Hans and Heinz Kirch

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Hans and Heinz Kirch is a novella by Theodor Storm from 1883 and belongs to the era of realism . Thematically it belongs to the father-son novellas, but also proves Storm's “turn to the bourgeois society novella”, in which, however, “the socially mediated conflict is shown as individual, as an exception”. As in many other novels, the plot is based on the “guilt-atonement scheme”.

content

The seaman Hans Adam Kirch from Heiligenhafen , a man from a humble background, works his way up to become a ship owner and merchant. His wife has a son, Heinz, and a daughter, Lina. Hans hopes for the best educational and advancement opportunities for his son and dreams of one day seeing him as heir to the company and senator of the city. When Heinz, at the age of six, gets into a dangerous situation on his father's ship, a cabin boy who was supposed to be supervising him is cruelly punished by Hans. From then on, the relationship between father and son cools down, as the son is shocked by the harshness of the father. Heinz grows up and becomes a lively, sometimes wild boy: For example, he steals apples from the parish garden for Wieb, a girl next door from a disreputable house, rows with her in small boats on the Baltic Sea and goes with her to a fair on the Warder peninsula .

After his father hired him as a cabin boy on various cargo ships, he is now supposed to go on a trip to China that will take over a year. On the last evening before leaving, he says goodbye to Wieb on a last boat trip, during which she gives him a souvenir ring that he once gave her. He comes home late, to which the father reacts very severely.

Hans learns about his son's adventure with Wieb and reprimands him for it by letter. After a year it turns out that Heinz is not returning but has been hired on another ship. He sends a letter home, but there is no postage. From this the father concludes that the son is financially unsuccessful: he sees all his hopes disappointed and refuses to accept the letter, which amounts to rejecting the son.

For more than fifteen years there has been no news from Heinz, his mother has since died, and there is a rumor that Heinz is in a sailors' accommodation in Hamburg . Hans drives over immediately and persuades him to come home. He has changed a lot on the outside and is also behaving unusually. He tells nothing about his experiences and is not interested in his father's company, which he now runs with his son-in-law. When the father realizes that Heinz lacks any ambition, tension arises again between the two of them.

One night there is another fair at Warder. Heinz rows over and hopes to find Wieb again. He learns that she works in a sailors' tavern at the port. The next day he goes there and sees how badly Wieb is treated by her husband, a brutal drunk, and the other guests. She recognizes Heinz immediately. Both recognize that it is too late for a new relationship; Disappointed, Heinz throws the ring that he still has with him on the ground and leaves. Rumor has it that the stranger in the Kirch house is not the missing son Heinz at all, but a man of the same age who grew up as a boy in the town's poor house, went to sea and was no longer seen. This now wants to get at the money of the church. Lina and her father Hans now also doubt Heinz's identity. Hans wants to get him out of the house and pays him his inheritance so that he can disappear. The next morning he left and took only a very small part of the money with him. For Lina it is thus proven that it was really Heinz. Wieb shows Hans and Lina the ring as proof of their real identity. Despite the pleading of the two women, Hans refuses to follow Heinz, he has given up on his son.

The aging Hans becomes more and more bitter. One night he sees Heinz standing in the room, he interprets this apparition as a sign of his death. As a result of the shock, he suffers a stroke, from which he recovers. Only now that he believes Heinz dead does he regret his hardship and hope to see Heinz again in the afterlife.

Subject

The central conflict of the novella is the relationship between Hans and his son Heinz. Hans represents the typical values ​​of the rising middle class of the 19th century: Each generation tries to accumulate as many values ​​as possible for the following. Hans is hardworking, ambitious and ascetic . Material success is his top priority. As the head of the family, he requires his son to represent these values ​​and conform to his ideal, respecting and obeying the father.

Hans had Heinz's career in mind right from the start: from cabin boy to sailor, to the helmsman's examination to captain. Then the takeover of his father's company and a place in the city's Senate will follow. He takes Heinz's consent for granted and therefore hardly talks about it. Heinz rejects this life plan, probably also because he inherited his father's independence and would rather (like him) build a future for himself.

