Karl and Anna

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Karl and Anna is the title of a novella by the writer Leonhard Frank published in 1926 . It tells the love story of a soldier who has returned from captivity and the wife of his comrade.

contents

Two German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians shortly after the outbreak of war and had to dig trenches in the steppe as a group of two a day's march away from the camp. In the loneliness of the vast Russian landscape, Richard told his comrade Karl every day for four years about his longing for his wife Anna and thus informed him about all the details of her personality and characteristics, her behavior in everyday life, her appearance, her body, her behavior of love, their biography and their environment. In this way Karl's imagination creates an image of the woman he falls in love with, and in his imagination he wishes he were her husband. Cape. I tells of one of these two prisoners' working days, which always run the same way. Like once a month, they march to the prison camp after work to get provisions. This time they will be separated immediately upon arrival. Richard is assigned to a group that is already ready and shipped a few days' journey further east by train.

From the 2nd chap. The story of the relationship between Charles and Anna is told on. One day after Richard was evacuated, Karl managed to escape from the camp and set off for Germany. “The longing for Anna drove him on the great journey.” A quarter of a year later he arrives and immediately visits Anna. He knows where she lives in the Dreihof block, which is nested with the front, intermediate and rear buildings, he knows the stenciled pattern in the stairwell, every piece of furniture in the kitchen-living room, he knows where the stove and where the bed is, that the gas burner whistles and where the three brown moles on her body can be found. In his longing for a solid bond with Anna, Karl has decided to take a risky action and pretends to be her husband. He finds access to it through some external similarities: same size, hair and eye color, curved eyebrows, dark-colored skin of the metalworkers. He amazes you with his orientation in the apartment and his detailed knowledge. But she immediately notices that the stranger is not her husband, especially since the military authorities informed her of Richard's death as early as autumn 1914 and she has not received any news from him since. She is in a situation of uncertainty and loneliness. She has lived alone for four years and earns a living as a worker in a cardboard box factory. In this way, the young woman is receptive to affection. Karl talks about their life as if he had experienced it himself and combines this with his fantasies about their marriage together. This mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar confuses them. She lets him spend the night with her and becomes intimate with him the next day (Chapter III). She notices that he is more spontaneous and more gripping than Richard. Although many women in her Dreihofhaus have a marriage-like relationship with a subtenant while their husbands are away, partly for financial reasons, Anna has a guilty conscience and is angry with herself for having gotten involved with a fraudster so quickly. She distances him again and speaks to him as “you” while he persistently stays with “you”. He is allowed to stay at home, but the neighbors shouldn't notice, and so he has to sneak out of their apartment to look for a job. But word of the secret gets around with the cramped living conditions. When she meets in the courtyard, Anna's friend thinks she recognizes Marie in Karl Richard, and so the good news spreads quickly, even among the shopkeepers, from whom they buy their daily needs. Anna does not contradict them. And so the neighbors strengthen Charles's development into Anna's husband (Chapter IV).

Gradually a mutual love relationship develops. She feels his tender, unconditional love for her, likes him too and would like to believe that he is her husband, and she now addresses him with Richard: “It was quite unimportant whether he was Richard. She felt that he wasn't lying. What she had experienced and felt was not a lie. I was very lucky. May everyone believe that he is their man, if he and luck so choose. [...] she wanted it too [...] Not alone anymore! How good that was! ”(Chapter IV). His mixed picture of Anna from Richard's memories and his wishes, which he conveys to her again and again, makes her think about her life and discover new sides of herself. The relationship with the past dissolves more and more and she develops an independent love for Karl. He finds a job and Anna no longer has to go to the factory when she is three months pregnant.

This intense togetherness and the joy of having a family are disturbed as more and more soldiers return from captivity and discover illegitimate children and lovers of their wives on their sudden arrival. In the Dreihofhaus too, there are various reactions: fights, husbands or lovers flee, forgiveness and return to the old situation, arrangements for three. Now Anna and Karl are aware of their situation. They both fear Richard's return and think about how their lives might turn out then. Anna has a dreadful dream about Richard's letter, which actually arrives at the same time. He writes that he is alive and trying to return to her through minefields, forcing Karl to reveal the truth. The latter confesses his deception and explains to Anna the background to his attempt at deception. Anna is in the conflict of being loved by two men and being able to live with only one. She and Karl would rather die than part and, in contrast to social conventions and human obligations, confess their love, which, as they feel, was fateful. They briefly think of the way out that Richard could die on the way, but they want an open solution: “The way they looked up and leaned back, both of them, and looking into their eyes, felt the inexplicable secret of their love, which stood opposite Richard's right , they had come back to themselves, free from the wish for Richard's death and ready to pay if it had to be paid. ”(Chapter V)

In the last chapter, the protagonists are brought together in parallel actions, Richard's train journey and Anna's desperation when announcing his return by letter in the kitchen-cum-living room. When Richard sees the table that has been set for two, he is sure that Anna is expected to be her husband, and he is amazed at what he thinks Karl who happens to be arriving and naively invites him to dinner. Only when Karl informs him and he sees that Anna is pregnant and she helplessly confesses to him "Kill me, Richard, it happened that way," he realizes that he has lost his wife. He no longer has the strength to commit an act of violence and collapses helplessly. Anna and Karl quickly pack up their things, Marie promises Anna not to leave Richard alone, and the two of them leave the house: “They didn't speak, they didn't think. They walked in the inexplicable mystery that they can only be separated by death. "(Chapter VI)

shape

The novella consists of six chapters, in which the gradual development of the love relationship is told. It begins with an atmospheric attunement from the gaze of an airplane that approaches the two prisoners of war and disappears again, leaving them behind in their loneliness: “A man appeared over the distant, distant planetary arched horizon of the steppe, on the border between Europe and Asia Point, smaller than a songbird that approached two men at the highest flight speed and yet seemed to remain motionless in the blue distance, heaven and earth were so overwhelmingly large here. ”From this mood the author develops with nuanced, sensitive language , mixed with expressionist pathos, a psychological study. The situation of the woman, the development of the love affair and the tragedy of the man who returned too late are portrayed with a precise representation of the petty-bourgeois milieu.

