Friend Hein. A life story

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freund Hein (subtitle "A life story") is a social and especially school critical novel by Emil Strauss published in 1902 . The novel is about a sensitive and musical young person who, in the course of his school career, can no longer withstand the passion for music, which represents his life instinct, and at the same time the pressure to perform at school, especially mathematics. The novel can be assigned in a specific sense to the school and student novel of the literature of the turn of the century and also deals with the aspect of young people's search for meaning and identity. In terms of literary history, the novel can be compared with Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening and Hermann Hesse's Unterm Rad .

Content and subject

The plot extends over twelve chapters, in which Emil Strauss tells the life of Heinrich Lindner from his birth to his suicide at the age of 18. Heinrich grows up at the end of the 19th century. It is an artist's novel that describes an irreconcilable contrast between artistry and bourgeoisie. The motif of the artist, who cannot be part of society because of his talent, appears in Freund Hein very early. Even in the motto the shortened life path of Heinrich is indicated by quotations from Petrarch and Hölderlin . The theme of the novel is comparable to Thomas Mann's story Tonio Kröger . The process of perfection accompanied by the artist is a common thread in the novel.

Heinrich Lindner's childhood

Heinrich Lindner grew up well protected in the security of the family and in the familiarity of the garden, the forest and the field near a Baden town on the Rhine at the end of the 19th century. Heinrich Lindner is born the son of a successful lawyer who is aiming for a more successful career for his son than his own. The first words that the father speaks to his son are therefore "The boy sees you through and through: he has to become a public prosecutor for me". The father's wish that his son should become a public prosecutor goes hand in hand with the requirement that Heinrich should complete the high school, which was elitist at the time. However, when he discovered the world, Heinrich was shaped and attracted by the music from which he draws his vitality. This tension between the sensitivity to music, which by the way runs in the family, because grandfather and father Lindner were enthusiastic and passionate musicians, and the compulsory school attendance, will shatter Heinrich Lindner. Heinrich Lindner is an adjusted and righteous child who spends a lot of time in the garden at home. He recognized his passion for music very early on. When he asks his father to be allowed to learn the violin, Heiner puts him off. At the same time, however, Heiner began to be interested in the piano. His mother sometimes played the piano and also taught Heiner. From that moment on, Heiner had become addicted to music. One day Heiner met Helene. Helene is the Lindner's neighbor and the exact opposite of Heiner: Helene is a wild and rebellious girl and thus a contrast. Nevertheless, the two become best playmates and spend their entire childhood together. It is happy and uncomplicated. Heiner is finally allowed to learn to play the violin and often plays both well-known and self-composed pieces to Helene in the garden at home.

Heinrich Lindner's youth

At the point in time when Heinrich realizes that he is not up to the demands of the school, his happy and well-protected childhood finally ends. Helene has moved away with her family and Heinrich loses his best friend as a result. "As early as Christmas he realized clearly that he would not be able to meet the demands of the class and told his father so." For Heinrich, a time begins with adolescence in which he has to reconcile his love of music and the duty and compulsion of school. The school subject of mathematics is particularly troubling for Heinrich. He limits his social contacts to the bare minimum in order to use self-compulsion to prepare math problems for school. A far greater sacrifice for Heinrich, however, is the reduction in the time that he can spend on his music. In addition to this misery comes the alienation with Helene, who leads a completely different life far away from him and has already become a young fine lady and goes through all the beautiful things that are interesting for a young girl. "Now she came from Kissingen as a ready, safe young lady, radiant with zest for life, [...] and never tired of talking about the shining bathing life, of spa promenades, excursions, reunions, [...], of everything what can dazzle a young girl when entering the full social. " Helene has become a young lady and Heiner still has to go to school. After Heiner had to repeat the class for the first time due to his poor performance in mathematics, he met Karl Notwang in his new class. Karl Notwang appears just at the moment when the break with Helene is complete. Notwang is the counterpart to Heiner. He despises the school system, but has to visit it in order to be able to study. School is not difficult for Notwang and so he takes on Heiners. The two become good friends.

