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“Die neue Rundschau” with the first print of Ein Glück , 1904

Ein Glück (subtitle: study ) is a story by Thomas Mann , which was first published in 1904 in the literary magazine Die Neue Rundschau and ten years later it was included in the anthology Das Wunderkind (1914).

content

In the garrison town of Hohendamm, the hussar officers act like masters and sometimes go overboard, especially Rittmeister Baron Harry. His bits of hussar go so far that he occasionally complains about his victims - e. B. makes fun of a baker's boy, from whom he takes a large basket of bread rolls to throw them into the river - and thinks he can make amends with money. Even before his wife, the quiet and weak Baroness Anna, the brisk Rittmeister does not stop with his deep insults. Nevertheless she loves him cowardly and miserably, although he betrayed her and treated her heart like a boy every day .

The “Wiener Schwalben” perform in Gugelfing's beer hall, a traveling troupe of around thirty singing women. The mounted noblemen of the garrison attend the performances of the young vaudeville singers and come up with the idea of ​​engaging ten of the prettiest "swallows" for a private celebration in the presence of their wives.

This leads to various emotional entanglements. The dreamy avantageur , a young poet who secretly adores the poor little Baroness Anna , is shooed from his place at the piano because, according to Baron Harry, he only makes mourning bells instead of a waltz . Harry, however, wants something swinging with rhythm . When he then dances exuberantly with Emmy, the youngest and prettiest of the swallows and is watched by his wife, Anna suddenly realizes that this wild Emmy with the dark almond eyes looks at her now and then and that her own longing for the little 'swallow' was hotter and deeper than Harry's . But that's not all: With all of this, nobody notices far and wide that Emmy, this neglected little creature who made the wine sentimental, pecked at the young avantageur all evening .

At first Anna has to stand by and watch as her husband, this wretch and fan , is courting the thoroughly vulgar but wonderful Emmy all evening. When the Rittmeister then even physically harassed her in public and thereby put his wedding ring on the reluctant one, Anna gets up and leaves the place of her humiliation. And then something very strange happens . Emmy takes Anna's side, describes Harry as mean , gives Anna back the ring and presses her a soft, fervent kiss on the hand. Anna, delighted and enchanted because this fool came to her from a vagabond , experiences for a moment the happiness that arises when those two worlds, between which the longing wanders back and forth, come together in a brief, deceptive approach .

To the form

Quiet! We want to look into a soul. In flight, as it were, in passing and only for a few pages, because we are very busy. Even these introductory words show that the author gives his text the character of an apparently incidental study, not least by framing it in the empathic commentary of a benevolent narrator who is currently traveling during the cursory writing, has just returned from Florence, where he had difficult matters to attend to and now has little time to spare to sketch the story of little Baroness Anna , too little time to look into a soul and put into words what is hidden behind her poor smile . This fatherly narrator not only bows to Anna like a child, but also takes his readers by the hand, chatting affably, speaks to them directly ( look at the precious little detail! ) And shows them - now and then in the “experienced Speech “alternately - the world entirely from Anna's sensitive perspective, before he says goodbye to her again just as quickly and sympathetically: We are leaving you, Baroness Anna, we are kissing your forehead, goodbye, we are running away! Sleep now! You will dream all night about the 'swallow' that came to you and be a little happy.

To the background

The short story was commissioned for the first issue of the Neue Rundschau . Thomas Mann's close friend Kurt Martens had told him a “casino story” in the summer of 1903, which he had witnessed during his military service in a hussar regiment. Thomas Mann noted in Notebook 7 some key words that he used in November 1903 for writing Ein Glück . The introductory words of the narrator We come from Florence, from ancient times refer to the work on the drama Fiorenza . He is on his way to a royal palace , the planned novel Royal Highness . Hermann Kurzke sees the story as a “subtle revenge” on Paul Ehrenberg .

The longing of the serious, clumsy, socially inept for the lively, “vulgar” darling of society is a motif that often occurs with Thomas Mann. Tonio Kröger, for example, feels it, and Paolo Hofmann (in Der Wille zum Glück ) and many other of his protagonists experience similar things. What is unusual, however, is that in Ein Glück a woman desires a woman, while the subjects and objects of longing in Thomas Mann are usually male.

To the reception

This section needs to be revised: incomplete, the actual reception history is missing.
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  • Hans R. Vaget lists some details, such as the author's weakness for "the motif of same-sex inclination" and describes the casino novella as kitsch .
  • Peter Sprengel does not include them in his literary history.

expenditure

  • Die Neue Rundschau , 15th year 1904, issue 1.
  • The wounderchild. Novellas. S. Fischer, Berlin 1914.
  • All the stories. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1963.
  • All the stories. Volume 1. Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-10-348115-2 , pp. 332-344.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermann Kurzke: Thomas Mann. Life as a work of art. 2001, p. 133.