Night watch

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Nachtwachen is a satirical novel attributed to August Klingemann and published in Penig by Ferdinand Dienemann in 1805 with the addition "Von Bonaventura". He was part of the journal of new German original novels , in which Sophie Brentano and Christian August Vulpius published, among others . In research, the authorship of the novel, which was highly valued by the critics, was considered unclear for a long time, until the discovery of a manuscript in the University Library of Amsterdam in 1987 confirmed the Braunschweig poet and theater director August Klingemann as the author.

Title page of the first edition from 1804

Form and content

shape

The novel is divided into 16 episodes, which are referred to as "night watches". Different text forms (speech, prologue, correspondence, poem, essay or picture description), which do not necessarily belong to the plot, break through the narrative structure of the text and make it appear incoherent and fragmentary overall. He is based on romantic models such as Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde or Clemens Brentano's Godwi .

content

The main character is the cloister, a night watchman who has been cast out from the world and who now walks through the dark alleys of a city every night and calls up the hour for the population. On his forays he meets a wide variety of characters who stimulate him to consider. These mostly lead to a criticism of his time. The core of this disapproval is the futility of existence. Science, religion and art are targeted with grotesque images. Kreuzgang vehemently denies the aims and purposes of the individual or of society as a whole. With the last words the novel expresses a threefold void, which brings it very close to nihilism . This is symbolized above all with the metaphor of the role . The tragedy of man is that in the end everything is just a show. If you want to get to a reason - in the image of the role metaphor: to find the actor behind his mask - this endeavor inevitably leads to nowhere. Thus writes Kreuzgang in the Fourteenth Watch in the role of Hamlet :

“It's all role, the role itself and the actor who is in it, and in him again his thoughts and plans and enthusiasm and antics - everything belongs to the moment and, like the word, quickly escapes from the lips of the comedian. Everything is just theater, whether the comedian is playing on the ground itself, or two steps higher, on the boards, or two steps lower, in the ground where the worms pick up the cue of the departed king; may spring, winter, summer or autumn decorate the stage and the theater master hang the sun or moon on it, or thunder and storm behind the curtains - everything flies away again and is extinguished and transformed - except for spring in the human heart; and when the curtains are completely pulled away, there is only a strange bare skeleton behind it, without color or life, and the skeleton grins at the other comedians still running around. "

- Fourteenth watch

But the text does not stop at the basic nihilistic trait. There is one role that world theater as a whole does not value higher than it actually is:

"Now the buffoon reappears to soothe and comfort him, and among other things, when he does it too badly, angrily mentions how silly it would be for a marionette to think of reflecting on itself, since it was all nothing according to the mood of the director, who would have to behave, who would put them back in the box if he liked it. Then he also says some good things about freedom of will and about the madness in a puppet brain, which he treats very realistically and sensibly; all to prove to the doll how great it is of her to take things like that very high, since everything would ultimately amount to a trifle, and the buffoon would basically play the only sensible role in the whole farce, precisely because he did it Farce would not take higher than a farce. "

- Fourth watch

Kreuzgang not only wants to rehabilitate the role of the Hanswurst - this was banned from the stages of the 18th century by Johann Christoph Gottsched and Friederike Neuber (see: Hanswurst ) - he also points to the only possible setting with the upgrading of the Hanswurst that he takes up against the omnipresent masquerade. Another example of this global disguise is the metaphor of the world as a madhouse:

“Humanity organizes itself just like an onion, and always pushes one pod into the other down to the smallest, in which man himself sticks very tiny. In the great temple of heaven on whose dome the worlds float as miraculous hieroglyphs, smaller temples with smaller domes and aped stars, and in these again even smaller chapels and tabernacles, until at last she has enclosed the holy of holies in a miniature like a ring because it hovers around mountains and forests, great and mighty, and is lifted up in the shining host, the sun, in the sky, so that the peoples fall down in front of it. In the general world religion, which nature has revealed with a thousand characters, it again nests smaller folk and tribal religions for Jews, Gentiles, Turks and Christians; yes, the last ones have not had enough of that either, but nestle themselves again. It is just the same with the general madhouse, from whose windows so many heads look, partly with partial, partly with total madness; Even smaller madhouses for special fools are built into it. "

