Mimili

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Mimili, painted from nature by Wocher, engraved by Bolt (title copper of the first edition from 1816)
Mimili informs the flatlander

Mimili is a short story by Heinrich Clauren . It appeared in sequels in 1815/16 in the magazine Der Freimüthige or entertainment paper for educated, impartial readers, later in numerous reprints and is a love story between a German officer and a mountain farmer's daughter in the Bernese Oberland . Based on the epistolary novel Julie or Die neue Heloise ( Rousseau 1761), it addresses the conflict between virtue and desire .

content

A Prussian officer by the name of Wilhelm, who has just been awarded the Iron Cross , is looking for the quiet in the Bernese Oberland that he cannot find in “noisy Paris, the so-called capital of the world”. He wants to spend the night in an alpine hut with the herdsman, when a girl arrives there, Mimili, who also wants to spend the night there. This somewhat embarrassing collision causes the girl to invite the stranger downstairs to her father's house and also to accompany him downstairs. They get closer to each other very quickly, with Mimili proving to be an excellent botanist who even knows the Latin names of the plants. When Wilhelm, completely headless by Mimili's charms, voluntarily or involuntarily displayed, asks for her hand, the father negotiates a postponement of one year; During this time he wants to try to find a man for Mimili who will not kidnap the heiress to distant Germany, but who will continue the business on her hereditary farm. At this point the first-person narration broke off (after about 80% of the total volume) in its first edition. Clauren then continues it in the third person by reporting on Wilhelm's death in the Battle of Belle Alliance , which also makes the foreboding Mimili sick to her death. In a second turn, the author claims to have been informed by a letter from a neighbor that Wilhelm was seriously injured, rushed to Mimili and saved the dying woman from certain death. Wilhelm and Mimili get married, the blessing of children comes.

role models

Clauren was educated and well-read and made use of successful literary models, which he consistently trivialized. The famous scene from Goethe's Werther , in which the protagonist is overwhelmed by emotion and delight when he sees the beloved Lotte satisfying her siblings' hunger, is trivialized by Clauren into a scene in which Mimili feeds and feeds the poultry speaks lovingly with each individual animal:

“I had seen poultry feed a hundred, a thousand times in my life; but whoever saw Mimili in this merry circle was bound to be charmed by her mood, by her cheerfulness, by her fortunate gift of putting pleasure and character into the simplest of business. "

- Heinrich Clauren : Mimili

Clauren also found the idea of ​​associating the high Swiss mountains with busty women, in the 23rd letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie or Die neue Heloise . There Saint-Preux, exiled to Valais , describes the Valais women and compares their appearance with Julies, his lover:

“With a smile, I sometimes combined the big beards and the rough appearance of the guests with the dazzling skin of these shy young beauties who blushed at a word and thus became all the more graceful. But I took some offense at the enormous size of her bosom, which only in the dazzling white had one of the advantages of the model with which I dared to compare it, that single veiled model, the surreptitiously copied outlines of which brought those of that sculpture before my eyes. which was shaped after the most beautiful breast in the world. "

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau : Julie or The New Heloise

Clauren also took over the explicit struggle between virtue and instinct from Rousseau. In contrast to Goethe and Rousseau, however, Clauren only apparently leads his protagonists into death and catastrophe; they find each other and become happy.

reception

Mimili was Clauren's greatest literary success; the story has been translated into Danish, English, Hungarian and Polish. A dramatization was performed in Vienna in 1832. To the present day Reclam has remained loyal to the work. Mimili exemplifies the path in inwardness and nature that the literature of the beginning Biedermeier should follow.

rating

Mimili is one of the most thoroughly criticized works in German literature, which suggests what a nuisance the story, but above all its success in bookselling, was for the established literary scene. Clauren shares this fate with authors such as Christian Heinrich Spieß and E. Marlitt .

From today's point of view, Clauren proves to be a pioneer of entertainment dramaturgy in the business-minded exploitation of the cliffhanger effect . Mimili was long on the index for fonts harmful to minors , from which the work was only deleted in February 2008.

Wilhelm Hauff's slap

With his novel The Man in the Moon, which he published under Claurens' name in 1825, Wilhelm Hauff had masterfully imitated his narrative technique and style, which brought Claurens to his publisher. Hauff followed up with his controversial sermon about H. Clauren and the man in the moon, given to the German audience at the autumn fair of 1827 . In this slap , he criticizes the ingratiating “pleasant”, the apparently “natural”, the ridiculously touching and finally the superimposed “charm” of the “Mimili manner”:

“And what is this lovely thing? This is the sensuality that it excites, these are those lovely, seductive, alluring images that appear pleasant to your eye. I am glad to see that you cannot open your eyes down there. I am pleased to see that now and then the blush of shame rises on some cheeks. I am glad that you do not dare to laugh, gentlemen; when I touch this point. I see you all understand all too well what I mean.

A Lessing , a Klopstock , a Schiller and Jean Paul , a Novalis , a Herder were really great poets, and have you ever seen that they had to descend into these filthy corners of sensuality in order to make an audience? Or what? Should it really be true that those noble spirits uttered their noble words for only a few people, that the great crowd only always follows the barker because he speaks delicious rant and his bajazzo makes cute jumps? Poor people of men, that you know of no higher spiritual pleasure than reading the physical charms of a woman in print, reading from a marble bosom, from bouncing snow hills, from beautiful hips; of white knees, of well-formed calves and of the like beauties of a Venus Vulgivaga. Wretched generation of women who want to draw education from Clauren! Do not blush with displeasure when you read that one only pays homage to your body, that one admires the charms that you develop in the rapid movement of a waltz, that the wind that plays with your robes delights the lustful eye of your beloved more as the sacred flame of pure love that glows in your eyes, as the gods' sparks of wit, of the whim which love elicits from your spirit? Lost beings, if it doesn't offend you to see your sex so deeply, so infinitely deeply humiliated, cleaned dolls, which you have trampled on your virginal mind from the very beginning, always read from other cleaned dolls, always plant your imagination with those forget-me-not flowers that grow on the swamp, you deserve no other than sensual love, which is over with the honeymoon! "

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. Dieter Wenk in http://www.textem.de/826.0.html
  2. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13452/13452-8.txt

Web links