Isabella of Egypt, Emperor Charles the Fifth's first childhood sweetheart

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Achim von Arnim
(1781–1831)

Isabella of Egypt, Emperor Charles the Fifth's first childhood love is a story by Achim von Arnim that appeared in the so-called collection of novels from 1812 in the Realschulbuchhandlung Berlin .

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Duke Michael, ruler of all the Gypsies of Egypt, is hanged in Ghent as an innocent thief. His only daughter Isabella, "the pale, beautiful child", is an orphan . Because the mother - from the old house of the Counts of Hoogstraaten - has already been dead for four years. By means of a magic blow that hits Isabella when she has almost climbed the Ghent Galgenberg, she digs a mandragora at the place of execution of the poor father , the mandrake root, out. The girl raises the root as a hangman. The cocky little man calls himself Field Marshal Cornelius Nepos and can dig up treasures. Mr Cornelius, who lives hidden with Isabella and her foster mother, the gypsy Braka, in an abandoned house in the country, wants to drive up to the court in Ghent in a state coach. A raised treasure makes it possible. The trio is joined by the bearskin, a dead German mercenary, the stingy owner of the treasure, awakened by the lifting of the treasure. The root penetrates males in Ghent actually to Archduke Charles, which is the later Charles V , above. Cornelius praises the beauty of his bride Isabella. The young Karl, who has not yet gotten to know a girl better, wants to make Isabella's acquaintance, but has to outsmart his guard, the chief steward Adrian von Utrecht , for the purpose . During the encounter with Karl, Isabella feels as if she has met her second magic. When Braka found out about the young love, she immediately designed a program. Isabella has to have a child from Karl, the "future heir of half the world". This child must one day gather Isabella's people scattered across Europe and bring them back to the ancestral land of Egypt. Karl wants to marry the bride of "Wurzelburzius". One of Karl's childhood friends has a duplicate of Isabella conjured up from clay for the little root groom. This is the golem Bella. Isabella confesses her origins to Karl and explains why she wants a child from him. When Karl has to travel, Isabella remains strong. The beautiful young girl, “without any world experience”, believes in their happiness. But Karl falls in love with the Golem Bella with "irresistible desire". Besides, Karl has other worries. His grandfather Ferdinand is dying.

At the next rendezvous, the Golem Bella is confronted with Isabella. The root man gets confused. It has two women at once. The Golem Bella physically attacks Isabella, but is quickly transformed back into a pile of clay by Karl. The grandfather dies. Karl desperately wants to take the throne and ponders: may the future ruler of half the world marry a duchess of Egypt? Karl allows Isabella to send all of her subjects, who were scattered across Europe, back to Egypt. That goes against the grain of the mandrake. Through Braka's loquacity, it is known at court that the root man can raise treasures. Karl wants the little one as finance minister and agrees to marry the dwarf to Isabella “on the left hand”. Isabella spends half a night with the emperor. When he then pushes her away, she jumps out of the window. One of them catches the young woman. On the train to Egypt she gives birth to "Lrak (the reverse name of the father Karl)". The mandrake tears. It smells like burned sulfur. Charles V rules, finally lies down in his coffin and dies soon afterwards. A month earlier, on August 20, 1558, the famous Queen Isabella had judged herself on the banks of the Nile in the presence of her loved ones and died afterwards. Isabella's love, the narrator concludes, was spurned by Karl, but it did not perish, but passed over to her people. The narrator presents Isabella as a role model for all those who judge themselves in the hour of death.

reception

  • Riley: Because Karl confuses real with wrong in love matters and because he turns the root man out of greed for money into his financier, he could not get his empire under control later as emperor.
  • Schulz calls Isabella Arnim's greatest novella; a fantastic fairy tale. The combination of a delicate love story and the grotesque was artistically successful. Karl failed in his childhood love just as, in Arnim's view, he would later fail as emperor during the Counter Reformation . The root man symbolizes the emperor's seductiveness through possession and the golem Bella stands for the slide of Karl's love into the sexual.
  • Moering gives details of the origin: Arnim knew Cervantes' story of the gypsy girl Preziosa and Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann's Die Zigeuner . Grellmann call a Duke Michael. Arnim had the biographies of Charles V by Antoine Varillas (La Pratique De L'education Des Princes, Amsterdam 1684) and by William Robertson (The history of the reign of Charles V, edition 1788). Arnim's material for the Golem legend came from Jacob Grimm .
  • In his in-depth investigation of the hierarchy of motifs, Andermatt moves from the erotic to questions of life and coexistence in a society.
  • Schulz mentions the medieval folk belief that mandrake supposedly thrives from the semen of the hanged. In this context, Arnim indulgently described seeds with tears .
  • According to Hahn, Arnim believed in the existence of a spirit world . Isabella bear the features of Mary .
  • Riley names other leading works: Paul Ernst (1942), Peter Horst Neumann (1968) and Ernst Schürer (Munich 1970).

literature

  • Helene M. Kastinger Riley : Achim von Arnim . rowohlt's monographs edited by Kurt Kusenberg . 158 pages. Reinbek near Hamburg in July 1979, ISBN 3-499-50277-1
  • Gerhard Schulz : The German literature between the French Revolution and the restoration. Part 2. The Age of the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration: 1806–1830. 912 pages. Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-09399-X
  • Renate Moering (Ed.): Achim von Arnim. All the stories 1802–1817. Vol. 3 in: Roswitha Burwick (Hrsg.), Jürgen Knaack (Hrsg.), Paul Michael Lützeler (Hrsg.), Renate Moering (Hrsg.), Ulfert Ricklefs (Hrsg.), Hermann F. Weiss (Hrsg.): Achim von Arnim. Works in six volumes. 1398 pages. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1990 (1st edition), ISBN 3-618-60030-5
  • Michael Andermatt: Stunted life, happiness and apotheosis . The order of the motifs in Achim von Arnim's narrative. 629 pages. Peter Lang, Bern 1996, ISBN 3-906756-15-7

expenditure

Quoted text edition

  • Achim von Arnim: Isabella of Egypt, Emperor Charles the Fifth's first childhood love. A story . P. 3–123 in Karl-Heinz Hahn (ed.): Ludwig Achim von Arnim: Works in one volume. 423 pages. Library of German classics. Issued by the NFG . Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1981 (1st edition)

Web links

Individual evidence

Source means the quoted text edition

  1. ^ Riley, p. 136, entry from 1812
  2. ↑ Information on the history of the edition can be found in Moering, pp. 1254–1259. The collection of novels from 1812 still contains: Melück Maria Blainville , The Three Loving Sisters and the Happy Dyer and Angelika, the Genoese, and Cosmus, the rope jumper .
  3. ↑ Source, p. 393, 3. Zvo
  4. ↑ Arnim, who describes the two lovers dying synchronously, refers to the day on which Karl is said to have laid himself in his coffin for a trial (source, p. 121, 14th Zvu).
  5. ↑ Riley, p. 101, 7. Zvo
  6. ↑ Schulz, pp. 406-407
  7. ↑ Moering, pp. 1254-1259
  8. ↑ Schulz, p. 407, 7. Zvo
  9. ↑ Source, p. XXXIII
  10. ^ Riley, p. 152, 9. Zvo