the shearing

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Die Schur (Czech: Postřižiny) is the title of a 1976 comedic short story with autobiographical references by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal . The development phase of an eccentric young wife is told. The German translation by Franz Peter Künzel was published in 1983.

overview

The action takes place in Nymburk , Czech Republic, in the 1920s . Marie (Mařinka) tells of her phase as a fun-loving, childishly naïve wife of the dutiful manager of the town brewery Francin. She drinks and eats extensively, laughs and dances with the employees, the board of directors of the brewery and "Uncle Pepin" and the burlesque socializing usually degenerates into slapstick -like turbulent excesses. Finally, Marie's serious husband intervenes in his wife's actions.

→ Chapter overview 

The narrative consists of a series of burlesque situations:

1. The Belgian brewery horses Ede and Kare romp around in the yard and are tamed by Francin.

2. On the day of the slaughter, Marie plays tricks with the butcher and guests.

3. Marie cycles through the city and lets people admire her long blond hair.

4. Francin's brother Josef (Pepin) comes to visit and triggers a chain reaction with his loud talk and his cobbler's glue.

5. Francin brings gifts to his wife from his monthly trips to Prague, including a high-frequency physical relaxation device.

6. Pepin and Marie climb the brewery chimney and trigger a fire brigade operation.

7. Marie bathes in the machine room of the malthouse and thinks about situations where she almost drowned.

8. Pepin entertains the brewery workers by clowning.

9. Pepin and Marie dance the Jitterbug exuberantly and Marie injures her ankle.

10. Marie is sedated by the cast.

11. Marie confuses the doctor with the radio frequency device.

12. Marie has her hair cut as the beginning of a new life.

plot

marinka

At the center of the individual episodes is the narrator Marie, who describes her turbulent development phase. She is an emotional young woman. She describes the mood when lighting the kerosene lamps in the evening as the most beautiful moment of the day, when her husband Francin, exhausted from his work in the office, returns to their official apartment. (Chapter 1) In contrast to her disciplined husband, she longs for a little personal freedom and attempts to escape. Accordingly, she sympathizes with the strong Belgian brewery horses Ede and Kare, whom the coachman Martin cannot hold on to when he is unbridling the horse and who romp around in the yard rebelliously until Francis intervenes and takes control of the situation. Marie bubbles over with love of life and combines her love for the pigs while feeding them with a pragmatic pleasure in eating. Ironically with macabre humor, the author lets them write poetry about their ambivalent feelings before the day of the slaughter: "Goodbye my dear little pigs, you will be beautiful hams". Then she describes the slaughtering feast with relish. The Board of Directors present that day also takes part in your jokes with the butcher, when they smear blood on each other's faces while making sausages, reminiscent of a "pagan" ritual, and the day ends in a big feast with meat platters and beer. (Chap. 2) She is narcissistically in love with her almost body-length blonde hair, which she has washed and combed out at the hairdresser Bod'a Červinka. On her bike ride back, they flutter in the wind, she does a few more laps on the market square and enjoys the admiration of the passers-by. (Chap. 3) Marie also describes this body cult in her hot water bath in the machine room of the malthouse. (Chap. 7)

Francin

Francin, the reserved and conscientious brewery manager, is characterized by his number three Redis pen behind his ear. He loves his beautiful wife and supports her vanity with jewelry gifts and with a high-frequency device with a comb for hair care and with electrodes for massage and ozone inhalation with eucalyptus substances (chap. 5). Because she loves to dance, Francin brings her a gramophone from town and they dance the tango. He even took some dance lessons for it, but has to count the steps and, unlike his talented wife, cannot keep the rhythm. (Ch.9) He likes her naïve girlishness and arranges a hidden object game on his return from town to track down the hidden gifts. Her happy cry of surprise after the find is part of the ceremony and she always answers his question "Who bought you that, Marinka?" in a "delightfully childish way" with "Francin [...] my little man". He creates a fairytale world for her in the closed living room, but he finds her childlike, spontaneous appearances in public embarrassing.

