In the castle

Theodor Storm in the 1860s

In the castle is the title of a novella by Theodor Storm , which was first printed in 1862 in the journal Die Gartenlaube . It depicts a love affair between a teacher from the bourgeoisie and a noble lady of the castle, who over the course of time has developed a modern worldview.

With the confessional work Storm drew a first balance of his life and advocated the abolition of class differences. In addition to the political and social considerations of the story, there are passages critical of religion that extend to a departure from traditional Christianity . The optimistic story, planned as early as 1853, is one of the key texts in his middle work and was censored without his knowledge when it was first printed .

In addition to intertextual references to E. T. A. Hoffmann's story Das Majorat, there is a text analogy to his novella Immensee , published more than ten years earlier .

Form and content

As is so often the case, Storm divided his novella into a framework and internal plot in which the castle mistress Anna writes down her memories in first-person form . This internal narrative of the chapter The Described Pages is interrupted by another action after Anna has given her cousin Rudolf the notes, thinks through what has been written and remembers other details until it comes to the end.

Behind a fir forest, about a quarter of an hour from the churchyard of a nameless village, lies the castle with its park-like garden. For a long time it served as a hunting lodge for an imperial count , until the protagonist's class-conscious father, a former envoy, took over and moved in with her, her ailing brother Kuno, who was around nine years younger, and her uncle, studying natural history . The relationship to the class-conscious father is distant, while it is lived out all the more intimately towards her enlightened, philanthropic uncle. Emotional and ideological differences become apparent in their conversations. So he tells her the fairy tale of Frau Holle and speaks of Freischütz , but doesn't believe in her enthusiasm, wants to explain the anatomy of a fly and draw its attention to his studies of nature, which Anna is not interested in.

The girl has no playmates, but does not feel alone because she knows the “dear God ” around her, whom she imagines from a picture in church as a man with a white beard in a wide blue coat. While she pursues her reading madness in the library, she marveled at the paintings of the deceased nobles in the great knight's hall . At some point there she discovers the image of a twelve-year-old boy who, with his unadorned clothes and a sparrow in his hand that indicates his low origins , seems to stand out from the "silent society" of the noble. When she frequently deals with the boy who defiantly looks towards her, she perceives a trait he is suffering from, falls into enthusiasm and kisses the picture.

On her fourteenth birthday, her father sends her to her aunt in town for three years, where she is supposed to forget her dreams and pursue serious studies. Only the music lessons make her stay in the mundane environment bearable. After their return, it doesn’t take long for the head of house Arnold to move into the castle to give her brother private lessons. Arnold is a sensitive middle-class man who can sing and play the piano well. One afternoon he helps her and a singing partner from the city to rehearse a duet by Robert Schumann with which the two have difficulties, accompanies them and later sings an Italian folk song. The conversations with him and her unclear and scientifically oriented uncle gradually change her worldview. When she sings the third stanza of the chorale How beautifully the morning star shines by Philipp Nicolai , "Geuß very deep ... / The flames of your love", he interrupts her with disillusioning remarks about the cruelty of nature and the psychological origins of the Love , which is nothing more than “mortal people's fear of being alone.” She is shaken and on the same day sees a cat playing with a mouse and jumping away with the victim who is still alive. A little later she meets Arnold, who understandably explains to her that her concept of God is childlike and that the words of the Bible can be interpreted differently. He is critical of the nobility's idea of being superior to other people because of their class. When he sings her a love song, she senses that the words are meant for her:

When I have hardly seen you,
my heart has to confess,
I can never pass you by
.

If only the starlight falls
in my little room at night,
I lie and don't sleep,
And think yours.

Arnold's family has lived in the vicinity of the castle for generations. During a walk they visit the old family estate, a farm where his grandmother still lives. To the side of the main building is the "beehive", which his father created when he was young, but which is no longer in operation. As a child he had come from there to play with his cousin on a large meadow, through the bushes and over a swampy ground reached a dense deciduous forest and in the process lost his cousin, who was moving fast. In a clearing he was overcome by “a feeling of infinite loneliness” and saw a green shimmering lizard on a tree stump.

When Arnold's face reminds her one day of the boy with the sparrow and she speaks to him about it, he does not rule out that he is a descendant of the defiant-looking whipping boy . Since Kuno's condition continues to worsen and lessons cannot continue, the tutor gives up the job and leaves Anna in the solitude of the castle. In the further course, her father forces her into a befitting marriage. She becomes pregnant, but the child dies shortly after the birth. As her affection for Arnold penetrates the public and is whispered, the result is a divorce, which is followed by gloomy days. When Rudolf, who has read her pages, asks her whether her deceased child is the fruit of her love affair with Arnold, she angrily shouts: "No Rudolf [...] unfortunately no!"

She sends her cousin away and tries to re-establish the relationship with her husband through letters. Then she learns that he has died and now feels free for Arnold, with whom she can finally live together. She moves into town with him while her uncle takes over the management of the castle. In the last scene they stand blissfully under the image of the whipping boy who looks down at them like "the children of another time."

