writes to the Corinthians : “My strength is mighty in the weak.” In the stories Agathe Schweigert and Susi , Anna Seghers identifies herself as an autobiographer. The reed was preprinted in 1964. In 1990 the fragment The Just Judge , not mentioned below - probably from 1957 - was added posthumously.

content

Agathe Schweigert

The shunter Franz Schweigert had married Agathe Denhöfer, owner of a haberdashery shop , there after returning to Algesheim in the Rhineland , seriously wounded from the war . The son Ernst emerged from the marriage. The father soon succumbed to the consequences of the war. Ernst, an excellent student, is set to become a teacher of German and history one day. When he was studying in Frankfurt am Main, Agathe Schweigert received a visit from the state police . Ernst distributed leaflets. The mother knows nothing. She stops selling the "tiny swastikas", sells her property and goes in search of her son. When she reached the Albacete hospital , she finally got word. After a slight wound, Ernst continued fighting in a German division of the interbrigades . The fighter falls. Agathe Schweigert works in a Republican hospital and soon after flees to France. On the run from the Germans , she ended up in the Antilles . Agathe Schweigert met Anna Seghers there in the spring of 1941 .

The leader

After the Italian fascists used poison gas against the Ethiopian civilian population, three Italian geologists with officer rank, coming from Addis Ababa , go to a mountain area there. The yield of various mineral resources should be prepared. The gentlemen also want to dig gold privately. That is why they let the local, Amharic- speaking young Ato lead them into a rocky desert from which - as it turns out - there is no return. All four "gold prospectors" perish on a lonely, rugged ledge.

the Prophet

In one camp, a prisoner reported under what circumstances the internationally widely read Budapest war opponent and journalist Stefan was killed there by the SS . Stefan had already published the first article against the war during the First World War . Fled to Austria before Horthy , Stefan later worked as a journalist against the war in Germany and France. One trait had become his undoing in Paris in the summer of 1940 . Although Stefan was able to forecast the political future in Europe and in some cases across European borders quite accurately and to make newspaper readers plausible with selected formulations, the events of the day in his immediate vicinity had rushed past him, taken insufficiently seriously.

The reed

The very healthy young farmer Marta Emrich - "big-boned, with a broad and flat face" - stands alone. The parents died, the fiancé fell on the Maginot Line and the younger brother on the Eastern Front.

Once in a lifetime Martha met love; As a 26-year-old in the late summer of 1943: Marta runs her vegetable gardening on one of the lakes in the Berlin area without outside help. The refugee Kurt Steiner sneaks into her modest property. Rejecting at first, Marta then takes the newcomer to her fresh bed. Shortly before the field police also combed Marta's property for deserters, Marta persuaded the refugee to feint. Kurt is hiding in the shallow water at the bottom of the lake, breathing through a cut reed .

This love experience remains an episode. After the war, the older brother returns home and Marta marries the widowed neighbor Eberhard Klein. Both live peacefully with Klein's child.

Goodbye

Volodja, who took part in the war, recalls this lament for the dead many years after the war between two Russians who were shot by the Germans after October 20, 1941. Volodja tells how he consoled his next of kin after the loss of his school friend, the soldier Sergej in the Russian village of G. and the schoolboy Kostja in Rostov . At the end of 1941, he lied to Sergei's mother in a letter about the circumstances of her son's death. Because nothing really happened with the beautiful, quick death. Volodya laments his weakness at the time. Years later, his consolation in the death of Kostja comes from a more stable emotional situation: "If there hadn't been someone like him [like Kostja], where would we be now?"

The duel

A few years after 1945: Professor Winkelfried duels with Karl Bötcher. Fortunately, the two physicists attack each other with words, primarily with convictions. Bötcher survived the Nazi prison and wants to whip his four extremely dumb but stubborn people through a geometry course given by the professor. Those who pass the exam are allowed to take the next step on the way to a difficult, physically influenced degree. Winkelfried and Bötcher know each other from their time in Dresden. In May 1933 Winkelfried had signed a follow-up commitment to the new rulers at the Technical University there , which at the time had also been directed against university members such as Bötcher. Botcher and his people are called socialists by the opposing party, i.e. the professor's supporters . From the context is not word for word, but unequivocally indicate Anna Seghers says future manager, called cadres of the party . Of course, Bötcher and his four comrades-in-arms win the fight by hair and bust.

Susi

In France, Anna Seghers had to hide from the German occupiers . Once she stayed for one night with Susi, an old friend from German childhood days. After the First World War, Susi Mangold met and fell in love with the soldier Jean during the French occupation of her hometown Kronbach in the Rhineland . She finally went to Courcelle with him. Susi continued to stand by Jean when she learned from his friend Viktor that Jean was a married father of two children. Jean fell ill and died. Susi married Viktor. The couple housed Anna Seghers. Years earlier, the Feuerkreuzler Jeans leased inn in Meudon had broken down after Viktor had used his friend's bar several times for his meetings. After the death of her lover, Susi continues to pay for the damage to property. Neugebauer calls the text a story of love beyond death.

