Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat meadows! The story of an ambitious one

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Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat meadows! The story of an ambitious is a novel by Friedrich Ernst Peters from 1925. The work is a bilingual Low German- High German educational novel and as such a novelty in the history of the genre. It tells the story of the rise and fall of an illegitimate child who grew up in a Holstein village at the turn of the century, the fictional Vollstedt , and who sought a military career to compensate for the humiliation suffered in youth. Heine wants to show it to his home village (“Ik wöll ju dat woll wiesen!”). When he begins to climb the rungs of the social ladder, his youth enemy Jürgen Grootholm becomes an obstacle on the way up. In order to "overtake" him, to get revenge on the Vollstedtern and to be able to marry the calculating Margot Kandelhardt, Heinrich Steinhagen denounced the competitor for exceeding his vacation in the hope of preventing his promotion. With that he ushers in his own end.

The novel is divided into two parts, a Low German, Heine Steenhagen's youth in the country (thirteen chapters), and a High German, Heinrich Steinhagen's military career (eight chapters). The end of the High German part is again written in Low German. The circular layout of the novel thus refers the reader back to the hero's origins and linguistic roots. The perspective shift that goes with it - the village community comes to the fore, the hero becomes less important - quotes about the comparison with Heine Icarus the famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus .

content

Low German part

The novel begins with a reference to the first important turning point in Heine Steenhagen's life, the imminent entry into the professional and adult world. He is 11 years old and was supposed to be working as a servant boy for a farmer at the age of 10: "En Daglöhnerkind, dat must be with teihn Johr na 'n Buern, so hürss sik dat now." The first three chapters consist of a flashback to his childhood. The village gossip reveals to the reader that Heine is a "slap", that is, an illegitimate child and that his father is presumably Hinnerk Grootholm, the son of the powerful mayor Detelt Grootholm. Heine's mother Gretjn is silent about the identity of the father, but the rumors persist and she has to leave the village, pregnant. After two years she returns with her son and his stepfather, Hannes Schröder, a day laborer whom a Vollstedter farmer hires despite the resistance of the head of the office. Little Heine grows up in Vollstedt and lives in the fantasy world of his fairy tale books. He quickly experiences the first humiliations that will determine his spiritual development and his later life. Jörn Grootholm, who is the same age and the son of the head of the office from his second marriage, mocks him when they pick flowers together because of his poverty. A number of other insults followed: the head of office gave the unsuspecting boy a brutal whip in the face because he felt provoked by him, a haughty farmer's daughter refused to dance with Heine and Jörn Grootholm explained to him that peasant sons who did not inherit a farm to "infreen", d. H. being able to marry an heiress, but: “Infreen can only do it with Buerjungs”, a new humiliation for Heine, the child of the day laborer. When the protagonist gets an insight into Vollstedt's scandal chronicle through the seamstress Lena Wiem, he learns to despise his home village. Nevertheless, Jochen Suhr, a foreman and fatherly friend, still seems to turn things around for the better. With his good work, Heine earned the respect of the village community and Jochen Suhr saved him from debauchery. Both caregivers, Lena Wiem and Jochen Suhr, recommend Heine a career in the military that enables advancement regardless of social status. Heine feels drawn to this profession, which has a reputation for giving farmers no advantages. Then he falls in love with Anna Pahl and makes advances in an erotic window scene. His jealousy leads him to later start a fight with Jörn Grootholm, in which Anna immediately takes the side of the farmer's son Jörn. Jochen Suhr separates the two and the matter ends in the sand. However, the head of the office lets Heine know that he has to apologize. He refuses and threatens to set fire to the house above his head. Anna Pahl becomes pregnant with Heine and has to quickly marry the young son of a dairy manager from the neighboring village. The farmer settles the matter with money and Heine gets drunk out of desperation. Like Jörn Grootholm, he wants to go to the artillery so that he can compete with it. Hoping to annoy the head of office, Heine goes fishing with a friend, although Grootholm has leased the fishery and has issued a fishing ban (De Fischeree, de rests!). The two hang a fish head garland over the door. The head of office immediately suspects Heine and sends a gendarme to take him away. The walk through the village in the company of the gendarme is a new disgrace for Heine. But he withstood the interrogation and nothing can be proven against him. On March 14th, Grootholm's barn burns down. In the newspaper, the fire is attributed to an act of revenge and of course everyone remembers Heine's threat to set fire to the house above the head of the office. Accordingly, suspicion falls on him, although opinions differ on this. Ultimately, one cannot prove anything to him here either and the reader is not finally clarified about the question of guilt. Heine waits longingly for his last day in Vollstedt and vows retaliation, while the village hopes that the military will make a “decent person” out of him.

