A country doctor

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
First printing of the story in The New Poetry. An almanac (1917)

A country doctor is a story by Franz Kafka . It was written in 1917 and first appeared in The New Seal in 1918 . An almanac published by Kurt Wolff Verlag . It gave its name to the eponymous volume of stories A Country Doctor Kafkas, published in 1920, in which it was included along with thirteen other prose texts.

content

An elderly country doctor is called to see a seriously ill person at night. While the maid Rosa tries to find a rental horse in the village because her own horse died in the "icy winter", he stands around in the snowstorm in his yard. When Rosa comes back without a horse, the helpless doctor kicks the door of a supposedly empty pigsty on his property. To his surprise, he finds two strong horses and an unknown man there who suddenly attacks Rosa a little later. Only half-heartedly reprimanded by the doctor, the stranger willingly hitched the animals to the wagon. The doctor gets in and the car is racing away, and the doctor can still hear the front door, behind which the unhappy Rosa has locked herself, shatter under the man's onslaught. In a very short time and independently, the horses cover the long distance and take the doctor to a farm, where he is led to a boy who is bedridden. Only after repeated requests by the parents and the sister does the undecided doctor, who is also thinking about the fate of Rosa, find the boy's illness, a "palm-sized" pink wound in his side with worms as thick as a finger. The doctor immediately knows that he cannot help the boy.

In the meantime people have arrived from the village who, according to an old custom, undress the doctor, who lets everything happen to him, and lay him in the sick person's bed. Meanwhile, a school choir sings threateningly in front of the house: "And if he doesn't heal, kill him!" Then the two are left alone, and only the enigmatic horses sticking their heads through the open windows into the room witness the conversation between the doctor and his patient, which ends with the doctor, who insists on his professional experience, that “the Wound is not so bad ”. Then the doctor has his rescue in mind. Assuming that the return journey will be as fast as the outward journey, he swings unclothed onto one of the two horses. But now the uncontrollable animals are moving "slowly like old men" through the frost. The narrative ends with partly accusatory, partly resigned thoughts of the failed doctor, who has been handed over to "unearthly" horses, about his own situation ("I never get home like this") and about the situation of Rosa, the "beautiful girl whom he had barely paid attention to for years" . His final sentence sums up: "Once you have followed the incorrect ringing of the night bell - it can never be made good".

shape

The country doctor speaks as a first-person narrator . The narrative mode is clear and descriptive, but also contains the country doctor's complaint monologues full of emotions: he has no horse - he gets horses, but he unintentionally sacrifices pink - people ask the doctor the impossible - with the unearthly carriage he is driven into space at night. A children's choir sings twice. The narration is fast. The text shows elements of the dream , the fairy tale , the ballad , but also the sober reportage .

Biographical references

Kafka was possibly inspired to the story by his uncle Siegfried Löwy, who worked as a country doctor in a small village in Moravia . About this uncle, Kafka says in a letter to Max Brod : "And he lives in the country, indissoluble, content, just like a quiet, rustling madness that one takes to be the melody of life".

Kafka's diary entries from October 9, 1911 describe a dream of a brothel with a prostitute whose whole body was "covered with large, sealing-lacquer-red circles with pale edges and scattered red splatters".

On August 12, 1917, Kafka suffered a violent hemorrhage in connection with his tuberculosis , from which he eventually died. On September 5, 1917, he wrote to Max Brod that he had “predicted” his illness with the “blood wound” in the country doctor .

Kafka himself described Ein Landarzt as one of his few really successful stories.

Interpretative approaches

Kafka's stories, including the country doctor, have provoked a wide variety of interpretive approaches from the interpreters, from socially critical to psychoanalytic to religious .

Psychoanalytical approach to interpretation

Also in 1917 was the treatise "A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis" by Sigmund Freud . One insight from this is that “the ego is not master in its own house”. That is exactly the exclamation Rosa makes when the horses suddenly appear from the abandoned pigsty. Both refer to the unconscious in which the instincts are located. The powerful, proud horses are symbols of masculinity. The maid Rosa is the subject of the servant's instinctual gratification, but also of the country doctor's sexual imagination.

The young patient's wound is also described as "pink" with various efflorescences. It can be seen as a symbol of the inhibited drive and thus also of unsuccessful existence. But the existence of the country doctor is also fragile, because he too lives with repression and inhibitions, is not “master of his own house” and thus misses his life identity and the resulting demands.

Ries writes: “The country doctor's loss of control over the team of horses corresponds to the subversion of the subject : namely that what we call our 'I' is essentially passive in life, that we are lived by unknown, uncontrollable forces like Sigmund Freud in Das Ich und das Es 1923. "

Intertextual approach to interpretation

Kafka's reference to a number of previous literary texts was also used to interpret the narrative. As a thematic starting point, the expressionist father-son drama The Son (1914) by Walter Hasenclever , which premiered in Prague in 1916 shortly before the country doctor was written, can be seen. The relationship between doctor, groom and maid, as well as between doctor and patient, corresponds in the drama to a similar relationship between doctor, son and maid, so that the country doctor story, like The Judgment , can be understood as a father-son story with multiple perspectives revolves around the generation struggle and the question of succession. Other references are made to the tale of the 672nd Night (1895) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal , the narrative A case from practice (1898) by Anton Chekhov and the Legend of St. Julian the guest outdoors (1877) by Gustave Flaubert , to respect the subject of horses such for the Iliad of Homer (horses of Achilles ) to Shakespeare's Richard III. and to the novella about the horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas (1810) by Heinrich von Kleist (motif of horses in the pigsty).

