The people of Seldwyla
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The People of Seldwyla is a two-part cycle of novels by the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller . Keller wrote the first five novellas, Part I, in Berlin from 1853 to 1855; they appeared in 1856 by Vieweg Verlag . Another five, Part II, were created in several phases between 1860 and 1875, i.e. H. mostly during Keller's tenure as state clerk in Zurich. The entire work was published from 1873 to 1875 in the Göschen'schen publishing house . It comprises ten “life pictures” (the working title during the time it was created in Berlin), which are held together by a common setting, the fictional Swiss town of Seldwyla. With the exception of “Romeo and Juliet in the Village”, an adaptation of Shakespearean tragedy , the Seldwyler stories are comedies in the form of novels with a strong satirical - grotesque element. The people of Seldwyla is considered a masterpiece of German-language storytelling of the 19th century and representative of the style of poetic realism . Two of the novels, “Romeo and Juliet in the village” and “Clothes make the man”, belong to world literature and, within German-language literature , to the most widely read stories. They served several times as models for films and operas, have been translated into many languages and are distributed in an almost unmanageable number of editions.
Content of part I.
introduction
- Seldwyla means a blissful and sunny place according to the older language, and so the small town of this name is indeed located somewhere in Switzerland. It is still in the same old circular walls and towers as it was three hundred years ago and is therefore always the same nest; The original deep intention of this complex is corroborated by the fact that the founders of the city planted it a good half hour from a navigable river, as a clear sign that nothing was to come of it. But it is beautifully situated, in the middle of green mountains, which are too open on the midday side, so that the sun can come in, but no rough breeze. That is why a pretty good wine also grows around the old city wall, while higher up on the mountains there are unpredictable forests, which make up the fortune of the city; for this is the emblem and strange fate of them, that the community is rich and the citizenship poor, in such a way that no one has anything to Seldwyla and no one knows what they have actually been living on for centuries.
With this famous description, Keller introduces the characteristics of his Seldwylers: They are almost Latin-tempered, always funny and in the mood for amusement, and not a little reckless. What they lack is thrift, determination and persistent industry. They would rather let other people work for them, speculate in securities and live on Borg. But the paradise of credit is only open to them while they are young. So the youth up to their mid-thirties form the real core and shine of the people . Afterwards, when the fruitful years begin for others, the Seldwylers are finished (insolvent), lead a shadowy existence as fallites ( bankrupts ) and learn to work afterwards, namely that crawling work of a thousand little things for which one is not trained. They earn their bread and fairly participate in the festivities of standing in the pile citizens only as onlookers part. But the most capable leave the city, go into foreign military service according to Swiss tradition or go adventurously through distant countries, so that you can meet Seldwyler in different parts of the world, all of whom are characterized by the fact that they know how to eat fish very skillfully, in Australia, in California, Texas, Paris or Constantinople.
In their many inns, the Seldwylers are passionate about skittles and card games, especially at the time of the credit crunch, and when the call for a constitutional change comes from Seldwyla, people in the country know that there is currently no money in circulation . Since they love variety, they feel most comfortable in opposition. When people of progress are at the helm in the country, they crowd around the pious town priest, whom they usually mock; if they are conservatives, they stick to the radical school teacher; if they are liberal jurists and moneymen, they vote for the next best socialist. But if they get on the nerves of the majority of the country too much with their activities, the government sets them up a financial audit commission in the town hall, whereupon they calm down for a while.
The Seldwylers are least of all good when their new wine is fermenting, and most of all when they are torn out of their cozy rag nest and on their own. This brings the narrator to his program: In such a funny and strange city, there can be no shortage of all sorts of strange stories and biographies, since idleness is the beginning of all vices . However, he does not consider the ordinary incidents to be strange and worth telling, but rather the more exceptional, as long as they could only go to Seldwyla.
Pankraz, the Schmoller
The very first story is about an outlier. The young Pankraz does not know what to do with himself in Seldwyla and torments his poor mother and sister with constant insult. At fourteen he runs away, becomes a soldier in the British colonial army, proves himself and has forgotten how to sulk. However, when he falls in love with his superior's daughter, Lydia, a beautiful but devious salon lioness, he relapses. Sulking, he leaves India, joins the French Foreign Legion and takes it to a colonel in Algeria. He returns at the age of thirty-seven, sunburned and with a lion's skin in his luggage. He tells his mother and sister about Lydia and how he got the lion's skin at risk of death. On a lonely hunt he hung after his exiles in his thoughts, did not look ahead and was caught by the lion. After waiting for hours in the scorching heat, face to face with the beast, comrades discovered and rescued him; since what stroke of luck he has felt reborn, cured of pouting and old lovesickness.
