Urban Roithner's horses

The Rosse des Urban Roithner is an Austrian novel about the rural Waldviertel by Imma Bodmershof .

expenditure

The work, written between autumn 1938 and July 1943, was set as early as 1943 and put into print in 1944 under the editing of Hermann Kasack with the imprint: Suhrkamp Berlin 1944 , the later officially founded Suhrkamp Verlag . The entire edition was supposed to burn twice in the chaos of war, only a few copies of this edition have survived. It was not until 1950 that the book was put on the market by the Austrian publishing house. Licensed editions followed in the 1950s in the German Book Association , the Donauland Book Association and the Gutenberg Book Guild , the title was included in 1982 as Volume 1 of Bodmershof's Collected Works in individual editions .

action

Urban Roithner works for the Hummel farmers, marries his daughter Barbara and takes over the Dürrnhof away from the village with her. He wants to finance the farm with hard work and a loan. With the social advancement in mind, he does not shy away from crooked deals, so he is even caught by the police, but is released again. He eventually loses his wife when his third child is born. In the end Roithner falls down a slope with his horses; whether it was suicide or an accident cannot be determined.

meaning

The novel stands out for its depictions of the village community, nature and animals. The connection between the biographical situation and the processes in nature, which every farmer must take into account, also determine the fate of Urban Roithner and his wife Barbara. This is reinforced by Urban zeal for work, his passionate love for Barbara, her pregnancies, the common fears of life and death and the isolated location of the Dürrnhof. This gives the work a strong natural and existential philosophical component and breaks through the literary genre of the homeland novel: rural life in the Waldviertel becomes an accessory to a philosophical approach to being and time, which is also illustrated by the author's intellectual biography.

The novel is considered to be the main work of Imma von Bodmershof and at the same time marks her literary breakthrough.

literature

Review: Karl M. Benedek: Exceptional achievement by Imma von Bodmershof. Comments on an Austrian novel. In: Diary , monthly books for culture, politics, economy. Vienna 1952, No. 2, p. 5.
Review: Robert Breuer: The Rosse des Urban Roithner by Imma Bodmershof. In: Books Abroad , Volume 27, 1953, No. 2, p. 170. ( JSTOR 40091885 ).

Individual evidence

^ Martin Heidegger, Imma von Bodmershof: Correspondence 1959–1976. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-94265-3 , p. 209.
↑ Norman Kasper: Heidegger light: Granite of the home - appearance of things in the village. On a phantasm in the local literature of the 1930s and 1940s (explained in the context of Imma von Bodmershof's novel 'Die Rosse des Urban Roithner') , in Nell, Werner; Weiland, Marc: Imaginary villages. On the return of the village in literature, film and the world of life , Verlag transcript, Bielefeld 2014, p. 247ff ( limited preview in the Google book search).

[1] Martin Heidegger, Imma von Bodmershof: Correspondence 1959–1976. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-94265-3 , p. 209.

[2] Norman Kasper: Heidegger light: Granite of the home - appearance of things in the village. On a phantasm in the local literature of the 1930s and 1940s (explained in the context of Imma von Bodmershof's novel 'Die Rosse des Urban Roithner') , in Nell, Werner; Weiland, Marc: Imaginary villages. On the return of the village in literature, film and the world of life , Verlag transcript, Bielefeld 2014, p. 247ff ( limited preview in the Google book search).