Else von der Fir

Scene "Encounter in the forest" in the historical novella "Else von der Tanne" by Wilhelm Raabe. Graphics by Kühn und Ade.

Else von der Tanne is a historical novella by Wilhelm Raabe , which was written in the winter of 1863/1864 and published in 1865 in the magazine “Freya. Illustrated sheets for the educated world ”was published by Moritz Hartmann in Stuttgart . The book edition was brought out by Hallberger in Stuttgart in 1869 as part of the “The Rainbow” collection. During Raabe's lifetime, reprints were published in 1871, 1896, 1901 and 1905.

In Germany no one can escape the Thirty Years' War , even if it has been hidden deep in the wild Harz for years .

content

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 1648, Pastor Leutenbacher is still sitting over his Christmas sermon in the Harz village of Wallrode . He can't do it. It snowed all day. “The dust and vortex” in front of the door doesn't want to end. Somebody knocks on the window and brings a message: “The beautiful young Else must die”. Peoplebacher jumps up and penetrates through the drifting snow to the lonely hut by the tall fir. Else's father, Magister Konradus, answers the knock. The pastor is let in. Else is dead. The clergyman kneels down. Then he leaves the dwelling and gets lost in the wilderness. The farmers are looking for their pastor and only find his body on Boxing Day after a long search far from the village.

Leutenbacher was born in 1610. The “robbers of General Pfuhl ” and then those of Linnard Torstenson had tortured him. The barbarians from the Gallas troop had given him the " Swedish drink ".

Bannier had eighty thousand people killed north of the Harz Mountains. When the plague broke out in Magdeburg in 1636, Magister Konradus carried his six-year-old daughter Else to the Harz Forest during the Swedish era. Five years earlier, two siblings and Else's mother had been burned to death . The Magister Konradus had been a teacher at the cathedral school in Magdeburg.

The scholar builds a crooked hut by the tall fir tree in the forest away from the village. When Menschenbacher wants to check on the strangers, Else is friendly to him, but the Master is hostile. He threatens him and does not want to speak to him, whereupon the pastor goes back to the village. Once there, he advises his community to leave the strangers in peace, since everyone is confused in the war years in which they lived. The villagers are not enthusiastic, but listen to their pastor. Three weeks later, Magister Konrad surprisingly comes to the village and sits down in front of the ruins of the community center. The villagers then send for Leutenbacher, who also comes and is greeted politely in Latin by Konradus. He first apologizes to the pastor for his initially hostile behavior and asks him and his community to help build a hut for him and Else. If they help him, he promises to reward them. The villagers are initially divided, as some want the reward, but others no longer trust anyone due to the suffering of the war. When Konrad finally gives them his name and offers them four gold pieces, the doubters are overruled. A contract is signed with a handshake between the Magister and Pastor Leutenbacher. The Wallröder help. Although the two strangers are not at all comfortable with some farmers, the Magdeburg residents are allowed to stay. The Magister, who among other things owns some scientific instruments, does not make himself particularly popular with the uneducated villagers with these possessions. These devices are alien to them and since Konrad also tries to keep what he is doing as secret as possible from them, bad rumors about him are soon circulating in the village. These do not lose their strength over time, but rather gain significantly in strength. Soon all the villagers, with the exception of Leutenbacher, regret letting the strangers stay in this place. At first, Magister Konradus doesn't want to know anything from Pastor Leutenbacher. But in the spring of 1637 the master gave up his restraint. He meets the pastor in the forest and since Else fell ill over the winter, he asks him about a place where St. John's wort can be found. Menschenbacher shows him this, helps him pick the plant and starts a conversation with him. The two men realize that they have met an educated counterpart and then slowly but steadily become friends with each other, which also means that the pastor learns the history of the Magister and his family. The miracle and the magic now begin for the pastor. Menschenbacher is drawn under the spell of the child's large, dark blue eyes. Else teaches the pastor the song of the good bishop Buko and picks yellow buttercups in the mountain forest. A rumble comes from the plain. Lieutenant General Königsmark chases with the imperial . Over the years Else grew up from the fir tree to the most beautiful of the virgins. Peace comes into the soul of the tormented pastor as soon as he is allowed to be near Else. It then seems to him that he is not living in times of war at the moment.

