The Crusaders (novel)

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Handwriting of the first page of the novel "Krzyżacy"

The Crusaders ( Polish ' Krzyżacy' - literally: "Cross bearer", in parlance: "Crusader") is a novel by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz . It was first published in 1900 and has since been translated into 25 languages.

By the partitions of Poland existed for over 100 years, no Polish state more than Sienkiewicz's novel about the Teutonic Order wrote of the 14th century, the 1410 in the Battle of Tannenberg a defeat against a united army of Poland , Lithuanians , Belarusians and Tatars suffered .

The importance of Krzyżacy is described by the fact that it was the first book printed in Poland after 1945, for the edification of the Polish population, whose image of the Teutonic Knights and the Germans in general was influenced by this work as strongly as that of the Indians among the Germans by Karl May , albeit in a reverse manner.

In 1960, the novel was filmed in Poland by Aleksander Ford .

action

At the end of the 14th century, the young Polish nobleman Zbyszko von Bogdaniec moved to Kraków to attend the court of King Władysław Jagiełło to accompany his uncle Maćko . On the way he met Danusia, a maid of Duchess Anna of Mazovia and daughter of the knight Jurand von Spychów. The train meets the ambassador of the Teutonic Order, Kuno von Lichtenstein, near Tyniec Abbey . The hot-blooded Zbyszko promptly attacks the knight, who then brings an action against him at the king. Because of this serious violation of the royal authority, an envoy is under the protection of the monarch, the young Zbyszko is to be executed. Danusia saves him by promising him marriage.

Meanwhile, some knights of the order of the Ortelsburg Commandery around Hugo von Danfeld and Siegfried von Löwe are looking for a way of countering the constant threat to the Order from Jurand from Spychów. Jurand seeks revenge on the knights of the order for the death of his wife, Danusia's mother. It is decided to kidnap his daughter to force her father to give up. Meanwhile Danusia and Zbyszko have secretly married.

Danusia is kidnapped with ruse from the court of Duke Janusz of Mazovia. Her desperate father then sets out to save his beloved daughter and decides to place himself under the power of the order. In Ortelsburg, the once feared knight is mocked for days and refused to surrender his daughter. The furious Jurand then caused a massacre among the occupation of the Ordensburg, to which Hugo von Danfeld also fell victim. He is then captured. When a knight at the court of Mazovia brought a lawsuit against Jurand because of the bloodbath and demanded the Polish-Mazovian nobles as proof of the correctness of his claims to the duel, Zbyszko accepted the challenge. He suspects that the knight is one of the kidnappers, his young wife. Zbyszko succeeds in defeating his opponent in a tough duel, so that the kidnapping and the lies of the knights are now also proven in the eyes of the duke.

Zbyszko now goes in search of his beloved Danusia, which leads him to Shamaiten . The captured Jurand is severely mutilated, and finally left blind and dumb to his fate. By chance the badly marked man returned to Spychów as a beggar. In the chaos of war in Shamaiten, where the local population is fighting against the foreign rule of the knights of the order, Zbyszko actually manages to find Siegfried von Löwe and thus his Danusia again. But she is dying as a result of the severe imprisonment. Jurand mourns his deceased daughter and in an act of unheard-of generosity releases her tormentor Siegfried, who soon afterwards commits suicide. After Jurand died shortly afterwards, Zbyszko, knighted by the Duke of Mazovia, is also Lord of Spychów due to his marriage. After it took him a long time to get over his loss, Zbyszko married Jagienka von Zgorzelice, who had long been sympathetic to him and with whom he had a happy marriage from now on.

The novel concludes with a detailed description of the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410.

criticism

The Crusader is controversial in the criticism; Sienkiewicz wrote a heroic epic that, according to Michael Birke at buchwurm.info, does not take the historical truth very seriously and pursues “black and white painting par excellence” through “simplified condemnation of the Crusaders and evil nationalisms”. The friars appear as the embodiment of evil, arrogant, cruel and sadistic, the image is drawn of the bellicose, aggressive German.

The ideology of the book is no longer in the foreground these days and Sienkiewicz's work of art can not only be reduced to the effort to depict "the unifying elements" of national consciousness in dramatic national stages. Rather, this work is intended to affect the reader from the perspective of artistic, human and aesthetic values.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Review by Michael Birke at buchwurm.info
  2. ↑ In Sienkiewicz, as in Eisenstein, the friars appear as the embodiment of evil, arrogant, cruel and sadistic, which the peace-loving, just Polish King and the Grand Duke of Novgorod oppose. In: Jürgen Sarnowsky: The German Order. CH Beck, 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-53628-1 . Google Books
  3. ↑ Bernd Martin: In the historical literature of the two later Nobel Laureates, the image of the Prussian land robbers celebrated happy origins since the time of the German Order. In the novel »Die Kreuzritter« by Henryk Sienkiewicz and in writings by Władysław Reymont , such as the fictional diary of a Poznan teacher, the image of the bellicose, aggressive German is drawn. In: Bernhard Chiari, Jerzy Kochanowski: The Polish Home Army: History and Myth of the Armia Krajowa since the Second World War. Military History Research Office , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-486-56715-2 . Google Books
  4. ↑ H. Sienkiewicz: Križiaci. Bratislava 1972 Commentary on the book, pp. 778, 27 f.