Standard German part

Heinrich Steinhagen is with the artillery in Bahrenfeld. He has transformed himself into a representative of the imperial army who believes in authority, a “pig” who torments his teams, enjoys the admiration of the civilian population and takes “dashing” military representatives as models. He only speaks High German, although his incomplete artificial Berliners are reduced to the reproduction of well-worn phrases and also force the farmer's sons to speak High German. He himself tries to perfect his education by reading the "classics", especially Schiller's. After two years he was transferred to Rendsburg, where Jürgen Grootholm is also stationed, because he still hopes to get revenge on him and on his home village and to "show" it to everyone through a brilliant career. Jürgen Grootholm, on the other hand, is very friendly to him and has long since forgotten the childhood stories of his youth. He repeatedly offers reconciliation to Heinrich Steinhagen without success. At a spring ball, Heine gets to know the “elegant” Margot Kandelhardt, the sister of Mrs. Wachtmeister Müller, who simulates great enthusiasm for “classical” education and tries to be affected as a member of higher society. Heine is deeply impressed and begins to meet with her regularly. But she keeps him at a distance with a clever calculation and finally promises him the engagement only on condition that he succeeds in being promoted to sergeant, because she in turn wants to "show her sister". She coldly points out to him that Jürgen Grootholm, who was promoted to sergeant together with Heine, is his only competitor and that it is important to "get him out of the way". Heine decides to denounce Jürgen Grootholm for having exceeded his vacation shortly after he made one last attempt to reconcile himself with him.

The High German part of the novel is based on real events from the time of Peters's military service, a time of personal development and aesthetic change for the writer: "The military year made me wiser and I believe that I am now less one-sided I will no longer just write silent stories of worldly, mimosa-like artistic natures, but also others, full of boundless love and hatred, nerdism, ambition and meanness. A sergeant recently shot himself here because in his ambition he was like a mindless gambler about his future bet on a card and when the prank failed, went and put a bullet through his head. That would be something! "

Contemporary history / language

This novel is a valuable source for studying the history of culture and mentality in northern Germany at the turn of the century.

The Low German part describes the festivals that were common in the country at that time, such as the girls 'ring driving and the boys' shooting competitions, the "school beer" or the harvest festival in the jug. There are also numerous references to manners and customs, to the ring riding and its losers, the "sand rider", the wedding ritual of "knitting", the student singing at a funeral or the gatherings on the occasion of a baptism (the "Kindsfoot"). The social order based on the extent of peasant property, the hooves , is thematized and at the same time the increasing rebellion of the population against social disadvantages is portrayed: the women rebel against preferential treatment of peasant daughters in the ring, and at the beginning of the novel Gretjn Steenhagen only comes back for this Vollstedt, because Heine's stepfather finds work on a farm whose social-democratic servant left the village in an argument at the best harvest time.