Pastor Leutenbacher persuades Else and her father to go down to the village only once on Midsummer Day in 1648. The Magdeburg citizens are supposed to hear Leutenbacher's sermon. Both outsiders agree, but overlook threatening signs when they go to church unfamiliar. The deer accompanies Else and her father to the edge of the forest, looks after them briefly and then flees into the forest in a wild hurry. The villagers they meet on their way do not return their greetings and act unfriendly. The two forest dwellers do not even take the obvious warning from an old woman who is notorious in the village seriously. It comes as it has to and the impending disaster takes its course. Else is considered a witch in the village and the caring father is her sorcerer. When Menschenbacher wanted to greet the two of them in the churchyard, the villagers clearly demanded that the strangers be forbidden from going to church. But even the pastor does not take the anger of his community seriously and makes the mistake of taking Else by the hand and leading her to church. Furthermore, his gaze does not rest on his congregation during the service, but only on Else. This increases the anger of the villagers immeasurably and the villagers left behind in the cemetery are now trying to banish the witchers in the church. To do this, they use a superstitious ritual, which includes the spreading of grave earth and the attachment of a branch broken from a gallows tree. When the churchgoers leave the church after mass, their comrades call out to them what they have done to banish the witch, and the congregation gathers screaming in front of the church to see whether the strangers can leave the house of God. The pastor now makes the next mistake and asks the strangers to wait in the church until the angry crowd has dispersed. When this does not happen, however, the father and daughter try to leave the church anyway and are accompanied by Leutenbacher, who calls his congregation to listen to him and curb their anger. His efforts are in vain as the villagers believe that the strangers have bewitched him. Lumps of earth, sticks and stones fly and one of these pebbles hits Else in the left breast, whereupon she bleeds from her mouth and passes out. Menschenbacher and the Magister carry them to the rectory, where they spend the day. Only when evening falls does Else wake up briefly, remembers what happened and then sinks back into a swoon. The clergyman and her father then take them to the forest hut and no villager, apart from the old woman from the morning, follows them. From then on the virgin lies sick in her father's hut. This is where the story of the pastor who wrote his Christmas sermon, already described above, starts again. His body is buried by the villagers in the village, while the Magister buries his daughter in the wilderness. He leaves the forest in spring and the old woman knows how to report that the shadow of death has followed him.

shape

The story is told on three levels. First of all, there is the description of the pastor's last hours of life at Christmas, sketched above. Then in those few hours Pastor Leutenbacher wistfully remembers the good eleven years in which he was allowed to love Else. Third, the narrator has his say. At several passages in the text, he looks into the gloomy future, about which the reader does not yet know exactly. For example, he says: "It was terrible - a pain beyond compare, to have to think of this splendor, this blissfulness of life, which should sink forever, in this winter stormy night." With such inserts the attentive reader is deprived of all hope.

Oppermann described Raabe's tough struggle for a new, nontrivial form. The author had previously had success with the fairly linearly structured and therefore catchy “ Hunger Pastor ”.

Raabe's deep pessimism when he speaks of war takes shape in the novella: "You two [Else and the pastor] were given the best that God had to give on this Christmas Eve of the year one thousand six hundred forty-eight." With the best comes death meant as redemption from evil.

Central themes

Demarcation

"Boundaries play an important role in Else von der Tanne." The Thirty Years' War, against the background of which the novella is set, has to do with this topic. The spatial border shifts on what was then the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation are proof of this. That this was not without consequences for the population at the time becomes clear in Raabe's work. In the margins, reference is made again and again to the suffering that the villagers had to endure from the mercenaries. This results in further demarcations within the village and its immediate surroundings, which are of central importance for the novella. One of the first distinctions to be made is that of the pastor from his community. Although he belongs to the village community due to his job and his origins, his education clearly distinguishes himself from the villagers. He usually writes his sermons outside the oppressive narrowness of the village and its self-contained village community, in the forest of Wallrode . This makes the forest more important. Although it is part of the wilderness and is separated from the civilization of the village, this demarcation is made even more acute because the pastor (and later also Master Konradus) can also understand it as a place of free, spiritual development. "The forest thus becomes a place where education and free development of people are still possible, where human existence is determined by the beautiful and the good." This is in stark contrast to the war-ravaged village and the lack of education and conformity of opinion that prevail there. It is therefore no wonder that the Magister and his daughter are not moving to Wallrode but to the forest. However, this reinforces a further demarcation. The foreign master's degree does not even try to remove the boundaries of being foreign. At first he even reinforces it with his dismissive behavior towards the villagers and their pastor. The only contact that is halfway friendly at first happens on a purely business basis. This is due to the fact that the Magister drew a line between himself and the rest of humanity, since he left Magdeburg after the death of his family to live with his remaining daughter far away from civilization. The events of St. John's Day exemplarily show that crossing borders by strangers is not tolerated by the villagers. The result of these events is also decisive in the fact that the pastor leaves the village in the end to die. He chooses death outside the boundaries of the village because he no longer seems to have any ties to his community. “The villagers do not even accept his crossing of the border to the forest in death,” as they carry his body back to the village and bury it there.

