Three feathers

Drei Federn is an educational novel by Wilhelm Raabe that was written in 1864/65 and published by Otto Janke in Berlin in the summer of 1865 . At the same time, the text was printed by the same publisher in the "Deutsche Roman-Zeitung".

Karoline Sonntag dies soon after the birth of her only child. Before that, she made a promise to her childhood friend August Hahnenberg on her deathbed. May he be the godfather of the newborn boy. The notary Dr. Hahnenberg keeps his promise. The guardian raised his ward August Sonntag for three decades.

shape

Raabe turns to the present and treads a new path. The single teller standing above things is missing. In six chapters, three protagonists present their extremely subjective view of the topic.

In the first and last chapter, the educator August Hahnenberg has his say. Since there was more than thirty years between the two requests to speak, the tone of voice differs considerably. While Hahnenberg arrogantly exposes the weaknesses of his friend Joseph Sonntag - that is Karoline's husband - in the first chapter, at the end of the novel he regrets his thoughtless condemnation, but at the same time looks back proudly on what he believed to be a successful upbringing.

In the four middle chapters, the now adult godchild Dr. med. August Sonntag and his wife Mathilde as narrators twice. Mathilde begins the lecture in chapter two with refreshing humor. Unfortunately, she soon has to push the pen into her husband's hand because the child is screaming. But she doesn't leave the writing instrument to her husband for long. Because in Mathilde's opinion the husband is not a special biographer. He "write down his life story like a recipe".

content

I. Eighteen twenty-nine

The 30-year-old lawyer August Hahnenberg laments his lot. He was born in the “capital”, which is never mentioned but is recognizable as Berlin, in a house “in the oldest, most angular part of the city, <...> fairly closed from the open air and sunshine”. After studying law, he practiced as an accessist in Hohennöthlingen , then returned to the capital and since then has been working starving and freezing in winter together with his clerk, Pinnemann, in a “dark, cold hole”. The clientele is rare, and he has no luck with women either. It is true that his great love, the pharmacist's daughter Karoline Spierling, promised him solemnly that “it would be better to die than to belong to someone else”, but things turned out differently. The pharmacist gives the daughter to his first assistant , the son of a wealthy confectioner's widow. Joseph Sonntag is called the lucky one. Joseph is August's friend of all people. The new husband knows nothing of the unhappy secret love of the couple August and Karoline. August turns a good face into a bad game. When Karoline was dying in childbirth, she had her lover called, made the above-mentioned promise and died on November 20, 1829.

II. The second spring

Mathilde Sonntag, daughter of the Rector Frühling from Hohennöthlingen, discovered the above writing by the godfather Hahnenberg in a corner over thirty years later. Hahnenberg has meanwhile become established and rich in the capital. Mathilde finds the manuscript and its author intolerable. Actually she wants to report about the godfather Hahnenberg, then she will write about herself first. The young medical doctor August Sonntag was lucky enough to meet the narrator, his future wife, at the wedding of the “languishing blonde” Theodore. The young gentleman had danced “indescribably badly” and confessed to the dancer his poverty. The father brought through all of the family's money and "in bankruptcy" lost "the pharmacy and drugstore business Spierling". Despite those very poor initial conditions, Mathilde catches up with this young doctor.

III. August has the floor

After the financial ruin, August's father Joseph had worked tirelessly as a conscientious copyist . The father had sometimes told the child August about his love for the late mother Karoline. If August thinks back on it, he has to condemn all the more "every disgraceful, merciless word" and "every ice cold irony" in the found papers of the lonely godfather. These bitter and selfishly written lines are what the young Dr. med. prefer to forget. August hates his guardian, but at the same time feels that he cannot do without him, that the dying mother made the right decision. With financial support from the guardian, August had obtained his university entrance qualification and began studying law. He blames the father for not getting rid of the godfather. Joseph had clung tighter and tighter to his childhood friend Hahnenberg the worse things went.

August had met Pinnemann, now the guardian's private secretary. Pinnemann, who had grown fat in the meantime, was always close to the godfather. August wanted to rebel against the notary. One-to-one conversation had been impossible. Hahnenberg had refused the student and reminded him in one breath of the promise he had made to August's mother. Hahnenberg wanted to “chase through the veins” of August the iron that his parents lacked. But after August got to know the blind born musician Friedrich Winkler, the handicapped helped him to free himself from the dependence on the godfather. After his father's death, August switched to the medical faculty and later became a doctor in Hohennöthlingen.