The High German section contains a critical-satirical depiction of the Wilhelmine petty bourgeoisie and the imperial military, reminiscent of Heinrich Mann's novel Der Untertan (1914). The high reputation of the German Army, its code of honor, the military pomp and its flipside, the soldiers 'social problems (syphilis diseases, gambling debts, alcoholism, risky reintegration into civil society), the ignorant reputation of the regulars' table and the efforts made by enemy images with reference to the "feeling of racial solidarity" dominate the description of Heine's environment in the Rendsburg barracks. The protagonist himself learns to deal with power quickly and this school of life is the most important part of his educational path: “If Miss Margot had once again pierced the feeling of his nothing to her cavalier through icy resistance, it helped him the next day Legs when he saw one of the “guys” lying in front of him in the dust or rain-dirt. You were still a factor not to be underestimated! “Lie down - up! Lie down - up! ”It was fun how the jumping jack thrashed with arms and legs! And like a child who cannot get his way tugs at his jumping jack until the wires break, so Sergeant Steinhagen continued his joke until the soldier's tongue hung out of the mouth. In such a way he had to regain his self-confidence if Miss Margot had humiliated him. ”(235) Miss Margot Kandelhardt, a department store clerk, like most of the characters in the novel, appearance is more important than being. She only wants to marry a man who can offer her a certain social status: "He found the love of Minna [von Barnhelm] touching; but Margot laughed cuttingly:" Nice and silly to throw yourself at the major's neck like that. The men must be kept short. "" Couldn't you love like that? "asked Heinrich in great anxiety." Me? "she said with the same hard laugh." Well, so blue! "(p. 231) Economic interests are always in the foreground and Feelings are all based on economic reasons, and this pessimistic worldview is softened by Peters' humor and irony, which are expressed differently in the two languages, softer in the Low German part, and clearly sharper in the High German part.

Linguistically characteristic of the novel as a whole is the pleasure in phraseology, in using fixed idioms. Especially the Low German part with its puns, rhymes, proverbs, etc. illustrates Peter's lecture on the “formulaic nature of Low German” (1939), u. a. by staging ritualized conversations between the characters, e.g. B. in a fishing scene: "Ummer Tog üm Tog", see Heine. "Because sometimes 'n Heek and sometimes' n Pogg, bröch Kröschen Sass de Saak to Enn.", (130). In the appendix to "Heine Steenhagen" the "Notes on the question of Low German" are published for the first time, Peters' declaration of love for Low German and an answer to those who wanted to see an attack on Low German in his lecture on "Formula-like".

The High German section exposes the hierarchical rhetoric of the military and documents the hollow sayings that Heine, the country man, picks up and uncritically reproduced: “Heinrich had said very coldly and deliberately:“ Mr. one-year-old volunteer von Reisswitz, maybe you want to show the habit and do the grin subside? "But of course you can only let go of these imaginary faces if you are educated." (177)

In his early essay on Henrik Ibsen (1911) , Peters provided a literary model for Heine's pseudology and reputation addiction : Peer Gynt flees to a fairytale land where he is emperor. He is “a liar out of longing for creativity and poetry and the desire for happiness; he is lying his crooked world again, doing well what God has done wrong. ”In his successor, Heine Steenhagen also becomes a poet, his fall from Icarus to the failure of the imagination in the struggle for life, the artist in reality.

Intermediality

“Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen!” Is embedded in a multitude of intertextual and intermedial references. The work is interspersed with real and fictitious quotations; in its overall structure it refers to the genre of the educational novel, whose genre-specific features it takes up and ironically breaks.

In the High German part mainly classic quotations are present. They come mainly from Wallenstein and Minna von Barnhelm and document the educational requirements of the hero obsessed with upward mobility and his mediocre environment. The positive, but also negative role models, by which the protagonist orientates himself in the course of his “educational history”, are a. transported via these quotations. The Low German part in particular contains an extensive multi-page pastiche of entertainment literature from the turn of the century, which justifies Heine's dreams of ascension, which are characterized by trivial literature, and his childish bovarysm.

To the literary-historical tradition of the educational novel refer u. a .:

  • the first name of the hero: Heine / Heinrich is also the first name of the protagonists of the great literary novels of the 19th century, s. Heinrich Lee in The Green Heinrich (1854/55) and Heinrich Schaumann in Stopfkuchen (1891).
  • the passage through the typical educational levels, d. H. dealing with the parental home (mainly in part II), the influence of mentors (Jochen Suhr, Lena Wiem) and educational institutions (the military), the encounter with the sphere of art (Lena Wiems "Romanböker", the German lessons with teacher Hamann) , erotic (soul) adventures (Anna Pahl, Margot Kandelhardt), self-testing in a job and contact with public-political life (both in the military).
  • the structure of the novel: as a negative Bildungsroman, Heine Steenhagen is not, like the classic Bildungsroman, divided into three parts based on the Wilhelm Meister model (youth years - traveling years - master years), but is limited to the youth and traveling years (parts I and II), because Heine's educational history breaks off and in the end there is neither integration into society nor reconciliation with the world. The backward-looking hero remains trapped in his quest for revenge, in the struggle with the past.
  • the educator figures who advise the hero (Jochen Suhr, Lena Wiem) and occasionally comment on the events, also for the reader (Hauptmann Goesch).
  • finally, the constant and central thematization of education, not only in terms of the humanistic ideal of education, but also in terms of the sociological concept of distinction coined by Bourdieu .

That Peters has deliberately engaged in novel theory, be occupied by Thomas Mann internal estimates essay , Thomas Mann and romance (1926) in which he ( "The novel") explores in section 7 of the genus and detail on the big Bildungsroman his Time, the magic mountain , and the "plasticity" of the protagonist Hans Castorp. At the end of an important study on Seume ( Ein Jugendfreund. Johann Gottfried Seume , 1927), Peters spans an arc from the autobiography, "Document of the History of Education", to the "deep German" Bildungsroman . The central event in Heine Steenhagen , the lash of the head of the office, which triggered Heine's campaign of revenge, is passionately mentioned in this text: "Every blow received unjustly can still burn today as it was when it was dealt, and the people from whom it was dealt went out is not forgiven in her grave. " The vulnerability and pride that are revealed here do not seem to be just traits of the hero of the novel alone.

At the end of Heine Steenhagen , the failed educational history and the self-inflicted crash of the hero are acknowledged by Captain Goesch with the remark “also an Icarus”. This comparison not only refers to Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 8), but also establishes a text-image relationship between Peters' novel and the enigmatic painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", which was long attributed to Bruegel the Elder and his discovery Ruled the headlines of the art world in 1912. The peculiarity of the picture consists in its extraordinary treatment of the Icarus material, in the boldness with which the fall of the mythological figure is portrayed as a footnote of world events and its existential tragedy through the indifference of the observers (a farmer, an angler, a shepherd and a Partridge) is classified as a minor issue. The fate of the individual does not stop the course of the world and the rhythm of the seasons. In keeping with this message, at the end of “Heine Steenhagen” the Vollstedter farmers talk in naive astonishment about the failure of the protagonist. You want to ask the priest what is going on with Captain Goesch's Icarus comparison. But very soon she was much more preoccupied than Heine's end with a child baptism by Eggert Reimers, a symbol for the cycle of life and its victory over death.

Franz Wende in the spring storm

The figure of Heine Steenhagen continues to have an impact in Peters' oeuvre. The protagonist of the story Franz Wende in the Spring Storm (1931) is in many ways a brother of Heine. As the son of an alcohol-addicted railroad worker and a failed farmer, he suffers from his lack of means, the humiliating dependence on state educational aid and a lack of social standing. While in Heine's case the frustration leads to blind subordination to the Prussian military and brutal fantasies of advancement, the young Franz Wende, like Heine, a deeply immature personality, decides first for National Socialism and later for the rural people movement (Schleswig-Holstein) of the late 1920s, only to finally find his way back to the simple rural life of his ancestors after a prison sentence. The focus of this highly political text is - analogous to Heine Steenhagen - the question of the causes of radicalization and extremism. School principal von Pahlen sums up the key message of the story: "Franz Wende is dynamite. If we don't let him into the mines of the spirit, where - as I believe in spite of everything - he will make use of his gifts that will benefit society if if we reject him, he will drop bombs one day. I mean to say that we must not drive him into the arms of extreme political parties. I used to say occasionally: We have no reason to supply such parties with refined intelligence. " Franz Wende in the spring storm , here and there a Weimar variant of Heine Steenhagen , which takes up various motifs and scenes from the early Bildungsroman and also processes autobiographies, documents Peters' clear view of the clientele of radical political currents on the right and left on the eve of Hitler's seizure of power .

literature

Reference edition

  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! The story of an ambitious one . Ed. Ulrike Michalowsky. Husum: Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012. In the appendix: Comments on the question of Low German

Text bases

  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! [Schleswig] July 17, 1925. Manuscript from the estate of FE Peters of the Schleswig-Holstein State Library in Kiel. Cb 106.23: 09.01-02.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! Schleswig, July 17, 1925. Typescript corrected by hand by the author from the estate of the heirs.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: "Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! The story of an ambitious man". In: Frontbrief Norderdithmarschen , Heide, undated [the only published excerpt, 4 pages]. SHLB estate in Kiel: Cb 106.34: 02.06.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Comments on the question of Low German . Typescript oOoD from the estate of the SHLB: Cb 106.24: 11.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters tells Döntjes . Typescript from the estate of the heirs and typescript from the estate of the SHLB: Cb 106.41: 17: 01.

Other sources

  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Thomas Mann and Romanticism . Schleswig, 1926. [with a letter from Thomas Mann to FEPeters]. Typescript from the SHLB estate: Cb 106.25: 11.01. The manuscript follows on from the manuscript by Heine Steenhagen in Cb 106.23: 09.02.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: A childhood friend. Johann Gottfried Seume. Schleswig, 1927. Typescript from the estate of SHLB: Cb 106.25: 15.01 and Cb 106.25: 19.02.
  • Friedrich Ernst Peters: Franz Wende in the spring storm . Schleswig, 1931. Typescript from the SHLB estate: Cb 106.23: 05.01.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Full text Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! The story of an ambitious one
  2. ^ Letter from Peters to his friend Otto Kröger dated December 9, 1912, Peters estate of the Schleswig-Holstein State Library.
  3. ↑ Cf. here home book of the district of Rendsburg. Edited by Jürgen Kleen u. a. Rendsburg, Möller, 1922; Schleswig-Holstein dictionary. Edited by Otto Mensing. Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1927 ff.
  4. ↑ Full text formulaic, a trait of Low German
  5. ↑ Henrik Ibsen's individualism. One try. , original manuscript, November 18, 1911, FE Peters estate of the Schleswig-Holstein State Library in Kiel, Cb 106.25: 8.01, pp. 29–31.
  6. ↑ See here Selbmann, Rolf: Der deutsche Bildungsroman. 2., revised. and exp. Stuttgart: Metzler 1994, p. 31ff.
  7. ↑ List from: Jacobs, Jürgen / Markus Krause: The German Bildungsroman: History of the genre from the 18th to the 20th century. Munich, Beck 1989, p. 37
  8. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu: The subtle differences. Critique of social judgment. Frankfurt / Main, Suhrkamp 1987.
  9. ↑ Full text Thomas Mann und die Romantik , letter from Thomas Mann to Peters of March 19, 1929: "The clever work, which knows how to treat abstract things in such a lively way," visualizes "as much of my spiritual biography as it does of yours. ..]. There are many subtle insights and hints in it. "
  10. ↑ Thomas Mann and Romanticism , p. 83 u. 84: "What delighted them [the romantics] so much about this book [ Wilhelm Meister ] was the portrayal of infinite becoming. A novel of this kind uses heroes with" boundless plasticity "and" versatile receptivity. "One does not serve him ready, rigid character that bends and breaks events. This is how Novalis interprets the passive nature of the hero of the novel. Often enough, Wilhelm Meister has been remembered on the occasion of the magic mountain. And what is real is the boundless plasticity and versatile receptivity of the master Hans Castorp related in his willingness to find everything "worth hearing" and, like gifted youth, to dabble with the various points of view on life for the time being, to make non-binding attempts. Thomas Mann thus proves himself to be a real romantic and a descendant of Novalis. " In Heine Steenhagen , too , Peters 'hero' s ability to listen well is underlined: "Lena is still having fun, who can hear so well." His limited and predominantly negative "plasticity", however, is characteristic of the anti-Bildungsroman.
  11. ↑ Full text Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! The story of an ambitious one
  12. ↑ Full text Friedrich Ernst Peters tells Döntjes
  13. ↑ Full text Thomas Mann and the Romanticism