Bluebeard

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Bluebeard presents the key
( wood engraving by Gustave Doré from the book Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Doré , 1862)
Marvel at the treasures
( Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Doré )
The brothers rush to the rescue
( Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Doré )
Bluebeard's death
( Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Doré )

Bluebeard , also called the bluebeard ( French original: La barbe bleue ), is a fairy tale ( ATU 312). It is in Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: contes de ma Mère l'Oye ( German : 'Stories or fairy tales from the past including morals: fairy tales of my mother goose ') from 1697. Through oral transmission about The Hassenpflug family found it as Bluebeard in the children's and house tales of the Brothers Grimm, but only in the 1st edition from 1812, instead of 62 (KHM 62a). Ludwig Bechstein took it over as The Fairy Tale of the Knight Bluebeard in his German Fairy Tale Book (No. 70, 1845 No. 79), Ernst Heinrich Meier as King Bluebeard in German Folk Tales from Swabia (No. 38). The material about the woman-murdering Bluebeard was also adapted and further processed for other stories, dramas, films, operas and illustrations. Perrault himself took up various motifs from folk tales, legends and ballads in his story.

content

A rich man with all kinds of possessions in town and country would like to marry one of the two charming daughters of a neighbor who is in good standing. He leaves it up to the woman and her daughters to marry him, but neither of them wants to marry him because they find his blue beard so ugly. They also find it scary that no one knows what happened to their previous wives. After he invited the mother, her daughters and friends to the country to lavish parties and all kinds of entertainment, the younger daughter decides to marry Bluebeard, because his beard is actually not that blue and he is a very decent man.

Soon after the wedding, Bluebeard informed his young wife that he would have to go to the country for six weeks on important matters. He hands her a bunch of keys and tells her to move around the house and to have fun while he is away. Under no circumstances should she use a certain small key to unlock the associated chamber on the first floor, unless she wanted to expose herself to his most terrible anger.

As soon as Bluebeard has left, the wife's friends rush to Bluebeard's house, marvel at the various treasures in the various rooms and envy the young woman. However, she is too restless to be happy about the compliments, and secretly and driven by curiosity, she hurries down the stairs to the small chamber so quickly that she almost breaks her neck. She hesitates for a moment whether she should respect the prohibition and not provoke Bluebeard's anger, but then shakily unlocks the door. In the chamber she finds Bluebeard's former women murdered. Horrified, she drops the key into a pool of blood, picks it up and locks the chamber again. Your attempts to clean the blood stains from the key fail because it is an enchanted key.

Bluebeard returns unexpectedly quickly, having been informed in a letter that the trip is no longer necessary, and immediately notices the disregard of his prohibition due to the traces of blood on the key. He becomes very angry and sentences his wife to immediate death so that she can keep the corpses company in the chamber. The woman succeeds in buying time and sending her sister Anne up to the tower so that she can signal her two brothers there to hurry up as soon as they arrive for their announced visit.

At the very last moment, before Bluebeard can behead his wife with a knife, the armed brothers appear and kill Bluebeard. The young widow inherits all of Bluebeard's riches, thus procuring officers' certificates for her brothers, helping her sister to marry a long-loved man and happily marrying an honorable man herself, so that Bluebeard soon forgot.

Perrault ends his fairy tale with two moral verses and denounces the curiosity of women as well as the weakness of male slipper heroes in his time:

moral
In spite of all its charms, curiosity
often costs a lot of repentance;
You see a thousand examples of this happening every day.
If the women like it too, this is a rather fleeting pleasure,
as soon as you give in to it, it disappears
and it always costs too much.
Different morals
Even if one had the least ingenuity
and hardly understand the magic book of the world
one would quickly see that this story,
is a fairy tale from the past.
There are no more such terrible husbands
and no one who demands the impossible
when he's dissatisfied or jealous.
He is seen making flattering speeches with his wife,
and whatever color his beard may be,
one can hardly see which of the two is master.

Other versions

The story was also included in the first edition of Grimm's Children's and Household Tales ( Bluebeard , 1812) in a version different from Perrault . It is no longer included in the later editions. Comparable fairy tales from Grimm's collection are above all Fitchers Vogel and Das Mordschloß , as well as The Robber Groom . The motif of the forbidden door is also available in Mary's Child .

There are also many other versions. The different versions of the fairy tale vary the status of the man (rich citizen, knight, sultan, king), the number of former women (six, seven, great harem) and the type of punishment (Bluebeard killed all women or just keeps them prisoner ). While Bluebeard is usually killed, he gets away with a gray beard in Peter Rühmkorf's Bluebeard's Last Journey (1983).

Bechstein's fairy tale of the Knight Bluebeard

Ludwig Bechstein's version simplifies and abbreviates Perrault's descriptions. Instead of going to one of his country houses, Bluebeard loads up to his castle, her sister visits the woman herself and urges her to open the chamber. Bechstein probably felt little enthusiasm for the rather unimaginative adoption of the French fairy tale: "Shaken by death, the women and their sister (meaning: the woman and her sister) now fell back." He judged that it was widespread, but probably only from books . According to Hans-Jörg Uther , his source was Perrault's Bluebeard in Friedrich Justin Bertuch's The Blue Library of All Nations I, 1790. Bechstein's The Beautiful Young Bride belongs to the same type of fairy tale , cf. also The Three Brides and The Golden Egg .

