John Maynard

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John Maynard is one of Theodor Fontane's most famous ballads . It was first published in Berlin in 1886 in Bunte Mappe. Original contributions from Berlin artists and writers ( publishing house for art and science, formerly Friedrich Bruckmann Munich) published.

The ballad celebrates John Maynard, helmsman of a passenger ship on Lake Erie , on which fire breaks out towards the end of a voyage from Detroit to Buffalo . John Maynard remains at his post "in smoke and fire" until the ship reaches shore, saving everyone at the cost of his own life.

background

John Maynard Memorial in Buffalo

On the night of August 9-10, 1841, the paddle steamer Erie caught fire on its way from Buffalo to Erie, Pennsylvania , after a load of turpentine and paint that had been stored near the boilers caught fire. The ship then set course for the coast eight miles away, but without reaching it. Of the approximately 200 or, according to other sources, up to 300 people on board, including many Swiss and German tween deck passengers, only 29 were rescued. The helmsman on duty, Luther Fuller, who is said to have persevered at his post until the end, survived seriously injured or died immediately, was in any case recorded in the list of the dead by Captain Titus.

The catastrophe was not only reported in the press; it also encouraged literary processing. In one by an unknown author from 1854, the steam sailor sailing from Buffalo to Erie is called Jersey , but the heroic helmsman is already called John Maynard, as with Theodor Fontane. In John Bartholomew Gough's short prose text about the brave John Maynard from 1860, the steamer's journey then leads from Detroit to Buffalo. Horatio Alger pointed out the use of the material in the lectures of the temperance man Gough when he published his poem John Maynard. A Ballad of Lake Erie 1868.

German visitors are often disappointed that in Buffalo nothing is known of the grave described by Fontane with the city's “thanks” in “golden letters” on the “marble stone”. The brave John Maynard, whose ballad is still often part of the German curriculum in Germany today, is virtually unknown there. In 1997, a cast bronze plaque was mounted lying on the quay wall in the Erie Basin Marina directly on the lake "in honor of the legend of John Maynard". She gives Fontane's poem in the English translation by Burt Erickson Nelson and mentions the fire of the Erie with Luther (Augustus) Fuller at the helm. The conclusion from "You lower the coffin in flowers ..." can also be read in the German original.

layout

The ballad consists of nine stanzas of different lengths (2-10 verses) and two individual verses at the beginning. Meter and rhyme show that it is a Knittel verse . Almost all verses have four uplifts with free subsidence fillings. This means that there are four stressed syllables per verse and the space between and before the first accentuation is filled with one or two unstressed syllables freely distributed. Before the first accentuation, there can be no decrease at all, so the verse begins with a stressed syllable. The first two verses and the attribution at the end of the dedication are shortened. According to the Knittel verse, the rhyme is a pair rhyme. This loosely composed verse form is particularly suitable for narrative poems and has been in use since the Middle Ages, especially for popular poems or poems that imitate the popular tone of voice. In contrast to the looseness of the meter stands the rigor of the cadence formation . Each verse ends masculine, that is, with a stressed syllable. This means that around half of the German words are excluded from the design of the mailing. Fontane brings the verse into balance in terms of meter and cadence. This is characteristic of the art ballad and distinguishes it from the folk ballad . The irregular formation of stanzas is also a sovereign artistic design decision by Fontane. Such an individuality is characteristic of the art ballad, especially of the great poets, because even the poets “from the second row” usually take a more standardized approach.

In terms of content and form, the first and last stanzas form a framework around the five middle stanzas, in which the last half hour before the accident is described. By varying the motifs (fire, water, reaction of the passengers, dialogue with the helmsman) and counting down the remaining “minutes to Buffalo”, which concludes each narrative phase, Fontane succeeds in creating an oppressive and increasing condensation of the events. As a result, Fontane's portrayal ends with the rescue of all people with the exception of the helmsman John Maynard and the breakup of the ship due to the ordered controlled stranding - and thus completely opposite to the real events. The bombastic funeral of Maynard in the last stanza is in stark contrast to the actual fate of the helmsman. The thanksgiving on the tombstone, which is similarly placed in the mouth of a survivor at the beginning of the poem, shows through variation the development from the individual utterance of a person concerned to the official funerary inscription - at the same time it forms a frame around the events of the middle stanzas that lead through this trick seem like a flashback. Due to the frame and variation, the poem appears strongly shaped from the outside and inside.

The ballad usually contains features of the three literary genres, which it also does here. As a narrative poem, it makes use of the design features of lyric (verse, meter, rhyme) and epic (depicting the course of the plot). Verbatim speech is the defining feature of drama .

Ballads tell of incidents in which the extraordinary, the uncanny or the gruesome happen. The mere reproduction of the misfortune and the unsuccessful rescue attempt is too superficial for a poet of realism despite the actual suffering. The subject calls for poetic reshaping. As early as 1853, Fontane "confidently created the program of literary realism" with the central demand to poetize the material taken from reality. This happens here to a particular extent through the reversal of real events and the stylization of Maynard as a hero that this brings about . With superhuman exertion, he puts his life to the rescue to save the passengers. With this, Fontane captures the extraordinary that the real events did not reveal in poetic terms. At the same time he moves in the educated bourgeois tradition of elevating a figure to an exemplary hero.

Scoring / film

literature

  • Norman Barry: Fontane's "John Maynard": New Discoveries in Source Research . In: Fontane Blätter 85/2008, pp. 150–170, article as PDF

Web links

Wikisource: John Maynard (Fontane)  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Burning of the Erie: Lloyd's Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters ..., 1841, pp. 121-126. In: Maritime History of the Great Lakes. Retrieved July 27, 2011 .
  2. ↑ Bettina Meister: A steamship catches fire. In: Zauberspiegel online. November 3, 2008, accessed September 17, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Harper's New Monthly Magazine No. LII - September 1854 - Vol.IX p. 565 books.google
  4. ^ German in George Salomon: Who is John Maynard? Fontane's brave helmsman and his American role model , Fontane Blätter, 1965, no. 2, pp. 25–40. pdf ; Original English in The Living Age Volume 67 Issue 856 (October 27, 1860) p. 213 digital.library.cornell.edu
  5. ↑ http://johnmaynard.net/mem.html
  6. ^ The German literature in text and representation, Vol. 11 "Bürgerlicher Realismus", ed. by Andreas Huyssen, Reclam Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 978-3-15-009641-3 , p. 51.