Flail Years (Jean Paul)

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Jean Paul
* 1763 † 1825

Flegeljahre is a novel by Jean Paul that was published by Cotta in Tübingen in 1804 and 1805 . The novel, consisting of four volumes , is available as a fragment. It tells about the twin brothers Walt and Vult - two starving Muses and Schulzen sons - and also about citizens and nobles in Franconia and the surrounding area in the 1890s .

A number in round brackets refers to the page in the source or in the literature reference.

content

The overall legacy

The wealthy Mr. Van der Kabel from Haßlau blessed the time. Seven citizens who think they could inherit the dearly dead man appear at the opening of the will. When they are told that they will initially not inherit anything and a newbie, one of the sons of the village mayor von Elterlein (not the little mountain town of Elterlein near Annaberg in the Ore Mountains ) is said to be the universal heir, their hope quickly turns into anger. In a following will it is determined that one of the seven gentlemen could inherit a house of the deceased. Condition: This heir must be the first to cry at least one tear after Van der Kabel. One of Kabelschen's disinherited heirs brings about the required difficult emotional movement and at least inherits the house. But even the greenhorn, that's Peter Gottwalt Harnisch - called Walt - it is not made easy. The encompassed will demands that the farmer's son from Elterlein can only take over the inheritance after he has proven himself as a piano tuner, gardener, notary, proofreader, bookseller, country school teacher and pastor. In addition, Walt has to prove that he can get along with the seven Mr. Accessite heirs [secondary heirs] by living with each one for a week. That is difficult, because most of the gentlemen throw clubs between the legs of their bread thief, Walt. When Walt finally becomes a piano tuner, his broken strings are counted. A hidden subsidiary clause in the will takes effect. The gentlemen sideline heirs cut off 32 beds of the heirs from Walt; a bed for each string - much to the annoyance of Walt's farmer-minded father. As a notary, Walt also makes legal notarial blunders . He has to be careful, he has already cut away 32 beds with the tuning hammer. This continues with Walt's forest. Again under the pretext that the testamentary conditions were not fulfilled, the sideline heirs simply cut down stately trees. Walt takes it all calmly; but not the father, who is completely oriented towards property.

The way of life of the potential heir Walt must be flawless. After adultery (Walt is a bachelor) and sitting in dungeon, restrictions threaten. However, lying on the sick bed and death bed is permitted.

Walt speculates: Maybe I owe my inheritance to poetry (72).

The reader does not find out from the fragment of the novel whether Walt, the alleged overall heir of the Van der Kabel inheritance , will now inherit and what he will inherit.

The complete novel

With the exception of the hunger years in Leipzig's schools, Walt stayed with his parents in his birthplace , wrote poetry and quietly sees himself as a second Petrarch . Walt's twin brother Vult, actually called this Quod Deus vult - what God wills , roamed the world for years and earned his living as a flute virtuoso Van der Harnisch . The income from the performances in almost all of Europe had never been enough to support the poor parents. Vult, born to be a businessman (496), played the flute, but the money went flat (95). He returns home after fourteen and a half years to give a concert in Haßlau and to see parents and siblings incognito , just as Walt, in order to fulfill a testamentary condition, is taking the difficult examination to become a notary . The father, mayor Harnisch , who at the time beat the flute piper out of the house, no longer wants to know the prodigal son.

The brothers embrace after they have recognized each other and cry for a long time . Both are authors. Vult, a real world lynx , is presented not only as a soloist, but also as a satirist and author of the Greenland Trials . Throughout the entire novel, the brothers write, sometimes late into the night , on a double novel, finally titled Hoppelpoppel or the heart . Previously, the title Flegeljahre was under discussion for the joint project. Vult continues to weave the novel among the instruments (152) and does not take the work on the manuscript so seriously. Vult writes to Walt: In future I will work much harder; for I really do too little for our entire novel, especially since I do nothing for it (404).

The brothers move in together, inhabit because of the halved the rent a neighborhood like a pair birds nest . In the Simultaneum the authors are only separated by a Spanish wall. Sometimes one of the two authors watches the other write through the partition . In their double cage , the brothers at Hoppelpoppel work day and night because it's winter right now - the best time for letters. In order to save light , extensive conversations and flute playing are postponed to dusk. Walt is happy about the length of the dusk and the starry morning (485). He eats his bread and says to himself: The whole court is now eating bread like me (486).

The finished manuscript is sent to the publisher Magister Dyk in Leipzig and is returned immediately. Peter Hammer , the next publisher, can not be found in Cologne . Then the work is sent without success to Mr. Merkel in Berlin , the letter and writer, so that he can recommend the book to a scholar, Mr. Nicolai. Then is the novel of Mr. Von Trattner to Vienna sent because you then, says should Vult, only half frank.

