Romeo and Juliet in the village

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Romeo and Juliet in the village is the best-known story from the series of novels The People of Seldwyla by Gottfried Keller . Like most of the Swiss poet's works, it took a long time to write: conceived in 1847, elaborated and published in 1855/56, it did not reach its final text form until 1875. The title refers to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and heralds an adaptation of the famous material . The author relocates the scene of the tragic love story to his present and to a village in his homeland: two young people, son and daughter of wealthy farmers, love each other despite the bitter hostility of their fathers. After this hostility has ruined both families and destroyed the children's prospects for a future together, the couple sees no other way out than to go to their deaths together.

The novella is considered exemplary of the style of poetic realism . It belongs to the canon of German-language literature , is widely used in school reading in numerous editions and has been illustrated, musically edited and filmed several times.

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The wild field. Woodcut by Ernst Würtenberger , 1919

On a September morning, the farmers Manz and Marti slowly plow their fields. They are located on a hill above the river that passes Seldwyla and are only separated by an area covered with stones and tall weeds. As the sun rises higher, two children, Manz's little son, seven, and Marti's daughter, five, bring them a snack. The fathers, good neighbors, take it in together and talk about the overgrown piece of land between their fields. It belonged to a villager who has long since passed away. As long as its descendants are not found, the Seldwyler authority offers it to the neighbors for lease. This is out of the question for them as they want to buy it and restoring the field would only drive up the price. But the Seldwylers, eager for interest, hesitate to sell and talk about the unresolved inheritance situation.

The children Sali and Vrenchen

It is true that there is a homeless person who lives in the woods among tinkers, pitchers and other traveling people and occasionally earns extra income as a musician at village festivals. He is called the black violinist. Manz and Marti could swear that he is the grandson of the deceased because he looks like his face. But that, they agree, would be stupid. Because the violinist does not have a baptismal certificate, and as long as no one attests to his parentage, he can neither inherit nor the community has to grant him the right to live in the village and pay poor relief . While the children play between stones, thistles and late poppies and take a nap, the fathers continue their day's work. At the end everyone silently plows down a good furrow from the overgrown area.

Manz and Marti start an argument

Harvest after harvest came, and each saw the children bigger and more beautiful and the abandoned field narrower between its expanded neighbors. Manz ' Sali is now with the boys, Martis Vrenchen with the girls, but when the weeds are pulled up and burned in their old playground, they are there, and it is always a party for them. At last the authority gives the field up for auction. There are only two bidders, the two neighbors. Manz wins the contract and immediately demands that Marti return the patch of earth that Marti had most recently acquired through crooked plowing. When Marti does not agree to this, Manz has the field stones, which both had thrown in the middle field for years, collected and piled up in a big pile, exactly above the disputed triangle. Marti goes to court, and from that day on the two peasants were at trial and didn't rest until they were both ruined .

The process turns the respected men who didn’t speak an unnecessary word and didn’t spend a penny too much, braggart and spendthrift, who kept a pack of false advisers in taverns - Seldwyler lawyers and speculators - happy and were constantly short of money for every lottery hoax. Nobody takes them seriously anymore. They let their flourishing agriculture go to waste and tyrannize their servants and families. The deeper they both feel their unhappiness, the more their hatred flares up : they spit out if they only saw each other from a distance; No member of her house was allowed to speak a word with the other's wife, child, or servants, while avoiding the grossest abuse. Salis and Vrenchen's happy childhood is over. Vrenchen, barely 14, lost her mother, who fell sick from grief and died. Sali's mother submits to her husband and runs the farm down completely. He's going under the hammer.

Sali's parents quarrel in the empty dining room

For the proceeds, Manz had the Seldwylers talk him into a miserable tavern and moved into town. In the beginning, curious Seldwylers came, but only to make fun of the clumsy landlord and the strange landlady. Sali, the son, went out into the dark kitchen, sat down on the stove and wept over his father and mother .

When the guests stay away, idleness and want return. Sali, meanwhile 19, stands with his father to the unemployed Seldwylern by the river to use fishing rods to improve the menu and to kill the time. One day in muggy weather they look upriver for a good fishing spot. Halfway between town and home village, Marti meets them, he too, driven by hardship and boredom. Vrenchen has to carry the fishing gear after him.

Manz and Marti are wrestling on a narrow bridge

While a thunderstorm breaks out, the old men begin to abuse each other. This is followed by strokes and a wrestling match on a narrow jetty, in which one tries to push the other into the water. With great effort, Sali and Vrenchen manage to separate them. In doing so, they come close again for the first time since childhood. Their hands touch, and when she gives him a fleeting smile through tears, he is amazed at her beauty.

On the way home he feels very happy and the next day he hears and sees nothing of the pathetic quarrel of his parents. He tries to picture Vrenchen's face and when that fails he wanders out into the village to see it. On the way he meets Marti, who gives him angry looks, but is in a hurry to get into town. Sali finds Vrenchen under the door of her half-ruined parental home. Fearing the old man's return and the village watchdogs, they arrange to meet in the fields where they once played as children. They get there unnoticed and stroll down the hill to the river, in which the white clouds of the July sky are reflected; then up the hill again, happily hand in hand without speaking much.

Suddenly a man walks in front of them in soot-blackened clothes and with a black face. You can recognize him by the violin he is carrying under his arm and follow him as if spellbound to the pile of stones, which is now overgrown with fiery red by the blooming poppies. The black violinist swings up and speaks to her: "I know you guys, you are the children of those who stole the ground here!" They hear for the first time about the injustice that their fathers have committed and leave them sad Heads hang. But only for a short time; for scarcely has the man gone his way - without threatening to retaliate or giving them any other bad words - than Vrenchen has to laugh at his grotesque appearance. Laughing, they lie down in the high corn, exchange kisses, listen to the larks and have amorous conversations. Vrenchen winds a wreath of poppies and puts it on.