pepin

In her brother-in-law Josef, whom she calls Uncle Pepin, she finds a congenial partner. Actually, he only comes to visit, but then stays and, as Francin feared, his roaring and chaotic behavior causes unrest in the household and triggers turbulent chain reactions. For Marie he is a welcome conversationalist and she doesn't blame him for his rude mannerisms, e.g. B. when he tests her knowledge of relatives, about the military system and his shoemaker's trade and loudly scolds her alleged ignorance, which disturbs the board members of the brewery who are meeting in the next room. Francin warns him to be quiet, but smears his hands with the "Schusterpech", a stubborn glue lying around in the kitchen and soils his clothes and files when he tries to free himself, and the board meeting has to be canceled. After a similar taping, an angry Francin and his guilty brother burn the shoemaker's paraphernalia. (chap. 4)

The consequences of climbing the chimney are even more spectacular: after the cobbler's equipment has burned down, the unemployed Pepin plays military training, parade step, duel, etc. in a corner of the brewery, and climbs up the high chimney with Marie to observe the surroundings. She blows her long hair in the wind and is watched from around town, which she enjoys but triggers a fire department call. While she and Pepin safely return to the ground, the commander, who had climbed up to save them, falls and falls into the jumping sheet. In order to avoid a repetition of such actions, Pepin is employed in the brewery to treat his "screaming addiction". But he entertains v. a. the workers with singing demonstrations, wrestling matches and anecdotes and his spectators laughing at the clown. (Chap. 8)

The cut

Marie's childish spontaneity increasingly turns bizarre. She discovers the new fashion, everything is getting shorter: In a shortened skirt, she shows her knees while riding a bike. Doctor Gruntorád explains the cuts as a phenomenon of the times: the working hours, the distances caused by driving faster, the music on the radio, etc. Marie finds the table and chair legs in her apartment too long and Uncle Pepin helps her with the redesign. As he tells anecdotes, one leg grows too short, but Marie spontaneously makes up for the difference with books. Also the tail of the dog Mucek is no longer fashionable. Marie chops it off while distracting the animal with sweet cream rolls. Francin later has to shoot the dog because he won't stop howling in pain. After an acrobatic, wild jitterbug dance with Pepin, Marie's actions end when she falls over a sawn-off table leg. (Chap. 9) She is temporarily immobilized with her foot in a cast. (Chap. 10)

Marie causes turbulence one last time when she demonstrates the high-frequency device to doctor Gruntorád, who is treating her foot. She forgets to dilute the ingredients of the ozone inhaler and the doctor runs away, confused and euphoric. Francin seems to have run out of patience with his wife's antics. This is also a turning point for Marie: she drives to the hairdresser Bod'a Červunka and has her long blond hair cut off. (Chap. 12) When she sees the image of a handsome young man with a cheeky facial expression in the mirror, she realizes that Bod'a has peeled her soul out: “This head à la Josephine Baker characterized me, that was mine now real likeness, here my new hairstyle would look like a club to people.” On her way back, she is not recognized by passers-by at first, but then the women of the beautification association with their bikes follow and insult her. When Francin sees her with the short cut, he smacks her butt with the hose of the air pump and says: "Well, my girl, now a new life begins." He comes to her when she looks up at him, still beautiful the taming of the wild horses at the beginning of the story and she tries to cover up the situation in front of the watching cyclists by explaining to them where she bought the air pump.

shape

The plot of the novel consists of a series of burlesque exaggerated episodes. The author uses various traditional elements of comedy : the character comedy of the rogue, the fool, and other commedia dell'arte characters as well as the situation comedy with turbulent, over-the-top slapstick scenes known from silent films.

autobiographical references

"Die Schur" is the first part of the trilogy "The little town by the water" (Městečko u vody), in which the author deals with his childhood in literary form (2nd part: "Schöntrauer", 3rd part "Harlequin's millions"). The works The Town Where Time Stood Still (Městečko, kde se zastavil čas, 1973) and Dance Lessons for Adults and Advanced Students (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé, 1964) also have autobiographical references:

