The mask of the red death

This article covers the story of Edgar Allan Poe. For the 1989 film of the same name by Larry Brand, see The Mask of the Red Death (1989) .

Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley , 1894

The Mask of the Red Death ( English. The Masque of the Red Death ) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe , which first appeared in Philadelphia in 1842 in Graham's Magazine , in whose New York editorial office EA Poe worked as editor-in-chief for a year . In it, Poe describes the failure of a group of privileged people to seek safety from a plague, a calamity.

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Regardless of the fact that an illness (the Red Death ) kills half of the subjects, prince Prospero, who has retired to an abbey designed by him and feels safe, gives a pompous masked ball. Prince Prospero loves the extraordinary, his taste is strange. He has a good eye for light and color. Through the design of the rooms he has a considerable influence on the appearance of the masked people, through finely tuned moods ("finely tuning the atmosphere") - for example the light, etc. The event takes place in seven rooms, of which more than one is never seen in full can be. In the first room there are Gothic windows with colored glasses that match the color of the window decorations. The second room is purple, the third green, the fourth orange. Another ballroom is white, the next one is purple and finally there is a black hall with scarlet windows.

While the extravagant festival takes place, a clock strikes every hour on the hour, the sound of which terrifies even the most exuberant and crazy. After the bell rings, there is always relieved laughter in the party. When the clock strikes twelve, a figure appears in the mask of the Red Death. Their presence creates fear. The terrifying figure falls out of Prospero's festival arrangement, it reminds of the epidemic and its victims. As a result, the prince asks to unmask the stranger. This, however, strides through several rooms and the guests step back. So Prince Prospero himself pulls a dagger and goes in pursuit, but the mask turns to its pursuer, a sharp scream sounds - and Prospero sinks dead to the ground. Now finally the guests try to unmask the stranger, but have to realize that he is actually the Red Death. There is nothing under the mask: no face, no skeleton - the mask is just itself. The Red Death has moved into the castle and reigns supreme.

Background and interpretation

Poe had witnessed a great cholera epidemic in Baltimore in 1831 and the reactions it triggered. Poe's short story to the framework plot of Boccaccio's Decamerone shows similarities , in which wealthy Florentines retreat to a country house / castle in order not to be infected with the plague . The Italian name Prospero, which means as much as wealthy , also refers to Italy comparable to Fortunato in Das Fass Amontillado . Further references can be found to Thomas Campbell's Life of Petrarch ; In a review of the book in 1841, Poe had complained that the author had not adequately represented the plague in his work. In addition, it is hardly a coincidence that Poe's protagonist bears the name of the almighty magician from William Shakespeare's romance The Tempest .

The name Red Death has been chosen carefully, as its victims die of a kind of hemorrhagic fever with terrible bleeding; Poe had lost his mother and foster mother to tuberculosis , and his wife also suffered from the disease and the associated bleeding . At the same time, the name refers to the " Black Death ". The first-person narrator who brings only three times in passing into play is all-knowing like an authorial narrator.

The disease, the Red Death , can triumph because the prince, himself wealthy ( “prosperous” ), cares above all about himself and his own pleasure. Instead of taking responsibility for the suffering country, he gives an elaborate masquerade ball. And instead of letting the masks work for himself and for himself, he has a significant influence on the design of the festival by determining its external circumstances. The prince only sees himself, his own wishes and needs, not those of the country, the population or his guests.

As an allegorical narrative that is located in the timeless space of a Gothicist ( fantasy ) architecture and shows the onset of the plague in the supposedly securely sealed castle Prosperos, The Masque of the Red Death can accordingly be used as an existential parable about the inevitability of death as well be understood as a study of a mad eccentric . However, if one looks at The Mask of the Red Death in connection with Poe's oeuvre, in which the apocalypse of the individual is repeatedly opposed to his apotheosis in contemporary American worldview or ideology , then, according to Poe Zapf, this story can also be described as “ parody and apocalyptic reversal an absolute pursuit of happiness and thus as the apocalypse of the American dream ”. Led by Prince Prospero, the people in The Masque of the Red Death all pursue the promises of a false dream of happiness, which in reality is just as impossible to fulfill as the American Dream , in vain , transforming their individual personalities into empty masks .

