The power band
The Powenz Gang is the title of a novel by the writer Ernst Penzoldt that was published in 1930 .
action
The action takes place in the tranquil town of Mössel an der Maar, which is mainly inhabited by better-off pensioners and pastor's widows with their daughters. Nothing would happen in this small town if a train traveler - Baltus Powenz - hadn't got stuck in "Adam's small, brown wine bar" a few years before the actual action, and then immediately recognized himself as a richly tattooed lifeguard, driving and singing teacher, Inventor (not least of his own past), automobile designer, poet, musician and manufacturer of joke articles and fireworks to settle there and start a family, always with the aim of building her own house one day.
With his “rarely loving” wife Sabina, he has seven sons and a daughter, a crowd as loud as they are heady, whom the righteous Mösselers shake their heads and call them the “power band” and who are suspicious of any outrage. They provide the city with a happy precariat of diligent bon vivants, they are the “noble savages” from next door, a living contradiction to all bourgeois norms, poor in everything except spirit, not very squeamish in the choice of their methods or their food. Life is sacred to them, but existence is only a necessity.
Their Bacchian joys, free love and domestic violence excite the righteous as well as the self-righteous, and so soon a guerrilla war begins between them and the Powenzen, whose formal declaration of war is the rejection of a building application, the Baltus Powenz, based on a "small anticipation of the reserves of the future ”and a fund of 999 bricks collected over the years, submitted to the city administration. This war is fought in open "boy battles" on the heath in front of the city as well as in guerrilla operations, in which the vegetable seedlings are neatly removed from the beds of the neighbors and replaced with weeds, carpets hung for ventilation are infected with fleas and bedbugs, which spread in the homes of the "fine", and sometimes with criminal energy. The other side strikes back with house searches and is relatively unsuccessful in relation to the flexible powers.
This war was interrupted in 1914 by another conflict. The Powenz family is successfully switching their production from joke articles to patriotic knick-knacks, images of emperors and war folklore. However, Mrs. Sabina, daughter Lilith and the youngest sons Jadup and Jubal soon have to take over the business because the grown men of the family have to join the army. They quickly gather at the same section of the front, where the narrator of the novel meets them again, who is one of the “fine” in Mössel. The Powenze pragmatically draw every advantage from the war. You enjoy the adventure about it and use every opportunity to collect something valuable.
On one such occasion, the artistic son Violand is wounded and rescued by his relatives and friends, all of them brave from drunkenness. They use this to recover a treasure trove of expensive red wine from the ruins of the “La Ferme Trouchy” winery. Shortly before the end of the war, Baltus Powenz had his domestic production switched to black, red, gold and red flags in order to make future political disputes usable.
In this way, all Powenze contribute to the modest fortune with which they want to build their house. Daughter Lilith capitalizes on her carefully cultivated bad reputation, father Baltus uses his ingenuity to earn money with foreign exchange speculations in the troubled times after the war, the always tired son Fabian founds the Church of the Holy Sleep. Only Jadup does not contribute to this, as he is soon carried away by love in the form of a balloonist to Berlin. His down-to-earth family criticized above all the total unprofitable.
It even happens that the Powenz gang is out of debt for the first time when the death of their American uncle Melchior and the idea of an inheritance in millions of dollars make them popular with the Mösseler. They are even given the plot of land that was once denied them, including the building permit. Father Powenz immediately exchanges it for one in the neighboring community, where he finally builds the house he has dreamed of. The legacy, however, actually consists of millions, but in the negative range.
At the end (which the narrator puts at the beginning), Baltus Powenz, who goes for a walk, cheerful and drunk as always, is struck by a meteorite three days after the topping-out ceremony of his house, still in the same jacket he was in when he arrived Mössel had worn. His respectful sons immediately fence the meteorite and take admission to its viewing.
meaning
Ernst Penzoldt, the inventor of the word “Tomoffel” , wrote the “Powenzbande”, one of the few picaresque novels in German literature. He draws the Powenze, but also their opponents in a very human way, with love and humor, lovingly depicting each of his peculiarities and peculiarities. His narrator character - who bears the author's name - condemns neither one nor the other. She ascribes a role among the “fine” to herself, but mostly remains an observer, only enters into relationships with the members of the Powenz family in war and love and then presents herself with a fine sense of humor.
manuscript
Penzoldt's partial literary estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Individual pieces of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, especially the manuscript for Die Powenzbande - written on continuous paper and rolled up like ancient papyri.
filming
Penzoldt's novel was filmed in 1973 by director Michael Braun as a five-part television series under the title Die Powenzbande for ARD . The actors of the family members included Gustav Knuth , Ruth-Maria Kubitschek , Helga Anders , Michael Ande , Pierre Franckh , Heinz Werner Kraehkamp , Martin Semmelrogge and Peter Kranz . On October 30, 2007, the television series was released on DVD.
Secondary literature
- Christian Klein: Ernst Penzoldt. Harmony from contradictions. Life and Work (1892–1955). Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-412-34205-X , pp. 300–306.