After Heinz returned, no reconciliation could be achieved due to the stubbornness of both. This shows that both are very similar inside: They insist on their positions and expect each other to make a first concession. A tentative attempt at mediation by Linas fails. Communication within the family is severely disturbed; the actual conflicts are not carried out openly. The father's repentance follows too late. But it shows that Hans was not a callous despot from the start, but a loving father, who, however, was never able to openly show these feelings out of consideration for social conventions and traditional gender roles.

Action structure

The main plot can be read as a syntagma of eight plot cores or crises, which increasingly alienate father and son from each other:

  1. On his first voyage on the ship, Heinz recklessly puts his life in danger; after having overcome fear, his father breaks out in anger that the boy cannot understand.
  2. The evening before he left for a year-long voyage as a sailor, Heinz Wieb met one last time and came home too late, disregarding the civic bell, his father was angry.
  3. Jule (messenger of bad luck) tells her brother Hans about the son's rendezvous. Hans writes an angry letter to the departed.
  4. First rejection: Hans refuses to accept the unfranked letter.
  5. Jule reports of Heinz's presence in Hamburg, Hans decides to pick him up there.
  6. A rumor denies Heinz's identity.
  7. Second rejection: Hans wants to pay off his son and compliments him from the house, Heinz leaves the next morning.
  8. Heinz appears to the father as a revenant , who suspects the death of the son, accepts him and hopes to see him again in eternity.

The background to the catastrophe of the first repudiation is an unusually [high] loss account in Hans Kirch's company, and on this basis he also justifies the refusal to accept the letter: it is too expensive for me . Here the economic ratio is played off against the love of the son, the calculation triumphs over the heart.

In contrast, the love affair between Heinz and Wieb takes up little space; narrative, the subplot is drowned in the flow of the father-son story. In a surprising twist at the end, Hans accepts her in place of his son and virtually spends his old age with her. What connects them is the absent Heinz, whose loss they mourn together. The impossible love triangle, in which the middle-class girl and the lower-class girl compete structurally for the person Heinz, ends in an improbable two-way relationship, an illusionary reconciliation of the classes . The engagement ring that Wieb shows his father as proof of Heinz's identity has a catalytic effect.

Hans finally considers the young woman in his will, which equates to her social advancement. The outcast Heinz works in his absence to promote the community; he has to sacrifice himself so that the antagonistic classes can unite. In this way he becomes the founder of a new covenant, that is to say Christ, while Hans “Adam” purifies himself from the old biblical punishing to the New Testament loving father. The failure of the father-son relationship takes on a higher, utopian sense: class reconciliation takes place at the expense of the individual, which in turn reconciles the individuals with one another and with themselves.

This socio-historical project of relaxation and abolition of the social opposition is narrative realized through the setting of dominant character or anthropological features: Hans transforms himself from an ambitious businessman to a loiterer. This ideological exchange becomes relevant even at the level of the characters and their attitudes, when Hans projects the son's career onto the level of civil honors , a socially binding code that defines social status as a function of age levels and thus a social continuum depicts the anthropological continuum: at around forty years of age (one becomes) a shipowner . Ideological and typical of bourgeois storytelling is the “quantification of the social axis”. The relationship between social status and subject status appears as a law of nature, and whoever does not follow this rule falls, like Heinz, out of the system of accumulation of property and civic standing. Heinz tended to disqualify himself from this by stealing apples as a young person - again a biblical connotation.

Social-historical context

The history of the 19th century reads like a crisis: The industrial revolution brought not only the "technical (ical) renewal of the production apparatus, increased accumulation of liquid capital, increasing labor supply" and "since the middle of the 19th century (underts) (the) revolution of transport (railroad, steamship) ”and the development of a“ uniform (ichen) market (es) ”, but also the“ great agricultural crisis ”of 1818, the revolution of 1848 and subsequent restoration, the emergence of the, historiographically- Euphemistically speaking, the “social question”, the rapid development of industrialization after the founding of the empire, so that since “the end of the 1970s [...] agriculture (was) no longer able to provide food for the entire population”, the “speculative fever the founding period was followed by the great crisis of 1874 ”, the structural transformation of the companies created the“ new class of employees ”, a“ new middle class ”.

