Jacob the Last
Jacob the Last. A forest farmer's story from our day is a novel by the Austrian writer Peter Rosegger , which was first published in 1887 and deals with the fate of the Styrian mountain farmers at the time of industrialization .
Background and origin
In Rosegger's Upper Styrian homeland there was a massive expansion of the steel and iron industry during the founding period , which until then was characterized by smaller companies (hammer mills), but which have now been replaced by large factories. Due to technical innovations and improved transport routes, large companies such as B. the Böhler works in Kapfenberg , the Austrian-Alpine Montangesellschaft in Donawitz or the Bleckmann works in Mürzzuschlag . The high demand for labor in the industry meant that more and more farmers migrated to the cities and became workers.
The development in agriculture intensified this trend: In the course of the peasants' liberation after the revolution of 1848, the peasants had to pay high transfer payments to the former landlords, on the one hand, and on the other hand they had to pay taxes in the form of money, like all citizens the tax offices were also consistently demanded. The high capital requirements of agriculture could only gradually be met by cooperatives , at the same time, due to free trade and the resulting increase in imports, agricultural prices fell. In Styria (including Lower Styria) around 50,000 farms were given up between 1860 and 1890, in Rosegger's closer home this affected around a third of all farms. The land of the abandoned mountain farms was mostly acquired for hunting reasons by large landowners, aristocrats and industrialists at low prices (“ peasant laying ”).
In the spring of 1886, on a hike in his old home on the Alpl , Peter Rosegger discovered that there were only eight farms left from 25 and most of the pastures had given way to the forest. When a forester answered a question in this regard that the farmers didn't deserve it any other way and that Styria was a wilderness, not a farming country, Rosegger was very irritated and decided to take up this current topic.
Rosegger wrote the novel in the summer and autumn of 1886 and published it from January 1887, initially in his Heimgarten magazine ; a year later, the Staackmann Verlag in Leipzig published the first, significantly expanded book edition.
content
On Pentecost Sunday in Altenmoos, a farming village in the Upper Styrian mountains, the farmer Knatschel appears at the farm of his neighbor Jakob Steinreuter vulgo Reuthofer and says that he sold his farm to the "Kampelherrn", an industrial millionaire, for 2000 guilders. Knatschel says that other mountain farmers have also sold their farms and that even the Guldeisner, the largest and richest farmer in the village, was seriously considering selling it. The Kampelherr is said to have offered him 30,000 guilders. Jacob shows himself negative.
Some time later, the chief forester, head hunter and forest master Ladislaus, a native of Poland, visits Steinreuter's farm and advises him to sell his farm too, but Jakob sends him away. When Ladislaus wants to leave the farm, Jacob's son “Jackerl” asks him to free him from the moss cellar in which his father had locked him up because he wanted to curb his urge for freedom. The woodruff is first impressed by him and opens the locking chain, Jackel tears open the door from the inside and easily injures the woodruff. This swears by revenge. Jacob's son runs away and disappears without a trace. A search for the child is started immediately, but you can only find his shoes on the bank of the mountain stream in the so-called "God's Peace", a lonely rocky area. It is believed that the boy drowned and a funeral service was held for him.
More and more Altenmoos residents are forced to sell due to lack of money or are blinded by the supposedly easily earned money. Jakob and a few neighbors realize that everything is due to the largest and richest farmer in the area, the Guldeisner, and try to stop him from selling, but this fails. In the Steppenhof in Altenmoos, the village inn, the Guldeisner negotiates with the Kampelherrn about his farm. For 30,700 guilders he sells the largest property in the area to the rich man. The farmers present in the inn turn away from the Guldeisner after the sale. The ex-large farmer tries to impress the farmers with invitations to free drinks, but the farmers leave the inn indignantly: They want nothing more to do with the "runaway" Guldeisner. Jakob takes the news of the sale with composure, but knows that the death sentence for the village of Altenmoos has been pronounced. The Kampelherr seems to be immensely rich, he buys one farm after the other, although Jakob warns the farmers with drastic words at a meeting:
“House thieves go around and you sell the land you stand on. Neighbours! When the world is destroyed, it begins: people first become unfaithful to their homeland, unfaithful to their ancestors, unfaithful to their fatherland. They become faithless to the good old manners, to the neighbor, to the woman and to the child. "
Soon there will only be one mountain farm in Altenmoos: Jakob Steinreuter's Reuthof. And Jakob is haunted by bad luck: his wife dies, his second son Friedrich ("Friedel") is drafted into the military and first deserted, later he died in an unspecified war. The harvests are getting worse and worse, the Reuthofer has tax debts, his cattle perish, farmhands and maids are leaving. His daughter Angerl has married a young farmer in the neighborhood, Florian Hüttenmauser, whom the woodruff sees and fights as a rival. Soon they too are forced to move away and settle on the plain, but have no luck there either, as Jakob discovered during a visit. His attempts to persuade her to return fail, however, and he is all alone. Only Pechöl-Natz, a day laborer , and a few old or unskilled servants still stay with Jakob and stay with him. Life is getting more and more difficult, which is mainly due to the fact that the damage caused by the game is increasing, which the farmer cannot defend himself against. The compensations are ridiculous; if, however, a head of cattle runs into the forest, it will be shot. He is also no longer allowed to enter his fields if a hunt is taking place there. Jakob recognizes that "the will of a master always takes precedence over peasant law." His situation is becoming more and more precarious.