Meanwhile Marti has become suspicious, turned around and sneaked after them. As they step out of their hiding place, he ravages his daughter, knocks down her wreath and pulls her away by the hair. Half in fear for Vrenchen and half in a rage , Sali grabs a stone and hits him on the head with it. The old man falls, lies unconscious, but is still breathing. Desperate, the two promise each other not to reveal anything about the incident and split up. Marti wakes up again, but only vaguely remembers what has happened and as if something funny had happened to him. Vrenchen takes care of him for weeks and brings him back on his feet. But he remains mentally confused, a harmless, happy fool whom the authorities admit to an institution at public expense. When Vrenchen delivers him there, his last property has already been sold. At night she returns under a roof that no longer belongs to her.

Sali and Vrenchen at the parish fair

Sali steps in to her there, driven by longing and worry. His home is spoiled for him too: his parents are now giving shelter to thieves and have become fenders; his father is childishly happy about Marti's misfortune. What should happen next? Asks Sali. Even if poverty didn't exist, says Vrenchen, Sali's act would be a poor foundation stone for the marriage. So they had no choice but to go their separate ways, she as a maid, he as a servant or soldier. They fall asleep huddled together and spend the night quietly like two children in a cradle. The morning after telling each other their dreams, they are in good spirits again. Vrenchen wishes to spend one more beautiful day with Sali before the separation, preferably at a dance, like at her wedding, which she dreamed of. It occurs to her that she no longer has any shoes for that. But Sali promises to get her some, takes the measure and rushes into town. In order to have some money, he sells the silver pocket watch that was left to him from better days.

The next day he picks up Vrenchen, unconcerned about people and talk. It's a beautiful Sunday in September and the two of them are hiking across the country to a village where there is a church fair and there is dancing. Since they introduce a pretty couple and are dressed as well as poverty allows, they are treated with respect on the way. At lunchtime, a friendly landlady even thinks they are a bride and groom on their way to the wedding. They do not contradict, they wander on and the closer they get to the fairground, the more they feel like the bride and groom. At the parish fair he bought her a gingerbread house with poetic sayings; give him the same gingerbread heart. “Oh,” sighed Vrenchen, “you are giving me a house! I also gave you one and only the real one; because our heart is now our home ” . Each secretly buys a cheap ring for the other as a souvenir when saying goodbye.

Sali and Vrenchen on the river

Since festival visitors from their home village have recognized them and begin to whisper, they avoid the dance floor of the rich village inn and seek out a secluded inn, the paradise garden , where poor people and traveling people enjoy themselves. There the black violinist greets her as an old friend: “I knew that I would play you again. It's just making fun of yourselves, darling! ” They mingle with the dancers. The moon rises and illuminates the strange festival of the homeless. Vrenchen is gripped by melancholy when the conversation returns to the impending separation. Then the black violinist steps up to them and invites them to join the homeless and share their free life in the mountains: “You don't need a pastor, money, writings, honor, bed, nothing but your goodwill " . When Sali donates wine and food, the mood is left out. The guests organize a comic wedding with the couple. After midnight, the black violinist leads the drunken, singing and dancing company across the nocturnal fields towards the woods. Sali and Vrenchen let themselves be carried away, and as they walked through their home village, past their lost father's houses, a painfully wild mood seized them and they danced with the others after the violinist, kissed, laughed and cried .

The hayship is drifting towards the city

But on the hill, by the three fields, they lag behind the mad train and wait for the music and laughter to fade away in the distance. “We escaped these,” said Sali, “but how do we escape from ourselves?” The river rushes softly below. They are now exchanging the rings that they have secretly bought. But the thought of separation and long deprivation, including the risk of losing and becoming unfaithful, can no longer be borne by anyone. So they decide to belong to each other on the spot and then go into the water. They run down to the river. A ship loaded with hay lies on the bank. They choose this for their wedding bed, climb on it and let it go. The setting moon, red as gold, laid a gleaming path up the river, and on this the ship came slowly across. As it neared the city, in the frost of autumn morning, two pale figures, twisting tightly around one another, slid down from the dark mass into the cold waters. The next day you find the abandoned hayship on a bridge and a little later, further downstream, the two bodies.

Background and origin

At the beginning of September 1847, the 28-year-old Keller, who had made a name for himself in Zurich as a political poet and partisan of radical liberalism, read the following message in a conservative newspaper:

Saxony. - In the village of Altsellerhausen , near Leipzig, a boy of 19 and a girl of 17 made love, both children of poor people who, however, lived in a deadly hostility and did not want the couple to unite. On August 15th the lovers went to an inn where poor people enjoyed themselves, danced there until 1 o'clock in the morning, and then left. In the morning the corpses of both lovers were found lying in the field; they had shot through the head.

Three weeks later, the poet wrote down a scenic idea in his dream book:

Two stately, sun-tanned farmers plow with strong oxen in two fields, between which a third large one lies fallow and overgrown. While they are turning the ploughshare, they talk about the beautiful middle field, as it has been lying fallow for many years because its neglected inheritance is loitering in the world. Pious and deep regret of the two men who go back to work and each of them plowing some furrows along the whole length of the deserted field. As the oxen pull the plows on slowly and quietly and the two trains here and there meet, the two peasants continue their monotonous conversation about the evil world, holding the plow with a firm hand and each pretending to be the iniquity of the other did not notice. The sun is lonely and hot in the sky .
Text of the fragmentary verse novella from 1848/49.

The sketch, still without a title and apparently without reference to the newspaper report, already shows the innovation that distinguishes Romeo and Juliet in the village from the classic treatment of the material. While Shakespeare leaves open why his Montagues and Capulets are bloody feuding, Keller searches for the cause of the deadly enmity and finds it in the injustices committed together by the family fathers. He immediately shines a light on this and makes it the engine of the action. According to Walter Benjamin, when they are carried out, “a devastating fate emerges from the broken property rights in a field.” The dream-like idea of embedding the sacrilege in the idyll of leisurely plowing peasants also provided the poet with the “strange, unheard-of incident” that the story told Gives novella character.

