Village history

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The term village history describes a genre of narrative literature that was particularly popular with 19th century authors. The generic name dates from around 1840 and has met with criticism because it is difficult to distinguish it from other narrative forms such as peasant novels and calendar stories. The village's history is characterized by its setting, the village environment and its realistic design. It can contain social and cultural criticism , but it can also have idyllic features. In less literary copies of the genre, the rural context of life serves as a projection screen for the wishes of the educated classes: the village sphere is transfigured into a simple, manageable, healthy world and set in contrast to the civilization-damaged city.

Berthold Auerbach's Black Forest village stories (1843, with the straggler Barfüßele 1856) could be the namesake of the genre . According to Oskar Walzel , however, the “Oberhof” chapter of Immermann's novel Münchhausen (1839) is already about a village story, which some disputed.

Instead of contestable definitions, Gero von Wilpert creates a typology of village history. He characterizes works and groups of works in which poets have described the village world since the late Middle Ages: bodily poetry , Meier Helmbrecht , Wittenwiler's Ring , Facetien and Schwänke , The adventurous Simplicissimus , Anacreontics , Haller's Die Alpen , Pestalozzis Lienhard and Gertrud , works by Johann Heinrich Voß , Mathias Claudius , Johann Peter Hebel , Jeremias Gotthelf . The time series initially contains poems in which the peasant class is ridiculed from a courtly-knightly or town-bourgeois standpoint, while towards the end, in the literature of the second half of the 18th and the first of the 19th century, the peasant-village world is taken just as seriously and is valued like other human life forms. (Repeal of the so-called class clause ). Von Wilpert sees poems like Das Haidedorf ( Adalbert Stifter 1840), Die Judenbuche ( Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 1842), The Heiterethei and their counterpart ( Otto Ludwig 1857) protrude far beyond the sympathetic portrayal of the milieu. He regards Romeo and Juliet in the village as the “highest fulfillment of the genre” ( Gottfried Keller 1856). With names like Balzac , George Eliot , Hamsun , Turgenew he also reminds us that the poetic preoccupation with the village world was a European phenomenon.

German-language village stories were written in the second half of the 19th century by Alfred Hartmann , Friedrich Gerstäcker , Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach , Ludwig Anzengruber , Ludwig Ganghofer and Karl May ( including Die Rose von Ernstthal 1874 and Erzgebirge Village Stories 1903 ). Friedrich Hebbel , too , coming from a poor rural milieu, had some stories set in a village setting, but at the same time spoke out in sharp words against the “peasant denigration of our days”, so that Jürgen Hein describes him as the founder of the “anti-village history” .

After Bernhard Spies, village stories also emerged in the 20th century, although the generic name was no longer used. Examples are: Oskar Maria Graf's village history cycle Finsternis (1926) and Anna Seghers' Der Kopflohn (1933). More recent attempts to use the genre come from Geert Mak : Wie Gott disappeared from Jorwerd (German 1999), as well as Katrin Rohnstock and Rosita Müller: Das Dorf leben (2007).

literature

  • Philip Ajouri / Wolfert von Rahden / Andreas Urs Sommer : Das Dorf = magazine for the history of ideas, issue IX / 2, summer 2015. Munich: CH Beck, 2015 ( ISSN  1863-8937 , ISBN 978-3-406-67382-5 )
  • Friedrich Altvater: Nature and Form of German Village History in the Nineteenth Century. Berlin 1930. (Reprint 1967)
  • Gero von Wilpert : Subject dictionary of literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). 6th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-520-23106-9 .
  • Jürgen Hein: Village history . Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-476-10145-2 .
  • Uwe Baur: village history. On the origin and social function of a literary genre in the Vormärz. Munich 1978, ISBN 3-7705-1544-7 .
  • Wolfgang Seidenspinner : Oralized writing as a style. The literary genre of village history and the category of orality. In: International Archive for the Social History of German Literature. 22 (1997), No. 2, pp. 36-51.

proof

  1. ^ Oskar Walzel: German poetry since Goethe's death. Berlin 1919, p. 56 ff.
  2. ↑ Cf. The design of reality in Karl Leberecht Immermann's novel Münchhausen ( Memento from February 16, 2005 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ^ Village history. In: Gero von Wilpert: Subject dictionary of literature. P. 182 f.
  4. ↑ Jürgen Hein: Friedrich Hebbel and the village history of the 19th century. In: Hebbel yearbook. 1974, pp. 102-125.
  5. ↑ Bernhard Spiel: Village history. In: Handbook of the literary genres. Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-84101-8 , pp. 137-142.

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