In the thicket of the Pelion

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In the thicket of the Pelion is a 1941 novel by the writer Werner Helwig . It is the second part of the so-called Hellas trilogy .

History of origin

In 1935 Helwig roamed the Pelion together with his friend, the dropout Alfons Hochhauser . Impressed by the historic landscape, by Hochhauser's stories and shared experiences, the first concept for the novel Raubfischer in Hellas was created . What Helwig experienced in the Pelion, also on his two other Hellas journeys between 1935 and 1938, is the subject of many of his autobiographical texts. Helwig's Pelion experiences are also the basis for the novel In the thicket of Pelion . In the winter of 1938/39 Helwig began writing the Centaurs , as the original title was. When he fled to Switzerland in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, because he was afraid of being drafted into the Wehrmacht, he finished writing the book in Zurich. In 1941 the novel was published in Germany under the title Im Thicket of Pelion .

Helwig, one of the writers who did not want to come to terms with National Socialist Germany, was able to publish the novel during the Second World War because the content was thematically harmless "in the 'Mythen-Binnensee' of Greek tradition".

action

The protagonist of the novel is - as in Raubfischer in Hellas - Clemens, also known as Xenophon, the strange sounder, an eccentric, who stands out for his stubbornness and idiosyncrasy. After being a fisherman in the Aegean Sea for 10 years , the seafarer in the thicket of the Pelion, the home of the Centaurs, becomes a "farmer", who stirs up the lives of the Pelion inhabitants through his demeanor and behavior. "He brings everyone into disaster, whether he wants to or not, that is his nature," he says.
In the port town of Chorefto on the northern Pelion coast, Clemens is a regular guest at a tavern that attracts many men. Clemens is in love with the landlady Charikli, daughter of Fassbauer Weinas. She marries the fisherman Jorgos and makes fun of Clemens. Hoping for a love wage, he lets her incite him against Mitchea's stabber in order to free Charikli from him, and then experiences that Charikli leaves her husband to run away with Mitscheas. In the fight with Mitcheas, Clemens is critically injured. The fact that he survived is thanks to his friend, the mule owner Archileo, which Clemens "appreciates" with lies. He takes the boat out to fish again, but has no fishing luck.

Clemens begins to stalk around, stealing things like grapes and coal and keeping his head above water by selling them. To put an end to this life, he hired himself out in a monastery as a worker to build a chapel, wondering whether he should become a monk, but then snubbed the abbot with abusive behavior in such a way that he had to leave his job. A dubious business with liquor dealers, a great binge and a storm that throws his boat out of joint make him completely destitute. After all, he joins the notorious landowner and bon vivant Samsarellos, who has traveled the world and rules over the land and people in the mysterious area of ​​the ruined city of Mizella, including the worker Mitschu, son of the herd owner Asbolos and brother of the shepherdess Katina. Clemens lives there in close association with his animals. His sleeping quarters are an old, hollow, giant plane. Since Clemens gets involved with the shepherdess Katina, her friend, the shepherd and flute player Evangeli, tries to destroy Clemens. He starts a forest fire in which many animals are killed.

For Clemens the situation comes to a head because he gets involved with both young Katina and young Margitza. When the residents of this area and Clemens meet on the feast of St. George in Mizella, Clemens, of whom everyone is actually a little afraid, is ridiculed and humiliated. Margitza's father, who has observed his daughter's love-making game with Clemens, demands redress through marriage. Clemens, however, refuses and provokes him so that Galanis tries to burn his eyes out. A little later, Margitza's body is found in a ravine. Clemens gets into the talk. It is no longer possible for him to continue working at Samsarellos. He gets out of his country life. He has become someone else. A shot is fired as he crosses the Katzenbuckelbrücke. Evangeli missed it. Clemens returns to his life as a fisherman; because “the sea is our immortal mother”.

About the work

Among Helwig's novels, Im Pelion's Thicket is his “most poetic work”. The fate of the protagonist, “captured” in the novelistic style, “is placed in the framework of lyrical prose, in the hymn to the unlimited vitality of the Mediterranean vegetation”. Richard Bersch sees the work as "close to the romantic novel". It is also an initiation novel in which Clemens, at the beginning, entangled in love affairs and not very successful as a fisherman, increasingly slips into unworthy thefts. Only when he takes on responsibility as a shepherd does he come to terms with himself. The end, however, sees him again in unsecured circumstances as a fisherman at sea. The mixture of stories, dreams, myths , folk songs and lyrical passages also points to the poetics of Romanticism .

Battle between Lapiths and Centaurs, terracotta, between 550 and 525 BC Chr.