Keller's attempt to bring the material into the form of a verse novella (see text box) did not flourish beyond seven stanzas in 1849. It was not until the summer of 1855, after the completion of Green Heinrich , that he succeeded in executing it in prose. In the years in between he had dealt with the genre of village history and especially with the stories of his compatriot Jeremias Gotthelf in a series of reviews .

The literary and socially critical program of the novella

In contrast to the other Seldwyler novels, Romeo and Juliet is framed in the village by remarks about the meaning and purpose of the story. A preliminary remark justifies the title loan from Shakespeare, a follow-up remark brings out the socially critical sharpness of the story.

The preliminary remark

To tell this story would be an idle imitation, if it were not based on an actual incident, to show how deeply rooted in human life each of the fables on which the great ancient works are built. The number of such fables is moderate; but they always reappear in a new guise and then force the hand to hold on to them.

What makes Sali and Vrenchen's Romeo and Juliet fate worth telling is that it is “based” on a real incident. The word has been chosen with care; it assures the truth of the story as a whole, but does not guarantee the factuality in detail. In fact, on the way from newspaper news to novella, a lot was added and rewritten, especially the circumstances of suicide. The social milieu was preserved: the tragedy takes place in the village, the dead are children of impoverished country folk, while in Shakespeare - Keller assumes that readers are aware of this - they belong to the rich urban upper class.

According to the narrator, the "real incident" has proven something, namely that the "fables" on which the great old works are based are not mere products of poetic invention, that they are found by the poets in real human life. Their number is "moderate" - not an excessive number of works are big and old - but they happen again and again in different disguises; to be added: now in the costumes of young noblemen, now in the garb of poor people.

The preliminary remark in the version from 1856

The weight Keller attached to his remark and the fact that he expressed a programmatic self-commitment with it follows from the concluding one and then forces the hand to hold on to it. He only added this half-sentence in 1875, after he had repeatedly rejected the advice to delete the introduction including the reference to the actual incident without replacement. The case of the two young people, children of poor people who would rather die than be separated, struck him as worth remembering and all the more memorable because it repeated a classic act of tragedy. So he saw himself pressed (“force the hand”) to hold onto the memory of the lovers.

The follow-up

In the final version, the post-comment reads:

When the corpses were later found below the city and their origins had been determined, the newspapers said that two young people, the children of two anemic [bitterly poor] families who had perished and lived in irreconcilable hostility, would die in the water sought after they danced together for a whole afternoon and had fun at the parish fair. This event is presumably to be connected with a hayship from that area, which landed in the city without shipmen, and it is assumed that the young people stole the ship in order to hold their desperate and godforsaken wedding again Signs of the rampant demoralization and wilderness of passions.

After a few pitying words, the fictional Seldwyler press voice falls into the tone of moral indignation, an attitude "whose claim and validity are refuted by the story." By leaving the narrator to the newspaper writer to convict himself of incomprehension, the novel according to Kellers concludes Words “malicious and ironic” , or, in Friedrich Theodor Vischer's words, with a “sword parade against the Philistines ”.

The last two paragraphs of the commentary in the first print from 1856

This polemical point was the result of a cut; because in the first print from 1856 (see text box) two longer paragraphs followed. On the point of moralizing , the author explained that the purpose of the story was not to gloss over and glorify the deed , and attached praise to the power of persistent loyalty and quiet work that might have made everything possible . On the point of the wilding of passions, however, he boldly remarked that only the lower folk had at least preserved the ability to die for a matter of the heart, so that, to the consolation of the novelists, it would not disappear from the world. This was followed by a satire on the way to get engaged and then to reward yourself publicly again, as is fashionable among the educated classes of today . The novella ended with a burlesque , similar to the way in which the tragedies were followed by a satyr play at ancient theater festivals .

This conclusion offended many readers, and Keller promised "ruefully" to leave it out at the earliest opportunity. As 1871 Paul Heyse Romeo and Juliet in the village the Germans novel Treasure incorporated, Keller asked him free to shorten the postscript what Heyse also underlined the fictional newspaper report. A little later, however, on the occasion of the new edition of the People of Seldwyla , Keller added it back in.

Critical comments

Keller's contemporaries

Several of Keller's fellow writers recognized Romeo and Juliet in the village as a work of standing: Berthold Auerbach called the novella “an extended folk song”, which was equivalent to high praise; Theodor Fontane wrote of a “wonderful story”; Otto Ludwig praised the dramatic increase up to the painfully beautiful end as entirely in the spirit of Shakespeare; Heyse even coined the term “Shakespeare the novella” on Keller in 1877. But artistic concerns were mixed with the admiration: Auerbach thought the title and the introduction were wrong; Ludwig found poverty unpoetic; Fontane saw the work fall into two stylistically irreconcilable halves, the realistic story of the demise of the two peasants and the romantic story of the love and death of their children; Heyse, who saw himself as apolitical, made it clear with his deletion that Keller's concluding remark seemed to him to be a dispensable remnant of pre- March tendency literature .

Literary criticism according to Keller

When the fame of the "immortal novella" (Benjamin 1927) spread in the second half of the 20th century, such concerns met with incomprehension. Instead, the insight prevailed that “Keller with the peasant history […] establishes the extraordinary depth and the convincing necessity of love between Sali and Vrenchen.” The juxtaposition of the two storylines found such an explanation, was no longer as a break in style, but as Complementary togetherness understood, their interweaving called for the harmony of controversial-hard and intimately-tender narrative tones - one stated the " polyphony of Keller's narration". The finding of style studies, according to which the narrative means, report, dialogue, interim observation, “from the beginning of the novella in a mix ratio that hardly changes”, pointed in this direction and confirmed the reading impression “as if from a single source”.