Against this background, “a […] image of the bourgeois nuclear family formed in the second half of the 19th century, in which the distribution of roles was externally fixed in a way that had only been customary in court etiquette until then. [...] (The) domestic educational power of the father, almost exaggerated into the role of the Godfather's absolute master with a rigorous demand for obedience, also extended to the mother, the housewife, who as a family mother never before had such a subordinate and dependent position in the family has held ".

The process of naturalization or anthropologization of social and historical processes turns the fable (series of crises) of the novella into a permanently new articulation of the same “principal conflict” and establishes the “rule of the nuclear family” ad infinitum: Is the family of ancient Rome “a legal institution To preserve property and to maintain religious duties ”and thus“ nothing given by nature, no physiological unity ”, the economic basis of the family context recedes in the bourgeois“ familial ideology ”: Here“ above all, 'love' becomes' natural 'Emphasizes the social bond between autonomous individualities. In this perspective, the nuclear family appears as a 'natural model' of society ”.

The narrative discourse now accuses the father of a lack of family integration - he is never at home - and the representation of anachronistic convictions with regard to the family, and propagates the family idyll as a counter-image. Hans, on the other hand, is “only a citizen”, and as such “exercises (he) a fundamental power that allows him to be a 'man of law' and 'man of government' at the same time”, for whom the family becomes a “place of separation , the exclusion and the purification ”, becomes the“ main place of the disciplinary question about the normal and the abnormal ”.

The "secret sympathy with which [...] the family itself is viewed in a state of decline" seems to motivate the ideological project of the text:

“You have to catch the Germans with the novella. The novella nests mostly in rooms and families [..], it takes refuge in the room where there is no gendarmerie. [..] So I see the novella as a German domestic animal. "

The reading appears here as a "part of socializing at home". While the program of the Vormärz authors apparently still aimed to get families ideologically on their toes , to mobilize them politically, after the failed revolution of 1848/49 narration is limited “to the sphere of domestic, family and civil entertainment and instruction, on the modest circle of daily life, which was interrupted by the extraordinary event, the unheard of occurrence, but only confirmed ”. In this way, the bourgeois family, which "in itself carries the beginning of its dissolution", is hypostatized to the natural, alternative-free nucleus of society, and what has become historical receives the sign of eternity.

Sources and biographical references

Storm himself suffered from a father-son conflict: his eldest son, Hans, was an alcoholic , barely passed his medical exam and, as a grown man, was always dependent on his father's support. Storm temporarily broke off contact with his son.

In September and October 1881 Storm visited his daughter Lisbeth and her husband in Heiligenhafen. There he heard the story of a shipper named Brandt who refused to accept a letter from his son and later, when he returned, had doubts about his identity. Storm processed this material from October 1881 to February 1882 into a novella. The first book edition was published by Paetel in Berlin in 1883.

Text basis

  • Theodor Storm: Hans and Heinz Kirch. Novella . Note by Heike A. Doane, follow-up by Walther Herrmann. Reclam, Stuttgart 2006 [1969]. (= RUB 6035)
  • Theodor Storm: Complete Works , Vol. 1–4. Edited by Peter Goldammer, Berlin and Weimar, 5th edition 1982

filming

  • Hans and Heinz Kirch (1976)
  • On the gray beach, on the gray sea (1979), directed by Klaus Gendries