And as a “romantic enchantment of the ordinary”, the list of persons can be seen at the beginning, in which all actors are listed and divided into Lapiths , Centaurs and “ordinary persons”. The latter includes animals, but also ghosts and Clemens' boat. Clemens himself is one of the centaurs, the horse men (half animal, half human).

A key scene in the novel is the nocturnal dream in which Clemens, while digging in the clay soil of Pelion, comes across the mighty ore head of a colossus whose body extends through the entire Pelion - "the body of a horse-man frozen in copper". Lapiths and Centaurs do not understand each other and fight each other, even within the camps of Lapiths and Centaurs there are repeated outbursts of anger, hatred, enmity and violence. “In the pictorial language of the dream, the Pelion is not only referred to as a mythical landscape, that is, shaped by the essence of the Centaur, but Clemens' way of acting in this mythical space is also interpreted as a penetration into the depths of its essence.” The Centaur “symbolizes the spiritual and physical The dual nature of man ”.

Effects

The novel - like the first part of the Hellas trilogy, Raubfischer in Hellas - met with great interest among the Bündische Jugend and has been an occasion to explore the Pelion in Helwig's footsteps up to the present day. Youth groups in the Pelion follow the tracks of Helwig and those of his protagonist Clemens and report on them in their writings. But it is not just groups from the youth movement who, fascinated by Helwig's Hellas novels, visit the locations. The majority of the guests who Alfons Hochhauser accommodated in his simple accommodations in the Pelion between 1957 and 1980 had read the Helwig novels and wanted to “translate the literature back into the experience.” Quite a few of them have settled in the Pelion.

expenditure

literature

  • Richard Bersch: Pathos and Myth. Studies on Werner Helwig's work with a bio-bibliographical appendix. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-631-44541-5 .
  • Richard Bersch: Afterword . In: Werner Helwig: Journey without returning home . Reclam, Ditzingen 2000, p. 367 ff.
  • Dorota Cygan: Condemned to be an outsider - outsider stories from Werner Helwig and Sergiusz Piasecki . In: Between the times. Young literature in Germany between 1933 and 1945 . Uta Beiküfner, Hania Siebenpfeiffer (eds.). Pp. 61-81. Berlin 2000. ISBN 3-8311-0309-7 .
  • Dieter Harsch: Palia Mitzela [1]
  • Erik Martin : In the thicket of the Pelion . In: Clams . Annual journal for literature . Viersen 1991. Vol. 26 A, ISSN  0085-3593 .
  • Erik Martin: Werner Helwig's Greek novels . In: the icebreaker . Heidenheim 1988, No. 4, ISSN  0342-1597 .
  • Ursula Prause: Werner Helwig. An added autobiography . edition lumiére, Bremen 2014, ISBN 978-3-943245-23-3 .
  • Ernst von Schenk: Werner Helwig's Hellas novels . In: Swiss Annals . Aarau 1945, No. 2.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ursula Prause: Werner Helwig. An added autobiography .
  2. ↑ Richard Bersch: Pathos and Myth. Studies on Werner Helwig's work , p. 208.
  3. ↑ Horst Denkler : Ruined works, lifelong dreams: literary traces of the 'lost generation' of the Third Reich . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 9783484321274 . Similar to: Günter Scholdt: No second class acquittal. To evaluate non-Nazi literature in the “Third Reich” . In: For discussion: Zuckmayer's "Secret Report" and other contributions to Zuckmayer research . Special print Wallstein 2002, p. 136, ISBN 978-3-89244-608-8 .
  4. ↑ Uwe Schultz: Werner Helwig . In: “Handbuch der Deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur”, Munich 1969.
  5. ↑ Richard Bersch: Epilogue to the Hellastrilogy . In: Werner Helwig: Journey without returning home . Stuttgart 1993, p. 370 f.
  6. ↑ Richard Bersch: Epilogue to the Hellastrilogy . In: Werner Helwig: Journey without Homecoming , p. 373.
  7. ↑ Richard Bersch: Pathos and Myth. Studies on Werner Helwig's work with a bio-bibliographical appendix.
  8. ↑ Michael Kohlhase: News from Pelion - the fourth research trip in the footsteps of Werner Helwig . In: newspaper. Journal of the German Freischar . No. 1/2008; Jürgen Ubl: the centaurs. impressions of a pelion ride . Mannheim 2010.
  9. ↑ Der Textfahrer - On the 100th birthday of Werner Helwig in: Der Eisbrecher No. 1/2005 .
  10. ↑ The geographer Michel Sivignon investigates this phenomenon in the article Alfonso et le Pelion in: Revue Desmos No. 31, 2009. Translation into English https://pelionwalks.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/alfonso-and-pelion- a-strange-story /