IV. Mathilde's days also follow one another, but are not similar to one another

Mathilde hands her son Fritzchen over to the nurse so that she can write in peace. The writer has resolutions. Neither the thread nor the accounting should get lost. It's difficult. Because Mathilde did not have it easy at the beginning of their marriage. The husband missed the patients. Then she absolutely had to research her husband's correspondence with a Luise Winkler. The letter writer turned out to be the blind man's sister. When Mathilde moves to the capital with her “future senior medical officer” - the husband wants to be close to the blind friend who lives there - she realizes what a “colorful city butterfly” the “naughty, self-bred, spoiled” Luise is. In the city, the godfather and his pin man also live nearby. The private secretary has a crush on Luise Winkler. Pinnemann dances to Luise's pipe.

August has now established himself as a doctor in the capital. Patients now come to his office hours. At the university he is becoming more and more famous among anatomists - mainly thanks to the beautiful, learned book about his discovery of the intestinal worm Coprosaurus Sonntagianus . The natural scientist Dr. med. August Sonntag instructs his wife that the notary Hahnenberg is no longer the old cynic. In the meantime, Pinnemann has turned the tables and dominated the now senile notary. Mathilde's first attempt to confront Hahnemann fails. “On the second of November, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, the mirror fell from the wall, the porcelain cupboard overturned and the roast goose, namely my little friend Luise Winkler, fell into the coals. <...> That second November, eighteen hundred and sixty-one <...> <...> went through <...> and took the godfather's wallet and our Luise with him; that day I went to the godfather for the second time and - found him 'at home'. "Mathilde tells the old boy what she thinks.

V. Coprosaurus Sonntagianus

When August found out that his blind friend's reckless sister had fled, he followed her headlong to the roadstead of Kuxhaven . The city butterfly Luise Winkler is accompanied by Pinnemann. The Europe-weary private secretary has “annexed” the “money bag” of the notary Hahnenberg. A law enforcement officer is on the fugitive's heels. The corpulent Pinemann, "Coprosaurus of human society", has no chance of emigration to England. The electric telegraph has already been invented. Luise - contrite - lets August bring her back to her waiting brother without resistance.

VI. Eighteen sixty-two

In the spring of 1862 the notary "Hahnenberg, more than sixty years old" looks back on the last thirty-three years of his life. He was a strong man. He was finally able to prevail against the less successful group of colleagues. He had only felt joy during the confrontations; never after. His resolution had been to make Karoline's child into a human being - “strong, bold, agile and ruthless”, but at the same time also to make the child happier than himself. While Hahnenberg monitored the boy's “development” with eagle eyes and gave him strength clearing the way, he had only provided the child's father and his friend Joseph Sonntag with the bare essentials. The notary writes: “I watched with real secret satisfaction how my protégé began to pull on his chains more and more dissatisfied, disgruntled and wilder; believing that he was facing me as an opponent, he became more and more of my comrade from day to day. ”When the blind Friedrich Winkler interfered in Hahnenberg's educational work, the rejected man fell back into his“ self-created loneliness ”. The notary had strived for serenity and achieved it in life. Now she left him. Then he remembers what happened “on November 2nd of last year”: “Twenty minutes past five - came Mathilde on Sunday!” Through her relentless reprimand, he feels affection. “She looked quite angry, but she was close to crying. 'Mathilde Sonntag, why did you come to see me that evening?' She came back, leaned over me and looked into my face with a tear on each lash. ”Together they go to Friedrich Winkler. “With the step over this threshold the conclusion of my life was drawn.” He can confidently write: “I no longer wish, as in the year eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, to continue these records on the following day; but your children, August and Mathilde Sonntag, should have the right to write their pens bluntly on it when you count: eighteen hundred and ninety-two. "

Quotes

• "Solus cum sola non praesumitur orare paternoster."
• "Every moment of life can become a ghost that emerges after years from behind the Spanish wall of oblivion."
• "We calculate with the waves, foam splashes and bubbles of the sea, but rarely with the sea itself."

Testimonials

• In 1921, Hans Martin Schultz passed on Raabe's words in personal memories: "This is my first independent work."
• In a letter to Sigmund Schott dated October 28, 1891 , Raabe criticized “ The People from the Forest ” from 1863 and concluded: “On the other hand, I modestly consider the 'Three Feathers' to be worth reading.”

reception

• After its publication, the novel was - if at all - discussed cautiously and critically.
• The novel was a "blatant failure".
• Oppermann examines the form of the novel and calls the text “a complicated network of experience perspectives and interpretations”.
• The author also deals with Darwinism .
• Goldammer and Richter highlight the seducer Pinnemann in their meeting.
• According to Jückstock-Kießling, this “unique narrative experiment” allows a preview of some of the peculiarities of the late Raabe. In addition, the little novel can be seen as an educational novel à la “ Hunger Pastor ” in a new guise. In any case, with this text, the author left the series of his “children's books” behind.
• Meyen names six works from the years 1865 to 1938.