- Ninth watch

In this ragout of his notes, the protagonist is also looking for his own identity. He's a foundling who was found in a cloister by a shoemaker and alchemist . His mother is a "Bohemian woman". She is said to have made a pact with the devil and tells him in the Sixteenth Watch about his real father, who turns to dust as soon as the cloister tries to touch him. The origin and identity of the foundling therefore remain a mystery to the last. The passage is also the end of the text:

"" Woe! What is it - are you also just a mask and cheating on me? - I don't see you anymore, father - where are you? When touched, everything crumbles to ashes, and only a handful of dust remains on the floor, and a few nourished worms sneak away secretly, like moral orators who have overdone at the funeral meal. I scatter this handful of fatherly dust in the air and it remains - nothing! "

"Over on the grave the seer is still standing and hugging nothing!"

"And the echo in the ossuary calls for the last time - nothing !"

- Sixteenth watch

Author's question

The authorship of the novel was controversial until the 1980s. The German has the text temporarily, among others Clemens Brentano , ETA Hoffmann , Karl Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel and Caroline Schelling attributed. Jean Paul suspected in his "Reminiscences and Licenses" for his "Gianozzo" that Friedrich Schelling was the author. This had in fact 1802 Musenalmanach by Schlegel and Tieck published poems under the pseudonym "Bonaventure". But Jean Paul himself came under suspicion. Due to the research of Jost Schillemeits and Horst Fleig, August Klingemann also came into play. Their evidence is based on interpretative and statistical methods of language statistics, with which they compared individual words, sequences of words or motifs from the “Night Watch” with the authors in question. Both discovered the greatest similarities in the writings of Klingemann. In 1987 Ruth Haag finally published the article "Once again: The author of the night watch of Bonaventura" in the magazine Euphorion and reported on a special find: There is one in the manuscript collection of Pieter Arnold Diederichs, which is stored in the University Library of Amsterdam List of publications by Klingemann, in which he handwritten “Nachtwachen. Penig. Servant. 1804 ”and thus calls the night watch his own.

literature

Text output (selection)
  • August Klingemann: Night watch of Bonaventura . With illustrations by Lovis Corinth. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-458-31789-9 .
  • Bonaventura (EAF Klingemann): Night watch . Edited by Wolfgang Paulsen. Reclam, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-15-008926-3 .
  • August Klingemann: Night watch of Bonaventura . Frankness . Edited by Jost Schillemeit. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-0831-2 .
Secondary literature (selection)
  • Thomas Böning: Contradictions. To the “Night Watch. From Bonaventure ”and on the theoretical debate . Rombach, Freiburg 1996.
  • Ina Braeuer-Ewers: Features of the grotesque in the night watch of Bonaventura . Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 1995.
  • Manfred Engel : In search of the positive. The criticism of subjectivism and the romantic form of a novel in Klingemann's “Night Watch” and Immermann's “Münchhausen”. In: Günter Blamberger u. a. (Ed.): Studies on the literature of early realism. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991.
  • Horst Fleig: Shattered Identity. Klingemann - Night watch of Bonaventura. (1973). The typescript appeared in 1974 as an addendum to: Horst Fleig: Self-failed narration (Fontane). (Göppingen contributions to German studies; Vol. 145). Kümmerle Verlag, Göppingen 1974.
  • Horst Fleig: Literary Vampirism. Klingemann's "Night Watch of Bonaventura" . Niemeyer, Tübingen 1985.
  • Ruth Haag: Again. The author of the "Night Watch of Bonaventure", 1804 . In: Euphorion . Vol. 81 (1987).
  • Peter Kohl: Free space in nothing. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
  • Jürgen Peters: August Klingemann, “Just keep dancing, you larvae” . In: Ders .: Of poet princes and other poets. A short history of literature in Lower Saxony. Volume 1, Revonnah-Verlag, Hanover 1993.
  • Walter Pfannkuche: Idealism and nihilism in the “night watches” of Bonaventura. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1983.
  • Kenneth Ralston: The captured horizon. Heidegger and the "Night Watch of Bonaventura" . Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994.
  • Jost Schillemeit: Bonaventura, the author of the "Night Watch" . Beck, Munich 1973.

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