Both the inheritance and the love story outlined below are, to the chagrin of the reader, not "acceptably" ended in the novel fragment. It also remains open whether a publisher has taken pity on the Hoppelpoppel manuscript. But at least the twins split up in a believable scene at the end of the novel. H. Walt stays in Haslau and Vult, blowing the flute, goes out into the free world from which he came - at the beginning of the novel - even giving concerts in Paris and Warsaw. Before his melodious departure, Vult says to Walt: I'll leave you as you were and leave as I came (563). I am well, you cannot be changed, I cannot be improved (565). With that everything is said.

Wina

Walt loves a Polish woman, Fraulein Wina , the quiet virgin (554), daughter of General Zablocki and the bride of Count Klothar. Wina means winner (291). The general has a manor in Walt's hometown. Wina is a Catholic and Walt is a Lutheran (288).

As luck would have it, Walt finds a lost letter to Klothar on his way . In it, Wina dumps the count. The finder is of good cheer. The general keeps Walt busy copying slippery papers. Jean Paul describes Walt as the general's erotic secretary . Anyway, Walt meets the white, slim Wina. When Walt sees the virgin , the violence over the earth says: She is his first and last love, sorry for him as he wants! (206) The shy approach of the young poet to the beautiful young girl is described from the point of view of the adolescent lover. Wina, level-headed, is not averse and walks with Walt through her moonlit garden when her father is absent. A chaperone cannot be missing. On the morning of the day on which he will meet Wina, the human flower , Walt jumps out of bed so happily as if it were a bridal day . The next time they meet, Wina throws a flower look at Walt that he dreams of too long . Wina's gaze kindles a fiery heartbeat in him . Walt is already on the electric insulated stool of first love and flashes (292). Wina trembles, he trembles and no longer stretches his arms out towards heaven alone, but towards the most beautiful thing on earth (383).

When Wina has to follow her father on a trip, Walt also goes away. His main intention was not to know the name of the city that he might encounter on the way, as well as of the villages (308).

When Walt was working for the general as a copyist for the last time, Wina greeted him quietly: Were you well, Herr Harnisch? Wina has a request. Walt grants it: On New Year's morning, a flute solo is to be played for a friend of Winas, and Wina would like to accompany a stretch verse set to music by Walts with her delicious, artfully singing voice . Wina throws Walt a glimpse of space , and the recipient swims in front of her in love and bliss . Vult feels the pressure of low ancestry especially in the preparation of social celebrations . Nevertheless, the flute player is now determined to make his hostile landing on Wina's heart on New Year's night - with the flute in hand (534). The performance is a success. Vult takes the opportunity to demand Wina's love affair . The heartbreaker receives his refus [rejection] and knows God damn it, he [brother Walt] loves Wina!

In the fragment of the novel, the series of encounters between Walt and the beautiful Wina Zablocki, which is scattered over the text , abruptly breaks off after the larvae dance (551), a masked ball. Walt is a miner to the ball and makes Wina as a simple nun, with a half mask and a fragrant Aurikelstrauß : Suddenly sees it, the half mask namely the half-face of the nun right on; Suddenly he recognizes Wina by the fine but bold line of the rose lips and the chin, full of determination , who only gazes out of the darkness with gentle star eyes (553). The lovers look at each other behind the dark larvae, as it were the stars in a solar eclipse, and each soul sees the other far away and therefore wants to be clearer (554). For the first time, Walt touches Wina's back and looks at her face, breathing life . Walt can't dance, but still puts his square waltz on the floor with Wina and asks for the next dance so that he can be close to Wina for a long time . The beautiful says softly yes! and lifts up the calm, full eyes to Walt. In a secondary room , Walt inexplicably gets involved in a larva swap with his brother . Now Vult convincingly plays his brother Walt in front of the astonished Wina. Wina can be fooled. Again the man of the world, Vult, demands her love-yes , receives it, laughs at Walt, dances to the end and disappears from the cheering circle .

The reader learns nothing more about the progress of the love story.

structure

The reader can enjoy a stringent plot especially at the beginning and at the end of the text. The inheritance, the double novel and the love story are three solid constituents of the novel's plot. Such systematization efforts don't hit the mark. The extensive text is a highly complicated mosaic made up of hundreds of stones.

The inheritance is highlighted at the beginning of the novel and it seems that this story stimulates the plot. But over time, the reader loses sight of the legacy. Only at the end, in the fourth volume, does the author come back to it, but actually only fleetingly. It is similar with the double novel Hoppelpoppel . The references to it appear in the text as succinct inserts. Authors among the readers will certainly enjoy intellectual chatter about a novel manuscript. And finally the love story between the beautiful Wina and Walt - the reader has to bite through to that.