expenditure

First edition

• Three feathers . Otto Janke, Berlin 1865. 281 pages

Used edition

• Drei Federn S. 455–610 in: Peter Goldammer (Ed.), Helmut Richter (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Selected works in six volumes. Volume 3: The Hunger Pastor . Three feathers. 655 pages. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1964 (text basis: Karl Hoppe (Hrsg.): The historical-critical Braunschweig edition)

Further editions

• Three feathers . Otto Janke, Berlin 1895 (2nd edition). 196 pages
• Three feathers . Otto Janke, Berlin 1909 (3rd edition). 226 pages

literature

• Peter Goldammer (ed.), Helmut Richter (ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Selected works in six volumes. Volume 1,928 pages. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1966
• Hans Oppermann : Wilhelm Raabe. 160 pages. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1970 (1988 edition), ISBN 3-499-50165-1 (rowohlt's monographs)
• Fritz Meyen: Wilhelm Raabe. Bibliography. 438 pages. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973 (2nd edition). Supplementary volume 1, ISBN 3-525-20144-3 in Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
• Joachim Bark: Raabe's "Three Feathers" (1865): Attempt at fictitious biography. At the same time a contribution to the German educational novel. P. 128–148 in Josef Daum (Ed.), Hans-Jürgen Schrader (Ed.): Yearbook of the Raabe Society (1981) , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-024370- 3
• Cecilia von Studnitz : Wilhelm Raabe. Writer. A biography. 346 pages. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-7700-0778-6
• Werner Fuld : Wilhelm Raabe. A biography. 383 pages. Hanser, Munich 1993 (dtv edition in July 2006), ISBN 3-423-34324-9 .
• Nathali Jückstock-Kießling: First contact: Wilhelm Raabe's early work and realism In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Wilhelm Raabe . Richard Boorberg Verlag Munich, October 2006, ISBN 3-88377-849-4 , pp. 8-26 (issue 172 of edition text + kritik ).

Web links

• Three springs in the Gutenberg-DE project

References and comments

1. ^ Bark, p. 128
2. ↑ On April 7, 1865, Raabe wrote in his diary: "10½ o'clock the end of the three feathers ." (Goldammer and Richter (1964), p. 644, 13th Zvu)
3. ↑ v. Studnitz, p. 311, entry 27
4. ↑ Goldammer and Richter (1964), pp. 644–645 middle
5. ↑ Although August Hahnenberg's narrative tone in its freshness in the first chapter makes you sit up and take notice, it is surpassed in the second by Mathilde, who wrote the pen, with an open-hearted, conversational tone. The rousing lightness of the presentation is surprising.
6. ↑ see also title: Drei Federn
7. ↑ When describing her young marriage in Hohennöthlingen, Mathilde happens to be her first educational carver: with "semi-official" instead of official plants. Later she attributes the saying of a Spartan "with the shield or on it" to a Roman woman. From Epicureans makes "Epikuristen" and from Gaius Marius on the ruins of Carthage "Marius among the ruins of Jerusalem or anywhere else." Raabe anticipates the treatment of Karoline Stöhr in the magic mountain . Yet his characterization of Mathilde remains loving in contrast to Thomas Mann's characterization of his figure.
8. ↑ "five thousand dollars stolen" (used edition, p 600, 20. ZVO)
9. ↑ Edition used, p. 576, 4th Zvu
10. ↑ Edition used, p. 610, 3. Zvo
11. ↑ "If someone is alone with you, one does not assume that they are praying the Our Father." One of the numerous interspersed educational phrases in the novel (and in Raabe's entire work).
12. ↑ Edition used, p. 567, 12. Zvo
13. ↑ Edition used, p. 581, 12. Zvu
14. ↑ quoted in Goldammer and Richter (1964), p. 646, 6. Zvo
15. ↑ quoted in Goldammer and Richter (1964), p. 646, 2. Zvo
16. ^ Goldammer and Richter (1964), p. 645, 21. Zvo
17. ↑ Fuld, p. 204, 14th Zvu
18. ↑ Oppermann, p. 72, 8. Zvo
19. ↑ Oppermann, p. 72, 27. Zvo
20. ^ Fuld, p. 203
21. ↑ see also Charles Darwin
22. ↑ Goldammer and Richter (1966), pp. 84–86
23. ↑ Jückstock-Kießling, p. 19, 13. Zvu to p. 23 middle
24. ↑ Meyen, pp. 326-327