One day Jakob receives a letter from his son Jackerl, who was believed to be dead, brought by the former large farmer Guldeisner, who is now coming back to Altenmoos as a beggar. Jackerl writes that at that time he moved to Trieste with a couple of hikers, later went to India as a seafarer, then to South Africa. Eventually he made it to California , where he succeeded as a gold digger but lost his fortune again. Then he moved with several German-speaking friends to the Sierra Nevada and built a farm there in the wilderness in a valley he named Neu-Altenmoos . He has returned to the farming class of his ancestors, has married and his wife is expecting a child. The son writes in his letter that he will soon be called Jakob the First in Neu-Altenmoos , asks his father for forgiveness and invites him to visit.
After Jacob reads the letter, he actually considers going to America to see his son. Sitting on a pile of stones, he ponders about it with the pitch oil natz, when he notices a deer standing in the middle of his field and eating the vegetables he has grown. Jakob has his rifle brought to him secretly, but when he aims, the woodruff ladislaus confronts him and accuses him of poaching with his rifle drawn. Jakob turns around and attacks the woodruff. Ladislaus pulls the trigger, then Jakob too. The ball from Ladislaus just misses Jakob, who hits the woodruff fatally. He knows that he is finally destroyed and flees to the mountains on the same path that his son Jackel had taken earlier. Natz, who hurried after him, finds Jakob floating lifeless in the lake; his corpse is later buried as a murderer and suicide in the ravine called "In God's Peace", while the woodruff is buried with all honors in the churchyard. Natz builds a cross that he puts up on the rock face with the inscription:
"Here in God's peace Jakob Steinreuter generally rests Reuthofer, the last farmer in Altenmoos."
While the Reuthof is "written on the Gant" (foreclosure auction), Natz makes his way to America to find Jackel.
reception
The contemporary reception was divided: Although the book was a great success with the public (five editions in six years), it was particularly attacked by the politically and socially influential hunters . For example, the President of the Austrian Hunting Protection Association, Baron Frank, called the book a "pathological fantasy painting". In contrast, the book was praised by the social democratic journalist Engelbert Pernerstorfer for its precise social criticism and Pernerstorfer asked for the right to reprint it in his own magazine.
The literary scholar Hermann Pongs regarded the book as Rosegger's main work, in which the author achieved “ Gotthelfian greatness” and staged the fate of Jakob Steinreuter as an “act of a world judgment”: “The depth of the shock gives the poet powers that reflect his simple peasant worldview World symbolic expanses ”.
Rosegger's novel shows a deeply rooted distrust of industrial society, which he contrasted with the image of a harmonious, albeit barren, rural world. The social historian Ernst Bruckmüller pointed out that the portrayal of peasantry in the novel did not match reality even during Rosegger's lifetime: “His image of society is not to be taken as a plan as reality, but as a well-observed excerpt, but with ideological projections and probably also was enriched not insignificantly with the wishes and longings of the farmer's son, who himself came to the city (and succeeded there) ”. In this context, Rosegger was also referred to as a “conservative utopian”.
Hubert Lendl had a striking parallel in Roseggers own environment through: The youngest brother of the writer, Jacob Rosegger was for decades a steelworker in Donawitz at (!) Leoben busy until he finally a small peasant farming with his savings in his home town of Krieglach buy that he managed with his family. Brother Jakob thus realized Peter Rosegger's ideal of a return to the rural way of life.
The economist and sociologist Max Weber referred to an agricultural policy study on Rosegger's novel. Weber took the view that the capitalized rent on forest property on good soils was generally lower than the market value of the land and concluded from this: “Rosegger's story of Jacob the Last is a process that occurs in areas with good, modern, vigorous farming Will at least not happen too often ”. The use of former agricultural areas for forestry and hunting purposes is generally unprofitable, said Weber.
