Popp and Mingel

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Popp and Mingel is a short story by Marie Luise Kaschnitz . She first appeared in the volume Lange Schatten. Stories published by Claassen in Hamburg in 1960 .

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An unnamed first-person narrator, male only and key child, probably of elementary school age or a little longer, reports what happened to him: Because his real parents are not at home during the day and spend little time with the boy in the evening, he has one A substitute family created that nobody knows about: Popp and Mingel, Harry and Luzia, the imaginary parents and siblings, are usually kept in a box in the closet and are only taken out when the boy comes home from school at noon and quickly put away again, as soon as the first real parent enters the apartment. Every day the child stages a warm welcome in the family circle: Father Popp, an old soccer ball, is seated in an armchair from where he welcomes his “youngest”, Brother Harry, a single ivory chess piece, asks how things are outside on the It was prairie, and exciting stories can be told, Mother Mingel, a legless old doll from which sawdust is already running, is taken into the kitchen, where she warms up the boy's “good bear ham”, and Sister Luzia is taken from teasing her little brother until the parents step in and warn the boy to leave her alone. After dinner, the boy continues to play family life all afternoon, with board games and little secrets of the "children" from the worried "parents" who sit at home all day waiting for their offspring and are always immediately concerned about them.

They thus represent the exact opposite of the boy's real parents, who - the story takes place in the post-war and economic boom in Germany - are busy earning the money for consumer goods such as music boxes and cars and maintaining their acquaintances. Externally z. For example, if the boy is well supplied with food and money, he misses the attention and care that only his surrogate family can offer him, because his real mother, who works as a secretary, is not too tired in the evenings to go out with his father, but finds board games a nuisance and reading books difficult and thinks her boy is big enough to read his books himself. The trips into the forest in the new car, which were so promisingly announced, do not take place; instead, the parents use the car to drive away with friends and without their son. He emphasizes that he doesn't care and that he always feels sick in the car, but on the other hand he wishes his mother could really upset her stomach and stay at home with him. But the mother always remains rosy and healthy.

One day, however, she evidently takes care of the apartment, in which the beds are usually unmade and the breakfast utensils not tidied up when the son comes home from school. She probably discovers the objects in the box in the closet that are useless in her eyes, throws them away and fills the container with dominoes.

When the boy comes home and wants to start the usual game, he can no longer find his "family". Increasingly panicked, he searches the whole apartment for Popp, Mingel, Luzia and Harry, but does not find them even in the garbage can in the kitchen. At a loss, he ponders whether he should choose other items that his family members could symbolize, but decides against such a new beginning. Basically, he notes, he could now simply join the somewhat neglected gang that whistles under his window every day and challenges him, even if he sees no point in their activities. B. consist of throwing shop windows and piercing car tires. But before he comes to this decision, because he suddenly knows, as the last sentence of the story says, “that you are no longer a child”, he is still undecided in the kitchen, where the crumpled paper is out the cleared rubbish bin is still on the gas stove. This turns out to be fatal. The boy comes up with the idea of ​​using all four flames of the gas stove and is happy because they are so warm and "lively". But he uses it to set fire to the garbage on the stove, and the flames quickly spread to the curtains.

Fortunately, at this moment, the real father comes home and prevents a major apartment fire. But since then the boy has apparently been viewed as disturbed and possibly pyromaniac and questioned by the doctor and the teacher, but neither accuses his real parents of neglect nor does he reveal his secret about his second family. The rescue by the real father was lucky, "only that afterwards all the questions came and the thing with the teacher and the thing with the doctor, as if I were not completely normal or as if I were angry my parents would have had. And yet my mother couldn't have known what she threw away or gave away, and I have nothing against my parents at all, they are what they are and I like them. Except that there are certain things that you can't tell them, just write them down and then tear up again when you're home alone, ”he comments on the event. Apparently, even the adults do not wonder whether they are to blame for the incident.

construction

The event is told in retrospect. Kaschnitz builds up tension by first letting the first-person narrator report that since the incident on the day before All Souls' Day he has been asked by all over the world what was going on in him, and that he hears reproaches because he hasn't lacked anything have. What actually happened and triggered this onslaught of questions is not mentioned for a long time, but on the first pages of the short story it becomes clear that the adults do not understand or do not want to perceive the needs of the lonely child. The existence of the boy who has no address at home is described in numerous details. Only gradually, by quoting the questions, is it concretized that the incident must have something to do with fire: “All adults later wanted to know what I like to play best, and they would have been happy if I had said to the fire chief or with the doll's room, in which a tiny Advent wreath hangs with real little candles, in short with something that has to do with fire or with light. But I said, with my little cars, "reports the child, only to explain shortly afterwards:" Of course I didn't want to play with my cars that afternoon, but with my family, but my parents don't know anything about them, and they do not need to know anything from her, and neither do the teachers, and certainly not the doctor ”. And only then does the actual story of the lost substitute family and the ended childhood begin. At the end, the narrator goes back to the situation he is in now: As before, not understood and questioned by the adults, but not adequately looked after even after the incident with the fire.

reception

Popp and Mingel found their way into school lessons and secondary literature. The short story was compared with Gabriele Wohmann's novel Paulinchen was alone at home , the protagonist of which, eight-year-old Paula, suffered “a hell of lovelessness” with her adoptive parents who are convinced of modern upbringing models. “Both children feel deprived of their childhood, long for feelings and security, want to be taken seriously and important.” And both children developed disordered behavior because of their malformed childhood. In Rūta Eidukevičienė's book Beyond the Sexual Struggle, of all things , the alleged arson of the narrator near Kaschnitz is described as a disruption and not the previous creation of the surrogate family, although it is actually clear in the entire short story that the fire is just a coincidental disaster The neglect of the child by the real parents made it necessary for the boy to create an alternative world.

The quality of the short story in an article in the time honored from 1975: "A strictly built in the shape of a ring-structured story whose special feature is the real dream world and the ambiguous reality. The realm of fantasy is clear, the realm of reality, anticipated, understood, denied, is ambivalent. ”The author particularly emphasizes the differences between Kaschnitz's text and its film adaptation by Ula Stöckl from 1975. The film did not achieve the quality of the narrative by far, so the tenor: "The dream degenerated into vague poetry (the structure of the fantasy family was not clear: the four people, father soccer, mother doll, brother chess horse, sister balloon did not gain an identity) ; reality was brought to the screen in the form of a naturalistic spectacle: everything clichéd and crude. Dear child, bad parents. [...] Just be clear, please! [...] Just always coarse! [...] This is how you mess up a story; this is how one deprives it of its punch line: the paradoxical representation of the realm of dreams and reality.

But even that might have passed if the editor had at least been consistent. [...] While the end of the story is highly plausible, since the doctor who treats the boy belongs to the strange world of the inquisitors, the finale in the film looks almost absurd: Here the doctor is a friend who is hugged by the child and is kissed ... a version that certainly demands a different ending than the one given in the story. ”And so the author finally raises“ objection in the name of poetry. ”

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rūta Eidukevičienė: Beyond the war between the sexes. Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-861-10345-5 , p. 115 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  2. ↑ a b Momos, The Destroyed Doll's House , in: Die Zeit 30, 1975 ( digitized version )