In an iron fist

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Title page of the copy from the Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library in Hamburg

In iron fist is a detective novel that Julius Stinde wrote in 1872 under the pseudonym “J. Steinmann ”published.

Lore

The novel was published in Altona in 1872 . Up until the beginning of the 21st century, only the title was known from bibliographies and contemporary book trade directories, but it could not be found as a text or book. The Carl von Ossietzky Hamburg State and University Library has received one last copy of the book, which has been torn up and threatened with paper disintegration due to acid damage . A label glued into the front cover provides information on the old location of the book at the Speersort “Hamb. City Bibl. Realkat SCa Vol XII p. 820 ”, which is recorded in the old, handwritten volume catalog, the so-called real catalog. Today the book can be found online in the campus catalog under the new shelf number A / 11301. However, the book or the paper is so brittle and ailing that it had to be blocked for normal use; it is also not available for interlibrary loan . However, it could be reproduced and is accessible both as a copy in the library and in digitized form. The novel was originally published in the Hamburger Novellenzeitung in 1872 and was reprinted in various regional newspapers, such as the Bozner Wochenblatt , the Laibacher Zeitung , the narrator zum Fürther Tageblatt and the Freiburger Zeitung .

action

At the beginning of the novel there is an insurance fraud, which the police officer Korn arranged to his advantage. A physician paid for it certifies a natural death to a suicide, which secures a considerable sum insured for the widow, Frau Ehrenfried. Korn “administers” this money and only gives small amounts to the widow now and then at her discretion, leaving her to believe that she has made herself a criminal offense and can only be spared persecution through his protection.

Her daughter Antonie and her friend Eva contribute to the cost of living by making artificial flowers. Eva is engaged to a helmsman who works as a seaman. The pretty girls are the target of erotic desires lecherous libertines, Pastor Schroeder and a roués who wants to marry the daughter of the rich family Dolomie. The aim of the police officer Korn is to lead the girls to prostitution for the benefit of these two interested parties and to make the greatest profit from it. His first victim, Eva, is kidnapped and made mindless with drugs.

A second storyline takes place in the Dolomie family. Here the widowed father strictly represents the interests of his company, to which he even wants to sacrifice the happiness of his son Georg, who, instead of becoming a businessman, seeks his luck as a painter. The daughter Leopoldine gives in to the decadent luxury life of the rich and only wants to marry the equally decadent Herr von Sejour so that she can live out her erotic fantasies after the marriage. It promotes the rift between father and son that arises from George's refusal to enter into an engagement arranged by his father to a wealthy merchant's daughter. She hopes that, as heiress, she will one day be able to dispose of all of the family's assets on her own. Georg met one of the lovely flower makers, Antonie, and fell in love with her, and despite the disinheritance from his father, he wants to work out a future together with Antonie as a painter. The offer of jeans, the old servant of the Dolomie house, helps Georg to get his savings on, so that he can complete his training as a painter. Georg's letters, which he wrote to Antonie during his training stay in Düsseldorf, were intercepted by the police officer Korn.

Antonie escapes the fate that Eva had to endure only through the unintentionally helpful intervention of the police officer's insane wife, who enables her to escape. Meanwhile, after marrying Herr von Sejour, Leopoldine had the plan to kill her husband in order to live in greater freedom without him. She meets regularly with a former lover, initially believed to be lost but then reappeared, the Italian Benvenuto, who procures her the poison Aqua Tofana , with which the husband is to be slowly killed without traces of the poison being detectable. The turning point came with Georg's return from Düsseldorf. Antonie escapes from the house of the police officer Korn and finds help from a young doctor who happens to be working in the apartment in which Antonie is taking refuge. The young doctor brings Antonie to Georg in the Dolomie house, where the poisoned Herr von Sejour is struggling with death. Georg immediately declares himself ready to donate his blood after the doctor has found out which poison should perish the patient and after he has declared that transfusion is the only way to save life. Mr Dolomie is suffering a breakdown and has to revise his previous views and attitudes. Eva is stabbed to death by her helmsman, who has recognized her as a prostitute. The helmsman is sentenced to long imprisonment, the lovers Antonie and Georg let a year of mourning for Eva pass before they celebrate their wedding.