Romeo and Juliet in the village
Based on a real incident, Keller retells Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and relocates the plot to the 19th century and Switzerland. Not far from Seldwyla, two rich farmers plow their fields. In doing so, they acquire the field of a poor man, furrow by furrow. In the dispute over this property, they become bitter enemies, fall into the hands of Seldwyler's lawyers and ruin their farms in trials that lasted years. Their hatred also destroys the lives of their children: Sali and Vrenchen love each other with no hope of a future together. They decide to spend one great day together and then separate. But at the end of this day they can no longer leave each other and take their own lives together.
Mrs. Regel Amrain and her youngest child
The story of a single parent: Ms. Regula Amrain married in from abroad. Her husband, a real Seldwyler, fled from his creditors to America and left her with three sons and an over-indebted quarry. She saves him, makes it profitable with the help of a young foreman and prevents her sons from taking the general Seldwyler approach. The climax of the story: Her youngest son Fritz, barely five, defends her knightly against the intrusiveness of the foreman, who longs for the beautiful woman and the prosperous business. As Fritz grows up, the mother reciprocates for this service and frees the son from the hands of a few Seldwyler women of dubious reputation - a lesson on erotic upbringing, followed by more on political upbringing. At the end there is a surprise: Mr. Amrain is returning.
The three just comb-makers
- The people of Seldwyla have shown that a whole city of unrighteous or reckless can survive in the change of times and traffic; the three comb-makers, however, that three righteous people cannot live long under one roof without getting into each other's hair.
We're talking about three German journeymen who ended up in Seldwyla. All three equally hard-working, neat and frugal, each pursuing only one goal of buying combing from his master. For this they toil, save and finally race with each other. But the main role in the story is played by the well-spoken maiden Züs Bünzlin, owner of a security, a certain education and also otherwise not without charm. The three journeymen lie at her feet and beg her to choose one of them. But Züs has a cruelly wrong heart and drives two of them to ruin. The third one gets what he wants, the maid and the comb-making, but is no longer happy with his life under Züs' slipper.
Mirror, the kitten
This story is subtitled A fairy tale and takes place in the late Middle Ages: The cat Spiegel ends up on the street after the death of his mistress. There he meets the Seldwyler city warlock Pineiss, who needs the pain (the fat) of cats for his witchcraft. In order not to starve to death, the cat signs a contract with him: Pineiss undertakes to feed mirrors out; Spiegel has to be slaughtered and boiled as soon as he is fat enough to gain pain. But when it comes to his collar, the clever cat tells the warlock the story of a gold treasure that only he, Spiegel, can lift. With the help of his girlfriend, an owl, he succeeds, and in the end Pineiss receives a lot of gold and a lovely young wife as a prize for Spiegel's freedom. On her wedding night, however, she turns into his hated neighbor, the pious Beghine , who is actually a wicked witch. - With a lot of art, Keller executed Spiegel's tale of the gold treasure as a classic love story in the style of the Decameron .
Content of Part II
introduction
- Since the first half of these stories appeared, about seven towns in Switzerland have been arguing over which of them is meant by Seldwyla; and since, according to old experience, vain people would rather be considered bad, happy and entertaining than good, but clumsy and simple-minded, each of these cities has offered the author its right of honorary citizenship in the event that he declares himself for it.
The author ironically and diplomatically eludes the honor offered, with which the cities - allegedly - stubbornly continue to want to secure their Homer while he is still alive , by advising Seldwyla to be viewed as an ideal city that only faces the mountain fog be painted and move on with him , also beyond the borders of the fatherland. Incidentally, the rapid change in the world has eliminated Seldwyla's conspicuousness. In particular, it is the widespread activity of speculation in known and unknown values, which has opened up a field for the Seldwylers that seemed to have been created for them since the beginning and puts them on an equal footing with thousands of serious business people . (In today's terms: Seldwyla is globalizing as the globe is seldwylized). However, continues Keller, it is precisely what makes Seldwyler likeable that is lost: They forget how to laugh, they lack the time to be funny and the courage for politics. Because: Already a lot of assets are accumulating here and there, which when a trade crisis occurs, trembles like a leaf or even quietly falls apart like an illegal gathering when the police arrive. In short, the Seldwylers look more and more like other people; Reason for the author to keep a small post-harvest with the second volume from the good, funny days of the city . Other cities come into his field of vision, first of all the solid and dignified Goldach.
