Uncle Tom's Cabin

This article describes the novel called Uncle Tom's Cabin . For more meanings, see Uncle Tom's Hut (disambiguation) .

Uncle Tom's Cabin ( Engl. Uncle Tom's Cabin ) is a 1852 published novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe , the fate of a number of African-American slaves and their owners in the forties of the 19th century in the United States of America portrays.

plot

This cabin in Bethesda, Maryland inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write the novel

The title character Tom (also called: Uncle Tom ) is a slave in Kentucky . His Mr. Shelby treats him well. Tom works as the manager of the farm . He is a professed Christian and regularly leads the services of the slaves. However, when Tom has to be sold for lack of money, he is separated from his wife and children. Its new owner, Mr. St. Claire, is a good-natured, indulgent bon vivant. St. Claire's angelic daughter Eva (Evangeline) develops an intimate friendship with Tom, but dies of consumption . Under the influence of his northern cousin Ophelia, who runs the household for him, St. Claire has developed into an opponent of slavery and wants to set Tom free. His sudden violent death by a knife stab prevents this, and his selfish widow Marie does not think about foregoing the sales proceeds. This is how Tom gets to Mr. Legree, who runs a cotton plantation with extreme brutality . He is the only white man who lives in a run-down mansion. His slaves have lost all humanity. Mr. Legree succeeds in playing them all off against each other. He doesn't succeed with Tom. Tom is supposed to be the overseer of the other slaves, but refuses to hit anyone. Instead, Tom exerts a positive influence on everyone through his practiced Christian charity , which Mr. Legree is particularly repugnant to. He wants to force Tom to give up his Christian faith through corporal punishment. But Tom resists and, dying, forgives his tormentors. After the death of his father, Mr. Shelby's son, George Shelby, tries in vain to keep the promise made to Tom to buy him back, but can only bury him and promise to take good care of his family. Thereupon he releases his slaves in order to take them into his service against payment.

At the same time, the story of the slave girl Eliza, who comes from the same household as Tom, her husband George Harris and her son Harry, who manage to escape to Canada with the help of Quakers, is told . There they meet George's sister and Eliza's mother, both of whom have also escaped slavery by different routes , and they go first to France , where George is studying. The whole family then emigrates to Liberia to help build the African state that was founded as a refuge for former slaves.

Tom's hut remains as a memorial to those who stayed behind: "When you remember him, all follow his example: Be honest, loyal and Christian as he was, and remember your freedom every time you see Uncle Tom's hut!"

Publication history

Title page of the first edition

In March 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to Gamaliel Bailey , editor of The National Era , suggesting some kind of serial novel in the form of short stories depicting the unhappy life in slavery. In this magazine, an organ of the opponents of slavery , the novel appeared from June 5, 1851 under the title Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly .

Driven by her zeal for faith, the author wrote a sequel every week. The last episode appeared in the April 1, 1852 edition. Bailey paid the writer three hundred dollars. The publisher John P. Jewett from Boston had been interested in the book rights even before this novel was finished. On March 20, 1852, the novel was published as a book with an edition of 5,000 copies before the last two sequels and was sold out within 48 hours. In the same year sales reached 300,000 copies in the United States, a million copies were sold in England, and German, Dutch, Flemish , French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish translations were made. The earliest German editions appeared simultaneously in 1852 by several renowned publishers. The work Onkel Toms Hütte received different subtitles: A Negro Story (1852), or Slavery in the Land of Freedom (1852), or the Story of a Christian Slave (1852) or Negro Life in the Slave States of North America (1853).

Harriet Beecher Stowe used the memoirs of Pastor Josiah Henson, a former American slave, as the source for her novel. Henson fled to Canada in 1830 and lived there in Dresden , Ontario, from 1841 .

In the USA there were a number of arrangements for the theater, on the style of which Harriet Beecher Stowe could not influence. Nonetheless, the stage version remained one of the most successful plays in American theater history for the next 80 years. It is estimated that around one hundred ensembles were on tour with the piece in the 1890s alone.

In 1853 Beecher Stowe published a second book: A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin . There she brought evidence of her representations and responded to her numerous critics who appeared after the appearance of Uncle Tom's hut on the scene. In the years up to the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, 27 novels were published that could more or less be understood as "anti-Uncle Tom novels".

The sentence attributed to Abraham Lincoln , with which he is said to have received Harriet Beecher Stowe during the Civil War in 1862 (“ So this is the little lady who started this big war. ”), Translated “ So this is the little lady who started this great war . ”) Is not historically certain. What is certain, however, is that Uncle Tom's Cabin paved the way for abolitionists like John Brown .