literature

  • The big Brockhaus in 12 volumes , 18th, completely revised. Ed., Wiesbaden 1977ff.
  • Heike A. Doane: Problems of communication in Theodor Storm's "Hans and Heinz Kirch" . In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft , 33rd vol., 1984, pp. 45–51.
  • Heike A. Doane: Theodor Storm: Hans and Heinz Kirch. Explanations and documents . Stuttgart 1985.
  • Michel Foucault : Monitoring and Punishing. The birth of the prison . Trans. V. Walter Seitter, Frankfurt / M. 1976, 4th ed. 1981
  • Michel Foucault: Madness and Society. A story of madness in the age of reason . Trans. V. Ulrich Köppen, Frankfurt / M. 1969, 4th ed. 1981
  • Winfried Freund : Theodor Storm: Hans and Heinz Kirch. A civil tragedy . In: interpretations. Stories and Novellas of the 19th Century , Vol. 2, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 301–332.
  • Ruth Hilbig: Theodor Storms “ Carsten Curator ” and “Hans and Heinz Kirch”. A contribution to the knowledge of his age novellistics . Greifswald (phil. Diss.) 1950.
  • Hartmut von Hentig : Foreword to the German edition by: Philippe Ariès: History of Childhood , trans. v. Caroline Neubaur and Karin Kersten. Munich 1978, 6th edition 1984
  • Volker Knüfermann: Realism. Investigations into the linguistic reality of the novellas "In the neighboring house on the left", "Hans and Heinz Kirch" and "Der Schimmelreiter" by Theodor Storm . Münster 1967, pp. 43-79 (phil. Diss.).
  • Jürgen Link: From “Cabal and Love” to “Love Story” - On the evolutionary law of a bourgeois story type . In: Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Ed.): Literarischer Kitsch , Tübingen 1979
  • Jürgen Link, Ursula Link-Heer: Propaedeutic in the sociology of literature. With the results of a Bochum teaching and research group for the sociology of literature 1974–1976 . Munich 1980
  • Fritz Martini: The German Novella in 'Bourgeois Realism'. Considerations for the historical determination of the form type . In: Josef Kunz (Ed.): Novelle , 2nd edition, Darmstadt 1973
  • Fritz Martini: From the narrative in bourgeois realism . In: Karl Konrad Pohlheim (Hrsg.): Handbuch der deutschen Erzählung , Düsseldorf 1981
  • More (Richard Lewinsohn): A world history of sexuality . Hamburg 1956, 51. – 60. Th. 1966
  • Hartmut Pätzold: The social space as a place of “innocent doom”. On the criticism of the reception history of Theodor Storm's novella "Hans and Heinz Kirch" . In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society, vol. 40, 1991, pp. 33-50.
  • Eckart Pastor: The language of memory. On the novellas by Theodor Storm , Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 141–161.
  • Hermann Pongs: Own movement of tragic material: Keller's “Regine” and Storm's “Hans and Heinz Kirch” . In: ders .: The picture in the seal, Vol. II: Preliminary investigations for the symbol , 2nd edition, Marburg 1963. [1. Ed. 1939, pp. 230–238.]
  • Wolfgang Tschorn: The decline of the family. “Der Herr Etatsrat” and “Ein doppelganger” as examples of a central subject of Storms . In: Writings of the Theodor Storm Society , Vol. 29, ed. Karl Ernst Laage and Volkmar Hand, Heide / Holstein 1980
  • Hartmut Vinçon: Theodor Storm . Stuttgart 1973 (= Metzler Collection Volume 122 )
  • Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann: The German family. Attempt a social history . Frankfurt / M. 1974
  • Manfred Weiß-Dasio: The inadequacy of the whole. On Theodor Storm's novella "Hans and Heinz Kirch" . In: Literature for readers , vol. 1988, issue 3, pp. 149-162.
  • Benno von Wiese: The German novella from Goethe to Kafka. Interpretations . Vol. II, Düsseldorf 1986. [first edition 1962], pp. 216-235.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hartmut Vinçon, p. 64
  2. ↑ Hartmut Vinçon, p. 58
  3. ↑ Jürgen Link: From “Kabale und Liebe” to “Love Story” , p. 146
  4. ↑ Brockhaus , Vol. 5, p. 528
  5. ↑ Brockhaus , Vol. 3, p. 111
  6. ↑ Brockhaus , Vol. 3, pp. 110f.
  7. ↑ Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, pp. 110–118
  8. ↑ Storm on November 27, 1882 to Keller, Complete Works , Vol. 3, p. 745
  9. ↑ Hartmut von Hentig, p. 11
  10. ↑ More, p. 67
  11. ↑ Jürgen Link, Ursula Link-Heer: Literatursoziologisches Propädeutikum , p. 432
  12. ^ Benno von Wiese, p. 228
  13. ↑ Michel Foucault: Madness and Society , p. 463
  14. ^ Foucault: Madness and Society , p. 25
  15. ↑ Foucault: Monitoring and Punishing , p. 277
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Tschorn: p. 51
  17. ↑ Theodor Mundt, cit.b. Fritz Martini: The German Novelle , p. 364
  18. ↑ Fritz Martini, From the story in bourgeois realism , p. 243
  19. ^ Fritz Martini: Von der Erzählung , p. 244
  20. ↑ Horst Becker: Die Familie , cited above. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, p. 180