Clothes make the man
The Silesian tailor Wenzel Strapinski moves to Goldach after losing his job and outstanding wages in a Seldwyler bankruptcy. Since he arrives in a stately coach - a compassionate coachman has charged him - and because of his good clothes and manners, the Goldachers consider him a Polish count in exile. Strapinski tried several times to escape the role that was forced upon him by fleeing. But then he falls in love with Nettchen, the pretty daughter of the Goldach district councilor. When the couple are giving a ball to celebrate their engagement, a carnival procession from Seldwyla appears - the motto is: “Clothes make the man” - and exposes the false count. Wenzel flees into the winter night. But Nettchen follows him, pulls him out of the snow, half frozen to death, and confesses to him after she has convinced herself that he loves her. The two flee to Seldwyla, in spite of the fools there, and enforce their marriage against fierce Goldacher resistance. According to the narrator, a new Trojan War almost breaks out over the affair , namely when the Goldachers approach with police forces and the Seldwylers band together in order not to miss out on Nettchen's great fortune. With this, Wenzel actually founds a studio, tailors fine clothes for the Seldwylers and, to their displeasure, lets them pay a lot for it.
The smith of his luck
The right man forges his luck with just a few targeted masterpieces, says Hans Kabis and changes his name to John Kabys in order to give himself an Anglo-Saxon, entrepreneurial nimbus . But luck didn't come and after a few more failures, John found himself in a corner of Seldwylas as the owner of a small barber shop. One day he found out that he had a very rich old cousin living in Augsburg. He closes his business, goes there, and wins Mr. Litumley's trust. Since he is married for the third time without children, he declares John his natural son and heir in his will. Now the barber might be satisfied. But to nail his luck to the wall, he gets involved with the young wife of his patron. One day the old man is in a particularly good mood and sends Kabys on a study trip: he is supposed to find out more about raising children. When John returns after a few months, a baby is squeaking in the house. Litumley beamed and informed him that his wife had given him a heir and that the will has been destroyed. John protests, accuses Madame Litumley of adultery, whereupon the old man throws him out. With the rest of his travel money, the fortune smith returns to Seldwyla, buys a small smithy there and learns how to do nails.
The abused love letters
The successful general store and leisure writer Viggi Störteler had the idea to train his wife to be a muse . During a business trip, he sends her grandiose love letters and orders her to answer them in the same style. Gritli cannot do that and in her need decides to copy the letters and send them to the schoolmaster Wilhelm. This, an enthusiastic young person, is surprised at the swollen stuff, but considers himself loved and answers with fiery effusions, which Gritli copies again and sends to Viggi. The man of letters has already come up with a book title for the collection of letters that is growing in size every day, and the dizziness is revealed. Viggi rages, demands a divorce and, amidst the laughter of the Seldwyler, loses his pretty wife and her companions. But poor Wilhelm loses his job. Ashamed, he withdraws into solitude to forget his beloved. But with Gritli it also ignited: She is looking for him, puts him to the test, and the two become a couple. Viggi finds a new muse in Kätter Ambach, a well-known blue sock . She helps him manage the rest of his fortune, but she appreciates his greatness of mind.
Dietegen
The story leads back to the late Middle Ages. - The dark town of Ruechenstein lies on the northern slope of the Seldwyler Forest Mountains. Their whole pride is their own blood jurisdiction . The Ruechensteiners practice this diligently and like to make short work of them, for example with Dietegen, an orphan boy whom they accuse of stealing a crossbow. On the very day they are celebrating the settlement of a long feud with the Seldwylers , they lead the eleven-year-old to the gallows. The guests lose their happiness. You set out and on the way meet the cart with the poor sinner's coffin. Then seven-year-old Küngolt discovers that the boy is still alive. Seldwyla receives him as a present and Küngolt's family takes him on as a child. Dietegen and Küngolt grow up splendidly together, he loves her and makes her protector, although she often offends him; for she regards him as her personal property, as she generally shows inclinations for lust for power and pleasure. When she wreaked havoc with it and created new strife between the neighboring cities, Dietegen gave her for lost and threw herself into wild war adventures. In the camp he received the news that the Ruechensteiners had captured Küngolt and were accusing them of witchcraft. Without hesitation, he sets out and saves her according to old legal practice by marrying her off the scaffold. Now the two are on the same footing and become a happy couple.