After Hrabal's mother Marie Kiliánová and the accountant of the brewery in Polná married František Hrabal in 1920, and Hrabal adopted the illegitimate six-year-old Bohumil, the family moved to Nymburk on the Labe in the Central Bohemian Region. Here the author spent his childhood and youth and got to know the work processes and the colorful happenings in the brewery. Josef, known as Uncle Pepin, the brother of his stepfather František came one day "to visit" and stayed "until death".

beautiful mourning

In "Schöntrauer" (Krasosmutnění, 1979), the second part of his trilogy "The little town on the water", translated into German by Franz Peter Künzel , Hrabal humorously tells burlesque everyday occurrences from the perspective of the child in a mixture of fantasy and experience his hometown. The title is taken from a tragi-comic situation, the death of the mayor: "The school director explained to us that today was a day of mourning, and so that we could all mourn nicely, classes were cancelled... I mourned beautifully."

Out of a need to return to childhood, he remembers the sumptuous dinners of his beautiful, theater-loving mother (Chapter Die Sextanerin), the serious father who was concerned about the education of his son, and the two cats spoiled by his parents like children Celstýn and Militka (chap. The Divided Apartment). The family picture is complemented by two eccentric uncles: Pepin, known from “Schur”, with his bragging skills, and Vinzek, who was an opera singer during his visit to the brewery.

In an essay, the boy in the sailor suit states that “unemployed” is the career aspiration: “An unemployed person is just as reluctant to go to work as I am to school.” He prefers to stay on the Elbe and watch the boats go by. The tattoos on the chest of the Sandschipper Korecký gave him the idea of ​​getting a sailing ship tattooed by Lojza in the inn on the bridge. He “borrows” the money for this from St. Anthony from the offering box. Then he wants to have the ship blessed by the dean. He finds him in the vicarage, twirling his two young cooks around the room, and learns that Lojza has a mermaid tattooed on his chest.

The boy's transfigured retrospect comes to an abrupt end when the premiere of the comedy Die Sextanerin, in which his mother plays the title character, is aborted. German soldiers have occupied the city.

Harlequin millions

“Harlekin's Millions” (Harlekýnovy milióny, 1981), the last part of the trilogy translated into German by Petr Simon and Max Rohr, is what Hrabal calls a fairy tale in which fiction and fact combine to create the comic, macabre, melancholy and ephemeral. The setting is a castle used as a retirement and nursing home. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator Marie walks through the chestnut avenue with old, brittle trees towards the portal. She walks through the tunnel path with falling branches. At the gate, pensioners take turns as guards and check the incoming and outgoing old people. So far, Marie and Francin have only come here on visiting days to look after Pepin, who has been in the ward for the handicapped for three months.

Today she is walking through the castle for the first time as a resident. Francin has rented a room for the two of them from his pension, they will eat in the dining room and go for a walk in the park. After 40 years of being together, Marie and Francin have said everything to each other. Now they just want to stand by each other until the end. Francin shields himself in a Russian fur hat with earflaps. He is only interested in the radio news from all over the world. During her walks through the castle courtyard, Marie hears string music from wire radio boxes, which accompanies a solo: "Harlequin's millions". This silent film accompaniment of love scenes entwines the castle. A week later she discovers statues of naked young men and women on the palace terrace, which is cordoned off with a wire fence: young beauties in the forbidden park. From here the memories lead the narrator back to Nymburk, the town of her youth. In this way she preserves her vitality while the other pensioners freeze in the same daily routine, like the old stopped clock in the castle courtyard, which always shows the same time: "[And] so I became the way I used to be, a proud old woman , which was different from the rest like when I rode my bike and my legs wowed the whole town".

Dance lessons for adults and advanced

Old Pepin's one-sentence speech to Miss Kamila is to be placed between the second and third parts of the trilogy. In a smooth transition, the narrator jumps from one adventurous anecdote from his "heroic life" as a potent woman's darling to the next. This monologue is first found in the prose text "The Sorrows of Old Werther", which was later rewritten as "Dance Lessons for Adults and Advanced Students". The template were the chats of his uncle, which Hrabal developed into his literary style, for which he invented the word "pábit" (German "bafeln").

reception

In the reviews, the style of "spontaneous surrealism" and Hrabal's method of resistance are the main themes.