It now also became clear that the novella’s literary, programmatic and socially critical tendency was not a superficial phenomenon, nothing that we had flown into, but rather resulted from Keller’s intensive examination of the possibilities of literary literature written by the educated about the people and for the people - a dispute that was almost the accompanied the entire development process of the novella and was reflected as a criticism of the worldview and the rampant anti- liberal propaganda of the pastor Albert Bitzius ( Jeremias Gotthelf ), whom he otherwise valued as an epic . The Marxist literary scholar Georg Lukács had already seen the lifeblood of the poetry of the Swiss republican Keller in political engagement. Following Lukács, around 1960 the first part of the people of Seldwyla was read in the east as a major work of the “littérature engagée” , admired in Romeo and Juliet in the village the astute analysis of the rural-bourgeois property relations and came to the conclusion that the “description the deep love between Sali and Vrenchen should be understood as a polemical contrast image ”. There was opposition to this in the West. There the work was understood primarily as an autonomous poetry that deals with "timeless" things removed from the political sphere, revolves around the mystery of life, love and death and makes statements that existentialist philosophy or theology are responsible for their interpretation . These opposing viewpoints can also be found in more recent interpretations.

While there is broad agreement today about the high literary quality and educational value of the novella, it met with violent public rejection twice during Keller's lifetime; a first time because it offends the moral senses of the reader, a second time because it would not make sense to a critic that people of low class, peasant children, take their own lives for the motives portrayed as honorable by the narrator. In the interpretive discourse of the present, which thinks differently about custom, class and honor, these reasons for rejection continue to play a role, as they allow the distance between Keller and views of his time to be measured and thus contribute to the understanding of the continuous impact of the novella.

Recurring themes of interpretation

Even where commentators and interpreters of the work deal with existential and religious questions, love, life, death, this happens in connection with the themes of morality, honor and - closely related to this - law. In this context, the motivation for the tragic ending is also discussed. Another theme is the rich symbolism of the story.

morality

The fact that a young couple spends their wedding night in the hay on a stolen boat without the blessing of the clergy and then commits suicide must have come across as highly offensive to conservative and ecclesiastical contemporaries of Keller. Shortly after the publication of the People of Seldwyla , an anonymous reviewer protested, initially cautious, wrapped in terms of idealistic tragedy theory:

“What we have to criticize about the catastrophe is that the passion is directed exclusively to enjoyment, breaks off the connection with moral life and precisely because of this, even with intentional suicide, no atonement and reconciliation with the moral world, but only a continued one and final rebellion against it is brought about. "

In fact, there is no "atoning liberation or even reconciliation of those who remain behind as in Shakespeare" with Keller. While the suicide of the children in Romeo and Juliet opens the eyes of the fathers Montague and Capulet, makes them renounce the blood feud and return to decent conditions with their followers, in Romeo and Juliet it only creates a hollow echo in the newspaper and remains without practical Consequences. Nevertheless, the appeal to change one's mind in the face of the dead is no less urgent in the novella than in the play. But because he would not do anything for the inmate Marti and the depraved innkeeper Manz, he skipped the characters involved. Instead of addressing the incomprehensible environment of the children, he is directed towards their posterity. With her, that is, with the audience, the narrator appeals for understanding for the dead. With their decision to belong to each other and then to die, the lovers do indeed rebel - in a wild mood Sali loosens the ropes that hold the hayship on the bank - but not against a world order that would have morally deserved the predicate, but against one whose rules of the game do not allow them to live together in accordance with law and good morals. The narrative thus rejects the notion of morality that accompanies these rules.

When a translation of Kellerscher novellas appeared in Copenhagen in 1875, a press campaign began against the book and its translator, the Danish writer Georg Brandes . This wrote to Keller:

“Some of our bigoted press luminaries have shouted about the 'immorality' of the first story Romeo et al. Julia thrown over the book and almost destroyed the sale. Had I not translated the book, then perhaps one would not have found that immorality; now they were found and made a hell of a racket. You are, like Paul Heyse, 'preacher of the gospel of enjoyment' etc. […] I am very sorry that the hatred of our pious people against me has been convicted of you ”.

honor

Less noise, but a sensation in the educated society of Vienna, caused a posthumously published criticism by the Austrian diplomat Alexander von Villers in 1881 :

“As I said, the introduction [...] is completely superfluous; for it happens every day that a peasant boy and a farmer's thorn drown each other out of love, is even more common with soldiers and maids than that the former win battles and the latter wash dishes, for the very obvious reason that these two respectable occupations, especially on the duration, becoming a nuisance, love, on the other hand, causes so much hardship in its practical application that those involved would rather tear up the bill than pay it. Therefore one does not need to refer to the beautiful fables of mankind, least of all the author was allowed to refer to Romeo and Juliet. For these two noble Veronese people [...] had nowhere a refuge for their love than in death; Saly and Vreeli, however - I can't help myself, I don't want to help myself at all, but I think that both could be helped with all due respect for poetry. They were neither Montague nor Capulet, noblesse ne les obligeait pas [nobility did not oblige them], I really don't see the tragic reason for the tragic end anywhere, and before love goes into the water, it'll have sore feet. Every motive is missing […]. So there is only one motive: reluctance to exams, to perseverance, to work, after a fun day. "

More precisely than most eulogies, this scolding captures the literary purpose that Keller pursued with the novella: a hundred years after Lessing broke the ground for bourgeois tragedy , an old rule for the production of tragedies still stubbornly resisted: the so-called class clause . It said that because of the "height of fall" only the fate of high-ranking people offered adequate tragedy, but not that of citizens and farmers. For Keller, however, the only point he could recognize in the now fashionable writing for and about the people was precisely to dispute the validity of this rule. In the first of his Gotthelf reviews, published in the revolutionary year 1849 , he formulated an idea of ​​human equality that had to provoke aristocratic readers:

When the inhabitants of the peasant huts learn that their hearts are beating in the same way as those of the noble people, when they see that their love and their hatred, their lusts and sorrows are as meaningful as the passions of the princes and counts , [...] then that addiction to carrier and refinement will finally disappear like a cloudy fog .