The lost laughter
Contrary to what was announced in the introduction, the last story takes place in the "modern" Seldwyla. - The laughter that is lost and found again is an expression of the cheerful disposition of two well-mannered and happy people, Jukundus and Justine, he is an officer in the Swiss army and standard-bearer of the Seldwyler Singers' Association, she is the daughter of the extremely wealthy Glor family, silk manufacturers in Schwanau. They fall in love at a song festival and get married after Jukundi has advised the Glors' youngest son wisely in a duel affair and thus allayed the family's concerns about his lack of money and his background in the rags. In the office of the silk factory, however, it turns out that he lacks commercial cleverness and toughness. Moreover, he is cool against the church reform movement, for which Justine is committed. There is a marital dispute. He can't stand a word that slips out of her and leaves the Glorsche house on the spot. From then on, the winning smile disappears from both features. Separately, they go their own ways - she religious, he political - and only recognize them as wrong turns when two public upheavals occur: A trade crisis brings the Glorian company to the brink of ruin and Justine realizes that reform Christianity offers her no support. A popular movement that Jukundus has joined in good faith turns into a smear campaign and shows its true colors. Terrified, everyone sets out to gain certainty about what they are doing and about themselves, and their paths happen to cross. Unexpectedly they stand in front of each other and hug each other. Laughing returns during their pronunciation when he asks her to repeat the swear word that separates them. She pronounces it as a loving word and says to him "Lumpazi!"
Explanations of salary and reception
Literary history
Seldwyla, painted on the mountain mist , belongs to the cities between heaven and earth , along with Nephelokokkygia and Laputa . Walter Benjamin called it a “civitas dei helvetica” , probably because it is the target of intense longing, regardless of the lack of godliness of its residents. Their dubious properties, however, do not prevent the city from continuing to exist in the change of times and traffic , as if that invisible hand ruled in it , which allows the vitality of a community to grow out of the moral inadequacy of its citizens. Georg Lukács felt reminded by Seldwyla of the alternative to virtuous utopia , Mandeville's paradoxical bee state from the early days of liberal social theory .
With Abdera , Schilda etc. Seldwyla is also one of the fool's towns. In each of the ten novels, the narrator attacks one or more follies, mostly through satirical drawings or ironic commentary, rarely doctrinally moral. The cycle thus presents itself as a later descendant of fool's literature . At the same time, it claims a place in the history of erotic literature: all Seldwyler stories are love stories or contain them at their core. Since the Middle Ages, the multitude of facets , swings and carnival games has proven that both genres are related . In the Decamerone and Don Quixote - Keller's favorite book - folly and being in love go hand in hand.
Thanks to Keller's extensive reading forays into the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, many works from this era were the inspiration behind the people of Seldwyla . In the age of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism - not least under the impression of the fool figures Cervantes and Shakespeare - the image of the fool had changed radically. The hilarious foolish scolding based on the example of Sebastian Brant's ship of fools had gone out of fashion, and with it the crude classification of follies, based on the catalog of deadly sins . The fool as a dreamer who recognizes the possibilities of the world more deeply by seemingly misunderstanding its reality, claimed philosophical interest. The social critics of the 18th century, heirs of humanistic moralism , discovered the fantastic story as a means of satire. They liked to slip into the garb of travelers (like Gulliver ), exploring imaginary countries and absurd cities (like Laputa) in order to shed light on the customs and facilities of their homeland from such crazy locations. The harshness of their criticism was now directed against the apparently wise and just, who used hypocrisy and bigotry to show that they were well-adjusted to irrational conditions . H. buy with the sacrifice of understanding and human dignity.
In this spirit, the Swifts and Molières , Keller created the three righteous comb-makers, the maid Bünzlin (a female counterpart to Tartuffe ), the sorcerer Pineiss, the legacy sneak Kabys, the would-be patrician Litumley, the literary arch-jester Störteler - Keller was "a Literary satirists of high grades ”-, the Ruechensteiner Darklings and the intellectually dishonest reform clergy in“ Lost Laughter ”. Several of these figures are also reminiscent of the pattern of the romantic satire on the Philistine . The polite cat Spiegel, on the other hand, stylized as an anti-Philistine, bears features of a “honnête homme” in the sense of the Enlightenment ideal of personality.