Dealing with the stranger

Another topic of the novella is dealing with the foreign. Mistrust plays a major role here. The turmoil and suffering of the war have made the Wallroder extremely suspicious of anything foreign. How far their suspicions go can be seen in their reactions to the request of the master's degree, who offers them money to help build his hut. “Some said that one had to help the foreign gentleman because he offered money and asked little; the others thought that the thing could not be trusted and that they did not like the essence at all. The latter had their heads full of all kinds of uncanny misgivings and said: they no longer trusted (sic!) Anyone, not their neighbors, not their relatives, hardly even the Lord God. ”For some, mistrust seems to even go beyond the boundaries of the stranger and to influence even the known. Only their pastor does not seem to show any signs of mistrust, because "[...] he alone cultivates a tolerant image of man". He tries to approach the strangers and establish contact with them. In the beginning he did not succeed in doing this, since the master's degree took a defensive stance towards the villagers who were foreign to him, but over time the educated man also reduced his mistrust towards people bacher. The strangers become acquaintances and the relationship between the two can definitely be described as friendly. The common element between the two men is their education. It is therefore not surprising that the village community finds no relation to the strangers, as they do not have anything in common with them and are just as suspicious of the Magister's education as their foreign origin. The bad relationship between the villagers and the strangers is thus characterized by mistrust, which is not improved even by the friendship of the pastor with the latter. Wallrode's population does not perceive the positive attitude towards life that their pastor gains from the contact with the strangers, especially Else. The residents are even strengthened in their aversion by this friendship, as Menschenbacher is moving further and further away from the village and is visiting strangers more and more frequently. The foreign in itself becomes something that changes for the villagers. It changes the clergyman they see as part of their village community. The guilt is therefore not sought from the pastor, but from the outsiders, since this change only occurred through them. Thus there is a projection of the negative onto the foreign and the foreign people who live in the forest are inevitably associated with everything negative. However, since this negative is not really visible, since the strangers do not commit any obvious crimes or the like, the invisible, in this case witchcraft, becomes the most satisfactory explanation of the uneducated and superstitious villagers. The scientific objects that Konrad brought with him, unknown to most people of that time, still contribute significantly to this idea. So there is no factual discussion. The stranger is treated with suspicion and there is no attempt to deal with him. Only the negative impressions are perceived and reinforced by assumptions and rumors.

Violence emanating from the crowd

Another theme that the novella includes is crowd violence. Here again the war plays an important role, as it consists on the one hand of the violence that the various armies, which consist of masses of people, bring against each other and on the other hand of the violence that is inflicted on the civilian population. Some battles of the Thirty Years' War are mentioned again and again, as the war noise can be heard in Wallrode and its surroundings every now and then. The violence that the civilian population experiences as a result becomes much clearer when looking at the destroyed Magdeburg and the village. Wallrode was attacked by three different armies and the villagers always suffered. They have thus been shaped by mass violence. It is therefore not surprising that the violence that hits young Else at the end of the book emanates from a mass of angry villagers and not from one or two individuals. “Especially in the crowd, the villagers embody evil par excellence.” This can also be seen in the fact that the individuals named and individualized by Raabe (Else, Magister Konrad and the pastor) stand for the good, the virtuous and the educated. They suffer from the war, but do not lose their humanity under its influence. The type of violence described in the novella by the villagers, which is based on mass thinking, fits in seamlessly with the violence of war and the armies associated with it, since here, too, two alien parties meet. The topic of dealing with the foreign mixes with the topic of war and mass violence.

