The sisters and the stranger

Data
Title:	The sisters and the stranger
Genus:	play
Original language:	German
Author:	Bruno Frank
Premiere:	December 17, 1917
Place of premiere:	Munich Kammerspiele
Place and time of the action:	Public ballroom. Restaurant terrace in front of the city. Apartment of the wife of Gallas
people
Wife of Gallas Cordula, her daughter Judith, her daughter Rudolf Dorguth Dr. Hoffmeister Thinka An old man A scourer A second scourer A caretaker A mask A dubious gentleman A landlady Masks, musicians, servants

The sisters and the stranger. A play in two acts and a prelude is the third play by Bruno Frank . The premiere took place under the direction of Otto Falckenberg during the First World War on December 17, 1917 in the Münchner Kammerspiele. The Berlin premiere took place on April 30, 1918 in the theater on Königgrätzer Strasse. The print edition of the piece was published in 1919 by Georg Müller Verlag in Munich.

Overview

Out of pity, Rudolf becomes engaged to the terminally ill Cordula, whom he does not love, and looks after her during the last months of her life. After her death, her sister Judith Rudolf confesses her love. However, he confesses that he is incapable of love and of no relationship.

action

The piece with little action consists mainly of dialogues. At the end of a ball evening, a serene elderly gentleman, two scrubbers and a young couple who only met and fell in love a few hours ago meet in a lively foreplay: Cordula Gallas and the writer Rudolf Dorguth.

Mrs. von Gallas' older daughter Judith is with the Syndic Dr. Walther Hoffmeister engaged. He is jealous of Rudolf Dorguth, who is very popular with Frau von Gallas and her daughters. The strictly bourgeois Hoffmeister mocks Rudolf, the "stranger". In a heated argument, he openly lets his hatred of Rudolf run wild until it comes to a scandal and Judith breaks off the engagement.

Cordula has a bronchial ailment. Not out of love, but out of compassion, Rudolf becomes engaged to her, who no longer has long to live. He accompanies her to a spa stay in Arosa and looks after her in the last months of her life. After the death of her sister, Judith Rudolf confesses her love. He rejects her and confesses that he did not love her sister at all because he is incapable of love. Cordula and Rudolf part with resignation, and the play ends on an empty stage.

background

Cordula's disease

Cordula suffered from a lung condition. Bruno Frank knew tuberculosis and its deadly effect from first hand. In 1911 he fell in love with the American Emma Ley (1887–1912), who was on a trip to Europe with her mother. The young woman with lung disease had to go to a forest sanatorium in Davos for a cure in December 1911, where she often visited Frank. Emma Ley died in April 1912 after several months. Bruno Frank expressed his grief in the poem cycle " Requiem ", which appeared in 1913.

Thomas Mann's wife Katia Mann stayed in Davos from March 1912 to cure her apex catarrh in the same sanatorium where Emma Ley died in April 1912. Katia Mann took an interest in Frank's grief and told her husband about the case. Her letters served him as a source for his novel " The Magic Mountain ". Almost ten years later, Bruno Frank edited the French passages in the Walpurgis Night chapter of the Magic Mountain.

Simple people

Bruno Frank had a soft spot for the “common people”. He was struck by their genuineness, in contrast to higher-ranking people who do not always get off well with him.

In the stage directions at the beginning of the play, it is recommended to use a dialect such as Bavarian or Viennese for the secondary characters, a popular language that comes from the heart. In the foreplay, scrubbers appear at the sweep of a ball evening and talk in hearty, clear language about God and the world.

When Judith once said to the waitress Anna: “I have to know you?” Her fiancé rebukes her: “Know? Do you need to know On ne connait pas la servante. "And she parries:" So? I may also quote a French word for you: 'Only gentlemen from good families talk to their servants.' From Goncourt. "

Bon vivant

Rudolf Dorguth seems to have the author's traits. Bruno Frank also had an irresistible charm, and "as a fifteen-year-old he took women wherever he found them," says his school friend Wilhelm Speyer . Perhaps the younger Bruno Frank also doubted his ability to love until he married Liesl Massary at the age of 37.

reception

• Julius Bab on the performance in Berlin, Die Weltbühne, May 2, 1918, pages 415–416:

If Bruno Frank [...] somehow grows into a secure dominion over the stage form, we can have something in this urbane resigned and yet humanly warm and morally demanding artist like a somewhat more northern, somewhat more masculine, somewhat more active counterpart Arthur Schnitzlers.

• Siegfried Jacobsohn on the performance in Berlin, Die Weltbühne, May 9, 1918, page 342:

Not much is happening. A sick girl blooms to a man and does not wither at all, but dies immediately. Her healthy sister would like to inherit everything from her under whose spell she has passed her correct bridegroom, and since she is young and beautiful, one thinks that after a grace period he will let her inherit him. [...]

Rudolf Dorguth uses the last tenth of the last act to explain to Fraulein Judith and us what his personality is all about. Burned empty is the place which, among other sons of earth, draws its charms from the old-fashioned set piece of the so-called heart. This one feels, has always felt, that he cannot feel, that he will never be able to. Out of a guilty conscience, he has taken on the role of the good person, whom he thinks he is up to for the brevity of Cordula's thread. In a relationship with the more permanent Judith, exposure would be inevitable. He prefers to do it himself and continues on his "lonely path". [...]

The dramatic inadequacy: here it becomes an event. For this art form, Bruno Frank seems a few degrees too feminine. He only tells, he chats charmingly about passion, alternately ironic and sentimental, but unfortunately sentimental in the main point.

• Bruno Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner judged the piece in 2009:

The autobiographical motives are obvious: the "bourgeois" artistry as a way of life, the spa stay in Switzerland - possibly also the fear of being unable to love? Frank tried to portray a psychological drama of existential depth, but in the end was unable to bring it into a form suitable for the stage. He failed to develop a dramatic conflict. It aimed solely at the self-disclosure of Rudolf, previously adored by both sisters, as the one who is terribly aware of his emotional deficiency and who knows that he cannot escape his fate. [...] The play ends on the empty stage: Judith has withdrawn in shock, Rudolf has walked away resigned. [...]

After Cordula's death, the piece becomes increasingly lifeless in the second act. The main character Rudolf, the "stranger" to himself, evaporates to abstraction in his self-defamatory speech. This is where the "technical" problem of acting lies, the playwright's mistake, as Jacobsohn convincingly demonstrated.

Print output

• The sisters and the stranger. Acting in two acts and a prelude. Munich: Georg Müller, 1918, PDF scan .

literature

• Frank, Bruno. In: Renate Heuer (editor): Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Archive Bibliographia Judaica, Volume 7: Feis – Frey, Munich 1999, Pages 250–268, here: 257.
• Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887–1945) - life and work. Düsseldorf: Grupello, 2009, pp. 88–91.

Footnotes

1. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 88.
2. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 89–90.
3. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 55–56.
4. ↑ You don't know servants.
5. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 21.
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 88–90.