Kaiserwetter (novel)
Kaiserwetter is a society novel by Karl Jakob Hirsch . It was published in 1931 by S. Fischer Verlag .
content
The novel depicts life in the Prussian province of Hanover , especially in Hanover itself, in the last two decades before the First World War . There is no central main character, but a panorama of many different figures from different social classes:
De Vries family
The Jewish lawyer Samuel de Vries is a wealthy and well-respected citizen of the city. His wife Johanna comes from a wealthy Hamburg merchant family, his son Joe de Vries attended grammar school and then the Hanover Conservatory . Samuel de Vries, however, gambled away his reputation and the peace in his family: First he began an affair with the wife of a client. When he got out of prison after a year and found out about it, he beat de Vries in the street, which spread rumors about him in the city. While he recovers from it, he becomes addicted to morphine. Later he voluntarily takes on the defense of a mass murderer. While the whole city is calling for the death penalty, de Vries pleads for mitigating circumstances, since it is a sex offender. He also points out the perpetrator's involvement in the highest social circles that the police and the court want to conceal. After the execution, he locks himself up in his study for days and dies of sepsis under circumstances that are not entirely clear .
Tölle family
The postman Emanuel Tölle is a typical representative of the conservative petty bourgeoisie. His wife Luise gives birth to their son Bernhard Tölle, who later, despite great social and character differences, has a long-standing friendship with Joe de Vries. Bernhard attended secondary school, then did an apprenticeship as a locksmith and attended the Technical University of Hanover , but without seriously aiming for a degree. Luise Tölle dies early and the often drunk Emanuel Tölle is overwhelmed with Bernhard's upbringing.
After the death of his wife and the increasing independence of his son, Emanuel Tölle often feels alone. He meets his old army comrade Hermann Wendelken again, who runs an inn in a small town on the railway line between Hanover and Bremen. He convinces Tölle to move to the same place to be around a friend. Tölle later marries his landlady, the widowed Meta Engelhardt, although he is actually targeting her daughter Tine. Because of his involvement in a criminal case, Bernhard has to leave Hanover in the meantime and move back to his father. He signed up as a one-year-old volunteer for the army just before the war broke out.
Little Holland
Gesine Geffken is the daughter of a miller in a small town between Hanover and Bremen. She works for the innkeeper Hermann Wendelken in his restaurant Hohenzollernhof and is engaged to the station master Cohrs. However, she postpones a wedding and one day Cohrs commits suicide. Gesine pushes her old father from his windmill to an old people's home in Hanover so that he can sell the mill. To do this, she works with Wendelken and the Bremen real estate agent Moritz Thaler. The three decide to start a company and convert the mill into an entertainment and dance venue called Klein-Holland . However, there is a lot of quarrel and mistrust between the three, and in the end Thaler withdraws his shares in the company. Meanwhile, old Geffken escapes from the old people's home and returns. He is shocked by what has become of his mill, has a stroke and is now being cared for at home. One day Little Holland burns down and old Geffken dies in the flames. It remains unclear whether he or Wendelken started the fire.
Form and narrative style
The novel is divided into four parts and a total of 41 short chapters. After each chapter, the authorial narrator switches to a different person or group of people, whose world of thought and life is discussed in more detail. The narrative style rarely shows clear sympathies or antipathies towards the people, but presents them with a certain ironic distance, through which the motives for the actions remain understandable.
Biographical and social context
Hirsch depicts the empire as an outwardly stable and orderly, but actually in transition and crisis-ridden society. The beginning of the world war at the end of the novel is hailed by many as an outbreak and departure.
There are clear parallels between the murderer Max Büter, the trial against him and the reactions of the population on the one hand and the real Fritz Haarmann case on the other hand, only that Hirsch relocates the story from the 1920s back to the imperial era.
Using the de Vries family and the figure of Moritz Thaler, the partly open, partly covert anti-Semitism is discussed. Hirsch himself grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Hanover; the character of Joe de Vries has some autobiographical traits.
reception
Karl Jakob Hirsch's artistic career began as a visual artist and did not begin to write until the 1920s. Kaiserwetter was his first novel and was a great success. However, it remained his only work that he was able to publish under his own name: as early as 1932, the publisher asked for a pseudonym for his second book Felix and Felicia in order to disguise the author's Jewish origins. In 1933 Kaiserwetter was banned, a volume that had already been written could no longer appear and was later lost. Hirsch left Germany in 1936; During and after his exile he could not find a publisher and was unable to build on the success of Kaiserwetter , so that many of the following works were only published after his death.
In the GDR the novel was published in 1952 by Verlag der Nation under the title Damals in Deutschland , but later by Aufbau Verlag under the original title.
In 1976 a Czech edition was published under the title Císařské počasí , translated by Ružena Grebeníčková.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Raabe: Hirsch, Karl Jakob. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 9 (1972), pp. 208 f. Online version