The same thought - a kind of radically liberal creed - he expresses negatively at a crucial point in the novella (see below): Just as reprehensible and equally foolish as princes who expand their territory at the expense of a weak neighbor, so do farmers who take the field of a homeless person Appropriately:

Of course, this happens every day; but sometimes is the fate of an example and allowed two such Äufner [hoarder] meet, then grinding down their house infallible honor and their good and eat like two wild animals. Because the majority of the empire miscalculates not only on the thrones, but sometimes also in the lowest huts and at the very opposite end to where they tried to come, and the shield of honor is a table of shame when looking around.

It has been pointed out several times that Manz and Marti's trial is not about ownership of the piece of farmland, but rather about honor: Nobody wants to be ridiculed as an overreached fool. It is all the safer for both, and the peasant story shows how the honor of the fathers is put to shame. In contrast, the love story saves the honor of children from the ruins of the destroyed family honor and protects them from new shame: "The revaluation of the voluntary renunciation of life by death-defying lovers was [...] one of Keller's goals". Not as if Sali and Vrenchen were concerned with their decision to gain any form of external reputation. They know the world they are fleeing from well enough to know how they feel about suicides and that no clergyman will accompany their corpses. But she doesn't care anymore. In their place, the narrator cares, who in her suicide honors the courage of despair, the courage to flee - both of which are by no means commonplace - but above all their inseparability, the ability to die for a matter of the heart . Even the “two noble Veronese” do not follow each other to their death because the aristocratic code of honor requires it, but because, according to von Villers' own words, they had “nowhere to go for their love”. That Keller thought similarly is shown by his persistent defense of the novel's title.

Law

The ideas of morality and honor that the narrator attacks reflect the neglected state of law that he encounters in his search for the roots of calamity. It consists in the fact that "wealth as right to wrong" is understood and tolerated. Step by step, this condition is revealed. The opening scene shows that the two farmers are aware of whose inheritance they are reducing furrow by furrow. They do nothing with it that most of the others would not have done in their place. But when the field, or what is left of it, is auctioned off, the villagers sense an injustice in the air , are glad that they did not commit it, and stay away. The Seldwyler Authority will temporarily keep the proceeds for the rightful heir. This is the black violinist, but he cannot prove it, since testimonies from his homeless friends are not valid in court. Sali and Vrenchen hear from him how he has begged their fathers for an explanation, according to which they "according to their conscience consider him the right heir" . But they chased him from the farm and thus lost the “bloody penny” with which he could have emigrated. Unselfish side effects of self-interest: The town of Seldwyla can keep the proceeds and the village community has no worries about granting a tramp home rights.

Where the law no longer protects the homeless from expropriation, it resembles a neglected dike: it becomes a danger for the expropriators themselves. This is shown by the legal dispute over the property line, which breaks out immediately after the sale. The anger with which the fathers ruin themselves and their families is fed by the “sedimented violence” that has built up in the property situation. Once unleashed, it looks like a force of nature, destroying the innocent and the guilty. The children, "innocently guilty" after Sali's blow against Vrenchen's father, drowned in the floods.

Motivation of suicide

Would another path have been open to lovers than into the water? Why don't they join the homeless? - The narrator prepares her decision well in advance. The love story, which takes up the greater part of the narrative time , although it only lasts from July to September, consists of four encounters. Sali and Vrenchen are each confronted with the misery of their parents' homes; everyone's feeling of happiness grows and the desire for a lifelong love for them grows; but with each of them it becomes painfully clear to them what is opposed to their marriage. Vrenchen in the Paradiesgärtlein in view of the imminent farewell to Sali: "We cannot be together and yet I cannot leave you, not a moment more, not a minute!"

Here the narrator interrupts the conversation with a description of the feelings and thoughts that overwhelm the couple:

Sali hugged and hugged the girl hard and covered her with kisses. His confused thoughts struggled with a way out, but he saw none. Even if the misery and the hopelessness of his origins could have been overcome, his youth and inexperienced passion were not able to undertake and survive a long period of testing and renunciation, and then Vrenchen's father would have been there, whom he was miserable all his life made. The feeling that in the bourgeois world one could only be happy in a completely honest and conscientious marriage was as lively in him as in Vrenchen, and in both abandoned beings it was the last flame of honor that glowed in their homes in earlier times and which the fathers who felt safe had blown out and destroyed by an inconspicuous mistake. [This is followed by the comment about the multiple of the house honor on thrones and in huts (see above)] Sali and Vrenchen had seen the honor of their house in their tender childhood and remembered how well-cared for children they were and that their fathers looked like other men , respected and safe. Then they had been separated for a long time, and when they found each other they saw in themselves at the same time the vanished happiness of the house, and both inclinations only clung to each other all the more violently. They might so much like to be merry and happy, but only on good land, and that land seemed inaccessible to them, while their flowing blood would have liked to run together.

Looking back at the origin of their motifs, the narrator carefully offers an explanation of why the two of them separate themselves from the homeless procession after dancing, eating and setting out for the woods, swapping rings and taking the path to the river.

