Pfister's mill

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Pfister's mill is a story by Wilhelm Raabe that was written between April 7, 1883 and May 8, 1884. Johannes Grunow , editor of the magazine Die Grenzbote , printed the text in Leipzig in 1884; Raabe experienced reprints in 1894 and 1903. The story reflects the changes in German society from the Vormärz to the 1880s, in particular the onset of industrialization, the mechanization of everyday life and urbanization. In this work Raabe expressed his concerns about the associated damage to nature and the environment.

The main character Dr. phil. Eberhard Pfister, a grammar school teacher for Latin, Greek and modern languages, tells a story from the early days . Every year a sugar factory pollutes the brook during the beet campaign and thus destroys the existence of his father, the water miller and " Schenkwirt " Pfister.

The work is considered the first German environment - novel . The mentioned environmental pollution by humans and industry is still considered topical by many interpreters.

content

Ebert, like Dr. Eberhard Pfister is called, spends the summer holidays together with his 19-year-old blonde wife Emmy "on enchanted land" - in the already sold mill of his deceased father Bertram Gottlieb Pfister, once host of "Pfister's amusement garden". Emmy is the daughter of the Berlin accounting council Schulze.

During this summer stay, Ebert tells the reader and sometimes "his young wife" about the history of the inherited and sold mill. Ebert had lost his mother early. He couldn't remember her and had been brought up by the housemaid Christine. The father had arranged for Ebert to be trained in Latin by Adam August Asche, a student of philosophy and later doctor of chemistry. Asche is the son of a whitewater . The old dyer was a friend of the miller's lifetime. In addition to his mill, Pfister had run a flourishing restaurant for excursions. In the summer, guests from the nearby town had sat under the old chestnut trees. One of the guests, school board director Dr. Pottgießer, a good friend of the landlord, had taken the lively Ebert into his high school. Study visits to Berlin, Jena and Heidelberg, financed by his father Pfister, followed.

Not far from the mill, the unsuccessful playwright and poet Dr. Felix Lippoldes, a drinker, together with "his clever, brave, brave daughter" Albertine a deplorable existence. Invited to the “fortified” mill on Christmas Eve, the poet climbed onto the Christmas table - otherwise speaking in “sonorous iambs of suns, palms, battlements, towers, women, heroes and armies” - and declaimed “with dark pathos”:

"One day the hour will come - don't think it is far away - ..."

The Christmas party is disturbed by the foul smell of the formerly light mill water - now "slime and grease". Ebert asks his friend Asche for a chemical analysis of the water. Chemikus eagerly gets to work and finds “mushroom masses covered with algae”, “rot dwellers” and Beggiatoa alba . The latter come from "the outflows of the sugar factories". On “Boxing Day” the friends start an “expedition to research the reasons for the sinking of Pfister's mill”. The march leads from the mill upstream to Krickerode to the enemy power. The factory there even produces "black clouds of smoke" and beet sugar on public holidays; releases her Satan's broth into the Mühlbach. Lawyer Dr. Smelling for Father Pfister also thanks to Dr. Asche's learned opinion started the process against the operators of the Kricker or sugar factory, but the water miller did not use the disgrace of his formerly intact little world. He died on the "bad smelling" brook. Albertine's father, the "ingenious playwright" Felix Lippoldes, had previously been found drowned in Mühlbach. Albertine, who could no longer help her father, looked after the Müller Pfister until the end.

The hours of the mill are numbered. Gentlemen come to the demolition of the old walls from the city “with their yardsticks and notebooks. Wheelbarrows and shovels and hoes ”are unloaded from the cart. “The architect of the new large factory company” spreads out his plan roles in the “barren dining room”. A “more lucrative, contemporary company” will be built in place of Pfister's mill. Dr. Asche, who had long since kept an eye on Albertine, marries the poet's “pretty, brave, clever” daughter and gets into “the water-spoiling business”: The “commercial chemist” founds the large AA spot cleaning company on the “Spree shuffling towards Spandau” Asche & Kompagnie ”, a“ large industrial factory ”. On his deathbed, Müller Pfister had forgiven the “abandoned fantastic” of his “old friend, Schönfärber Aschen, who took sides with the new world and fashion”, and gave in: “Then God will think it's best.”

Emmy and Albertine have children in Berlin. Occasionally the two mothers sit next to each other next to the noisy “chemical washing facility”, whose wastewater “pollutes the Spree as much as possible”. Emmy has taken the virgin Christine into her Berlin household.

characters

To put it simply, the main characters in Pfister's mill each embody a social context; they can be classified in the conflict between the old and the new.

