In the sunshine

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In the Sunshine is a novella by Theodor Storm . The novella, which is drawn in two passages in a contrasting manner, deals with the failed love affair between a bourgeois daughter and a French captain.

Emergence

The novella was written at the time Storm entered the legal service of Prussia . As early as mid- 1854 , letters to Theodor Fontane and Franz Kugler spoke of the novella that was to follow the one called Ein Grünes Blatt . In a letter to Hartmuth Brinkmann , Storm himself watched a »sister story« in Im Saal , in which (from the perspective of those affected) the technique was already tried out in a (wedding) hall, only briefly sketching a youthful episode, which then is contrasted out of age. At the end of the year, Eduard Mörike and Paul Heyse already seem to know the novella.

content

In the first passage, the beginning of this amoure , the courtship of Constantin for his "Fränzchen" is described, both protagonists are characterized here. On the one hand, the arithmetic, somewhat too serious daughter of a businessman, who doesn't want to sing because "it's not [suitable] for bourgeois girls" (354) and "so easily, so effortlessly [laughed]" that it "[...] ran over her like a breath of wind over the lake" (353) - on the other hand, the French officer, who is a little more light-footed than appearing, who lets the beloved go before him, about her Gang then cum grano salis to be characterized as "a wagtail" (355).

If in the first passage there are two completely different lovers, whose love affair seems to be inexorably tending towards the port of marriage, the second passage now begins with "It was a different time" (356). The added "probably more than sixty years later" (ibid.) Now seems not only to express a temporal distance (too) great for a human life, but also to reflect a certain lack of interest in ("probably") in the precise temporal recording. And so there is accordingly an old woman from whose (retro) perspective the fate of Fränzchen and Constantine is now reported. The old lady is not even Franziska herself, who is now at the end of her life, but her sister-in-law. Franziska, whose blooming, shimmering life was just a few lines before the reader's eyes, is now listed as the long dead.

And so the second passage develops back, that the once courted girl probably died of grief and that the grief is due to the unsuccessful marriage, develops out of the crypt in which the coffin of the happy girl, which has just collapsed, even her death in decay seems to have already overcome. This picture, in turn, is then contrasted by the impending wedding of the old man's grandson, hence the great-nephew of the long-gone, who, as a listener, is now listening to his grandmother, like her father, who after his great-grandson must have been "a tough man" (360), Only the young luck once brought failure.

So the lost happiness appears in double distancing. It is not only time that seems to have passed within sixty years - so that even if it had turned out differently, the story would have long since found its probable end in the death of the lovers. The narrative approach in the second passage also aims to prevent any closeness, to break off all intimacy and to bed in the situation between the old woman and her grandchildren, leaving the rust of the medallions that were found in the broken coffin of the Franzchen next to the »black lock of hair« ( 362) of the beloved stand abruptly.

Appreciation

The contrastive technique of orienting oneself twice in the life of a figure with a large amount of time and using this contrast to separate out the development between the two so harshly presented poles, provokes an astonishing dissatisfaction in the recipient, as Heyse involuntarily remarked Letter to Storm demanded the execution of the novel elided between the two points .

Storm seems to have succeeded for the first time in what he had intended over and over again with previous novellas, such as Im Saal , Immensee , Ein Grünes Blatt : to bring the failure of a love story closer to the reader by means of temporal and narrative distancing. For the first time in In the Sunshine , however , he leaves the purely rational impossibility offered by Ein Grünes Blatt , in which a return to the fairy tale would be the impossible attempt to transform precisely what contradicts the fairy tale, the real into the unreal, leaves the biographical representation as it is offered by the contemplation of the elderly in Im Saal and leaves the wistful observation of the social circumstances, how they destroyed the happiness of love in Immensee and thus leaves the circle that the life of the main character seems to draw:

In the sunshine, it seems, he wants to consciously seek and find new limits to narrative possibilities: A corpse - and not just this one, because "› now everyone is buried long ago ‹" (360), as the grandmother herself states - is back in the luxuriant life of his youth shifts and fails and arouses pity. Or vice versa: out of the coffins, because "the coffins of the old rulers no longer want to hold" (361), "in the crypt" (ibid.) The story begins to describe their failure itself.

literature

  • Theodor Storm, Complete Works in Four Volumes , ed. v. Karl Ernst Laage u. Dieter Lohmeier , Vol. 1: Poems. Novellas. 1848-1867 ; ed. v. Dieter Lohmeier; Frankfurt a. M. (Dt. Klassiker Vlg.) 1987, 349-362

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