Out in the heath village
Outside in the Heidedorf is the title of a novella by Theodor Storm , which began in late 1871 or early 1872 and was published in 1872 in the journal Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft .
It is about a fatal relationship in the peasant milieu and is based on an authentic case in Rantrum , which Storm had to deal with in 1866 while he was the governor in Husum . With her sober language she seemed to be a turning point in Storm's oeuvre, an assessment that was confirmed by contemporaries and literary research.
The sometimes eerie story belongs to the middle creative phase and shows with the vampire motif Storms great interest in fantastic elements of popular belief and superstition .
content
At the beginning the first-person narrator , a Husum governor, observes a conflict that suggests a strange web of relationships. On an autumn evening he strolls past an inn on his way home and is captivated by a scene that he can follow in the glow of a hand lamp . A young, curly-haired farmer stands next to a carriage ready to go , trying to help a beautiful, reluctant woman get on. With her pale features and slim stature, she differs from the "ordinary country girls" in the area and lets white and pointed teeth flash in the light . It is easy to see that the young man desires her and that tensions arise. So he wants to sit on the front bench next to her, while she rejects the request, wriggles away from his grip and takes a seat behind it next to a fat woman who urges you to hurry. When he announces that he does not want to drive like that, she bends down and asks whether she should go with Hans Ottsen next time, baring her white teeth between her luscious lips. Finally he jumps violently onto the front bench and jerks the vehicle into motion.
Six months later, the narrator is entrusted with the inheritance of the heavily indebted farmer Hinrich Fehse, who leaves behind two underage children and an adult son of the same name, in whom he soon recognizes the farmer boy who is in love. Since the homestead does not seem to be durable because of the strain, he wants to sell it. The former clerk and now guardian of the children, however, can convince him that an arranged marriage with the daughter of a wealthy Hufners adequate working capital is available to keep the farm in the family. When asked about the beautiful woman named Margret Glansky, the sexton explains that her grandfather is “Slovak from the Danube” and her mother is a midwife who “lures the stupid shillings out of their pockets”, which “would have been bad” in the old peasant family. . Whether "the whore would have taken him" is questionable anyway, since she has other, more solid admirers in tow. In order to get the “dangerous girl” out of sight of the boy in love, he arranges it as a “sewing maid” at a location six miles away.
Some time later, the narrator sees the young farmer in the hall of the inn and asks himself what he has to do so late in town. When he passed a horse market in the autumn , he saw the emaciated Hinrich Fehse, who was bargaining for two moored Moravians. A little later he learns that Margret is back in the village, that Hinrich has gotten involved with her again and that she is now “selling everything that is loose and firm” so that she can promenade “in silk jackets” and with golden pins. The sexton plans to put the desperate man under guardianship . Before that happens, Hinrich has disappeared, and rumors are circulating that he wants to emigrate or harm himself. To investigate the case, the narrator sets out with an official on the same day.
During the journey in the open carriage, he observes the gentle and melancholy spectacle of the familiar area with its hedges , hazel and oak bushes sliding by. After a while you will reach the wild moor , which with its black-brown heather , pools of water and peat heaps leaves a desolate impression and extends far north. In the gloomy atmosphere, the “melancholy scream of the great plover ” is all the narrator hears. He remembers reading years ago about an eerie creature who lived in the steppes on the lower Danube , which were still inhabited by Slavic tribes: a thread-thin creature called the “white alp” rose from the heathens at dusk has been. She crept through the villages and penetrated houses, lay down next to the sleeping people and withdrew their soul , whereby it swelled up shapelessly. The creature that left those affected stupid and soulless was not seen here; but the mists of the moor thickened in the twilight into other terrifying things that the villagers wanted to see at dusk and at night.
