Magellan. The man and his act

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Fictional portrait of Magellan. Engraving by Crispijn de Passe the Elder (1558) in the first edition of Stefan Zweig's Magellan. The man and his deed was printed. Inscription: "Ferdinand Magellan, discoverer of the Peruvian Strait and the southern country." Below: "I was the leader of a fleet in the name of the Lusitan king, sent through the wide sea to the southern lands: And when it seemed to us most of all an island, we got to the straits named after our name. The southern land itself now also retains Magellan's name; but a thousand perished in it. "

Magellan. The man and his act is a biographical novel by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig . The novel tells the life of the Portuguese knight and navigator Ferdinand Magellan , who commanded a Spanish expedition to the Moluccas from 1519 to 1521 . A ship on this expedition, the Victoria , completed the first historically documented circumnavigation of the earth in 1522 . Zweig wrote to Magellan. The man and his deed in exile in Britain between 1936 and 1937 . The book was published by Herbert Reichner in 1938in Vienna. It has been reprinted several times and translated into more than 30 languages.

plot

The life of Ferdinand Magellan is told in this book according to the archetypal scheme of a hero's journey .

After an introduction to the history of the spice trade between Europe and Asia and the voyages of Portuguese ships to Africa and India, the hero takes the stage: Magellan is one of more than a thousand “unknown soldiers” who set sail for India in 1505 under Francisco de Almeida . When he returned to Portugal after eight years of military service, he was "everything at the same time, warrior, sailor, merchant, expert on people, countries, the sea and the stars". When Magellan returned home, he received letters from a friend, Francisco Serrão , who had settled in the Moluccas. Serrão lets Magellan in on a great secret: he reveals to him the wealth and the exact location of the “fairy-tale spice islands ”, which are on the easternmost edge of the world, so far to the east that they can possibly be more easily reached from Europe by going to West sails. This is how the hero hears the call to his personal mission. Reaching the fairy-tale land of the Orient on the western instead of the eastern route is now Magellan's “life idea” and “fate”. To do this, however, he first has to find the much sought-after “paso”, “the mythical strait of the sea,” which, according to secret maps, should lead from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean . Once Magellan has found this passage, not only is the way to the Moluccas open to him, but also “the last, the most beautiful, the most difficult” of all tasks: “to circumnavigate the entire globe on one and the same ship and thus against all cosmologists and Theologians of the past to measure and prove the round shape of our earth ”.

Magellan presented his idea to the Portuguese King Manuel I , but was rejected by him. He then turned his back on his fatherland and in October 1517 crossed “the Rubicon of his life”: the border with Spain. There he wins over King Charles I for his idea and creates a fleet against "a thousand resistances". This is equivalent to a " Herculean task" and takes a year and a half.

On September 20, 1519, the Magellans pushed five ships off the mainland. After a stopover in the Canary Islands , they cross the Atlantic and reach the Bay of Guanabara , where Magellan does not allow the team to rest for more than two weeks: "A secret, burning impatience drives the outwardly unshakable impetuous towards that 'paso'". But the week-long exploration of the Río de la Plata and further south along the coast remains inconclusive. Magellan's “holy belief” in the existence of a passage to the west has been shaken, but for him “there is no turning back”.

The hero leads the fleet into a natural harbor at 49 ° 20 'south latitude and orders the crew to “hold winter quarters”. Some captains mutinate here, but Magellan is able to put down the mutiny . In October 1520 he lets the search continue, which leads him into the " world of Hades " in the American sub-Antarctic . In “ Stygian waters” he finds the passage into the Pacific, which “posterity will thankfully call the Strait of Magellan ”. But only after the hero has " traversed a huge new ocean ... as the first person of all time happily" does Magellan "discover" his kingdom: not the Spice Islands, but other, no less fairytale-like islands: "The landscape is wonderful, Heavenly the climate, friendly the natives who are still living in the golden age, peace-loving, carefree and lazy. "Here, in the future Spanish colony of the Philippines , Magellan realizes that he has" accomplished the essence of his deed ":" What the wisest suspected for thousands of years what the scholars dreamed, now it has become a certainty through the courage of one individual: the earth is round. "

After Magellan has torn the last secret from the earth “in a Promethean manner,” he has to atone for his heroic deed like Prometheus . The “greatest seafarer in history” - he “is felled by a ridiculous human insect Silapulapu ”, “by a… brown lout who has no unmatched mat in his dirty hut”: the “chief” of a “naked island horde”. Magellan's corpse remains in the hands of the “miserable savages”, “his grave is lost and, mysteriously in the unknown, the trace of the man who wrested his last secret from the infinite ocean.” The hero has lost his kingdom, no heirs will inherit him . Another will complete the circumnavigation of the earth on the last of Magellan's ships, others "gather the profit, ... celebrate the festivals." But apotheosis beckons for the hero : With his "immortal deed" Magellan has earned "eternal fame". "All of humanity" has "an inheritance to thank him for."

