Rural stories

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Rural Tales is a book by the German writer Arno Schmidt (1914–1979). First published in 1964 as Cows in Half Mourning , it contains ten stories written in previous years .

Publication frequency and title of the collection

The volume contains the following stories:

  1. Windmills
  2. Towards the sun
  3. Tails
  4. Cows in half mourning
  5. Great Cain
  6. Kundic dishes
  7. ‹Piporakemes!›
  8. The waterway
  9. The adventures of New Year's Eve
  10. Caliban over Setebos

Six of these stories were specifically published in the student magazine between 1960 and 1962 . In 1964 they were published by Stahlberg Verlag under the title Kühe in Halbtrauer , and in 1987 they were published in the work edition of the Arno Schmidt Foundation by Haffmans Verlag ( Bargfelder Edition ) under the title Ländliche Erzählungen . The editors explain in the “editorial follow-up”: “RURAL TALES was one of the working titles mentioned by Schmidt in letters and was used by him in conversations after the publication of the anthology. The title KÜHE IN HALBTRAUER seemed to the editors too closely linked to the order of the texts in that volume ”. In contrast, the Germanist Wolfgang Albrecht found the renaming “implausible” in his 1998 introduction to Schmidt's life and work. In “that volume”, the first book publication of the stories, the sequence of the texts was determined by Arno Schmidt. In the Bargfeld edition , the texts are arranged according to the chronological order in which they were created.

reception

Arno Schmidt never highlighted the stories as a particularly important work. He called them, for example, "antics with a rural background". The reviewers did not want to give the book much importance, between the novels Kaff , the Karl May study Sitara and the large book Zettel's Traum published in 1970 , it appeared more as a manual exercise in which Schmidt had tried out the themes, motifs and peculiarities of the later work.

The book was reviewed by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in a review entitled Selfmadeworld in Halbtrauer . Reich-Ranicki turns "critical statements Schmidts over the works of other writers" on Schmidt himself and judges the Republic of Letters , chaff and cows in half-mourning , "connect, unplanned Gequatsch 'with, tüftelnder consideration' and offer, manic-mechanical repetition 'Not only the characters, motifs and situations, but also the gags and tricks, the jokes, puns and quirks. ” Heinrich Vormweg , who in 1973 speaks of the restriction to the level of experience“ reality that can be experienced directly, ”expresses himself more respectfully :“ This has Schmidt tries to realize in the volume of stories [...], and very emphatically. Conditions of the welfare world, filtered from a rural and moral point of view, are repeated with sarcastic and indifferent precision. ”For Jörg Drews , the volume“ next to the novel Kaff also Mare Crisium (1960) can be regarded as Schmidt's most imaginative, complex and mature work to date ”.

Hans Wollschläger counts the rural narratives “among the best works of Schmidt, in which the whole psychoanalytic experience that was theorized in ZETTELS TRAUM had already been incorporated into practice, ie. That is, they contain large quanta of Etym language , which is of course not identified as such and can only be brought to light through analytical models. ”The Arno Schmidt research on the Bargfelder Bote already had Schmidt's own reference to mythological ones early on Topics in the Caliban story about Setebos were taken as an opportunity to search through these and other stories for allusions to myths. At the same time, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis , which Schmidt had only known since January 1962, and especially his Interpretation of Dreams and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake were named as important sources for Schmidt's text designs. It was not until the 1980s that readers and literary scholars began to realize that these stories were riddle texts that could only be understood with careful and subtle analysis. It also became more and more apparent that Arno Schmidt had used his own dreams as the basic and starting material for the texts. Because the dream always deals with the recurring basic problems of the dreamer, Schmidt was forced to disclose important parts of his soul life in the texts. He developed a technique of distraction and concealment trained on the pattern of dream work, which created the appearance of a simple representation of reality using compression, displacement, symbolization and secondary processing (Sigmund Freud), while it was in a subtext formed by associative allusions, word games and stylistic finesse it is always about something other than what is initially apparent when reading superficially. Likewise, Schmidt's idiosyncratic spelling, alien to Duden, and a large number of quotations evoke a variety of perspectives, which, if they are all taken into account while reading, often overwhelm the ability to understand.

Arno Schmidt describes this in the picture of the experiences he had as a child with the "early radio":

“... that was always on = & exciting for me as a child (it is probably the same?) When half a dozen stations maccaronized at night on the early radio in 1924; and if you pulled yourself together, you could still 'separate' them from each other: as one of them swiped a robbery of 'Tscherna = gorra' and the little man next to you immediately contradicted: 'Neenee monnte Näggro!'; (and windy = unshakable, the whole Scala subordinated the short two-word words with ‹Diddidd = dáa = didd: ditt = dáa = dáa = ditt!›). "

expenditure

  • Cows in half mourning . Stahlberg, Karlsruhe 1964; Reprint: S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-10-070615-3 .
    • Orpheus . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1970, ISBN 3-436-01283-1 (partial edition).
    • Tails . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-596-29115-1 (partial edition).
  • Cows in half mourning . Haffmans, Zurich 1985 (= Zurich cassette, volume 8).
  • Kaff also Mare Crisium. Rural stories . Haffmans, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-251-80010-8 (= Bargfeld edition, group of works I, volume 3).

Audio book

literature

  • Ralf Georg Czapla : Myth, Sex and Dream Game. Arno Schmidt's prose cycle “Cows in Half Mourning” . Igel-Verlag Wissenschaft, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-927104-35-3 .
  • Jörg Drews : Cows in half mourning. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Paperback edition, dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 7, p. 5410.
  • Marius Fränzel: Rural Tales . In: Marius Fränzel: "This miraculous mixture" . An introduction to the narrative work of Arno Schmidt. Ludwig, Kiel 2002, pp. 198-226.
  • Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidt's “Rural Stories”. Six interpretations . Bangert & Metzler, Wiesenbach 2011, ISBN 978-3-924147-63-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volume 3 of Work Group I (Novels, Stories, Poems, Juvenilia), p. 341.
  2. ^ Wolfgang Albrecht: Arno Schmidt . JB Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 1998, p. 66.
  3. ^ Arno Schmidt: The correspondence with Wilhelm Michels . Edited by Bernd Rauschenbach . Haffmans, Zurich 1987, p. 235.
  4. ↑ Marcel Reich Ranicki: Selfmadeworld in Halbtrauer , in: Die Zeit , No. 41, October 13, 1967 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Heinrich Vormweg: Prose in the Federal Republic since 1945 , in: Kindler's literary history of the present in individual volumes , Volume 1, Kindler, Munich / Zurich 1973, p. 274.
  6. ^ Jörg Drews: cows in half mourning . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 7, p. 5410.
  7. ↑ Hans Wollschläger: The island and some other metaphors for Arno Schmidt . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, p. 33.
  8. ^ Günter Jürgensmeier, message in the Arno Schmidt mailing list (ASml) from June 15, 2012, subject: windmills
  9. ^ Arno Schmidt: The waterway. In: Bargfelder Edition, Work Group I, Volume 3, p. 441.