German translations (selection)

• around 1900: Johanna Möllenhoff : The mask of the red death. Reclams Universal Library, Leipzig.
• 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The mask of the red death. JCC Bruns, Minden.
• 1909: Bodo Wildberg : The red death. Book publisher for the German House, Berlin.
• 1912: unknown translator: The mask of the red death. Kiepenheuer, Weimar.
• 1922: M. Bretschneider : The mask of the red death. Rösl & Cie. Publishing house, Munich.
• 1922: Gisela Etzel : The mask of the red death. Propylaea, Munich
• 1923: Wilhelm Cremer : The mask of the red death. Verlag der Schiller-Buchhandlung, Berlin.
• 1925: unknown translator: The Mask of the Red Death. Mieth, Berlin.
• 1925: Stefan Hofer: The mask of the red death. Interterritorial publishing house “Renaissance”, Vienna
• 1930: unknown translator: The mask of the red death. Fikentscher, Leipzig.
• 1947: Wolf Durian : The Mask of the Red Death. Ullstein, Vienna
• 1948: Ruth Haemmerling and Konrad Haemmerling : The Mask of the Red Death. Schlösser Verlag, Braunschweig.
• 1953: Richard Mummendey : The Mask of the Red Death. Hundt, Hattingen.
• 1953: Günther Steinig : The Mask of the Red Death. Dietrich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Leipzig.
• 1958: Gerhard Hermann: The Mask of the Red Death. Hoffmann, Heidenheim.
• 1966: Hans Wollschläger : The Mask of the Red Death. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.
• 1989: Gerlinde Völker : The Mask of the Red Death. Reclams Universal Library, Stuttgart.

Film adaptation and quotes

• In 1964, Roger Corman filmed the story with Vincent Price and Jane Asher under its original title. The film was released in German-speaking countries in 1971 under the title Satanas - The Castle of the Bloody Beast . The film's DVD release is announced as The Mask of the Red Death . Corman produced a remake in 1989 with the film of the same name - in the original - The Mask of the Red Death with Adrian Paul as Prospero and Patrick Macnee as the Red Death. Directed by Larry Brand .

• The Swedish death metal band Entombed used samples from this film on the 1991 album Clandestine .
• The Norwegian gothic metal band Theater of Tragedy also used some dialogues in the song And When He Falleth on the 1996 album Velvet Darkness They Fear .
• The American heavy metal band Hades had a three-part song called Masque of the Red Death on their 1987 debut album Resisting Success .
• The American metal band Crimson Glory also released a song entitled Masque of the Red Death on their 1988 album Transcendence .

• Tom Wolfe titled a chapter of his novel Purgatory of the Vanities with "The Mask of the Red Death". The backdrop for the action is a New York party.
• In Gaston Leroux 's novel The Phantom of the Opera , the phantom appears disguised as the Red Death at the masquerade ball.
• In Dan Simmons ' novel Terror (2007), the sailors trapped in the ice distract themselves with a masked ball inspired by reading Poe's short story. However, there is an escalation of violence and the festival is canceled.
• In Stephen King's SUSANNAH - The Dark Tower , Mia Susannah tells that the residents of the village of Fedic died a thousand years ago of the "Red Death". Susannah astonishes and remembers Edgar Allen Poe's short story.
• In the novel, Shining by Stephen King Jack Torrance compares a masked ball, which took place in the Overlook Hotel, with the masked ball of the story Poe.

• The Fantasy -Comiczeichnerin Wendy Pini designed Masque of the Red Death as a graphic novel .

The story ends with the famous sentence "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" . (Eng. "And the red death ruled over everything with darkness and decay.")

literature

• L. Cassuto: The Coy Reaper: Un-masque-ing the Red Death . in: Studies in Short Fiction , 25, 1988, pp. 317-320.
• Hans Galinski: Persistent structural traits in the course of a century of American short stories (presented in EA Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” and Ernest Hemingway's “The Killers”) . In: Heinz Galinski and Klaus Lubbers (eds.): Two classics of American short stories · Interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway . Diesterweg Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 1971, ISBN 3-425-04213-0 , pp. 5-51.
• PH Wheat: The Mask of Indifference in “The Masque of the Red Death” . in: Studies in Short Fiction , 19, 1982, pp. 51-56.

Web links

• The mask of the red death at Zeno.org ., German translation by Gisela Etzel (year 1922)
• German translation by Gutenberg
• Original English text
• German text read at Black Sweet Stories
• The Masque of the Red Death . Original English text in writing and as an audio version in two speaking speeds on ESL bits .
• The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe . On: teachers.randolph . Retrieved on May 19, 2014. (Collection of English-language interpretations as PDF files.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See e.g. B. the interpretive approaches in The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe ( Memento of October 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), pp. 7, 9, 16 and 28 ff.
2. ↑ See e.g. B. the interpretive approaches in The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe ( Memento of October 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), p. 22 ff.
3. ↑ On this alternative interpretation, see Hubert Zapf: Edgar Allan Poe: Romantic Aesthetics of Autonomy and American Apocalypse . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 110–116, here p. 114.