Ernst Heinrich Meier added a variant to the collection of German folk tales from Swabia (1852).

Cf. in Giambattista Basiles Pentameron II, 8 Die kleine Sklavin , IV, 6 Die Drei Kronen .

In Janosch's parody, all women laugh at Bluebeard until his beard has turned white, when a beggar takes him and inherits his land. He is also a poor guy in Kaori Yuki's manga Ludwig Revolution . Judith Kuckart transfers the plot to the present, with a convertible and a lonely residential area.

Margaret Mahy's young adult book The Other Side of Silence uses the motif of the forbidden door with reference to Bluebeard .

A treatise by George Steiner on the dark side of the old European way of life is entitled In Bluebeard's Castle .

Readings and interpretations

The fairy tale is a more recent version of dragon myths: The dragon demands a maiden and kills her if he is not killed by a knight (see Dragonslayer ).

A historical role model for Bluebeard is Gilles de Rais , Marshal of France and campaigner of Joan of Arc . He was a notorious sadist and boy murderer of the 15th century.

The blue beard suggests that the protagonist is no ordinary man. This can be interpreted as an indication of a sexual problem, since the beard is a specifically male attribute.

According to Bruno Bettelheim , Bluebeard's fascination with a child is based on the confirmation of his suspicion that adults have terrible sexual secrets. The indelible blood on the key means that the woman was unfaithful, and a jealous person may think that deserves death. Bettelheim compares the fairy tale with Mr. Fox .

Adaptations and quotations

literature

Opera

music

Movie and TV

theatre

  • Bluebeard - Hope of Women by Dea Loher ; World premiere: Bavarian State Theater, Munich 1997
  • Bluebeard - A puppet show (only preserved as a fragment) by Georg Trakl ;

Dance theater

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Terri Windling: Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber, 2007 ( Memento from November 11, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Charles Perrault: The Bluebeard . IN: Hartwig Suhrbier (Ed.): Bluebeard's secret: Märchen u. Stories, poems, etc. Pieces . Diederichs, Cologne 1984, pp. 83-89
  3. ^ Hans-Jörg Uther (Ed.): Ludwig Bechstein. Storybook. After the edition of 1857, text-critically revised and indexed. Diederichs, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-424-01372-2 , pp. 325–328, 392.
  4. ↑ Janosch: Bluebeard. In: Janosch tells Grimm's fairy tale. Fifty selected fairy tales, retold for today's children. With drawings by Janosch. 8th edition. Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim and Basel 1983, ISBN 3-407-80213-7 , pp. 161-164.
  5. ^ Judith Kuckart: Bluebeard and Nadine Kowalke. In: Die Horen . Vol. 1/52, No. 225, 2007, ISSN  0018-4942 , pp. 49-50.
  6. ↑ Margaret Mahy: The Other Side of Silence. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-70594-9 (translated by Cornelia Krutz-Arnold; New Zealand original edition: The Other Side of Silence ), p. 178.
  7. ↑ George Steiner: In Bluebeard's Castle. Notes on redefining culture. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-518-06577-7 (German by Friedrich Polakovics).
  8. ↑ Bruno Bettelheim: Children need fairy tales. 31st edition 2012. dtv, Munich 1980, ISBN 978-3-423-35028-0 , pp. 351-356.

literature

Primary literature:

Further reading:

  • Michael Hiltbrunner: Bluebeard - parodies of a potentate. Adaptations of the story La Barbe bleüe around 1940. (Zürcher Schriften zur Erzählforschung und Narratologie; 4). Marburg: Jonas, 2018. ISBN 978-3-89445-547-7
  • Winfried Menninghaus: Praise to the nonsense . About Kant , Tieck and Blaubart. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1995. ISBN 3-518-58200-3
  • Jürgen Wertheimer: Don Juan and Bluebeard. CH Beck, Munich 1999. ISBN 3-406-42116-4
  • Helmut Barz: Bluebeard - When someone destroys what he loves. Kreuz-Verlag, Zurich 1987. ISBN 3-268-00042-8
  • Ruth Neubauer-Petzoldt: Blaubart - From a complex of motifs to a metaphor of existence. In: Files of the X. International Germanist Congress Vienna 2000. Volume 9: Subsection 17c, Conceptualization and Mythography, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 2003, pp. 309-316.
  • Erik Durschmied : Witches, Death and the Devil's Work. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2004. ISBN 3-404-60536-5
  • Monika Szczepaniak: Men in Blue - Bluebeard Images in German-Language Literature. Böhlau, Cologne 2005. ISBN 3-412-15605-1
  • Hartwig Suhrbier: Bluebeard - model and figure of suffering. Introductory explanations . IN: Hartwig Suhrbier (Ed.): Bluebeard's secret: Märchen u. Stories, poems, etc. Pieces / ed. u. introduced by Hartwig Suhrbier . Diederichs, Cologne 1984. ISBN 3-424-00780-3 .
  • Ruth Neubauer-Petzoldt: Ritter, Sultan, Biedermann - An Iconology of Bluebeard from the 17th to the 21st Century. In: FABULA. Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung 2012 Vol. 53, Issue 3/4, pp. 258–290.

Web links

Commons : Bluebeard  - collection of images, videos, and audio files
Wikisource: Bluebeard . From: Children's and Household Tales , Brothers Grimm  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: King Bluebeard . From: German folk tales from Swabia , Ernst Meier  - sources and full texts