While the book is very popular in Germany, it has long been heavily criticized in the US for the portrayal of the slaves, which many have described as too submissive, and has become the subject of Uncle Tom Syndrome . Uncle Tom ("Uncle Tom") is even considered a dirty word there in many places. This is how the militant civil rights activist Malcolm X called the nonviolent civil rights activist Martin Luther King .

US tourists are often surprised to find a settlement in Berlin called Onkel Toms Hütte and the Onkel Toms Hütte underground station . This is due to a forest inn located on the former Zehlendorfer Spandauer Straße - today's Onkel-Tom-Straße - which was opened in 1884 and demolished in 1978. Its first landlord, Thomas, is said to have been a great admirer of Stowe's works and therefore ambiguously called it Uncle Tom's Hut , which was then transferred to the settlement built from 1926 to 1931 and the underground station built in 1929. The renaming of Spandauer Strasse to Onkel-Tom-Strasse took place in April 1933, in the first weeks of the National Socialist era .

Film adaptations

In 1903 - according to other sources in 1907 - the book was made into a film, also in 1911, 1914 and 1927 . In 1964 the novel was filmed again in a German-Italian co-production with John Kitzmiller in the title role and OW Fischer , Michaela May and Herbert Lom as his co-stars. Another film adaptation from the USA with Avery Brooks in the title role was released in 1987.

Radio plays

The material was set to music several times in German as a radio play . The record company Ariola-Eurodisc brought a version on the market in 1972 in the arrangement of Herbert Hennies . Benno Schurr directed the film and Kurt Ebbinghaus played the leading role . The EUROPA also brought out a radio play version of the book in 1972, in which the subplot about the slave girl Eliza was not taken into account. Franz-Josef Steffens spoke the main role . In the GDR , the piece was edited as a radio play as early as 1968 by Dieter Scharfenberg for Litera , the record label for speech recordings. The main role was given by Eberhard Mellies , other roles were spoken by Ursula Figelius , Roman Kretschmer , Dieter Unruh , Anneliese Matschulat , Gerd Micheel , Horst Ziethen , Hans Rohde , Ralph Borgwardt and Peter Bause .

output

• Harriet Beecher Stowe : Uncle Tom's Cabin . Novel. Anaconda, Cologne 2013 ISBN 978-3-7306-0036-8

literature

• Josephine Donovan: Uncle Tom's cabin. Evil, affliction, and redemptive love , Twayne, Boston 1991, ISBN 0-8057-8095-5 .
• Wieland Herzfelde: Epilogue , in: Onkel Toms's Hütte , Verlag Neues Leben, East Berlin 1952 (and Insel Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1977)
• Friedrich Lenger: In the run-up to the civil war. "Uncle Toms Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1851/52) , in: Dirk van Laak (Hrsg.): Literature that wrote history , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, pp. 43–60, ISBN 978-3-525 -30015-2
• Grace Edith Maclean: Uncle Tom's Cabin in Germany (= Americana Germanica. 10), dissertation , D. Appleton, New York 1910
• Debra J. Rosenthal (Ed.): A Routledge literary sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Toms's cabin” , Routledge, New York 2004 ISBN 0-415-23474-3
• Bernhard Lang: Religion and Literature in Three Millennia. Hundert Bücher , Paderborn: Schöningh 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-79227-3 , pp. 412-418

Web links

Commons : Uncle Tom's Cabin  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Free audio book at librivox.org
• Digitized from the illustrated edition Edinburgh 1853
• Website of the Onkel Toms Hütte museum in Dresden, Ontario
• Uncle Tom's hut in the Gutenberg-DE project

notes

1. ↑ John Carter, Percy H. Muir: Books That Change the World. Prestel-Verlag, Munich 1969, p. 605.
2. ↑ https://www.oth-reiten.de/index.php/der-verein/vereinsgeschichte
3. ^ The First Uncle Tom's Cabin Film: Edison-Porter's Slavery Days (1903) , Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, a Multi-Media Archive. Retrieved August 25, 2017.
4. ↑ Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
5. ^ Onkel Toms Hütte (1907) at The German Early Cinema Database , DCH Cologne.
6. ^ Onkel Toms Hütte (1911) at The German Early Cinema Database , DCH Cologne.
7. ^ Onkel Toms Hütte (1914) at The German Early Cinema Database , DCH Cologne.
8. ↑ Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 . 
9. ↑ E 2032 - Uncle Tom's Hut. In: EUROPA-VINYL. Retrieved December 11, 2018 . 
10. ↑ ddr-hoerspiele.net ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )