Free hours at the window
Free hours at the window is a novella by Wilhelm Hauff that appeared for the first time in April 1826 in the newly founded magazine “Der Eremit in Deutschland”. After Hauff's death, the novella was published in the collection “Fantasies and Sketches” in 1828.
The novella tells the story of an impoverished man who moves into a small room and observes the goings-on in the neighboring house. The text is kept in a cheerful, often ironic tone and peppered with socially critical and literary aesthetic marginal notes.
Overview
The impoverished first-person narrator withdraws from social life and throws himself into observing life and goings-on in the neighboring house. The attendant explains to him about the neighbors, whom he himself is now watching intensely and overhearing across the street. The love between the apprentice shoemaker and the master shoemaker's daughter is doomed to failure because she is supposed to marry a rich man. Finally, the narrator talks to one of the neighbors, a writer, about the incomprehensibility of German versus French literature.
content
The motto of the novella is a saying by Horace: "Laetus sorte tua vives sapienter" (Be satisfied with your fate and you will live wisely).
In the future, the first-person narrator will have to be content with a small room in a remote part of the city, since two long-awaited inheritances have shattered. He withdraws from social life and shamefully disguises his poverty under the pretext of a melancholy mood. He spends his free hours by observing the life and goings-on in the neighboring house with the opera glasses and listening across the street. The narrator admits: "I often feel like the Toggenburg knight ..., but God should keep me from giving up the little bit of spirit like the Toggenburg."
The owner of the house, the “Russian cobbler”, lives on the ground floor of the neighboring house. He became rich in times of war by delivering shoes to the Russians. He wants to marry his daughter, who loves the journeyman cobbler, to a rich man, a fate the journeyman comes to terms with, willy-nilly. A noble widow of the chief forester lives on the first floor with two daughters and an unwanted son. The writer Dr. Salbe and the "little lieutenant" Münsterthurm, who likes to blow himself up, especially in view of the cousin of the chief forest master.
Between Dr. Salbe and the narrator develop a discussion about German literature and philosophy. The popular and generally understandable writing style of the French is admirable, while the Germans enjoy themselves in incomprehensibility and mystification. The people will be saved from enlightenment and will have to be content with harmless entertainment literature.
Emergence
Window show
In the theater, the "view over the wall", the wall show , serves to depict events that take place beyond the stage. In addition to the motif of the view from the window, modern prose also includes the “window show”, the habitual gaze of an observing narrator out of the window.
Hauff apparently owed the outer framework for his novella to such a window show, ETA Hoffmann's story “ Des Vetters Eckfenster ” from 1822. While Hoffmann's cousin is involuntarily tied to his room due to illness, Hauff's first-person narrator freely chooses his observer at the window of his room . Hoffmann dictated his window story as a paralyzed man two months before his death, while Hauff put his lively chat on paper with youthful vigor.
In the first chapter of the novella, the narrator admits: “I often feel like the Toggenburg knight” and closes with the last stanza of Schiller's “ Toggenburg Knight ” from 1797, a ballad that has a kind of inverted window display as its theme. A hopelessly loving knight builds a hermit's hut near the monastery into which his beloved has entered and watches her when she looks out the window until after many years death overtakes him.
Hauff's room
From October 1824 to April 1826 Hauff was employed in Stuttgart as court master by Ernst von Hügel, the president of the war council . He lived in a room (see cover picture) at the back of the old war ministry on Charlottenplatz opposite the restoration of the box . From the living room window he could watch the life and goings-on in front of the restaurant in the busy Kanalstrasse.
Hauff's first-person narrator observes the hustle and bustle in the neighboring house from the window of his rented apartment in Stuttgart. The "palace", as Hauff's caretaker calls the house in Weinstrasse, belonged to the "Russian cobbler" Rupfer, who had made money as a war profiteer during the "Russian era" through lucrative shoe deliveries to the Russians. According to another source, Hauff should not have used the Russian shoemaker's house as a model, but rather the house of the baker Rupfer in Büchsenstrasse.
In the Stuttgart City Lapidarium , you can visit a portal of the Russian shoemaker's house, built in 1764, which has a cartouche with a boot, the guild mark of the shoemaker, above the arch.
Quotes
- The invention of a coffee machine aroused the displeasure of the attendant who had previously worked for Dr. Ointment the coffee prepared:
- “I used to bring him the coffee too, but now he makes it himself, the hungry man, in the machine with alcohol. If he really burned his fingers with the spirit of wine; what does he need to make coffee with the machine. But of course, everything should now be done with machines and with steam. You will no longer allow a poor woman a penny that she has honestly earned. "
- Even in Hauff's time, the fight for a good figure was in fashion. One visitor complained to the narrator:
- “O horror! I've got two thumbs' breadth stronger for three months. I was beside myself, I was furious, I was close to laying a hand on myself. I discovered myself the young Baron F .; You know his splendid stature, he comforted me, he gave me means. ... First I had to take rhubarb tincture that I was almost dead. Then for eight days I wasn't allowed to enjoy anything but a cup full of barley gruel, a few oysters and a glass of Madeira. Every morning after eight o'clock I have to drink a glass of herb vinegar and then go for a walk. Today is the fifth day; it's true, it helps, I've already lost a thumb, but my strength is dwindling, I'm so weak that I won't be able to dance tonight. "
- The narrator mistrusted the attendant's “evil tongue”, who ascribed an “unchristian relationship” to the apprentice shoemaker and the master's daughter, and sang a song of praise for innocent love:
- “There is something sacred, holy, about the impartiality of first love, and it should show itself in a cobbler and his master's daughter or in the boudoir of a young princess; it is the glorious enamel that innocence breathes; no art will replace it if you strip it off. Or can the painter paint the wings of the butterfly again when a rough hand has touched it and smeared the pollen with which nature covered its brightly colored coat? Isn't the soft blush on the cheeks of a beautiful child such a pollen? "
expenditure
- Wilhelm Hauff: Free hours at the window. In: The Eremit in Germany: a book on manners and customs of the 19th century in monthly books, Volume 1, 1826, pages 287-306.
- Wilhelm Hauff: Free hours at the window . In: Fantasies and Sketches. Stuttgart: Franckh, 1828, pages 87-152, pdf .
literature
- Patrick Bridgewater: Rotpeters ancestors, or: The learned monkey in German poetry. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft and Geistesgeschichte, September 1, 1982, Volume 56, Issue 3, Pages 447–462, here: 455–456.
- JA Schmoll called Eisenwerth: Window pictures - chains of motifs in European painting. In: Ludwig Grote (editor): Contributions to motivational studies of the 19th century. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1970, pages 152-153.
- Julius Hartmann: Chronicle of the city of Stuttgart. Six hundred years after the first memorable mention of the city (1286). Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1886, page 194.
- Stefan Neuhaus: Playing with the reader: Wilhelm Hauff: work and effect. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002, pages 40–43.
- Rolf Selbmann: A cultural history of the window: from antiquity to modern times. Berlin: Reimer, 2010, pages 128–130.
Web links
- Free hours at the window in the Bibliotheca Augustana .
- Free hours at the window in the Gutenberg-DE project .
Footnotes
- ↑ #Hauff 1826 .
- ↑ #Hauff 1828 .
- ↑ # Eisenwerth 1970 .
- ↑ #Hartmann 1886 .
- ↑ #Hauff 1828 , page 98, chapter 2.
- ↑ #Hauff 1828 , page 116, chapter 4.
- ↑ #Hauff 1828 , pp. 128–129, chapter 6.