The old church bell
The old church bell (Danish: Den gamle Kirkeklokke ) is an art fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen .
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In the small Swabian town of Marbach am Neckar , a good family lives in a small, poor house. Although the woman is no longer the youngest, she should become a mother again. When she went into labor, she heard the bell ringing from the nearby church tower, and at that very moment the child was born. The father notes in the family Bible: On November 10, 1759 God gave us a son. At baptism he was given the first name Johann Christoph Friedrich.
Years later the family moves to another city. When the mother and her son returned to Marbach to visit relatives there, the two of them passed the churchyard. They see the old bell lying on the wall. It fell from the church tower one stormy night and was so damaged that it can no longer sound. It has now been replaced by a new one. The mother takes this as an opportunity to tell her son how a bell accompanies all of life: It rings at baptisms, weddings and funerals.
The boy grows up and receives a good education at the ducal military academy. However, he cannot get used to the prevailing military drill there. When he saw the opportunity, he fled abroad, first to the Electoral Palatinate and later to Weimar .
Many decades later, a Danish sculptor from Germany was commissioned to create a statue of the most famous son of the city of Marbach. The metal for this comes from the bell that was sold as scrap and then melted down.
In Stuttgart the flags are waving from towers and roofs. All church bells ring for a festive occasion. Only one bell remains silent. Instead, in the light of the sun, it shines from the head and chest of the statue that was erected on the square in front of the castle and is to be inaugurated today. The statue adorns the man who was born in Marbach a hundred years ago: Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller .
Emergence
In 1860, the Danish fairy tale poet Hans Christian Andersen stayed for a few days in Stuttgart at the invitation of the publisher Carl Hoffmann. When the two men were sitting together over a glass of Württemberg champagne , Hoffmann asked the poet to deliver a fairy tale that had not yet been published anywhere. He can set the fee for this himself. So it happened that a year later the fairy tale of the old church bell was published for the first time - in German - in the Schiller album of the General German National Lottery for the benefit of the Schiller and Tiedge Foundations .
The real core
Even if Andersen called his story a fairy tale , it contains many historical facts: the attentive reader registers after just a few sentences that Friedrich Schiller is the protagonist of the event, even if Andersen does not reveal his full name until the end. In keeping with the title of the fairy tale, it contains numerous allusions to The Song of the Bell . By the sculptor, Andersen means his compatriot Bertel Thorwaldsen , who is actually the creator of the Schiller monument, which was erected on the old Schlossplatz in Stuttgart, today's Schillerplatz.
Literature and source
“From a thousand green mirrors ...”, a poetic journey of discovery in Baden-Württemberg by Thomas Vogel with photographs by Michael Büchner, Konrad Theiss Verlag Stuttgart, 1995 (pp. 126–127), ISBN 3-8062-1159-0