On the southern edge of the moor he reaches the house of the sexton, who seems to be resigned: It is questionable whether a curator could still help, because Hinrich did not want to forcibly recognize his luck. His talkative, sickly wife reports a long time ago, violent jealousy scene between Hinrich, Margret and Hans Ottsen while dancing in a jug . Before the festival, Hinrich Fehse had stolen red roses from her garden, which she later discovered in the girl's hair . Hans, the more affluent rival, strutted through the hall, looked at the girls as if they were about to buy, stopped in front of the couple and provoked with scornful remarks: "Stealer and stealer [...] The Rosenhinrich and the Slovak Margret? You make a clean couple together. ”Encouraged by Margret, Hinrich gave him two punches, which knocked him down, was grabbed by the pastor by the sleeper and excluded, while the beloved was already looking around for other dancers. After some adornment, she danced past “the poor fellow” with the rival, who looked after them with his little eyes, which luckily “weren't loaded with shotgun bullets!” The next morning Hinrich did not come home and was finally at the edge of the moor found the "water toad" and lay sick for a few weeks.
The bailiff lets himself be driven to the Fehse estate and there interrogates the mistress, a little later the mother and the wife of the missing person, who is still being searched for. Margaret Glansky is deathly pale and seems to be determined by “fear of external responsibility because of a possible internal guilt”. She speaks of the hatred of other women for her and rejects any guilt. When the other women enter the room, the tension can be felt in the exchanged glances. The old farmer's wife laments the fatal effect Margaret had on her son, who wasted a lot of money and confessed to her that he was dragged to the midwife's house without a will. Another conversation with Margret shows the different feelings. It wasn't until late that she noticed his passion, but then she couldn't solve it. According to her account, he visited her the night before his disappearance during a storm and spoke of plans to secretly emigrate to America together, which he wanted to pay with the proceeds from the sale of the magnificent geldings . When she refused, he reacted desperately, tossed the purse into a well in the house, cursed her, and ran away. Worried, she crept to the Fehses' courtyard in the stormy night and saw Hinrich through the window in the alcove until he suddenly stared at her and drove her to flee. The old peasant woman, on the other hand, claims to have heard a noise during the storm and to have seen an animal with white, sharp teeth and black eyes through the window. She couldn't stop her son, who kept staring at the shutter and then stumbled out. The narrator, looking at the pale girl, thinks of the white alp and almost said that the young man's soul had been drunk.
Hinrich Fehse's corpse, found in the moor, is soon brought home in a rumbling car and placed in the barn . The wealthy Hans Ottsen marries Fehse's widow and can thus acquire his rival's estate, while Margret's further life remains in the dark. She is said to have moved to another city and "lost there in the flood of people."
Emergence
The novella is based on a true story. During his time as governor in Husum, Storm had to deal with a case, which he reported in detail to his later second wife Dorothea Jensen in the spring of 1866: A young man has been missing for a few days, “who apparently lost his life through love affairs and debts shattered ". After Storm had the wells of the village examined, the body of the "handsome young man" was finally found in a drinking pit in Rantrum. Storm drove into the community and interviewed the deceased's pregnant wife, "whom he had not loved but married so that she could use her money to improve his father's property," and then turned to the "charming" girl he was loved for years and from whose “wonderful eyes” he drank “passion and death”. One day before his suicide , he went to his lover in a dejected mood and confessed to her that he could no longer bear domestic life. His betrayed wife, who obviously loved him very much and only treated him with “mild accusations”, had heard him leave the house from bed. As Storm noted, the beautiful girl seemed only fearful of "criminal responsibility" and showed no pain for the dead.
background
In Storm's opinion, he struck a “completely new tone” with the novel, which he defended against allegations of neglecting poetic beauty. For him, the peasant story was a turning point, a departure from the lyrical novellas, in that he wanted to prove that he could write a work “without the atmosphere of a certain mood”. He himself spoke of a “completely new storm” and believed that he had reached another level of “epic objectivity”, which is also reflected in his advice to Hermione von Preuschen , which he had made his own. She should refrain from “all reflections”, just tell “the most necessary” and not describe feelings, but let them become clear from “the life and actions” of the people. This self-confident assessment was confirmed by contemporaries such as Paul Heyse and literary research, which also dealt with questions raised by the narrative perspective . As never before, the homodiegetic narrator's insights are based on the statements of the other characters , including the sexton and his wife, Margret Glansky and the dead woman's mother.
The perspective objectivity contrasts with the "white alp", a monstrous being introduced from the narrator's memory . Storm combines the foreign superstitions from areas of the lower Danube with the Slavic background of the seductive woman, whose grandfather is said to have been a "Slovak". With her white and sharp teeth she is reminiscent of a vampire. The genre-typical attribute is introduced right at the beginning and repeated as a leitmotif in the further course of the narrative . In keeping with the sphere of the irrational, her mother, in addition to her work as a midwife, lays cards and discusses tumors in order to lure the fools out of their pockets.