Heinrich Lindner's suicide

The contrast between Heiner's love for music, which is his instinct for life, the duty and compulsory school attendance become particularly clear when his father forbids him to make music because Heiner does not receive a half-year report card in mathematics. The ban is a severe shock for Heiner and unbearable because it robs him of his happiness in life. "'Father-!' cried Heiner in horror and was very pale. " This prohibition, which shows the father's breach of trust, that the son does not concentrate enough on school, puts the sensitive Heiner into a deep crisis. He takes his father's prohibition seriously and renounces music in order to pursue his duties. When Heiner was repeatedly not transferred, however, he could not bear the shame and, after the testimony was given, went to the forest he knew so well and shot himself in the heart.

The school novel

Emil Straussen's novel Freund Hein can be counted as school literature or as a school novel because it follows the tradition of student-centered works such as Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening . However, at the turn of the century, which can be regarded as the first literary modernity, due to the variety of literary movements, many epoch terms and style names are used, although none of these terms can adequately capture and describe the literature and culture of the turn of the century. The term student novel does not fully do justice to Emil Strauss's friend Hein, because the meaning of the school “as a public authority is only (or only) grasped in its meaning when it is viewed as both a medium and an outpost of society, above all of civilized society " becomes. However, the term student novel includes the most important aspect of the novel, namely the role of the student in an encrusted, achievement-reduced school system. Therefore, the school novel fits into the era of the turn of the century, because it takes up a special, socially critical aspect, namely the criticism of the Wilhelmine Empire, the bureaucratic apparatus and above all the school as an institution. The student novel Freund Hein takes up the social problems of modernity, which are particularly evident in the authoritarian, superficial school system, reduced to mathematical reason and directed against nature, and thereby endanger the development of the ego personality. The novel focuses in particular on the psychological and social aberrations of Heiner Lindner, who suffers from the conditioning from the subjects of mathematics and Greek and perishes as a result. The student novel Freund Hein is particularly characterized by the fact that it focuses on the educational aspect, with the student and his misery receiving special attention. Education through school is understood in Freund Hein as being against nature. Heiner Lindner suffers from school as an institution and especially from mathematics.

shape

Narrative system

Focalization

At the beginning of the novel Freund Hein , the narrative system is structured in such a way that the text makes use of an omniscient narrator. The text is thus written from the perspective of a zero focus . "As Heiner on a cold winter evening like a patient passenger without a lot of trouble, even if half a month too early, his father, who had been summoned, welcomed him carefully, not without warming his hands on the brown stove tiles, to the pleasant first-born to examine; then two big blue eyes opened and looked at him seriously and rigidly, unyielding as the truth, so that he said: 'The boy looks you through and through: he has to become a public prosecutor for me.' So the narrator knows more than Heiner and he can also speak of the feelings and thoughts of the protagonists . In the course of history, the zero focus gives way to the internal focus . This means that it is told from the point of view of a specific person and events that are not known to this person cannot and will not be told. In Freund Hein this person is Heiner. The scene in which he longingly hopes and waits for Helene's return on the platform shows the internal focus because the reader knows just as little about Helene's whereabouts as Heiner himself. "'That's right! Nothing, nothing! Can't she come? ! - Nonsense! She's not coming! She laughs somewhere else where it doesn't help anyone. That's how it is! It's howling! If I only knew how to get rid of it. "

style

The style of the novel can be described as clear and understandable. "Jean Amery characterizes Strauss 'prose as' poetically exalted realism that does not obscure things, a style of great simplicity and nobility." Emil Strauss writes his novel Freund Hein in the style of a distant report by an omniscient narrator . This reduces the emotional side of a first-person narrator because the story is being described by an omniscient narrator. In contrast to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther , which is conceived as a letter novel and thus gives the reader the impression of a personal report with emotional closeness. With the authorial narrator , Emil Strauss can create the impression of an objective criticism of the school system. This removes the criticism of subjectivity by a person. In addition, the high-level language of the authorial narrator prevents a person from being profiled with the story and in turn achieves the impression of objectivity. Emil Strauss uses the metaphor of death in connection with music throughout the novel. The violin that Heiner receives from his father lies under the bed in a small black box that has not been opened for "twenty-four years". So the violin is in a coffin.

