Joseph (narration)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph is the fragment of a crime story by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff . It was created in 1845 and was first published posthumously in 1886 in the work edition edited by Elisabeth Droste-Hülshoff and Wilhelm Kreiten . A later edition is entitled Mevrouw van Ginkel.

content

In a frame story tells reindeer Caspar Bernjen of his former neighbor Mefrouw van Ginkel, an elderly lady, whom he visited often and tells the stories of her life to him. Then he tells the following story:

Van Ginkel's mother died in childbed and the girl grew up in Ghent with her father, a hardworking businessman, and the governess Madame Dubois. Since the father remains unmarried, there is no one in the house to supervise the domestic staff during the day, and so the servants begin to steal. The cashier Steenbeck even steals large sums of money to finance his gambling addiction. The fourteen-year-old "Stanzchen", as she is called by the governess, does not dare to tell her father about the thefts. Even the governess does not reveal Steenbeck, in whom she suspects an admirer. The matter is only discovered when Steenbeck disappears - however, he did not, as suspected, run away with the money, but fell into the Scheldt and drowned.

A few days later, Stanzchen's father dies of a hemorrhage . Stanzchen then comes first with a guardian and is then brought to her home by her uncle, the pastor of the village G. This was a stepbrother of Stanzchen's mother. When Mevrouw van Ginkel is about to start telling about her uncle and life in the village, the text breaks off.

There is no person named Joseph in the story.

interpretation

In the afterword of the single edition from 1951, Josefine Nettesheim interprets the story as a “legacy of Christian wisdom”, as is the title of her afterword. The “humanity of the Christian-Catholic worldview” is however “never expressed in terms of the program”, but rather emerges from the words and actions of the characters, precisely therein lies the mastery of the narrator. Nettesheim feels reminded of Wilhelm Raabe and Charles Dickens through the “fine humor that is only born out of tragedy” .

The protagonist Mevrouw van Ginkel is a model of virtues such as patience, charity and frugality, which are nourished by the certainty of their faith. The father, on the other hand, also perishes because he is completely addicted to the “this world”, namely his business - he lacks “the religious backbone, the inner balance, the balancing ground of being that supports him”; through its "internal disorder" it causes the following calamity. Madame Dubois is a pitiful, almost tragic figure, since the basically good woman is seduced into covering up a theft by an impending love affair, which she only imagines. Steenbeck's gambling addiction is an attack of "the devil", which is not inhibited by anything in an already poisoned environment.

expenditure

literature

  • Gerhard Kluge: The Netherlands picture of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in "Joseph", fragment of a crime story. In: Droste yearbook. Münster 2004, pp. 187-216.
  • Cornelia Blasberg, Jochen Grywatsch (ed.): Annette von Droste-Hülshoff manual. De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-035194-1 .