Storm had a particular fondness for the ghostly and carried on haunted stories well into old age . He assured Gottfried Keller that he did not believe in the supernatural , although “the natural is far from being recognized”. Keller viewed the sphere of the ghostly more soberly than Storm, which Thomas Mann explained with his "calm indulgence against pagan popular belief", "which the enlightened, unbelieving son of the 19th century admittedly faced with enough contradictions". With themes of death and the uncanny, his works are in a tense relationship with the guidelines of poetic realism . Gero von Wilpert explains Storm's frequent design of the ghost motif with its origin in the fog-shrouded landscapes of Northern Germany . Regionally rooted in the marshland , Geest and Waterkant , the typical regional mixture of superficial Christianity and deep-seated superstition offered him the atmosphere to reflect his melancholy inwardness.
Theodor Fontane reported on a meeting in Franz Kugler's apartment in 1854, at which Storm read his poem In Bulemanns Haus and sometimes observed those present with the eyes of "... a little sorcerer ...". The guests seated around the large round table were to be "spellbound by the half-ghostly, amused by the humorous, and lulled with a smile by the melodic". As Ferdinand Tönnies wrote, Storm liked to talk to him about mysterious things and believed that there were “as yet unrecognized powers of the human soul”, so that ghost and spooky phenomena did not just have a poetic charm for him. He also entertained his children with ghost stories tailored for their ages. His great interest in the uncanny is not only reflected in his art fairy tales and his own novels such as Renate , Eekenhof and above all Der Schimmelreiter , but also a collection of haunted stories by other authors that was not published and has remained unknown for a long time. In 1969, in the possession of a granddaughter of Storms, a manuscript of a New Ghost Book was discovered, which Storm had prepared for printing and which was subtitled "Contributions to the History of Spooks".
interpretation
For Rüdiger Frommholz Storm succeeded in creating a story that is equal to Gottfried Keller's Romeo and Juliet in the village . Unlike Keller's bright nature, Storm's landscapes are overshadowed by the bitter gloom of autumn and symbolize the inscrutable being and the tragic need for knowledge of people. The broken humanism of the novella arises from the melancholy insight into transience and the loss of a higher, transcendent meaning . According to Hartmut Vinçon, Storm shifted the connection between material rivalry and passion into the demonic . With his story set in a peasant milieu, he does not interpret the class difference socially, but only chthonically and bourgeois as a "game of dark forces". According to Gero von Wilpert, the work illustrates the rural folk superstition with elements such as spook and fortune-telling . To the deterministic worldview, Hinrich Fehse's erotic passion can only be explained by the legendary figure of the white Alps, a creature standing between vampire and werewolf that destroys the life of those who have decayed.
According to Karl Ernst Laage, the painted encounter in front of the inn at the beginning of the story illustrates Storm's working method, based on scenes that he had in front of his inner eye and ultimately combined into a unit. As a "scene seer", he described people and locations, perspectives and lighting conditions so vividly that it was easy for painters to translate them into pictures and to illustrate the works , while the reader was stimulated to inner pictures .
According to Josef Kunz, the few village details are sufficient to be able to draw conclusions about the prevailing values and the social structure of the community. For him, this shows that property ownership determines whether someone is recognized and respected. The norm system also has an impact on the relationship between the sexes, in that it is not love but property that determines the choice of a spouse. The marriage is arranged by the sexton, who has enough respect and foresight and, for financial reasons, chooses the bride for Hinrich Fehse, who is almost ten years younger than her. Storm presents her with a "well-formed (en)" but "unattractive (en)" face , "as it usually is with those who have already reckoned with their child's soul for the acquisition." In addition to the sexton, other authorities rule that order is not affected. One of them is the pastor, who is even present at a dance event and expels Hinrich Fehse from the hall, although his guilt is less than Ottsen's, a partial decision against which no one protests and which also reflects the value of the property. If the pastor embodies the clerical, the sexton the worldly authority. He wants to let Fehse become incapacitated in order to secure the property for his wife and child and to prevent everything from being squandered for the beautiful lover. After his death, he takes care of the property again by choosing the wealthy Ottsen for the widow and not wasting any thought on the fact that Fehse had recently killed himself in a desperate situation. According to Kunz, Margret Glansky brings the novelistic movement into the otherwise static, timeless structure of the village and thus embodies the other pole of tension in the story: the sudden onset of the unpredictable appears in the form of an erotically fascinating woman from abroad. Already in the entrance scene in front of the inn, Storm paints vividly how she differs from the ordinary village girl. In it the "untamed" took shape, a force that runs counter to the "legal", which Goethe encircles in the elective affinities and in the mouth of the lord's discreet companion. The bailiff is involved in the story as a narrator and, in Kunz's opinion, is characterized by a strange passivity. Although he sees how the calamity is gradually being announced, he follows the events without resistance and reports about it in precisely this passivity. So it seems that the figures are brought close to the receptive observer by accident , he tends to let himself drift by chance and take no initiative.
