Klein and Wagner
Klein und Wagner is a novella by Hermann Hesse , written in spring / summer 1919 together with Klingsor's last summer .
content
After embezzling a sum of money, forging documents and getting a revolver, the family man and bank clerk Friedrich Klein flees by train heading south. Full of desperation, he tries to understand what he has done, thinks compulsively and finally ends up in an Italian city as if by chance. Here the fugitive soon meets the dancer Teresina, in whom the oscillation between his deep desires and his bourgeois-moral character becomes particularly clear. Time and again, Klein was struck by the thought of a school teacher, Ernst August Wagner , who had killed his family in a rampage and with whom he felt “somehow ... connected”. Klein has finished bourgeois life; however, his late efforts to find his identity and to live according to his inner self are in vain. Again and again he gets into doubt, followed by feelings of fear and guilt. Finally, Klein gives in to his long-cherished suicide wish and drowns himself in the nearby lake a week after his escape. The story ends with Klein's last epiphany-like moments.
Brief analysis
Due to the classic dramatic division into five chapters, the predominant inner monologue in often free and above all indirect speech , coupled with the exclusively inner conflict and the sparse, just typifying description of the places and characters, Hesse becomes a co-founder of a new writing style and narrative mode. Behind the personal narrative , which initially appears to be a simple crime story, hides a modern “psychodrama” that has formal similarities to the 1922 novel Ulysses by James Joyce .
As in his novel Der Steppenwolf , the author subordinates the flow and rhythm of language to the feelings of the protagonist . With an antagonism, Klein und Wagner paints a picture of a bourgeois life in early modernism. On the one hand, Friedrich Klein works according to bourgeois values, on the other hand, the suppressed self breaks out in a moment. The bourgeois world, the conventional norms, values and goals have become an unbearable corset for Klein, into which he feels forced and constrained. In this very bourgeois life, which for him is much too narrow or even completely wrong, Klein violates bourgeois norms and values. His extreme adherence to what he himself considers to be the norms leads to a secure and comfortable social life, but also to growing dissatisfaction, which finds its equally extreme outbreak in embezzlement and flight. Klein's attempt to unbuckle the bourgeois corset leads him here and there to great insights into his innermost self. At the same time, however, he feels helpless and unstable and eventually dies. Although he despises the bourgeois world, he is also subject to fears for the future and the burdens of the past and does not manage to finally free himself from them.
Klein knows no alternatives to his socially shaped interpretation patterns and biases; the bourgeois world had given him no opportunity to know, love and learn to live himself.
With the figure of the teacher Wagner, Hesse draws on a historical, then current gunman, about whom the daily press had reported. Because of its popularity, the Wagner case is suitable for stimulating discussions about the responsibility of the individual and society as well as making clear the urgency and topicality of the conflict that Klein is fighting.
Autobiographical reference
When Hesse came to Ticino in April 1919 and finally settled in Montagnola , he had just made the difficult decision to leave his wife and three sons. This was preceded by the very strenuous work in setting up a center for prisoner of war welfare in Bern, which required separation from his family, and the ordeal of the First World War as well as the abuse and denigration of nests and homeless journeyman. Hesse had undergone a grueling one and a half year psychoanalysis when his first wife Mia fell into such a severe mental illness in October 1918 that her depressive relapses had to be treated as inpatients in three different hospitals until 1925. The psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung , who then supervised her , came to the conclusion that a separation of the spouses was inevitable in the sense that Maria would take over the three sons and Hesse would pursue his literary path separately. Mia Hesse's constitution, however, did not allow her to take care of the three sons, so that they had to be placed with friends, foster parents and in rural education centers.
Hesse did not seek the error and failure of his marriage in his wife, but in himself. He was also aware of the tragedy of the separation from his sons. Hesse reflected this overall constellation towards the four closest relatives in Klein and Wagner in the way that in the novella, the civil servant Klein burdened his conscience in an overwhelming way by murdering his wife and their children four times, and he saw the consequences of this enormous act Tried to escape under the code name "Wagner".
Book editions
Klein and Wagner was preprinted in October 1919 in the “Zeitschrift für neue Deutschtum” Vivos Voco, which was co-founded by Hesse . The first edition was published in 1920 by S. Fischer Verlag in the collection of stories from Klingsors last summer , together with the story of the same name and the story Kinderseele, which was written in Bern at the end of 1918 . In 1931 these three stories were published together with Siddhartha under the title Weg nachinnen ; in the new editions 1973 and 1983 supplemented by the Ticino records hike and eight watercolors by Hesse. The novella appeared individually for the first time in 1958 in the Suhrkamp Library series , and finally as Suhrkamp Taschenbuch in 1973 and its 21st edition in 2014.
- Klingsor's last summer . Stories. Fischer, Berlin 1920.
- Way inside . Four stories. Fischer, Berlin 1931; Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-04480-X .
- Klein and Wagner . Narrative. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1958 (Suhrkamp Library, Volume 43).
- Klein and Wagner . Novella. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-518-36616-5 (st 116).
Individual evidence
- ^ Siegfried Unseld : Hermann Hesse. Work and impact history . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-458-32812-2 , p. 91.
- ↑ cf. Volker Michels : "My noble ruin" - Hermann Hesse in the Casa Camuzzi . In: The many faces of Hermann Hesse , Eggingen 1996, ISBN 3-86142-078-3 , pp. 76 and 78f.