Yet another, often overlooked direction of enlightenment social criticism, economic satire, comes into play, where the narrator makes fun of the Seldwyler's meandering. By contrasting her bad credit transactions with Frau Amrain's acquisition based on real production , he followed a thread tied by Pestalozzi and Gotthelf . His ridicule of the Seldwylers' political goings-on in Part I is comparatively mild - in 1856, Keller is on the whole still satisfied with the “patriotic conditions” . In the final novella of the cycle, under changed circumstances in 1874, he allows him to shoot the reins all the more freely.
Not everything that is castigated as folly in the people of Seldwyla is laughable. While the narrator usually treats foolish lovers lightly, he shows no indulgence towards possessiveness. This is especially true of “Romeo and Juliet in the village”, the only story with a tragic outcome. Here the fathers figure as fools, but - in the sense of the medieval fool's image - as nefarious fools whose actions, ridiculous as it is, in view of the foreseeable consequences, nips all amusement in the bud.
Conversely, not everything that arouses amusement in the people of Selwyla is foolish or even unwise behavior. You laugh at little Amrain when he puts the intrusive foreman to flight, but you don't laugh at him. One takes pleasure in Vrenchen's roguishness when a farmer's wife pretends that Sali is his bridegroom and has won the lottery, or in the coquetry of Gritli's attractive friend when she puts Wilhelm to the acid test. Wenzel Strapinski seems almost chaplinesk when he sings a not entirely clean-cut song to the Goldach upper-class , whose Polish words he himself does not understand. This type of comedy , free from aggressive ridicule, often overlooks the other, malicious side of Keller's humor, which requires clarification.
humor
- "I tell you, the greatest evil and the strangest composition that can happen to a person is to be high, impoverished and in love at the same time, and in an elegant personage." Keller 1855 to Hermann Hettner .
For the author of the People of Seldwyla , Freud's definition of humor seems to be the "victoriously asserted inviolability of the ego": tormented by food and clothing worries, debts and feelings of guilt, in constant battle with his publisher, seriously homesick and suffering from the Swiss disease Finally still hopelessly in love, Keller wrote the autobiographical novel The Green Heinrich during his five-year stay in Berlin . During the breaks in this painful preoccupation with his own self, he invented a homely city to relax, populated it with other selves, placed it in all sorts of precarious situations and watched with interest its appearances, its behavior, the way in which it conformed to the laws of the world opposed or added. (Keller had come to Berlin to become a playwright; his interest was that of the playwright). As soon as the last volume of the novel was ready for printing in the spring of 1855, the poet put what was mostly only mentally spun on paper in a few months: Part I of the Seldwyler stories.
Self-experienced is to be found in abundance, heavily veiled. Biographical material that did not fit into the novel concept was outsourced, combined with what had been heard and read, supplemented by free invention, pointed and incorporated into the novels; like the disappointment of love in “Pankraz der Schmoller” - the only first-person story in the cycle with features of a concise developmental novel; So Keller's long-ago adventure as a vigilante in “Frau Regel Amrain” - he lets it serve as an apprenticeship to the twenty-year-old Fritz; so also the agonizing argument with the publisher in "Spiegel das Kitten" - the author sells his life to a sorcerer who is only a sorcerer in order not to starve to death. Part II of the cycle also contains Keller's life substance; hinted and subtle in “Clothes make the man” - Keller was able to understand the feelings of an involuntary impostor during the unmasking, since he had announced to his supporters in Zurich that he would gain theatrical fame in Berlin and had failed; massive and unmistakable in “Lost Laughing” - almost a key novel in which the politician Keller put down experiences he had made during his tenure.
In Green Heinrich , the narrator describes the satisfaction that playing fate gave him as a child. The boy Heinrich draws the four regions of the world, zones and poles, heavenly spaces , […] people and spirits, earth, hell, intermediate realm, on a sheet of paper . He lets his loved ones and himself walk in serene climes, but he banishes his opponents to hell:
- Depending on the behavior of the people, I would change their positions, promote them to purer areas or reset them where there was howling and chattering of teeth. For testing purposes, I let some people float in the indefinite, and I also locked two who did not like each other in life together in a remote region, while I separated two others who were fond of each other in order to bring them together in a happier place after many tests. I kept an exact overview and determination of the fate of all people I knew, young and old, in complete secrecy.