The passage is often quoted and interpreted because it reveals the outline of the narrative. However, the performers do not arrive at a uniform understanding of the motives for suicide. In an effort to do justice to historical distance, they often stray far from Keller's text. "Noblesse", a sense of honor, a feeling for justice and good morals is no longer denied to the rural-bourgeois children, rather in some more recent interpretations one tends to believe that they have too much of it:

  • The couple remain “stuck to bourgeois norms, to the point of oblivion to the world and self-abandonment.” “The idea of ​​marriage invoked by Sali and Vrenchen is the internalization of the economic category of private property.” On the other hand, the objection is that the two are less before proletarian existence - he is a soldier or Servant, you maid - shy away from the accompanying separation, from the "experience of the second loss [...] after the first loss of childhood". What connects both is the memory of a family life that has not yet been poisoned by quarrels, threats of violence and abuse, fathers respected and safe , not yet domestic tyrants and public fools.
  • Sali and Vrenchen's behavior is analogous to that of their fathers: “Like the fathers as contending parties, they put their 'cause' over self-preservation.” The lovers had “ elevated the 'honor of the house” to a fetish ”and wanted“ to be loyal children of a paternal order idealized to the point of phantasm ”. Her carefree childhood is illusion, “construction of a family novel”, her sense of honor “product of a memory of something that never existed.” This contradicts the narrator's portrayal, according to which the two experienced happiness as children, really saw the honor of the house .
  • The couple's decision to commit suicide is called “haughty”. Do Sali and Vrenchen share their fathers' contempt for the homeless if they do not join them? Do they even repeat “knowingly and willingly what their fathers did to the violinist”? Thomas Koebner's interpretation is closer to the text : “You choose suicide, the high courage to receive bliss until the last moment. [...] Because their happiness is connected with the half-serious, half-playful self-presentation as decent people, with the longing for the undisputed peace and prosperity of the irretrievable childhood, and last but not least with a passion that no longer rejects each other, neither of which anymore want to keep waiting, in the end they take the path of free life that the black violinist has mapped out for them, only in a more radical and abbreviated way. "

Symbolism. References to poetry, myth, the Bible

Romeo and Juliet in the village offers interpreters multiple opportunities to pursue the symbolic meanings that Keller ascribes to well-known things and phenomena. The novella is criss-crossed by a network of symbols , metaphors and similes , there is hardly an object in the narrator's focus that does not make the thought apparent, such as the poppy seeds that bloom in cornfields: the poppy blossoms that children play with, the fiery red of poppies Overgrown heaps of stones, from which the black violinist addresses the couple, and the poppies from which Vrenchen winds a wreath, point beyond the familiar to intoxication, oblivion and death sleep at the end of the story. The same goes for the deep river and the heavy stones: “Gravity is the dominant physical law, and Keller does everything to ensure that the cruel regularity of this force is fully valid in his narrative, right down to the moral level. […] Injustice unfolds its effect in the world designed by Keller with the majesty of natural laws, irresistibly and calmly, just as stones and water naturally strive towards the depths. "

Death as a violinist with a star, poppy seeds and the lettering nightingale . Pen drawing on Keller's Berlin writing pad

In the opening scene, the narrator compares the carriages of plows with constellations that regularly rise and set behind the hill, calls them weavers' shuttles of fate and adds, quoting Heine : "What he weaves, no weaver knows!" Even the realistically characterized people are symbolic Attributes included, especially the black violinist. On a factual level, this person embodies a type that everyone knew who was concerned with the social and legal problem of the homeless in Switzerland. On the allegorical level, however, the figure stands for death: in the cornfield scene the lovers see him walking in front of them as a dark star and being frightened, in the garden of paradise he approaches them with friendly advice: “Let the world go by and take yourselves and ask no one anything after! ” A caricature scribbled on the writing pad while working on the novella shows the strange minstrel as the“ friend Hein ”who is enticing with sweet tones .

Symbols of things : Like the poppies, they carry epic foreknowledge or, like the unchangeable folds of the clothes of the two plowmen (as if carved in stone), denote their peasant stubbornness or, like the overgrown field, function as a leitmotif ; wild and overgrown are generally key words, as are house: the gingerbread house that Sali Vrenchen gives at the fair has the meaning literally written in it, it bears it as a rhymed inscription: The dearest said: “O dearest, / nothing scares me back! / Have carefully considered everything: / Only in you my happiness lives! ” In view of the hayloft and water, Vrenchen speaks fearlessly what is in store for both: “ We caught fish back then, now we will be fish ourselves and two beautiful big ones! ” Here too lies what is meant is close and at the same time far-fetched. However, the narrator leaves it up to the reader to guess the poetic remote meaning. It is - to think of Auerbach's description of the novella as an "extended folk song" - in the ballad of the two royal children .

Sound phenomena: What touches the lovers' ears, whether far or near, past or present, moves them deeply: Every sound or distant call that fades away in the Sunday silence sounded shattering through their soul; for love is a bell which lets the most remote and indifferent ring again and transforms it into special music. When the tumult of the bacchanalian procession of the homeless is out of earshot, something sounds like "a beautiful song or a peal" in Vrenchen . Sali thinks it is the rush of water or his own blood, the narrator attributes it to the great silence or the magical effect of the moonlight . He compares the hollow doll's head, in which a fly is buzzing and the playing children seems to tell old fairy tales, with a prophetic head , as it has been handed down from the Orpheus myth .

Children's games: When they are portrayed in the opening scene, the narrator himself seems to slip into the role of the diviner . When Sali and Vrenchen completely dismantle the already damaged doll and bury the head including the caged fly, this process, during which the children feel horror, points to the later ostracism of the fathers as scapegoats , especially to Marti's lively burial in the insane asylum.

Religion: Although the novella can be read as “conspicuously deficient”, as a “Christian void” on this point, the narrator draws the glory of bliss in which he immerses the lovers from biblical sources. Gerhard Kaiser : "Sali is a pet form of Solomon, and the Song of Solomon is attributed to King Solomon ." Vrenchen's brunette type and passionate nature are reminiscent of the beloved who is sung about there. Sali feels rich, knowledgeable and wise like a king's son after seeing Vrenchen's beauty. Just as the old homeland now appears to him as a heavenly Jerusalem , so in the Song of Songs the “daughters of Jerusalem” are invoked as witnesses for the beauty of the beloved ( Holy 1  EU ). The heavenly Jerusalem of lovers is, according to Kaiser, no longer in a beyond to which death is the passage, "but in a hallowed this world of feeling that goes beyond the reality and receives the death in itself." As in other seals In Romeo and Juliet in the village Feuerbachian's cellar expresses “pious and yearning paganism”, the result of a secularization of Christian values ​​- the spiritual interpretation of a theologian. Keller's borrowing from the Song of Songs can equally justly be understood as a restoration of the sense of an originally secular, erotic poetry that had been alienated for centuries by theological interpretation.