Creation and publication

The Gazebo, 1862

Storm wrote the novella while he was a district judge in Heiligenstadt . As can be seen from a letter to Theodor Fontane , he had been planning the work since 1853. On October 28th, he wrote that the suggestion had come from an old miller from the Segeberg area, who gave him a walk "on the sunlit high heather" , told of "the secret story of an old estate" and "a beautiful elegant woman". After a long revision, he could not tackle it until 1861. He had previously finished Veronica , whose concept overlaps in places with Im Schloß . The protagonist of the short novella refuses to confess before Easter and decides to lead a life oriented towards this world.

For the first edition in issues 10 to 12 of the arbor of the editors censored Ernst Keil without knowledge Storms socially awkward exclamation Annas with which they responded to the question of her cousin Rudolf after paternity, which greatly outraged the author. Because of the supposedly immoral tendency of the work, Alexander Duncker and Heinrich Schindler declined to publish a book. The considerably changed version was published by EC Brunn in Münster in 1863. In no other novella did Storm intervene so often in the text that was already in print.

The critical passages in the work had led to concerns from aristocratic circles even before it was published. The wife of the district administrator Alexander von Wussow asked him while he was still at work not to “write anything against the nobility”. As he announced to his parents on December 9, 1861, Storm rejected this. He had to explain to her that according to his "deepest convictions [...] the nobility and the church" were the "two essential obstacles to a thoroughgoing moral development of our and other peoples". He also defended the novella to his son Hans.

background

With its social and institutional criticism, the novella was initially registered with skepticism by some publishers and was only discovered relatively late by literary scholars, but was enthusiastically received by the public. Today it is one of the key texts of his middle period, as it illuminates the traditional everyday culture of the Catholic Eichsfeld on the one hand, and the Prussian "state ideology of the alliance of throne and altar " on the other . In it Storm linked two of his important themes: liberation from this determination and the tension between contingency management and criticism of religion . Storm himself valued the novella and counted it among his most personal and important works. He wrote to Ludwig Pietsch that some passages were “as deep and significant as” he “only ever wrote something”. Storm's assessment of the work in this way was also based on his conviction that with him he had realized the postulates of poetic realism . He had succeeded in “expressing a real salary in a poetic way”, an assessment that Heinrich Detering shares: With her vivid attention to detail, which remains integrated in its abundance, Storm moves “at the height of his abilities”.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

In addition to a text analogy to Storm's own novella Immensee, there are numerous intertextual references to ETA Hoffmann's novella Das Majorat , which also deals with the decay of a castle and changed values. Storm held Hoffmann in high esteem and had collected almost all of his works for his extensive library. The influence of the romantic poet lawyer can be seen in some grotesque figures such as the stingy pawnbroker in the art fairy tale Bulemann's house or the overgrown painter in the novella Eine Malerarbeit . His admiration is also evident at the end of the short story Two Cake Eaters of the Old Time from the Scattered Chapter (s) and is evident at the beginning of the narrative Am Kamin , in which the punch bowl is praised with the words that "blessed Hoffmann had." his stories of serapion ”. Among the tales of Hoffmann, Das Majorat was "almost his favorite, because of its excellent local color and natural atmosphere and [...] the old Judicial Councilor V., certainly the most splendid figure drawn by H in his novellas." In Storm's novella the " missing people "in the knight's hall in an eerie way and next to the entrance door the" image of a knight [...] with a bad conscience "whose" face was covered with blood "can be found in Hoffmann's case Knight's hall with many pictures and reliefs.

The narrative is conceptually close to the memory novellas, which are typical for Storm and here also have to be considered hermeneutically . Anna describes a large part of the event from her memory , which she entrusts to her notes in portions and which shows up in her thoughts about her previous life. Although the retrospective perspective is not the sole view of the events, it still dominates large stretches of the representation. In this way memory becomes the object of narration and raises the question of how reliable it is, with which the narrative means themselves are reflected. For example, Storm includes a reference to Immensee at one point , which, in contrast to the continuous reference to Hoffmann's narrative, remains selective and limited to the person of the teacher. Arnold mentions the “beehive” and tells a strange story that, with its romantic forest loneliness and the enchanted-looking, golden-eyed lizard, seems like a fairy tale and is doubted by Anna and her skeptical uncle. The third chapter (Im Walde) of the earlier novella contains an episode in which the children Elisabeth and Reinhard try in vain to find strawberries. You wander through a fir tree, cut your way through the thick undergrowth and reach a clearing that looks just as lonely as the one discovered by Arnold. By combining what has actually been experienced with what is fictitious or read, reality is retrospectively rebuilt and enriched with elements of fairy tales.

