The Sterntaler (Bergengruen)
The Sterntaler is a novella by Werner Bergengruen that appeared in Zurich in 1953. The author rewrites the fairy tale of the Sterntalern because he “finally wants to create clarity about the nature of money”.
time and place
The location of the action is the Berlin district of Wedding "around 1930".
content
The stingy, domineering woman Mathilde Lankowski, b. Szimanek, tells her husband on the sickbed that she is in possession of a package of small notes worth twelve thousand marks. The novella does not reveal where all the money comes from. In any case, the 76-year-old disability pensioner Lankowski takes the unexpected wealth and loses it after a pub crawl in a booze in a Weddinger cellar. The seriously ill Ms. Lankowski dies, and the bereaved must report the death to the authorities. On the occasion Lankowski admits that twelve thousand marks were available.
Mr Gottscheu, a businessman with a wife and three children, finds the money. He begins to spend it little by little in association with his wife. Some jealous neighbor reports the Gottscheus for suspiciously large amounts of money. Police house searches unearth eight thousand marks in small notes. Mr. Gottscheu is charged with misappropriation and his wife with stolen goods . The public takes an active part in the process: That would not have happened to the people, all of them potential honest finders (who find nothing, who never win the lottery). The widower Lankowski, who is the owner of the money package established by the police, is sitting on the witness bench and cannot quite follow the course of the proceedings. The previously innocent Gottscheus get away with a suspended sentence. The married couple, who have been set free, take the widower home with them and parasitize their large amounts of money to their hearts' content. Lankowski dies. The irony of the story: Those who were still alive fifteen years later from the Gottscheus were now poorer than Lankowski "in his worst times".
Germany
Bergengruen calls his text a novella, but it tells a fairy tale. The author ties a bear to the reader. The narrative tone is not mischievous, but actually bitterly angry when Bergengruen z. B. - scattered throughout the text - repeatedly mocked the loss of the German colonies of Togoland , German Cameroon and also German East Africa in 1918 (e.g. there are only arboric colonies left). And Bergengruen, the aged poet, is resigned when he z. B. remarked, "At the beginning of the thirties the laws were still being observed." A conclusion of Bergengruen's satirical text: The German disaster after 1945 is far more disastrous than that after 1918.
Quote
The curious one has to worry all the time .
literature
- Source:
- Secondary literature:
- Frank-Lothar Kroll (ed.): Word and poetry as a place of refuge in difficult times. Gebr. Mann, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-7861-1816-7 .
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. Biographical and bibliographical concise dictionary based on authors and anonymous works. German authors. A – Z. 4th, completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 50.