Elisabeth Aman

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Elisabeth Aman (born as Elisabeth Volkart on January 11, 1888 in Winterthur ; † January 22, 1966 in Kilchberg ZH ) was a Swiss writer .

Life

Elisabeth Aman was the daughter of Georg Gottfried Volkart -Ammann (1850–1928) and Molly († 1901), née Ammann. Her three brothers died in childhood. Her father left his three daughters Nanny Wunderly (1878-1962), a long-time patron and close confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke , Elisabeth and Marguerite (1897-1987), an organic horticulture and watercolor is shown in with Hans Bühler was married, the Seeburg Castle in Kreuzlingen. Elisabeth Aman had contact with important writers and artists from an early age through her parents' house.

Elisabeth Aman was married to the lawyer Charles Heinrich (1882–1941) and lived in England for the first few years of their marriage. Together they had four sons and a daughter. With the death of her husband she got into a serious mental crisis. Five years later, she lost her eldest son in a plane crash. Rainer Maria Rilke's friend Max Picard , with whom she was closely connected, encouraged her to write.

In 1952, at the age of 63, after decades of preparatory work, she published her main work, the extensive historical novel The Legacy. For the most part she wrote the novel in a secluded place in a tower room at the family's Seeburg Castle. The novel was well received by the critics, and in 1952 they received a prize from the Swiss Schiller Foundation endowed with 1,500 francs .

However, it had little success with readers, which may be due to the subject matter (events in a French village in the 19th century), the sheer scope or the unusual narrative structure that does not correspond to the conventions of the narrative style of historical novels. There are also said to have been specific reservations about the author in Switzerland. At a book fair, for example, the publisher Hermann Rinn was told that “there is a real boycott of the novel, that the author is resented for the fact that she, a rich woman who does not need to start writing now”. Less than 1,000 copies of the first edition were sold. Years later, Elisabeth Aman bought the rest from the publisher at a high price.

The narrative itself has a framework in which a manuscript comes into the hands of a young American dealing with the fate of a Comte d'Egrenay, Seigneur de Corbeville, who lived in the second half of the 19th century. This main part of the novel presents in 15 chapters events that took place over several decades and captures numerous characters whose threads of life are linked with each other and with the protagonist who was arrested on suspicion of murder and ultimately wrongly convicted.

One of the peculiarities that may cause the novel's low success with the reading public is that it is actually ahistorical. This means that he repeatedly eludes a historical classification and temporal fixation of events and circumstances by methodically leaving references and identities in the dark. As a result, what appears on the surface as a "historical novel" is actually a timeless narrative. This describes the life of the farmers and the “little people” in rural Provence in a past century with precision and detail . One of the few annual dates given is accordingly 1900 as the year of death of the author of the manuscript, as the turn of the century at the same time marking the boundary between the timelessness of a pre-industrial Provence in the internal plot and the framework plot in the modern era.

The story Manuel und das Mädchen was published in 1952 by the same Munich publisher Hermann Rinn.

The Bernese literary critic Elsbeth Pulver (1928–2017) reissued The Legacy in 1997 in the “Swiss Texts” series from Paul Haupt Verlag , with detailed explanations of the author's work and life. Pulver was able to draw on direct testimonies from the writer's son, Thomas Aman, who was born in 1918.

Elisabeth Aman is buried in the Enzenbühl cemetery near Zurich.

Works

  • The legacy. The fate of the Comte d'Egrenay, known as Dreifuss. Novel. Rinn, Munich 1951. Reprint: Haupt, Bern a. a. 1997, ISBN 3-258-05644-7 .
  • Manuel and the girl. Narrative. Rinn, Munich 1952. Reprint: Haupt, Bern 2003, ISBN 3-258-06666-3 . Further reprint: Chronos, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-0340-0681-0 .

Awards

literature

  • Sabine Doering: The dehistoricization of history. Elisabeth Aman's novel “The Legacy” (1951). In: Marianne Henn (Ed.): History (s) - tell: Constructions of the past in literary works by German-speaking authors since the 18th century. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, pp. 53-67.
  • Anton Krättli: A rediscovered masterpiece - Elisabeth Aman's novel «The Legacy». In: Swiss monthly magazine - magazine for politics, economy, culture. Vol. 78 (1998), Issue 9, pp. 47-50 ( digitized version ).
  • Anton Krättli: Wrongly Forgotten - On the new edition of a novella by Elisabeth Aman. In: Swiss monthly magazine - magazine for politics, economy, culture. Vol. 84 (2004), Heft 2–3, S. 59, doi : 10.5169 / seals-167118 (on Manuel and the girl )
  • Charles Linsmayer : Aman, Elisabeth. In: Wilhelm Kühlmann (Ed.): Killy Literature Lexicon . Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. 2., completely revised Ed. De Gruyter, Berlin 2008, p. 121 f., Online .
  • Elsbeth Pulver: Epilogue to the new edition of The Legacy. Haupt, Bern u. a. 1997, ISBN 3-258-05644-7 , pp. 593-653.
  • Kurt Ruh: «The Legacy» by Elisabeth Aman. In: Journal for German Philology. 108: 244-263 (1989).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Renate Egli-Gerber: The last owners of the Seeburg Kreuzlingen. Accessed April 30, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Prices of the Swiss Schiller Foundation 1908–2012 ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schillerstiftung.ch
  3. ↑ Elsbeth Pulver: Epilogue to The Legacy. 1997, p. 651. Quoted from: Doering: Die Enthistorisierung der Geschichte. 2005, p. 67.
  4. ^ Doering: The dehistoricization of history. 2005, p. 67.
personal data
SURNAME Aman, Elisabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Volkart, Elisabeth (maiden name); Aman-Volkart, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Winterthur
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1966
Place of death Kilchberg ZH