The soldiers (drama)
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| Title: | The soldiers |
| Genus: | tragicomedy |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz |
| Publishing year: | 1776 |
| Premiere: | December 9, 1863 |
| Place of premiere: | Vienna |
| Place and time of the action: | in French Flanders (probably) around 1775 |
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The soldiers. A comedy is a civil tragedy by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz . The piece, written in 1776 , can be attributed to the literary epoch of Sturm und Drangs . The designation as “comedy” is based on Lenzen's own understanding of the genre.
The soldiers is set "in French Flanders " and is about a citizen's daughter who is courting an officer - but without any serious intentions. After he drops her, society stamps her as a whore . The drama can still end in a conciliatory way.
content
Marie Wesener, a merchant's daughter, begins a relationship with the young officer Desportes, although she is engaged to the cloth merchant Stolzius. After initial resistance, Marie's father realizes that his daughter's love affair opens up opportunities for social advancement and helps Marie to get rid of him with the help of a farewell letter to Stolzius, but to keep him warm if Desportes doesn't work out. But the young officer is only interested in a brief affair. Although Marie's father pays his debts, Desportes turns away from Marie. Another soldier named Mary, who is friends with Desportes, immediately recruits her.
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When she meets the young Count de la Roche, his mother takes Marie into her care to protect her from being stalked. Marie becomes the Countess's partner, on condition that she doesn't see a husband for a year. However, she meets with Mary, is caught by the Countess, and then runs away. Mary, who actually wanted to marry Marie, doesn't want to know anything more about her either, because she flirted with the young count.
Marie sets off in search of Desportes, but he lets a hunter stop her with dishonest intentions ("I will wait and see what he'll do with her now [...]"). When Desportes admits this in the presence of Stolzius, he is poisoned by Stolzius. Mary then wants to avenge his dead friend, but Stolzius has also poisoned himself. As he dies, he reproaches the soldiers' status for seducing young girls and thus making them outcasts from society.
Marie's father has meanwhile also made his way to Desportes. He finds his starving daughter begging on the street. At first he doesn't recognize her, then they embrace.
In the last scene, the countess and a colonel evaluate what has happened. They see the celibate soldier class as a "monster" to which a girl must occasionally be sacrificed in order to protect the others. In order to prevent this, a “nursery school for soldiers' wives” would have to be founded, which would be available to the soldiers as martyrs; as a result, the princes would always be supplied with new soldiers - the children from these connections.
background
As in many of his works, Lenz emphasizes in the soldiers the contradiction between the Enlightenment demands for autonomy and free development of the personality and the constraints of the class society in order to criticize the latter. In particular, he criticizes the unscrupulous behavior of soldiers towards daughters of bourgeois origin. But this is not only portrayed as the guilt of the "pleasure-seeking" soldiers: Marie and her father are also complicit in what happened through their social ambitions.
It was not until a hundred years after the work was published that E. v. Bauernfeld staged at the Vienna Court Theater.
Edits
- The soldiers served Georg Büchner as a template for his drama Woyzeck , in which he varied the subject, however, and transferred it to a much lower social class.
- In 1930 Manfred Gurlitt set the drama to music as an opera under the title Soldiers .
- From 1958 to 1964 Bernd Alois Zimmermann set the drama to music again. The opera of the same name premiered on February 15, 1965 in Cologne and, with its simultaneous scenes, is still considered a key work of modern opera .
Secondary literature
- Ralf Sudau: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, The Hofmeister / The Soldiers. Oldenbourg, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-637-01405-3
- Manfred Windfuhr: Afterword , in: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, The Soldiers. A comedy . Reclam, Stuttgart 2019, pp. 85–89, ISBN 978-3-15-005899-2 .