The end of the country doctor corresponds to the end of Der Kübelreiter , who, after likewise unsuccessful efforts, takes off into the icy heights. At the same time there are internal connections to Gracchus the hunter , who is also lost in space and has to move on aimlessly. The clearly sexual references are less pronounced in Kafka's other short prose pieces than in the three fragments of the novel, The Lost One , The Castle and The Trial . The protagonists there experience sexuality primarily as a taboo and abuse, or as a vehicle to achieve certain goals.

Further approaches

Peter-André Alt sees in the country doctor the myth "of the eternal Jew Ahasver, who is condemned to roam unredeemed by the foreign country", taken up. However, this reference seems more obvious in the story The Hunter Gracchus , since there also the motive of not being able to die occurs and the question of guilt is asked.

Kindler's Lexicon (p. 42) states that Der Landarzt contains all points of medical criticism from Kafka's autobiographical writings. The failure of conventional medicine and then the (also ineffective) healing ceremonies of magical practices are demonstrated.

Adaptations

Film adaptations
Opera

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: A country doctor . In: The new seal. An almanac. Kurt Wolff, Leipzig 1918 [published in 1917]. (First edition)
  • Franz Kafka: A country doctor. Little stories. Kurt Wolff, Munich and Leipzig 1920. (first edition - but not for all texts)
  • Reprint of the first edition: Franz Kafka: Ein Landarzt. Little stories. Stroemfeld Verlag, ISBN 3-87877-941-0 .
  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe , Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka The stories. Published by Roger Herms, original version Fischer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3
  • Franz Kafka: The bucket rider - a hunger artist. (Collection of Kafka's short stories) Hamburger Reading Books Verlag 189th Heft, ISBN 978-3-87291188-9 .
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 249-313 (anthology), 252-261 (story).
  • Franz Kafka: A country doctor. Little stories. With pen drawings by Alfred Kubin . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main u. Leipzig 2003 ( Insel-Bücherei 1243), ISBN 9783458192435 .
  • Franz Kafka: A country doctor . With illustrations by Karel Hruška and a supplement on the origin and impact of the work, Vitalis Verlag, Prague 2016, ISBN 978-3-89919-239-1 .

Secondary literature

  • Juliane Blank: A country doctor. Little stories. In: Manfred Engel , Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 218-240, esp. 227-231.
  • Thomas Borgstedt: Kafka's Cubist storytelling. Multi-perspective and intertextuality in “A Country Doctor”. In: Irmgard M. Wirtz (Ed.): Kafka prescribed. Göttingen 2010, pp. 51–94.
  • Hans P. Guth: Symbol and Contextual Restraint: Kafka's "Country Doctor". In: PMLA 80 (1965), pp. 427-431.
  • Henry Hatfield: Life as Nightmare: Franz Kafka's “A Country Doctor” . In: Henry Hatfield: Crisis and Continuity in Modern German Fiction. Ten essays by Henry Hatfield . Ithaca, London 1969, pp. 49-62.
  • Hans Helmut Hiebel : Franz Kafka. "A country doctor" . Munich 1984.
  • Robert Kauf: Responsibility. The Theme of Kafka's Country Doctor Cycle . In: Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972), pp. 420-432.
  • Detlef Kremer: A country doctor . In: Michael Müller (Ed.): Interpretations. Franz Kafka. Novels and short stories . Stuttgart: Reclam 1994. pp. 197-214.
  • Hans Lösener: Text system and perspectivity - On Franz Kafka's story "Ein Landarzt" . In: Hans Lösener: Between Word and Word. Interpretation and text analysis . Paderborn: Fink 2006. pp. 125-192.
  • Helmut Motekat : Interpretation as an opening up of poetic reality (with an interpretation of Franz Kafka's short story "Ein Landarzt") In: Interpretations of modern prose . Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Munich 1973, pp. 5-25.
  • Ewald Rösch: Clouded knowledge. Comments on Franz Kafka's story "Ein Landarzt" . In: Rainer Schönhaar (Ed.): Dialog. Literature and literary studies under the sign of Franco-German encounter. Festival ceremony for Josef Kunz . Berlin 1973, pp. 205-243.

Web links

Wikisource: A Country Doctor  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 493 ff; P. 29.
  2. ^ Letter to Max Brod dated September 5, 1917
  3. ↑ Ries p. 83
  4. ↑ Alt p. 505 ff.
  5. ^ Wiebrecht Ries: Kafka for an introduction. Hamburg: Junius 1993, ISBN 3-88506-886-9 , p. 85
  6. ↑ Borgstedt, p. 67ff .; Quotes from Hasenclever's “The Son”: “Let yourself be warned about the sweet worms of this melody. Don't you want to accompany me to the beds in my hospital - the redness of your youth writhes in a rotten foam and swelling ”-“ Often, when the night bell rang through the house, your father got up and fetched wine from the cellar and hurried to a sick person who was dying. "
  7. ↑ Borgstedt, p. 81ff.
  8. ↑ Borgstedt, p. 84ff.
  9. ↑ Borgstedt, p. 89ff.
  10. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 501
  11. ↑ [1]