Quote

• "There is no salvation in the world from the world."

reception

• This story was invented by Raabe. So there are no sources that relate to history.
• Hoppe counts the text to be one of Raabe's most popular publications. This is also evident from the Raabe bibliography in the Braunschweig edition. There Meyen lists 23 issues and 14 reviews.
• The novella is "almost a masterpiece".
• Another example is Rüttiger's article.

expenditure

First edition

• The Rainbow. Seven stories by Wilhelm Raabe. Hallberger, Stuttgart 1869. Vol. 1 contains The Hämelschen children. Else von der Fir. Celtic bones. Saint Thomas

Used edition

• Else von der Tanne or Das Glück Domini Friedemann Leutenbacher, poor servant of the Word of God at Wallrode in misery. P. 529–567 in: Peter Goldammer (Ed.), Helmut Richter (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Selected works in six volumes. Volume 1: The Chronicle of Sperlingsgasse . After the great war . Stories 1860–1870. 928 pages. Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1966 (text basis: Karl Hoppe (Hrsg.): The historical-critical Braunschweig edition)

• Wilhelm Raabe: Else from the fir tree . Reclams Universal Library. Stuttgart 2009.

Further editions

• Wilhelm Raabe: Else from the fir tree . With 8 full-page original stone drawings by Hugo Steiner-Prag . 55 pages. Hermann Klemm publishing house, Berlin around 1926
• Else von der Fir . Pp. 159-198. With an appendix, written by Hans Oppermann, pp. 455–473 in Karl Hoppe (arrangement), Hans Oppermann (arrangement), Hans Plischke (arrangement): Erzählungen. The last right . A funeral oration from 1609 . Elderflower . The Haemel children . Else von der Fir. Celtic bones . Three feathers . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1974. Vol. 9.1 (2nd edition, obtained by Karl Hoppe and Rosemarie Schillemeit), ISBN 3-525-20118-4 in Hoppe (ed.), Jost Schillemeit (ed.), Hans Oppermann ( Ed.), Kurt Schreinert (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
• Wilhelm Raabe: Else from the fir tree . Reclam's Universal Library 7575, anno 1986, ISBN 978-3-15-007575-3

literature

• Andreas Blödorn: The death semantics of realism. On the connection between sensory perception, death and narration using the example of Wilhelm Raabe's “Else von der Tanne” . In: Yearbook of the Raabe Society (2014), pp. 1–19.
• 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.
• Eberhard Rohse : Raabe and the young Brecht. On the reception of early historical stories by Wilhelm Raabe in Bertolt Brecht's high school drama “The Bible”. In: Yearbook of the Raabe Society 1978, pp. 17–62 (on Else von der Tanne especially pp. 39–46). ISSN 0075-2371
• 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 .
• Andrea Rüttiger: Borders and Exclusions. Dealing with the stranger in Wilhelm Raabe's "Else von der Tanne". S. 143–156 in: Ulrich Kittstein (Ed.), Stefani Kugler (Ed.): Poetic Orders. On the narrative prose of German realism. 292 pages. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3670-5

Web links

• Else von der Tanne in the Gutenberg-DE project
• The text at Zeno.org

Remarks

1. ↑ Raabe writes about the pastor: "His congregation ..., gripped and shaken by the madness of the times - his congregation, beside himself, mad, furious, knew nothing of any tie that tied them to heaven and earth." Edition, p. 556, 20. Zvo)
2. ↑ see also Raabe's note on the Else manuscript: "scriptum in miseriis" (Fuld, p. 196, 4. Zvo)
3. ↑ For example, Hatzfeld's cuirassiers hang up the mayor of Wallrode in 1644 (edition used, p. 554, 14th Zvo)
4. ↑ Fuld, p. 195, 3. Zvo (Fuld does not justify his statement. Presumably those details are meant that were usually dismissed as kitsch in the 20th century and later. For example, Else is sometimes spoken to by a tame deer. P. 551, 15. Zvu) accompanied.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ von Studnitz, p. 310, entry 26
2. ↑ Goldammer and Richter, p. 871 above
3. ↑ Hoppe in the Braunschweig edition, Vol. 9.1, p. 466
4. ↑ Edition used, p. 549, 15. Zvu
5. ↑ Oppermann, p. 70 below to p. 71 below
6. ↑ Edition used, p. 567, 2nd Zvo
7. ↑ Rüttiger, p. 144
8. ↑ Rüttiger, p 146
9. ↑ Rüttiger, p. 147 f.
10. ^ Reclam, p. 11.
11. ↑ Rüttiger p. 149.
12. ↑ Rüttiger, p 148
13. ↑ Edition used, p. 564, 13. Zvu
14. ^ Goldammer and Richter, p. 871, 2. Zvo
15. ↑ Hoppe in the Braunschweig edition, vol. 9.1, p. 466, 3rd Zvo
16. ↑ Meyen, pp. 65-68
17. ↑ Meyen, pp. 327-329