Polymeter

Polymeter (many dimensions) or Streckvers is what Jean Paul calls the rhythmic prose that his poet Walt publishes in the poet corner of a Haslauer Blatt. When Wina recites his stretch verse Das Maiblümchen for Walt , the poet cries and the reciter cries with him without noticing it :

White bell with the yellow clapper, why do you lower yourself? Is it shame because you, pale as snow, break through the earth earlier than the great, proud flames of color of the tulips and the roses? - Or do you lower your white heart before the mighty sky that creates the new earth on the old, or before the stormy May? ... (518)

humor

  • Sunday of a poet: Walt offered his morning prayer, in which he thanked God for his future. He now started the double novel (120).
  • Likewise, I bowle in letters with a very drafted bishop; we write to ourselves how much wood each made; the other puts and placed his pins exactly according to the letter and then pushes in turn (135).
  • Walt receives an oral invitation card (172) to the dinner.
  • In the arbor, Walt finds a garter with Wina's friend's name embroidered on it. The simple-minded young man takes it for a bracelet and gives it back to the loser with the words a beautiful ribbon of love (283).
  • General Zablocki speaks vehemently to servants. Like an Aeolian harp, Wina translates the storm wind from Polish (363).
  • ... that the German audience wishes its authors, like the English audience of its bears, not only to see them dance but also to see them harassed (389).
  • Jean Paul castigates the pirated printers in Vienna and Cologne by having the writing twins naively send the Hoppelpoppel manuscript to Vienna and Cologne.
    • The reprint, Herr von Trattner, replied from Austria that he seldom printed something that had not already been printed .
    • The Kölner Post is not aware of any Peter Hammer - no wonder, it is the oldest virtual publisher of pirated printers.

fun

  • We are talking about the doctoral cap of Dr. Hat (297).
  • The inner man can be fed into a great man in fourteen days , like a goose, hung suspended, blindfolded, ears plugged, and fed and fattened so far in no longer time that the liver weighs four pounds (391).
  • A well-known author is humble; but that is his misfortune that nobody knows how modest one is, since one cannot speak of oneself and cannot say it (393).
  • In winter, my Günther, that's how the grain is threshed;
    when it's cold, not old, just bravely frozen?     (478)

Quotes

  • To the right and left were the meadows, the rolling fields and the summer (130).
  • The sun rises in front of battlefields full of heroes - in front of the garden of the bride and groom - in front of the bed of a dying man at the same time (217).
  • We are all individual (218).
  • Every distance makes you more beautiful (220).
  • Oh, who can say in a often confused life: I am pure (264).
  • The whole world shines for the poet (282).
  • Eternity is just as great as immeasurability; we refugees in both therefore have only one small word for both: time-space (310).
  • All beings must dream in the end (373).
  • God does not dream (374).
  • Man must lack [an] external creation access to inner (480).
  • The highest delight makes you serious like pain (490).

Sentiment

  • The lower lip of the dismayed notary was drawn down deeply by a hot, heavy pain of love (265).
  • Walt sat down, rested his head on the hand that covered his eyes, and had a long pure pain (274).
  • The moon shines on a very blue arbor made of blue flowers. Blue gentian - blue star flowers - blue speedwell - blue clematis barred to form a small sky (373).

Testimonials

  • According to Günter de Bruyn (260), Jean Paul praised the flailing years as the work in which he actually lived.
  • Gert Ueding (144) quotes two notes by Jean Paul on the intention to write in the flail years :
    • Love and poetry in the struggle with reality (after Gustav Lohmann).
    • Tell me how you wanted to portray yourself as Vult and Walt in the flail years (after Christian Otto (a friend of Jean Paul) and after Ernst Förster ).

reception

  • Sprengel (56) quotes a review of the Flegeljahre from its publication year 1804, which he attributes to Karl Leopold Heinrich Reinhardt: What a chaos of mature and immature knowledge, - of bits and pieces from all subjects of learning, ... of genuinely funny ... and flat ideas - of sublime ones , deeply thought and shallow, false thoughts - of beautiful and tender, - sickly and exaggerated feelings - generally of excellence and bizarre of every genre in the writings of this ingenious, original writer !!
  • Sprengel (197) quotes a review of the Flegeljahre by Karl Christian Planck from 1867. The reviewer goes into the triangular relationship between Walt-Wina-Vult.
  • In 1927 Karl Wolfskehl classified the flail years as Jean Paul's most perfect poetry (quoted in Sprengel (246)).
  • According to Schulz (367), a piece of German reality on the threshold of the industrial age is captured in the flail years.
  • Ortheil emphasizes the humor in the boozy years.
  • Berhorst goes into the readings of the flail years during the reception history and adds his own.

literature

source

Jean Paul: Flegel years . Reclam Stuttgart 1970, 583 pages.

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