Historical content

In the introduction to Magellan. The author explains the man and his deed that he depicted Magellan's heroic journey "as faithfully as possible according to all available documents". Zweig had the book manuscript checked by the Viennese geography professor Eugen Oberhummer before it was published. In fact, the external plot of his Magellan novel essentially corresponds to the historical facts, insofar as they were scientifically established at the time of writing. However, this does not apply to the statements about the hero's psyche and inner drama, which occupy a large space in the novel and are allowed to be his leitmotif . Zweig's Magellan is driven by the "idea of ​​life" to circumnavigate the earth by ship. But in the surviving documents from the planning phase of Magellan's Moluccas expedition, there is not a single evidence that Magellan ever had a circumnavigation of the world in mind. The historical sources also do not indicate that he wanted to prove the spherical shape of the earth , especially since this had long been recognized since antiquity - with the exception of only a few late antique authors who had little influence. The altruistic and humanistic motives that Zweig attributes to his hero several times cannot be historically proven.

Likewise, the racism that is in Magellan. The man and his act shining through in many places can be viewed as the author's own ingredient. Zweig depicts members of non-European cultures with whom Magellan met on his journey as if they were at a lower level of cultural and intellectual development ("the Tierra del Fuego as a culturally completely inferior race"). By assigning skin colors to the developmental stages ("the brown nature children" vs. "the white gods"), Zweig uses a racist code that is not (yet) found in the historical documents and eyewitness accounts of Magellan's expedition.

literature

First edition

  • Stefan Zweig : Magellan. The man and his act. Vienna: Reichner 1938. 370 p .; Ill., Kt .; 21 cm

Other issues in German (selection)

  • Magellan. The man and his act. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag 1953. 334 S .; Ill.
  • Magellan. The man and his act . License issue. Berlin / Darmstadt / Vienna: German Book Association 1962. 260 pp; Ill.
  • Magellan. The man and his act . Collected works in individual volumes. Edited by Knut Beck. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag 1983. 315 p .; Ill., ISBN 3-10-097040-3
  • Magellan. The man and his act . Edited by Knut Beck. Frankfurt am Main: FISCHER paperback 1983. 315 S. Ill., ISBN 978-3-596-25356-2
  • Magellan. The man and his act . Berlin: Suhrkamp-Insel Verlag 2013. 297 pp., ISBN 978-3-458-79060-0

Secondary literature

  • Maria de Fátima Gil: Uma biografia "moderna" dos anos 30. Magellan. The man and his deed de Stefan Zweig . Coimbra: MinervaCoimbra 2008. 425 p .; Ill .; 23 cm (port.)
  • Maria de Fátima Gil: Magellan in the circle of the demonic . In: Stefan Zweig and the demonic . Edited by Matjaž Birk u. Thomas Eicher. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann 2008, pp. 115–121, ISBN 978-3-8260-3622-4
  • Helmut Koopmann: History, Myth, Parable: The Answer of Exile . In: Aesthetics of History . Edited by Johann Holzner u. Wolfgang Wiesmüller. Innsbruck: Inst. For German Studies at d. Univ. Innsbruck 1995, pp. 77-98, ISBN 3-901064-16-8
  • Rüdiger Siebert : Magellan - explorer in the twilight. Searching for traces in Southeast Asia. Würzburg: Arena 1987, ISBN 3-401-01557-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stefan Zweig Bibliography. Retrieved November 6, 2020 .
  2. ^ Stefan Zweig: Magellan. The man and his act . Ed .: Knut Beck. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-25356-X , p. 10 f .
  3. ^ Stefan Zweig: Magellan. The man and his act . Ed .: Knut Beck. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-25356-X , editor's note, p. 313 .
  4. ^ Stefan Zweig - Joseph Gregor: Correspondence 1921-1938 . Ed .: Kenneth Birkin. Oniv. of Otago, Dunedin 1991, pp. 286 .
  5. ↑ Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas (ed.): Colección general de documentos relativos a las Islas Filipinas existentes en el Archivo General de las Indias de Sevilla. 5 vols. Barcelona 1918 ( bne.es ).
  6. ↑ a b Christian Jostmann: Magellan or the first circumnavigation of the earth . 3. Edition. CH Beck, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-406-73443-4 , p. 322 .
  7. ↑ Bastian Spangenberg :, Weltbürger ‛as a refugee. Stefan Zweig and the loss of the “spiritual home” . Master thesis. Vienna 2016, p. 53 ( univie.ac.at [PDF]).
  8. ^ Maria de Fátima Gil: Uma biografia "moderna" dos anos 30. Magellan. The man and his deed de Stefan Zweig . CoimbraMinerva, Coimbra 2008, p. 284 .