Overall, a broad panorama of Hamburg society in the 1860s is presented, in which, of course, the bad guys are painted in the blackest colors and the good guys show a nobility that is so selfless and unrealistic that even the most gullible reader must doubt whether it is in the real world could actually be like that, or maybe not a little less generous.

Literary history prerequisites

With his police novel , which is an early example of German crime literature , Stinde stands in a tradition that did not go very far back in his day. The first crime stories come from François Gayot de Pitaval (1673–1743), who compiled a twenty-volume collection of “causes célèbres et intéressantes” between 1734 and 1743, in which he described historical criminal cases. As a result, the term “roman policier” was common for French crime stories and German authors used the term “Pitaval” for comparable publications, such as Julius Eduard Hitzig and Willibald Alexis . Older authors who wrote crime stories were Jane Austen with Emma (1815), ETA Hoffmann with Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819) and Edgar Allan Poe with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). The originator of the German term “Polizeiroman”, however, is the Lübeck lawyer and writer Friedrich Christian Avé-Lallemant (1809–1892), who has been publishing stories from his practical legal experience since the 1860s, which he subtitled “Polizeiroman” . Avé-Lallemand became famous for his book on German crooks (1858–1862). The titles of his relevant novels are: "Die Mechulle-Leut ', a police novel" (1867-68), "The heir and court lord, a police novel" (1870) and "Heart and Money, a police novel" (1871). The German crime writer Jodocus Donatus Hubertus Temme (1798–1881) also seems to have had a strong influence on Stinde. Stinde quotes him and refers to long passages from Temme's "Criminal Library" (1872), which actually interrupts the story of the novel and distracts the reader on side paths. Another crime writer was August Gottlieb Meißner (1753–1807), who wrote crime stories in the spirit of the empirical psychology of the Enlightenment, in which the psychological requirements of crimes were described in particular.

Special considerations

The description of a blood transfusion is particularly noteworthy because at that time, at best, the first attempts with this healing method had been made, of which only a few were successful. The prerequisites for successful transfusions , knowledge of blood groups and their compatibilities, were only created at the beginning of the 20th century. The author sends a cold shudder down the spine of the readers of his “police novel” by describing the sensational procedure as a dangerous, but in the given situation beyond doubt to be used means in all fantastic details: the freshly drawn blood of a perfectly healthy noble youth is in a preheated crystal bowl and then pumped into the veins of a poisoned person.

The novel is characterized by the complete absence of humor . Julius Stinde, who was later celebrated as an important German humorist, apparently only later found this basic attitude, which spiced up all of his later books and writings. One looks in vain for the witty and funny. The author himself commented critically on the genre of the sensational novel two decades later . Under the pseudonym Theophil Ballheim, he gives aspiring writers the following lessons in his fictional "Dicht-Lehr-Anstalt für Adults":

“The narrative itself does not matter much if you only make sure that the noble, rich and noble are portrayed as consummate villains and villains, while the lower classes are portrayed nobly and well. (...) The moral conclusion is simple. After the lie has spun its web, the peace of the soul has been stolen, the bitter struggle against the inexorable fate has been granted long enough, true love shines over the whole and the secret is unveiled. At the side of the lover beckons high wages and the guilty party is torn from the hideous face. It is only necessary not to let it be loud that the horrors and abominations serve as stimulants and enticements, but to conclude by saying that the sensational novel was written to expound the truth, to punish sinners, to encourage virtue and to deter morality to lift. (...) The audience reads the horrid again so much when they are told that it was only written because of the natural truth and the worse it is, the easier it is to buy the printed matter. Those who understand this correctly and are not ashamed can earn a lot of money with it. "

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expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The sensational novel. By Theophil Ballheim. In: Der Äolsharfenalmanach , Volume 2, 1888, pp. 67-71, here pp. 70-71.