“The world as Bohumil Hrabal sees it is a 'giant pub'. His characters talk about their lives as if the second or third 'ten-degree beer' had loosened their tongues: babbling, waffling, bramar-based, erratic, disrespectful, obscene, but always with relish, always full of enthusiasm. 'Automat Svět' (Snack World) is the programmatic and logical name of a volume with selected texts from Hrabal, which was published in Prague in 1966 - at a time when Hrabal's "spontaneous surrealism" had become the epitome of liberalization, that "Prague Spring". So, which ended so amicably in the autumn of 1968.” In this context, the critics largely unanimously praised the pleasure of reading Hrabal’s novels, which arises from the writer’s virtuosity in combining literary surrealism and down-to-earth folk poetry: “Hrabal commands sovereignly and therefore unobtrusively using the means of European modernity. […] But he always gets his material from the immediate vicinity, the pubs, his own family history. What his people tell each other over a beer (and they drink a lot) appears in his stories, supposedly uninterrupted, as if it were taken from real life - and at the same time in a strangely surrealistic light."

Hrabal had to come to terms with his country's political system in order to be allowed to publish. That is why his resistance is different from that of the writers in exile: “Hrabal's heroes are 'people obsessed with experiences, whose heads glow with mad dreams'. Each is the sovereign of a world that, seen through the 'diamond eye' of the imagination, has transformed into an earthly (and deeply human) paradise. […] And it is also a piece of that 'Prague irony' which he defined like this: 'It is the futile struggle for man and for his view of the world that surrounds him, it is the fight of humanity against man merely formal humanism, it is the battle against the state theory and the apparatus of the bureaucracy, which is the only salvation.”

Susanna Roth (review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung) and Detlef Rönfeldt criticize the inclusion of revised Czech “originals” in the edition of the “Nymburker Trilogy” without presenting the edition history of the texts in an afterword. “Ever since Hrabal was allowed to publish, he has been writing variations on his texts. But before an obviously (self) censored version like 'Schöntrauer' is presented to a foreign-language audience without comment, the publisher should consider whether it might harm the author (and himself) in the long term.”

adaptations

  • Czech film "Postřižiny", 1980. Directed by Jiří Menzel . Cast: Jia Schmitzer (Francin), Magda Vášáryová (Maryka), Jaromír Hanzlík (Pepin)
  • Divaldo Josefa Kajetana Tyla v Plzni (JKTyla Theater Pilsen) "Postřižiny", 2021. Text: Jiří Janků, Petr Svojtka. Director: Simon Dominik
  • Audio book "Schöntrauer", 2011, read by Mario Adorf , text version: Jürgen Plank. audio art art man

Individual references and notes

  1. ↑ a ritual haircut with symbolic and often initiating meaning, like a tonsure.
  2. ↑ Little Mariechen
  3. ↑ 1939, Interwar Period and World War II
  4. ↑ The model is Count Sporck's castle in Lysá . Matthias Braun 's students created beautiful baroque statues here.
  5. ↑ Detlef Rönfeldt: "By and about Bohumil Hrabal: Prague irony" | TIME ONLINE. May 12, 1989. https://www.zeit.de/1989/20/prager-ironie
  6. ↑ Martin Lüdke : "Socialist Surrealism". DER SPIEGEL 17/1988.
  7. ↑ Detlef Rönfeldt: By and about Bohumil Hrabal: Prague Irony | TIME ONLINE. May 12, 1989. https://www.zeit.de/1989/20/prager-ironie
  8. ↑ Detlef Rönfeldt: By and about Bohumil Hrabal: Prague Irony | TIME ONLINE. May 12, 1989. https://www.zeit.de/1989/20/prager-ironie
  9. ↑ Detlef Rönfeldt: "By and about Bohumil Hrabal: Prague irony" | TIME ONLINE. May 12, 1989. https://www.zeit.de/1989/20/prager-ironie