In both stories, the music shows the hopeful approach to overcoming class differences . As in the Majorat , she binds the lovers together "in the castle" and helps the protagonists to banish their melancholy and loneliness. With Storm's musicality and musical prose, it is no wonder that he dealt with questions of music in over 20 novels and incorporated scenes with concerts and house music , singing and music lessons. If the play of the organist Georg Bruhn in the novella Renate symbolically points to the essence of the novella, the rehearsal of a duet leads the protagonist to gradually develop a modern worldview and to cast off initial prejudices. Another point of contact is science, as the intellectual exchange between Anna and Arnold flows into his lectures and publications.

Interpretative approach

The story ends hopefully. With her disobedient love, Anna steps out of the shadows of the past, whose oppressive burden is symbolized by the paintings in the great hall. That it opens the door to a new age is made clear by the last sentence of the novella: The whipping boy as part of the medieval class society looks down on the liberated “children” of another epoch. As a way out of the narrowness of the castle, in addition to the educated bourgeoisie of the teacher, the simple way of life of the farm workers, which is vaguely reminiscent of the attitude of Tolstoy , offers them .

In the novella, two places face each other, each with a different meaning. The castle appears as a death room filled with the genealogical ghosts of history. The lively nature forms the opposite area in which Anna can pursue her dreams. So she sometimes retreats with her reading material to the heights of the “Laubschloss”, a leaf-vaulted refuge in a treetop. Another contrast that runs across this semantic spatial arrangement is shown in the different views of the world that clash in the conversations, whereby the possibilities of enlightened reason are explored. Anna attaches herself to fairy tales, art and a naive belief, while her uncle takes a pessimistic , science-oriented worldview. If he pursues scientific studies and denies her enthusiasm for the hymn How beautiful does the morning star shine with Darwinian teachings, loves fairy tales from an early age and still remembers her childlike trust in God as an adult, an idea that goes back to early Romanticism , the closeness to God to connect with being a child.

The sometimes painful discussions with Arnold and his uncle, who presented Anna with gruesome details of nature, confront her with the question of truth , whereby she gradually learns to solve the world riddles with her mind instead of passively accepting them as revealed truths.

More programmatically than in Storm's previous work, the novella seems to want to link rational and irrational moments, an integration that is derived from the criticism of Christianity and the merely materialistic view of nature. The worship of Anna, initiated by Arnold with deistic expressions, is now “more modest” and recalls Ludwig Feuerbach and monism in the sense of Ernst Haeckel .

With the seemingly magical and happy ending of the novella, it should not be forgotten that the hoped-for bliss depends on an open future and that the certainty of the formula “And they lived happily ever after” is not given. It also remains unclear to the reader whether the joint plans of Anna, Arnold and the uncle can be realized.

literature

• Heinrich Detering : In the castle. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-02623-1 , pp. 159-161
• Rüdiger Frommholz: In the castle. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 16, Munich 1991, pp. 30-31
• Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading methods in Theodor Storm's novella “Im Schloß” In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), pp. 93–112

Web links

Wikisource: In the castle  - at Wikisource

Individual evidence

1. ^ Heinrich Detering : In the castle. In: Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 159.
2. ↑ Theodor Storm: Im Schloß In: Complete works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, p. 533.
3. ↑ Theodor Storm: Im Schloß In: Complete works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, pp. 537-538.
4. ↑ Theodor Storm: Im Schloß In: Complete works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, p. 531.
5. ↑ Theodor Storm: Im Schloß In: Complete works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, p. 545.
6. ↑ Theodor Storm: Im Schloß In: Complete works in three volumes. Volume 1, Phaidon, Essen, p. 550.
7. ↑ Quoted from Karl Ernst Laage : Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 67.
8. ^ Heinrich Detering: Veronica. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 157.
9. ^ Heinrich Detering: In the castle. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 159.
10. ↑ Quoted from Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 113.
11. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading methods in Theodor Storm's novella "Im Schloß" In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 93.
12. ↑ Quoted from: Heinrich Detering: Im Schloß. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 159.
13. ^ Heinrich Detering: In the castle. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 159.
14. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella "Im Schloß" In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 95.
15. ↑ Philipp Theisohn: Scattered chapters. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 266.
16. ↑ Quoted from: Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 55.
17. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella "Im Schloß" In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 95.
18. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella “Im Schloß” In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 102.
19. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella “Im Schloß” In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), pp. 102-103.
20. ↑ According to Achim Küpper: "It comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella "Im Schloß" In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 100.
21. ^ Karl Ernst Laage: Theodor Storm. Boyens, Heide 1999, p. 45.
22. ^ Heinrich Detering: In the castle. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 160.
23. ^ Rüdiger Frommholz: In the castle. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 16, Munich 1991, p. 31.
24. ^ Heinrich Detering: In the castle. In: Christian Demandt and Philipp Theisohn (eds.): Storm-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, p. 160.
25. ↑ Achim Küpper: "That comes from all 'reading books"! Intertextuality, narrative problems and alternative reading plans in Theodor Storm's novella “Im Schloß” In: Schriften der Theodor-Storm-Gesellschaft, Volume 54 (2005), p. 106.