interpretation

The characters

Heinrich Lindner

Heiner is portrayed as a child of nature because of his special talent and sensitivity to music, but also because of his connection with the landscape. His natural love for music and the connection with nature become more and more important as the novel progresses. Music is playing an increasingly important role in Heiner's life, and at the same time Heiner's sojourns in nature are also becoming increasingly important. Music and nature are increasingly becoming a place of longing and escape. This has to do with the fact that the pressure and compulsion of school have a steadily increasing influence on Heiner's life. In the school novel, the school symbolizes the unnatural, civilizational compulsion of society, which damages the natural and autonomous development of the child. This tradition follows Emil Strauss and provides Heiner child of nature, as the natural assets of the child as "instinct of life" is. Emil Strauss believes, in this novel, the educational reform position, which in the era was very common turn of the century. Heiner is an example of Rousseau's "'homme naturel'". For Heiner, nature inspires and arouses phantasies. When the weather was good, Heiner went to the garden or the forest at home, listened to nature and made music on his violin. When his father refuses to play music because of his poor school performance, he loses his instinct for life and fails because of the civilizing pressure of school. Heiner Lindner symbolizes the sensitive artist and nature child who fails because of the cruel, nature-hostile institution of school. In Emil Strauss' novel Freund Hein, the school criticism contains the basic tension between nature and civilization and the basic conviction that the child can develop through nature. The school, on the other hand, is generally criticized as a leveling authority of civilization.

Father Lindner

Heiner's father is an exception in the school novel from the turn of the century because he is an understanding, caring and sensitive father figure. The father's first words after Heiner's birth are: "He must become a public prosecutor for me!" Such statements from fathers are typical of the school novel, because they depict how the parents exert civilizing pressure on the children from an early age. However, Heiner's father leads Heiner's career with almost no apparent pressure. Due to the father's concern that the child will become a dreamy musician and not an energetic man because of his passion for music, the father comes up with diversionary maneuvers and difficulties for the boy's musical career. For example, he doesn't let the boy play the piano because he supposedly still has little fingers. When this tactic no longer works, however, he lets Heiner learn to play the violin, in the hope that the boy will lose his motivation to play because of the difficulty of this instrument. "But he had decided to let him [Heiner] learn the violin instead of the piano because he was hoping that the much more difficult, unpleasant and boring learning of the beginnings of playing the violin would tire and paralyze the boy's zeal. " He wants to frustrate and scare Heiner away. He always bases his decisions on his own experience. The father is of the opinion that the urge for music shows immaturity and that this natural urge must be overcome through discipline, just as he overcame this passion for music as a student. The difference to Heiner, however, is that for Heiner it is a life-sustaining element. Heiner draws all his strength for life from music. He is an artist's child who cannot live without music.

Mother Lindner

Heiner's mother is far less worried about Heiner's future than his father, because she is one of the few mothers who wants nothing more for their child than that they recognize their inclinations and develop independently. Thus the mother embodies the educational reform ideal of the child's self-development according to his natural disposition. It would therefore be best if the children never grow up in order to protect them from civilization. The mother's role, however, is limited to being the "extended arm of her husband". For Heiner's musical development, however, his mother is a very important authority, because it is through playing the piano that he first becomes aware of the music and, with her help, also learns the piano. When Mr. Lindner asks her to play less on the piano so that her son is not too taken by it, she carries out the man's wishes without questioning them and without contradiction. She trusts in the maturity and cleverness of her husband, since she loved and adored him "as a strong and clever man like a demigod [...]"

Helene

For Heiner, Helene is the epitome of his childhood. Helene and Heiner are happy in their young years, there is only him, she, music and nature. She is his counterpart. Heiner is a quiet, withdrawn and obedient boy, whereas Helene has a wild nature. However, these opposites have a balancing effect.

Karl Notwang

"While Heinrich Lindner is an obedient son and student, his friend Karl Notwang is the reasoning behind the novel." Karl Notwang is a rebel spirit with mature life experience, vitality and an enthusiasm for art and nature. He only shows up when Heiner's relationship with Helene is broken and when he is stuck in school and. He takes on the role of Helene. Karl Notwang detests the entire school system. However, he does not rebel against certain teachers or people, but against schools as a compulsory institution in general. He sees the opposition to nature in the school system. He sees in it a conditioning through certain subjects, which wants to form a civilizing norm and does not allow any artistic freedom. In Heiner's endeavors to comply with school pressure, he breaks off all social contacts. The only exception is Notwang, because he has made it his business to help Heiner.

Teacher and school

Compared to the other works from the turn of the century that deal with the student problem, the school is presented as comparatively positive. The teacher character is demystified and portrayed as a normal citizen who only tries to conscientiously do his job. The teachers are also not stereotypes, as in Hermann Hesse's Unterm Rad or in Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening .

The suicide

Heiner's death was preceded by the giving of testimony and the collapse of the relationship with his father. For Heinrich Lindner, the only way out of the school system and the anti-artist conditioning is death, as Hein's friend , who releases him from his torments. Death has a mythical meaning here and is to be interpreted as a return to the origin. It is not an indictment against the school system. Compared to other works of this epoch, Heiner's suicide also does not seem to be absolutely necessary, because neither the father nor the teacher are portrayed as ignorant and tyrannical people, but rather as understanding and benevolent. "It can be explained when the psychological constitution of the highly sensitive and artist is understood as a weakness in the struggle for life." Heiner's sensitivity to aesthetics is particularly evident in the death scene, in which Heiner does not shoot himself in the head, but in the heart because he wants to spare other people the horror of the sight. In addition, the head is the symbol for the cognitive and the heart stands for art . With this, Heiner shows that he did not fail because of the world's cognitive challenges, but because he cannot follow his heart, art.

literature

  • Emil Strauss: friend Hein. A life story (= Reclam's Universal Library , No. 9367), Reclam, Stuttgart, 1995 (first edition: S. Fischer Verlag , Berlin 1902, OCLC 4886100 ), ISBN 3-15-009367-8 .
  • Theodor Karst: Afterword . In: Freund Hein (1902), Reclam, Stuttgart 1995.
  • Joachim Noob: The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century (= contributions to modern literary history , volume 3: volume 158). Winter, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8253-0696-8 (Dissertation University of Oregon 1997, under the title: Non vitae sed scholae discimus: the student suicide in literature at the turn of the century ).
  • Wenchao Li : The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century. Investigations into Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks", Friedrich Huch's "Mao" and Emil Strauss' "Freund Hein". 1989, DNB 910594260 (Dissertation FU Berlin 1990, 191 pages).
  • Dorothe Kimmich, Tobias Wilke: Introduction to the literature of the turn of the century , WBG Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 978-3-534-17583-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 9
  2. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 93
  3. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 118
  4. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 143
  5. ↑ Cf. Kimmich, Dorothee / Wilke, Tobias, Introduction to the literature of the turn of the century, 9.
  6. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, 95.
  7. ^ Brenner, Peter J., New German Literature History, 205.
  8. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 105
  9. ↑ Karst, Theodor: Afterword. In: Freund Hein (1902), Emil Strauss. Stuttgart: Reclam 1995, p. 215
  10. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein, 65.
  11. ^ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 96f
  12. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 99
  13. ^ A b Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 102
  14. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 107
  15. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 109
  16. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 48
  17. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, Vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 205
  18. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, Vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 223f
  19. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, Vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 222ff
  20. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, Vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 222
  21. ↑ Emil Strauss, friend Hein. A life story, 1995, p. 10
  22. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 105
  23. ↑ a b c Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 112
  24. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 215ff.
  25. ↑ Li, Wenchao, The motif of childhood and the figure of the child in German literature at the turn of the century, p. 119.
  26. ^ Jochim Noob, The student suicide in German literature at the turn of the century, contributions to recent literary history; Episode 3, Vol. 158, Heidelberg 1998, p. 236f.
  27. ↑ Karst, Theodor: Afterword. In: Freund Hein (1902), Emil Strauss. Stuttgart: Reclam 1995, p. 210.