The author Keller does not deal much differently with Seldwylers and Seldwylers when he gives them the right sponsorship, depending on their earnings, the witch the sorcerer, the apprentice tailor the councilor's daughter. Again, a remark by Freud provides the following comment: “The adult can reflect on the seriousness with which he once played his children's games, and by now equating his allegedly serious occupations with those children's games, he throws off the all-too-severe oppression through life and wins the high gain in pleasure of humor. "
For the writer, for whom thinking out résumés is everyday professional seriousness, humor offers a far greater advantage over and above the private pleasure bonus: it enables him to jump over his shadow as a modern, subjective, “ sentimental ” poet and return to the ancient world To write poetry "Homeric- naive ". How well Keller was aware of this is shown by the allusion to Homer in the introduction to Part II of the cycle. Here the author steps in front of the curtain for a moment and - ironically - acknowledges himself as an omniscient, “objective” narrator, native in a well-established cosmos. Otherwise he is more likely to be behind the scenes. Even more inconspicuous than the child in the fairy tale of the emperor's new clothes , but just as attentively he watches the scene, recognizes what is being played and speaks it out openly. The "incomparable freshness" of the people of Seldwyla , their truthfulness and topicality, is due to this humorous naivety.
The majority of contemporary reviewers praised the people of Seldwyla Keller's humor. Wherever he showed his implacable side, some of the fun went too far. Benjamin penetrated deeper into the “questionable” grotto and cave system ”in the underground of the texts, thereby opening our eyes to the grotesque in Keller. Lukács criticized the widespread tendency to stick to the sunny, golden side of his humor and to refrain from the dark:
- Keller's humor is closely linked to the relentlessness of his morals and his artistic composition. He is not a maudlin 'understanding' of human weaknesses, not a smiling embellishment of ugliness, the prose of life, like most of his German contemporaries. [...] Keller's humor unearths the essence of certain types, whose hidden ridiculousness is thereby revealed and increased to monumental quality. And Keller exposes any insignificance or baseness exposed in this way to relentless Homeric laughter . In this way Keller is just as cruel as Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Molière.
- And he also resembles them in that he relentlessly surrenders to laughter the comical aspects of otherwise capable characters, which he would otherwise approve of, however dear to the character in question. [...] Because this sympathy is also based on reality, on the actions of such a figure, on human characteristics that become apparent in them, as well as on those comical traits whose relentless portrayal arouses our laughter. It is precisely the all-round and realistic portrayal of the human being that enables the reader to take such a contradicting, multifaceted attitude towards the poetic figures.
realism
In the dispute over the literary heritage of the 19th century, which smoldered after 1945 between literary scholars from the warring political camps, the "Swiss Homer" was also negotiated. It was about the portrayal of poetry, the reflection theory and, related to this, the explanatory power of the term realism .
In the East, at least Part I of the people of Seldwyla was understood as an image "of far-reaching typicity and deep reality content". It shows the predominantly small-town, semi-rural world of Switzerland and large parts of Germany at the moment when the first effects of the capitalist process unleashed in the metropolises reached them. Unlike his German contemporaries, however, Keller does not depict the petty bourgeoisie as a weird individualist who mourns the dwindling idyll . Rather, he portrays the “petty bourgeoisie as a social phenomenon”, as a class in motion, with the “torn between progress and reaction” typical for them. Thanks to his roots in the “original Swiss democracy” (Lukács) and as a citizen of a cosmopolitan republic with a lively political life, he is “far from adopting a romantic-anti-capitalist position and […] just as far from uncritically adopting the capitalist form of society affirm it or even glorify it literarily . ”With this, Keller was classified as a critical“ bourgeois realist ”who, in his early work, perceived“ all possibilities of a pre-Marxist understanding of history ”.
In the West, meanwhile, the work-immanent interpretation was practiced , largely disregarding biographical and social references and instead investigating the structures of poetry and the function of the poetic imagination . The findings of Eastern German studies came up against the argument that the poet does not simply reflect reality ( mimesis ), but rather creates it ( poesis ) by bringing out what is timeless and generally human in what is depicted and, at the same time, humorously with the imperfect, all-too-human reconcile. Keller was thus classified as a “poetic realist”, a label that was suitable for making one forget the sharpness of his criticism of the times and society .
The author of the People of Seldwyla himself has laid down his conception of the poetic in a brief preliminary remark to “Romeo and Juliet in the Village” : Poets invent much less than is commonly assumed; they find. The poetic fables of the great old works did not spring from the imagination; they occur outside in real human life, and always anew, in disguise that changes over time. The poet's job is to discover and hold onto them, which, however, requires imagination. He thought no differently about poetic characters, such as Don Quixote: there really are these types, the Fauste , the Don Juans , the Falstaffs . If the poets hadn't described them, they existed just as well; only literature would then be poorer and probably also the language.