The historian Othmar Pickl assumes that the figure of the camplord represents a barely veiled portrait of the Styrian mining industrialist Viktor Seßler Freiherr von Herzinger . In the 1870s and 1880s, Seßler bought farm property in the Mürz Valley in order to have forests available for the extraction of charcoal for his works.
Edits
In 1976 Axel Corti filmed the novel with Bruno Dallansky in the role of Jakob Steinreuter.
Felix Mitterer created a play from the novel that was premiered with August Schmölzer in the title role on July 28, 2013 - a few days before the writer's 170th birthday - as an open-air theater in front of Rosegger's birthplace, the Kluppeneggerhof in Alpl. The cultural journalist Heinz Sichrovsky praised the “archaic simplicity” of the staging and emphasized the relevance of Rosegger for the present:
“When we were at school, we were tortured to the point of vomiting with Rosegger, who was idyllic as a caricature, and what a great, powerful, socio-political visionary he was! Jacob the Last is a farmer who, at the cost of his own life, fights back when the landowners want to squeeze his land from him. Twelve performances are sold out, that's how pressing is the anti-capitalist message. One already thinks of showing the play every year like a Styrian " Jedermann ". And unlike the Salzburg hypocrite, Jakob the Last would in fact be a contender for eternity. "
literature
- Felix Mitterer : "I see Rosegger as my spiritual brother". Jacob the Last - yesterday and today. in: Volkskultur Steiermark (Hrsg.): Yearbook of Styrian Folk Culture. Graz 2013, ISBN 978-3-9503747-0-4 , pp. 132-149
Individual evidence
- ↑ Birgit Strimitzer: From the idylls of a setting world to a vision of a rising era. The industrial revolution in Styria reflected in the literature of Peter Rosegger. In: Gerald Schöpfer (ed.): Peter Rosegger 1843–1918 . Steiermärkische Landesregierung, Graz 1993 pp. 141–147
- ↑ Hubert Lendl: Introduction. In: Peter Rosegger: Jakob the Last. A forest farmer's story from our day. Novel. Staackmann Verlag, Leipzig 1994, pp. 5-8
- ^ Eva Philippoff: Peter Rosegger. Poet of the Lost Floe. A biography. Styria Verlag, Graz-Vienna-Cologne 1993, p. 140
- ↑ Peter Rosegger: Jakob the Last. A forest farmer's story from our day. Verlag Staackmann, Leipzig 1994, p. 82f.
- ↑ Peter Rosegger: Jakob the Last. A forest farmer's story from our day. Staackmann Verlag, Leipzig 1994, p. 218
- ^ Eva Philippoff: Peter Rosegger. Poet of the Lost Floe. A biography. Styria Verlag, Graz-Vienna-Cologne 1993, p. 144
- ^ Hermann Pongs: Lexicon of World Literature. Concise dictionary of literature from A – Z. Kapp Verlag, Bensheim 1990 p. 478
- ↑ Ernst Bruckmüller: From plow to hammer, from hammer to circle. Social change at the time of Peter Rosegger. In: Gerald Schöpfer (ed.): Peter Rosegger 1843–1918. Steiermärkische Landesregierung, Graz 1993 pp. 119–130, here p. 128
- ↑ Birgit Strimitzer: From the idylls of a setting world to a vision of a rising era. The industrial revolution in Styria reflected in the literature of Peter Rosegger. In: Gerald Schöpfer (ed.): Peter Rosegger 1843–1918 . Steiermärkische Landesregierung, Graz 1993 pp. 141–147, here p. 143
- ↑ Hubert Lendl: Introduction. In: Peter Rosegger: Jakob the Last. A forest farmer's story from our day. Novel. Staackmann Verlag, Leipzig 1994, pp. 5-8, here p. 7f.
- ^ Max Weber: Agricultural statistics and socio-political considerations on the entails question in Prussia . In: Max Weber: Economy, State and Social Policy. Writings and Reden, Vol. 8. Mohr Siebeck Verlag, Tübingen 1999, pp. 18–68, here p. 40
- ↑ ). Othmar Pickl: Josef Seßler and the beginnings of the Mürz Valley iron industry. in: Ferdinand Tremel (Ed.): Styrian entrepreneurs of the 19th and 20th centuries. A collection of images of life. ( Journal of the Historical Association for Styria , special volume 9). Graz 1965, pp. 28–33, here p. 32
- ^ Heinz Sichrovsky: Rosegger, rehabilitated with splendor news.at, July 31, 2013