Eberhard Pfister - Humanities : The miller's son Eberhard Pfister spent a sheltered childhood and youth in the natural idyll of the mill. Thanks to the academically trained guests in his father's tavern, he gained access to education at an early age. His first teacher, Adam A. Asche, taught him mainly in Latin. Eberhard attended various schools and eventually became a high school teacher. While Eberhard was still strongly influenced by the natural idyll of the mill in his childhood, his indifference to the old and traditional times grows with his rise in the sciences. In the end he even sells the mill to a factory, that is to say to the very people who were actually responsible for the downfall of the mill.

Father Pfister - old traditions : The owner of Pfister's mill and father of Eberhard embodies the tension between the traditional small business and agricultural class on the one hand and the modern industrial state on the other. When the waters of Pfister's mill were polluted by the Krickerode sugar beet factory, father Pfister started a legal battle that he won. However, he perishes in this legal battle and dies shortly after his victory.

Adam A. Asche - Natural Sciences : Eberhard's first teacher and childhood friend. Is in the favor of Father Pfister. He also grew up with the humanities, but his studies focus on the natural sciences and especially chemistry. Raabe raises a contradiction in Asche, on the one hand he openly admitted that he wanted to pollute creeks himself (he later became a partner in a factory), on the other hand he helped father Pfister with a water test in the trial against Krickerode. From this one can conclude that ashes actually recognize what industry is doing to nature; because the mill he has come to love, on which he also spent his childhood and youth, he cannot expect the pollution from industry.

Narrative structure

In the narrative there is a frame narration and an inside narration . The framework narration consists of the stay of Eberhardt and his wife Emmy in the mill of their deceased father. In the form of conversations between Eberhardt and Emmy or through Eberhardt's “Sommerferienheft”, the internal narrative provides a look back at the past of the mill and the characters who appear. The frame narration already indicates the outcome of some events that are described in more detail in the internal narrative. The outcome of the trial against the sugar factory, the death of the father, the sale of the mill and the marriage of Dr. Asche and Albertine have already been mentioned in the framework narrative, without this being presented in the chronological internal narrative.

The form of the narrative structure means that Eberhard Pfister has to accept the destruction of his mill. Raabe uses two possibilities to draw the reader's attention to this: The nested structure of a frame and an internal narrative makes it clear to the reader that the times when the mill still had a chance and when the old world still offered resistance are long gone . Raabe's second method is the flowing poems. Pieces of Eberhardt's poems are repeatedly woven into the novel. The further the novel advances, the more melancholy the poem, which slowly takes shape, becomes. It is drawing to a close together with the mill. The poem sections can thus be seen as a progressive coping mechanism by Eberhardt. Just like Eberhardt, in the end the reader has to come to terms with the destruction of the mill and nature.

reception

  • Meyen names eleven works from the years 1894 to 1963 that deal with Raabe's story.
Contemporaries
  • Julius Rodenberg, as editor of the Deutsche Rundschau, rejected the manuscript.
  • In 1885 W. Eigenbrodt stumbled upon the “hard and all too grainy language” in the “Deutsche Literatur-Zeitung ”.
  • In the same year a certain GN speaks in " North and South " of a " swan song on romance".
Recent comments
  • Hesse finds the epithet "tender" for the story. The text smells of home and radiates warmth .
  • Oppermann demonstrates Raabe's extraordinary narrative technique with examples.
theatre

Interpretations

Sprengel addresses a strange hurdle that appears in front of the interpreter. Dr. Asche initially prepares the miller's trial against the sugar factory operator with his chemical analysis, but then becomes an entrepreneur himself; participates in the destruction of nature.