The Keller people are small people, live on small feet, and however they act, heroic or villainous, generous or petty, they fit into the housing designed for them, the small town of Seldwyla. The author did not deliver his version of human comedy as broad as a novel, but as slim as a novel. For this he had (didactically and politically colored) artistic reasons. Georg Lukács , who was used to great historical standards by Hegel , Marx , Balzac and Tolstoy, analyzed, weighed and approved this . On the other hand, some critics did not see Keller's devotion to the small as a limitation of the master, but rather inability out of petty bourgeois, petty masterly bias. So, in Keller's words, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer : “It's a shame about your gift of style! They waste it on low matters, on all sorts of rags! I only work with history, I can only use kings, generals and heroes! That is where you should strive! ”Keller was not deterred by this. He replied to a fellow writer who thought he had to encourage him: "I will try to obey the admonition at the end to sing about more important or larger objects, although everything seems to me to be the same."
literature
- Gottfried Keller: The people of Seldwyla . Göschen, Stuttgart 1873–74
Text output:
- Gottfried Keller: The people of Seldwyla . Text and comment. Edited by Thomas Böning. German classic publisher (Suhrkamp island). Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-618-68010-9
- Gottfried Keller: The people of Seldwyla . Edited by Bernd Neumann. Reclam Publishing House. Ditzingen 1993, ISBN 978-3-15-006179-4
Representations:
- Walter Benjamin: Gottfried Keller. In honor of a critical complete edition of his works. 1927. In: Collected writings. Vol. 4., edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser . Edition suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
- Georg Lukács: "Gottfried Keller" (1939). In: The Entombment of Old Germany. Essays on 19th century German literature . Rowohlt (rde), Reinbek 1967
- Hans Richter: Gottfried Keller's early novellas , Rütten and Loening, Berlin 1960
- Wolfgang Preisendanz: Humor as a poetic imagination. Studies in the narrative art of poetic realism. Eidos Verlag, Munich 1963
- Gerhard Kaiser: Gottfried Keller. Das Gedichte Leben , Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981. Study edition: 1995, ISBN 978-3-458-32726-4
- Hans-Joachim Hahn and Uwe Seja (eds.): Gottfried Keller. The people of Seldwyla. Critical Studies . Lang Verlag, Bern u. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-03911-000-1
Individual evidence
- ↑ In italics : Quote from Gottfried Keller: Complete Works , Vol. 7 and 8, ed. by Jonas Fränkel , Rentsch-Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich and Munich 1927.
- ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 259.
- ↑ After Homer's death, seven Greek cities fought over the honor of being his place of birth.
- ↑ Another fictional city, not to be confused with Goldach (Hallbergmoos) and Goldach (St. Gallen) .
- ↑ Not to be confused with Schwanau (Baden-Württemberg) .
- ↑ Walter Benjamin: “Gottfried Keller. In honor of a critical complete edition of his works ”(1927), p. 284.
- ↑ Georg Lukács: "Gottfried Keller" (1939), p. 46.
- ↑ For the edition of 1874, Keller deleted a lengthy, moralizing commentary on “Romeo and Juliet” except for the first sentence.
- ↑ See Friedrich Theodor Vischer's review from 1874, online on Walter Morgenthaler's Gottfried Keller website under Review (contemporary) .
- ↑ So the narrator of Green Heinrich often equips his hero with fool attributes . For the praise of the “treasures of wisdom and nobility” in the figure of Don Quixote cf. the 12th chapter of the fourth volume ("The Frozen Christ").
- ↑ Gerhard Kaiser : Gottfried Keller. Das Gedichte Leben (1981), p. 316.
- ↑ As also in 1860 in the flag of the seven upright ones , cf. Gottfried Keller: "Autobiography" p. 5.
- ↑ Cf. Klaus Jeziorkowski: "Romeo and Juliet in the village" as a model for every new present . Epilogue to the Insel paperback edition of the Kellerchen Text, Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 126.
- ^ Letter of November 2, 1855. In: Gottfried Keller. Collected Letters , ed. by Carl Helbling, Benteli Verlag, Bern 1950-54, Vol. 1, p. 418.
- ^ Sigmund Freud: "Der Humor" (1927), in: Gesammelte Werke , S. Fischer, Hamburg 1961, vol. 14, p. 385.
- ↑ On this struggle cf. under Gottfried Keller # living conditions, publications, concepts .
- ↑ First version, vol. 1, chap. 7, final version vol. 1, chap. 10 "The playing child".
- ↑ "The Poet and Fantasizing" (1908). In: Collected Works , S. Fischer, Hamburg 1961, Vol. 7., p. 215.
- ↑ See Wolfgang Preisendanz : Humor as a poetic imagination , p. 152 f. Cf. also Theodor W. Adorno : “About epische Naivetät”, in: Notes on Literature , Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1958, pp. 50–60.
- ^ Friedrich Sengle : Biedermeier period. German literature in the field of tension between restoration and revolution 1815–1848 , Metzler, Stuttgart 1971, vol. 1, p. 264.
- ↑ So Vischer 1874 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and Berthold Auerbach 1875 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ So Heinrich von Treitschke : "Gottfried Keller", in: Historical and political essays , Vol. 4, Leipzig 1897; more recently Adolf Muschg : Gottfried Keller , Kindler Verlag, Munich 1977, p. 385.
- ↑ Benjamin, p. 287. See also Wolfgang Kayser : The Grotesque in Painting and Poetry , Rowohlt (rde), Reinbek 1960. Kayser introduces his study with a detailed consideration of “The three just comb makers”.
- ↑ Georg Lukács: Gottfried Keller , p. 47. These statements are rarely cited. Preisendanz implicitly rejected them when he stated that there was no “clean” separation between conciliatory humor and aggressive satire at Keller because it was difficult “to decide where justification ends and rejection begins, in terms of human imperfection and frailty “forgivingly” accepted and what is condemned and chastised ”. Humor as a poetic imagination , p. 205.
- ↑ Hans Richter : Gottfried Kellers early Novellen (1960), p. 185. In the chapter “Seldwyla and Reality” Richter deciphered from Keller's introduction to Part I the basic political and social conditions during the preparatory period and the first years of the modern Swiss federal state (1830 -50).
- ↑ Hans Richter, p. 186 f. In fact, Keller's petty bourgeois caricatures are more like Daumier than Spitzweg's .
- ↑ p. 35, recurring leitmotif.
- ↑ See collective of authors under the direction of Kurt Böttcher: Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur , Vol. 8.1 (from 1830 to the end of the 19th century), Verlag Volk und Wissen, Berlin 1975, p. 573. The blatant difference between the political conditions in GDR Germanists were hesitant to recognize Switzerland and Germany as a basic requirement for Keller's work. In 1960 Richter explicitly distanced himself from Lukács' “Overestimation of the Swiss Republic” (p. 6).
- ↑ Hans Richter, p. 189. On Keller's criticism of capitalism cf. also Uwe Seja: "Seldwyla - A Microeconomic Inquiry". In: Hans-Joachim Hahn (ed.): Gottfried Keller, The people of Seldwyla. Critical essays . Lang Verlag, Bern u. a. 2007, pp. 93-117.
- ↑ History of German Literature , Vol. 8.1, p. 578.
- ↑ When, in the further development of Western literary studies, the method of interpretation inherent in the work was displaced by social and media science processes, new ways were found to take the sting out of Keller's social criticism. In 1980, Gerhard Kaiser, in his deconstructivist reading of Keller's complete works, interpreted the end of the Kammmacher novella as "the misanthropic, terrible satire of the mother's son and bachelor, from whom a journeyman took his mother away in his second marriage" (p. 329). For proof of the incorrect requirements on which this reading is based, cf. Rainer Würgau: The divorce process from Gottfried Keller's mother. Theses against Adolf Muschg and Gerhard Kaiser , Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1994.
- ↑ See Kellers An Hettner, June 26, 1854, Collected Letters , Vol. 1, p. 400.
- ↑ Mainly recorded in Keller's reviews of the novels by Jeremias Gotthelf , published between 1849 and 1855 .
- ↑ See Lukács pp. 54–70.
- ↑ Keller to Theodor Storm , December 29, 1881, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.1, p. 471.
- ↑ To Jakob Frey , March 20, 1875, Collected Letters , Vol. 4, pp. 97f.
Web links
- The people of Seldwyla , 1874 , full text at Zeno.org
- The people of Seldwyla. 1856. This first edition contains the first five novels in their original form and is therefore of particular interest to those familiar with the cellar ( digitized version and full text in the German Text Archive )