History and reception

In his autobiographical novel “Links wo das Herz ist”, the author tells how he was inspired to write the novel by a newspaper note with the headline “They had never seen each other before”. The little article reports on the sentencing of a soldier who had returned from Russian captivity to six months in prison for attempting to sneak into the wife of a fellow prisoner as her husband, who had been mistakenly declared dead. This message, which he found hardly credible, inspired Frank to come up with situations and motivations in order to shape them into a psychologically coherent triangular relationship. In 1926 he put the story on paper in nine months, the dramatization in 1928 only lasted three weeks.

“Karl and Anna” has been translated into all European languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, basic English and an Indian dialect. This world success as a book was followed by the theatrical version performed on many stages with prominent cast: “Tears ran down Homolka's [Karl] s cheeks while he read Anna the letter of fate [Richards, who writes that he still loves Anna as he used to] and in the silence of the house the charged stillness of inner movement had arisen. The chamber play kept the attention every second and increased the inner tension to the last curtain ”. The first film adaptation was made as early as 1928, and two more followed. The critic Vormweg sums it up: “A stroke of luck. The story "Karl and Anna" touched the masses and is at the same time a complete narrative in which the darkness and the paradox of the human are tragically and comfortingly tangible [...] Karl and Anna deny the conventional rules to avoid the real and the true to miss. [...] The story has that simplicity that can only be achieved with a high level of technical skill. "

Dramatization

"Karl and Anna". Play in four acts. Premiere: January 16, 1929, Residenztheater (Munich) . The author describes the Berlin premiere at the State Theater in his novel "Links where the heart is" (Chapter VI).

Adaptations

In the first two film adaptations, the outcome of the novella was changed, in the second the plot was moved to France in the time of the Second World War , the third essentially follows the original.

  • 1928: Homecoming Universum-Film AG (UFA) (Berlin). Upon his return, Richard discovers Anna's relationship with Karl, he wants to shoot the rival, but then runs away and is hired on a ship. Karl follows him and tries in vain to persuade him to return.
  • 1947: Desire Me (USA). The action takes place in a German prison camp in Normandy during the Second World War . The story between Paul (= Richard in the novel), Jean (= Karl) and Marise (= Ann) develops similarly to Frank's story, but closes differently. In the end, there is a duel between the two men on the cliffs, which ends with the death of Jeans. After a psychiatric analysis by a Paris doctor (framework story), Marise can process her feelings of guilt about the affair with Jean and continue her marriage to Paul.
  • 1985: " The woman and the stranger ". The DEFA film received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in the same year, but was only shown for a short time in the GDR due to legal problems with the literary original and was shown again in theaters in 2008.

Individual references and comments

  1. ^ Leonhard Frank Society. https://leonhard-frank-gesellschaft.de . Comprehensive bibliography of Leonhard Frank's works prepared by the Franconian Regional Studies Department of the Würzburg University Library. Overview 1: In German according to the year of publication: Karl and Anna, Berlin Propylaen, 1926. The DNB names 1927 as the year of publication.
  2. ↑ Leonhard Frank: "Left where the heart is". Structure Verlag Berlin Weimar 1959, dtv Munich 1963, chap. VI.
  3. ^ Leonhard Frank Society. Comprehensive bibliography of Leonhard Frank's works prepared by the Franconian Regional Studies Department of the Würzburg University Library. List of Leonhard Frank's works in translations according to title, place, year, language.
  4. ↑ Leonhard Frank: "Left where the heart is", chap. VI.
  5. ^ Heinrich Vormweg . Epilogue to Leonhard Frank “Karl and Anna”. Stuttgart 1965, p. 71 ff.
  6. ↑ Production: Erich Engel , with Käthe Dorsch as Anna, Oskar Homolka as Karl and Heinrich George as Richard. Stage design: Caspar Neher .
  7. ↑ Director: Joe May . Script: Fritz Wendhausen and Joe May. Roles and cast: Karl (Gustav Fröhlich), Richard (Lars Hanson), Anna (Dita Parlo).
  8. ↑ Producer: A. Hornblow Jr. Script: Zoë Akins, Marguerite Roberts, Casey Robinson. Because of the difficult production conditions and disputes, at least four directors replaced each other one after the other. Roles and cast: Marise Aubert (Greer Garson), Paul Aubert (Robert Mitchum), Jean Renaud (Richard Hart).
  9. ↑ Direction and screenplay: Rainer Simon. Roles and cast: Anna (Kathrin Waligura), Karl (Joachim Lätsch), Richard (Peter Zimmermann), Marie (Katrin Knappe), revolutionary (Ulrich Mühe).