For Christoph Deupmann, the girl embodies a strange eroticism that undermines the traditional peasant order and the patriarchal structure and annihilates the weak hero economically and existentially. The constellation of the figures is shaped by the motif of the defense of the desired woman, which is often found in Storm's novellistics. Margret appears as a border figure between controllable and unleashed nature and is stylized to animal sensuality, which she excludes from the realm of the human.
literature
- Christoph Deupmann: Out in the Heidedorf. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-02623-1, pp. 177-178
- Rüdiger Frommholz: Out in the Heidedorf. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 16, Munich 1991, p. 28
- Josef Kunz: Theodor Storm's novella "Outside in the Heidedorf". Attempt at interpretation. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 22, Heide in Holstein 1973, pp. 18–31
- Eckart Pastor: “You are a party here!” Theodor Storm's novella “Outside in the Heidedorf” and its narrators. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 44, Heide in Holstein 1995, pp. 23-40
- Harro Segeberg : Theodor Storm as a "poet-jurist". On the relationship between legal, moral and poetic justice in the stories “Draußen im Heidedorf” and “Ein doppelganger” . In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 41, Heide in Holstein 1992, pp. 69–82
Individual evidence
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 174
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 177
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 180
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 181
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 185
- ^ Theodor Storm: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: All works in three volumes. Volume 2, Phaidon, Essen, p. 197
- ↑ Quoted from: Rüdiger Frommholz: Draußen im Heidedorf. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 16, Munich 1991, p. 28
- ↑ Christoph Deupmann: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 177
- ↑ Quoted from: Hartmut Vinçon: Theodor Storm. In self-testimonials and picture documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1972, p. 126
- ↑ Christoph Deupmann: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 178
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage : New Ghost Book. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 113
- ↑ Thomas Mann : Theodor Storm. In: Essays. Volume 3: An appeal to reason. Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 239
- ↑ Christiane Arndt / Tove Holmes: Storm's poetic self-image and realism. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 316
- ^ Gero von Wilpert: The German ghost story: Motive, form, development. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 310
- ↑ Quoted from Gottfried Honnefelder . In: Theodor Storm. At the fireplace and other eerie stories , Insel-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1976, p. 157
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage: New Ghost Book. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 112–113
- ^ Rüdiger Frommholz: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 16, Munich 1991, p. 28
- ↑ Quoted from: Hartmut Vinçon: Theodor Storm. In self-testimonials and picture documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1972, p. 126
- ^ Gero von Wilpert: The German ghost story: Motive, form, development. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 318
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 74
- ^ Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, pp. 206-207
- ↑ Josef Kunz: Theodor Storm's novella "Outside in the Heidedorf". Attempt at interpretation. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 22 (1973), pp. 18-19
- ↑ So Josef Kunz: Theodor Storm's novella “Outside in the Heidedorf”. Attempt at interpretation. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 22 (1973), p. 20
- ↑ Josef Kunz: Theodor Storm's novella "Outside in the Heidedorf". Attempt at interpretation. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 22 (1973), pp. 26-27
- ↑ Josef Kunz: Theodor Storm's novella "Outside in the Heidedorf". Attempt at interpretation. In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, Volume 22 (1973), p. 28
- ↑ So Christoph Deupmann: Outside in the Heidedorf. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 178