Adaptations

Operas

Orchestral work

  • 1968: Herbert Baumann : Three scenes from Romeo and Juliet in the village , Vogt & Fritz music publisher, Ettlingen

Movies

literature

Text output

  • Gottfried Keller: Romeo and Juliet in the village . In: German Novellenschatz . Edited by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz. Vol. 3rd 2nd edition Berlin, [1910], pp. 233-348. In: Weitin, Thomas (Ed.): Fully digitized corpus. The German Novellenschatz . Darmstadt / Konstanz, 2016. ( digitized and full text in the German text archive )
  • Gottfried Keller: Complete Works . Seventh Volume (The People of Seldwyla). Edited and textual criticism edited by Jonas Frankel . Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich and Munich 1927.
  • Gottfried Keller: Romeo and Juliet in the village . With commentary and afterword by Klaus Jeziorkowski. Insel-Taschenbuch Nr. 756, Frankfurt am Main 1984 (8th edition 2005), ISBN 978-3-458-32456-0 .
  • Gottfried Keller: Romeo and Juliet in the village . Reclams Universal Library No. 6177, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 978-3-15-006172-5

Secondary literature

Literary studies

  • Hans Richter : Gottfried Keller's early novels . Rütten and Loening, Berlin (East) 1960, (2nd edition 1966).
  • Gerhard Kaiser : Fall of Man, Paradise and Heavenly Jerusalem in Keller's “Romeo and Juliet in the Village”. In: Euphorion 65 (1971).
  • Heinrich Richartz: literary criticism as social criticism. Representation and political-didactic intention in Gottfried Keller's storytelling. Bouvier-Verlag, Bonn 1975, ISBN 3-416-01035-3 .
  • Winfried Menninghaus : Artistic writing. Studies of the compositional art of Gottfried Keller. Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-03649-1 .
  • Thomas Koebner : Gottfried Keller: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Research into the causes of a love death. In: Stories and short stories of the 19th century . Reclams Universal Library No. 8414, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 978-3-15-008414-4 .

Reading and teaching aids

  • Reiner Poppe: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Analyzes, reflections and suggestions for the design of the lesson . Beyer, Hollfeld 1982, ISBN 3-921202-83-3 .
  • Edgar Hein: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Interpretation . Oldenbourg, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-486-88607-X .
  • Rudolf circle : Romeo and Juliet in the village. Primary text and materials for historical-sociological development . Diesterweg, Braunschweig 1995, ISBN 3-425-06262-X .
  • Beate Hermes: Reading aids: Romeo and Juliet in the village . Klett, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-12-922322-3 .
  • Klaus-Dieter Metz: Reading key to Romeo and Juliet in the village . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-015324-7 .
  • Gert Sautermeister: Explanations and documents on Romeo and Juliet in the village . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-016032-4 .
  • Gerhard Friedl: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Grades 8-10 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-14-022298-X .
  • Peter Haida: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Text output with materials . Klett, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-12-354100-2 .
  • Walburga Freund-Spork: Romeo and Juliet in the village. Explanations and materials . Bange, Hollfeld 2010, ISBN 3-8044-1790-6 .

