See Naples
Seeing Naples is a short story from the Village Stories Collection 1960 , with which Kurt Marti (1921–2017) first emerged as a narrator that year. It is about the death of a worker who sacrificed his life to the piecework of the factory.
Emergence
Village stories 1960 was created in Niederlenz , an industrial village in the Swiss plateau. Marti was a pastor there and through village life, as he himself says, became
- politicized [...] by meeting people who come up short, are treated unfairly, are socially and economically bad off. That drove me to the left and, without wanting to, I became the pastor of the Soci minority in this industrial village.
content
A factory worker has built a wooden wall around his garden to remove the factory he hates from his sight. He always hated his work, the machine with its work cycle and the rush for piece bonuses. He hates the doctor who advises him to take it easy, the master who, in false consideration, recommends lighter work without piecework bonuses, his wife who draws his attention to the fact that he twitches in his sleep. After 40 years of work and hatred, he becomes seriously ill. Tied to the bed, he looks out the window at his little garden. He does not share the hope of recovery from his wife and the doctor.
The worker gets bored of looking at the garden, he asks his wife to have two boards removed from the wall and then the whole wall. The man's gaze rests tenderly on the factory, whose daily events he observes, a smile relaxes his face before he dies.
shape
For Marti, literature is first and foremost language and form: “For me, form is the midwife of content. Form ideas, form ideas, form attempts, form games gradually bring the content to the world. "
The text is written in a greatly reduced form, with the floor plan of what is happening in the house and garden, wooden wall and factory. There are no sections; The almost fifty lines stand there like a compact block.
Furthermore, there is no psychologization of the characters: They are introduced as “the woman”, “the master”, “the doctor” and “the neighbor” - they are barely contoured.
The syntax is straightforward and the vocabulary is simple, but two verbs stand out in particular: In the first half it's hate - it appears ten times, often as an anaphor “He hated” . In the second half it is seen - it occurs eleven times, but in a more subtle way.
The word Blust is a dialect from the Bernese German "Bluescht" and describes the blossom of the tree in spring.
interpretation
The title See Naples is an ironic allusion to a Neapolitan saying, which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe already reported in his Italian journey :
- "Vedi Napoli e poi muori!" They say here. "See Naples and die!"
Today, usually translated as see Naples and die , that means: Having experienced Naples in its beauty and splendor cannot be surpassed by anything in a person's later life. Applied to the short story, this proverb as a title means that the sick worker recognizes his factory, in which he has grown old and sick, as the only important content of his life, that the hated world of work was the most important and decisive in his life. With that he can die peacefully. The title is to be understood ironically, however, since the working world of the worker stands in stark contrast to Naples. The worker has not been able to get to know the really beautiful and is therefore to be regretted in his abandonment to the work that determines him into death.
Seeing the “accord” in Naples is a bracket that relentlessly connects work and private life. The man owes his little wealth, house and garden to the accord. But the piecework that made this possible takes possession of him and undermines him. Even if he seems to be his own master at first glance, he is only his own slave driver.
literature
- expenditure
- See Naples. In: Kurt Marti: Dorfgeschichten 1960. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1960. P. 60–63.
- See Naples. In: Kurt Marti selection of works in 5 volumes. Selected by KM and Elsbeth Pulver. Vol. 1: Seeing Naples. Stories. Nagel and Kimche, Zurich / Frauenfeld 1996. p. 16 f.
- See Naples. In: Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Classic German short stories . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 978-3-15-018251-2 . P. 251 f.
- interpretation
- Elsbeth Pulver, in: Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Classic German short stories. Interpretations. Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 978-3-15-017525-5 . Pp. 240-245.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Dossiers Kurt Marti , par Elsbeth Pulver et Anna Stüssi, in: Feuxcroisés. Litteratures et Echanges culturels en Suisse. Revue du Service de Presse Suisse, No. 5 , Editions d'en Bas, Lausanne 2003, p. 23.
- ^ Elsbeth powder in: Werner Bellmann (Hrsg.): Classic German short stories. Interpretations . Reclam, Stuttgart 2004. p. 240
- ↑ Kurt Marti: Talk and Answer. Accountability in conversation. Stuttgart 1988, p.29 books.google
- ^ Goethe: Italian journey . Second part. Naples. March 3, 1787. zeno.org . “Io sono Napolitano. Vedi Napoli, e poi muori ", Carlo Goldoni : La bottega del caffè 2nd act 16th scene (German Das Kaffeehaus ), in: Le Commedie di dottore Carlo Goldoni. Edizione giusta l'esemplare di Firenze. Dall 'autore corretta, riveduta ed ampliata. Tomo primo. Torino MDCCLVI (1756). P. 213 books.google .