Through his protagonist Eberhardt, Raabe describes the mill as timeless and romantic. In doing so, however, the reader has to think about whether the mill itself, through its gastronomic use, is not an industry, just like the sugar beet factory. Katrin Hillgruber writes about the theater performance: “On the stage at the Schauspiel Stuttgart, a black and gray monster turns in the background. A harmless rattling mill wheel? Or a noisy industrial turbine that is better not to get too close? "

Historical background

Fuld identifies the unnamed city with Braunschweig , the Mühlbach with the Wabebach, which is still present today, and the location of the mill with the Green Hunter near Riddagshausen Abbey at the gates of Braunschweig. During walks between 1882 and 1892, Raabe came up with the idea of ​​dealing with the subject in more detail with his hometown association “ The honest clothing sellers in Braunschweig ”. In the winter of 1882/83 there was a fish death , and Raabe was allowed to inspect the appraiser's files.

expenditure

First edition

  • Pfister's mill. A summer vacation booklet . 227 pages. Verlag Johannes Grunow, Leipzig 1884. Linen

Used edition

  • Pfister's mill. A summer vacation booklet . Illustrated by Ruth Knorr. With an afterword by Gerhard Wolf . 215 pages. Union Verlag Berlin 1971

Further editions

  • Pfister's mill. A summer vacation booklet. (Pp. 5–178) with an appendix by Hans Oppermann (pp. 517–544) in: Karl Hoppe (ed.), Hans Oppermann (edit.): Wilhelm Raabe: Pfisters Mühle. Restless guests . In the old iron . (2nd edition) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1970. Vol. 16 (without ISBN) in Karl Hoppe (Ed.), Jost Schillemeit (Ed.), Hans Oppermann (Ed.), Kurt Schreinert (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
  • Pfister's mill . A summer vacation booklet. Afterword by Horst Denkler . Reclams Universal Library 9988, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 978-3-15-009988-9 .
  • Meyen names four issues.

literature

  • Hans Oppermann : Wilhelm Raabe. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1970 (1988 edition), ISBN 3-499-50165-1 (rowohlt's monographs)
  • Fritz Meyen : Wilhelm Raabe. Bibliography. 438 pages. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973 (2nd edition). Supplementary volume 1, ISBN 3-525-20144-3 in Karl Hoppe (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe. Complete Works. Braunschweig edition . 24 vols.
  • Werner Fuld : Wilhelm Raabe. A biography. Hanser, Munich 1993 (dtv edition in July 2006), ISBN 3-423-34324-9
  • Rita Jungkunz-Höltje: "Life picture book" of a culture and consciousness crisis. Wilhelm Raabe's "Pfister's Mill" (1884). In: Braunschweigische Heimat . Edited by the Braunschweigisches Landesverein für Heimatschutz eV (Editor: Wolf-Dieter Steinmetz), 79th year, Wolfenbüttel 1993, pp. 28–38
  • Peter Sprengel : History of German-Language Literature 1870–1900. From the founding of the empire to the turn of the century . CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-44104-1
  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Wilhelm Raabe . 114 pages. Richard Boorberg Verlag Munich, October 2006, ISBN 3-88377-849-4 (issue 172 of the edition text + kritik )

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolf in the afterword of the edition used, p. 209, 16. Zvo
  2. ↑ Fuld, p. 290, 11. Zvu
  3. ^ Arnold, p. 105 below, entry from 1884
  4. ^ Oppermann in the Braunschweiger edition, vol. 16, p. 523, 11. Zvo
  5. ^ "Middle of the seventies" of the 19th century (used edition S, 47.4. Zvo) is the narrator Primaner .
  6. ↑ a b c d Katrin Hillgruber: Wilhelm Raabe: The misunderstood Utopist , on Deutschlandfunk on October 3, 2015
  7. ↑ Braunschweig, see Fuld's investigations under “Reception” in this article. See also in the edition used, p. 194, 2nd Zvu: Asche and Ebert use the night train to get to the mill from Berlin “when the time is good”.
  8. ↑ Meyen, pp. 367-368
  9. ↑ Horst Denkler: Afterword, in: Wilhelm Raabe, Pfisters Mühle. A summer vacation booklet. Reclam, Stuttgart 2015, p. 227 .
  10. ↑ quoted by Oppermann in the Braunschweiger edition, vol. 16, p. 522, 10th Zvu
  11. ↑ quoted by Oppermann in the Braunschweiger edition, vol. 16, p. 522, 12th Zvu
  12. ^ Hesse, quoted by Volker Michels (ed.): Hermann Hesse. A literary history in reviews and essays. Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main 1970 (paperback edition 1975), ISBN 3-518-36752-8 , p. 353, 2. Zvo
  13. ↑ Oppermann, p. 106 above, see under “Form” in this article
  14. ↑ schauspiel-stuttgart.de: Pfisters Mühle - A summer vacation booklet
  15. ↑ Sprengel, p. 334, 15. Zvu
  16. ↑ Fuld, p. 287 below
  17. ↑ Meyen, pp. 113-114