Hornberger shooting
Every child on the wide earth v.
Hornberger Schiessen has already
heard that the powder ran out at the
most beautiful hour, so that you can no
longer shoot! Anno 1564
The Hornberg Shooting is the event that brought about the phrase : "It ends like the Hornberg Shooting". The phrase is used when a matter is announced with a lot of noise, but then nothing comes of it and it ends without result.
Emergence
The historians do not agree that the following events and explanations really the famous phrase above this basis. As with any etymological meaning that can not be clarified with certainty, numerous legends surround this idiom at Hornberger Schießen , with the following two being the most widespread in relevant works. However, neither of the two stories is historically guaranteed.
Duke visit
In 1564, Duke Christoph von Württemberg had announced himself in Hornberg . This should be received with a gun salute and all honors. When everything was ready, a large cloud of dust approached from a distance. Everyone cheered and the cannons thundered as hard as they could. But the dust cloud turned out to be just a stagecoach . The same thing happened when a grocer's cart and, a little later, a herd of cattle approached the city. The lookout had given false alarms every time, and all the powder was gone when the duke finally came. Some Hornbergers tried to imitate the thunder of cannons by roaring. Some reports estimate the duke's visit to be at the end of the 17th century.
This version is regularly performed in summer on the open-air stage in Hornberg as a folk play .
Attack on Hornberg
According to the second version of the declaration, the proverb refers to an event in 1519 when the town was attacked by the neighboring Villingers . The Hornbergs are said to have fired their ammunition in a short time, so that the attackers only had to wait for the cannonade to end before they could then conquer Hornberg. This explanation goes back to the pastor Konrad Kaltenbach, who describes it in numbers 3, 4 and 5 of the Heimatklänge from old and new times , a supplement to the Freiburger Tagespost from the year 1915 and refers to historical sources (Villinger Chronik 1495-1533 ).
Other versions
At the beginning of the 18th century there should have been such disagreements about the course of a free shooting in Hornberg that gradually all the shooters left the festival and the planned shooting was finally canceled.
Use in literature
Friedrich Schiller already wrote in his work Die Räuber (first edition 1781) in the first act: “It went like shooting at Hornberg and had to pull away with a long nose.” Thomas Mann formulated in his story Herr und Hund (1918): “It can also be that the whole thing, after all the events and inconveniences, ends like the Hornberg shooting and quietly fizzles out. " Hannah Arendt uses the saying in her book Macht und Macht (1970):" Nevertheless, this situation need not lead to a revolution . Firstly, it can end with counter-revolution, the establishment of dictatorships and, secondly, it can end like the Hornberg shooting: nothing at all needs to be done. "
literature
- Lutz Röhrich : Lexicon of the proverbial sayings (= Herder spectrum 5400). Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 2003, ISBN 3-451-05400-0 .
- Peter Tokofsky: "The Hornberger Schiessen": Proverbial Expression, Narrative, and Drama. In: Proverbium 10 (1993), pp. 321-330 ( online ).
- Konrad Heck: The Hornberger shooting in the different readings . In: Die Ortenau 33 (1953), pp. 200-205 ( online ).