Tuomas gives gifts to the Sorsa peninsula

The descendants of ancient seafarers survive with great difficulty in an inhospitable rocky bay on the barren Sorsa Peninsula. Grain is sown on barren fields in spring and harvested in autumn. Occasionally the nests of the wild ducks are gutted. Tuomas, who with his wife Aagi and their three children suffer from hunger in bad years, imitates his father. The family makes colorful trinkets; "Finely carved, colorfully patterned plates and pots, pipes and crosses and chains". Piggyback with the knickknacks, Tuomas pulls across the peninsula into the rough autumnal country. Nobody wants to buy the junk in the bad year. Bitterly disappointed, already on the way home, Tuomas found a few buyers for his odds and ends. In addition to the exchanged wool, salt, bacon and schnapps, these farmers add three sacks of winter grain as a gift for the guests to be sown before the first snowfall. Tuomas has to hurry. Winter is just around the corner on the Sorsa Peninsula. He moves home, plows and sows just before the onset of winter. The experiment succeeds. Tuomas' winter grain does not freeze under the snow. Next fall, a couple of Sorsa people will do the same for Tuomas. Anna Seghers writes: "It slowly made life a little better on the Sorsa Peninsula."

  • Tuomas gives gifts to the Sorsa peninsula. P. 330–354 in Anna Seghers: Post to the Promised Land. Stories. Selection of Ursula Emmerich. Illustrations Günther Lück . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1990 (1st edition), ISBN 3-351-01653-0

The homecoming of the lost people

The Mayans withdraw into the jungle before the Spanish conquerors . After centuries of fleeing and hiding from the overpowering enemy - the Spaniards have long been chased away - they accept President Cardenas' invitation to Mexico City , but reject the strip of land on the Pacific side of Mesoamerica as their new home. Cardenas finally grants them the old homeland of the Yucatán .

reception

Contemporaries
Recent comments
  • The editor in Barner's literary history praised the collection in a row with The Light on the Gallows and The Real Blue . All three texts have the “sobriety, density and imagery of great prose” in common.

literature

First editions

  • Anna Seghers: The strength of the weak. Nine stories. Construction Verlag, Berlin 1965, 181 pages
  • Anna Seghers: The strength of the weak. Nine stories. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1966, 205 pages

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Heinz Neugebauer: Anna Seghers. Life and work. Pp. 180-189. With illustrations (research assistant: Irmgard Neugebauer, editorial deadline September 20, 1977). 238 pages. Series “Writers of the Present” (Ed. Kurt Böttcher). People and Knowledge, Berlin 1980, without ISBN
  • Ute Brandes: Anna Seghers . S. 82. Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1992. Vol. 117 of the series “Heads of the 20th Century”, ISBN 3-7678-0803-X
  • Andreas Schrade: Anna Seghers . Pp. 128-130. Metzler, Stuttgart 1993 (Metzler Collection, Vol. 275 (Authors)), ISBN 3-476-10275-0
  • Andreas Schrade: Draft of an undivided society. Anna Seghers' path to the novel after 1945. pp. 127–131. Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 1994, ISBN 3-925670-89-0
  • Wilfried Barner (ed.): History of German literature. Volume 12: History of German Literature from 1945 to the Present . CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1
  • Sonja Hilzinger: Anna Seghers. With 12 illustrations. Series of Literature Studies. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, RUB 17623, ISBN 3-15-017623-9

annotation

  1. ↑ The terms Yucatán and Maya do not appear in Anna Seghers' legend , but not of the white Spaniards or of Juarez , the country of Mexico, Cardenas - the president in Mexico City - or of a peninsula on the Atlantic side of Mesoamerica as the original home of the named brown natives is the talk.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 203, 3rd entry vu and edition used, p. 657 middle
  2. ↑ Anna Seghers 1964 in conversation with Günter Caspar (Hilzinger, p. 156, 11. Zvu)
  3. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 157, 10th Zvu
  4. ↑ Bible , New Testament , Pauline Letters ( 2 Cor 12,9  LUT )
  5. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 156, 17th Zvu
  6. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 157, 7. Zvo
  7. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 213, last entry
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 60, 5th Zvu
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 87, 16. Zvo
  10. ^ French Courcelle
  11. ↑ Neugebauer, p. 181 below
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 151, 13. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 164, 5th Zvu
  14. ↑ Barner, p. 537, 10. Zvo