Audio

  • Julia Straube (reader): Romeo and Juliet in the village. Unabridged reading with text and images . Reclam's classics on CD-ROM, 2001, ISBN 3-15-100036-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In italics: literal quotations based on the text of Complete Works , Vol. 7, ed. by Jonas Fränkel , Erlenbach-Zurich and Munich 1927, pp. 83–187.
  2. ↑ See Gottfried Keller # Der Freischärler
  3. ↑ Züricher Freitags-Zeitung of September 3, 1847, quoted from Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 391.
  4. ^ Entry from September 20, 1847, Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 391.
  5. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 392 f. Words in [] are crossed out in Ms. Instead of Hat (line 3), newer editors read Hob (cf. Historisch-Kritische Gottfried Keller-Ausgabe , Vol. 21, p. 412).
  6. ↑ Cf. Thomas Koebner, who gives his interpretation of the novella the subtitle “Research into the causes of a love death”. In: interpretations. Stories and short stories of the 19th century . Vol. 2, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 203-234.
  7. ↑ Walter Benjamin: “Gottfried Keller. In honor of a critical complete edition of his works ”(1927). In: Gesammelte Schriften , Vol. II / 1, Frankfurt 1980, p. 287.
  8. ↑ Hans Richter: Gottfried Keller's early novels , Berlin (East) 1960, 2nd edition 1966. In it: “Romeo and Juliet in the village”, pp. 111–141.
  9. ↑ On the intertwining of literary and social criticism, cf. Heinrich Richartz: literary criticism as social criticism. Representation and political-didactic intention in Gottfried Keller's storytelling. Bouvier-Verlag, Bonn 1975.
  10. ↑ Cf. the letters to Berthold Auerbach of June 3, 1856 and to Ferdinand Weibert of August 29, 1875, Gesammelte Briefe , ed. by Carl Helbling, Vol. 3.2, Zurich 1953, pp. 168 and 262.
  11. ↑ The Volksmarsdorfer Pflastersteine ( Volksmarsdorfer Pflastersteine) , a blog designed as a blog of the Leipzig district, reminds of the names of the unhappy lovers and the details of their suicide . (Search the website for Wilhelm and Auguste; accessed February 14, 2020).
  12. ↑ Koebner: "Research into the causes of a love death", p. 226.
  13. ↑ a b To Heyse, June 10, 1870, Collected Letters , Vol. 3.1, p. 16.
  14. ↑ Vischer: "Gottfried Keller. A Study". In: Kritische Gänge , Vol. 6, ed. by Robert Vischer, Munich 1922, p. 278.
  15. ↑ a b c On antiquity in Keller cf. Walter Benjamin, “Gottfried Keller”, p. 289.
  16. ↑ Keller to Ludmilla Assing , April 21, 1856, Collected Letters , Vol. 2, p. 43.
  17. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung of April 17, 1856, quoted from Walter Morgenthaler . Auerbach compared the novella with old, sad folk tunes and quotes the second and third stanzas of It fell a frost in the spring night .
  18. ^ Theodor Fontane: Writings and glosses on European literature , ed. by Werner Weber, Vol. 2, Zurich and Stuttgart 1967, p. 348.
  19. ↑ Otto Ludwig's work in six volumes , ed. by Adolf Bartels, Vol. 4, Leipzig undated [1900], p. 285 f.
  20. ^ In the sonnet "Gottfried Keller" , published in the Deutsche Rundschau of February 1877.
  21. ↑ Paul Heyse
  22. ^ Richter, Keller's early novellas , pp. 124 and 126.
  23. ↑ Arthur Henkel : "When rereading Gottfried Keller's story Romeo and Juliet in the village ", in: Text and Context , vol. 6 (1978), pp. 187-199.
  24. ^ Winfried Menninghaus: Artistic writing. Studies on the art of composition Gottfried Keller , Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 109. Menninghaus refers to Jürgen Rothenberg: Gottfried Keller. The symbolism and reality of his storytelling , Heidelberg 1976.
  25. ↑ See Richartz: literary criticism as social criticism , pp. 82-103. For the first time, Richartz demonstrated the close connection between the novella and Keller's Gotthelf reviews .
  26. ↑ Georg Lukács: "Gottfried Keller" (1939). In: German Realists of the 19th Century , Berlin (East) 1951, as well as in: The Entombment of Old Germany. Essays on 19th century German literature , Reinbek 1967.
  27. ^ Richter, Keller's early novels , p. 141. Cf. also Die people von Seldwyla # Realism .
  28. ↑ Cf. the criticism of Richter by Gerhard Kaiser: "Fall of sin, paradise and heavenly Jerusalem in Keller's Romeo and Juliet in the village ", in: Euphorion 65 (1971), p. 45; as well as the criticism of Lukácz, Richter and Richartz by Harold D. Dickerson: "The Music of This Sphere" in Keller's " Romeo and Juliet in the Village ", in: The German Quarterly 51 (1978), passim.
  29. ↑ See the criticism of Richter, Richartz and Koebner by Michael Schmitz: “About love, life and death. On the structure and problem reference in Gottfried Keller's Romeo and Juliet in the village ”, in: Wirkendes Wort 52 (2002), p. 67 et passim.
  30. ↑ Anonymous reviewer in the literary sheet of the Deutsches Kunstblatt , Jg. 1856, No. 15; quoted from Richter, Keller's early novels , p. 141.
  31. ^ Menninghaus, Artistic Script , p. 120.
  32. ↑ Brandes to Keller, December 13, 1875, Collected Letters , Vol. 4, p. 161.
  33. ↑ Alexander von Villers: Letters from a Stranger , Vienna 1881; quoted from Alfred Zäch: Gottfried Keller in the mirror of his time , Zurich 1952, p. 47.
  34. ^ In the first Gotthelf review , p. 97.
  35. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 176, included in the summary of the couple's motifs.
  36. ↑ Cf. Koebner, “The research into the causes of a love death”, p. 210, and Schmitz, “Um Liebe, Leben und Tod”, p. 69 f. Text passages: Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 98 f. and p. 104.
  37. ↑ Koebner, "The research into the causes of a love death", p. 204.
  38. ^ Richter, Keller's early novels , p. 123.
  39. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 89.
  40. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 97.
  41. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 131.
  42. ↑ Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift , p. 105. Menninghaus follows Benjamin's model of interpretation of Goethe's elective affinities , which relates law, violence, guilt, fate and tragedy to one another.
  43. ↑ Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift , p. 110. See also Tragedy # The term “Tragedy” .
  44. ↑ See all works , vol. 7, p. 127, p. 139 and p. 144.
  45. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, pp. 175 ff.
  46. ↑ Gert Sautermeister: “Gottfried Keller - Critique and Apology of Private Property. Possibilities and limits of liberal intelligence ”, in: Gert Mattenklott , Klaus R. Scherpe (Ed.): Positions of the literary intelligence between bourgeois reaction and imperialism , Kronberg / Ts. 1973, p. 69 f.
  47. ↑ Koebner, “The research into the causes of a love death”, p. 219.
  48. ↑ Peter Stocker: “ Romeo and Juliet in the village . Novellistic narrative art of poetic realism ”, in: Walter Morgenthaler (Ed.): Interpretations: Gottfried Keller. Novels and short stories , Reclams Universalbibliothek 17533, Stuttgart 2007, p. 70.
  49. ↑ Herbert Uerlings: "'Gypsies", Home and Homelessness in Keller's Romeo and Juliet in the Village ", in: Ulrich Kittstein, Stefani Kugler (Ed.): Poetic Orders. On the narrative prose of German realism , Würzburg 2007, p. 168.
  50. ↑ Uerlings, "'Gypsies", Heimat und Heimatlosen ", pp. 166 and 179.
  51. ↑ Alexander Honold: “Mediation and Wilderness. Gottfried Keller's Romeo and Juliet in the village ”, in: DVjs , vol. 2004, p. 479.
  52. ↑ Uerlings, "'Zigeuner", Heimat und Heimatlosen ", p. 170, with reference to Vrenchen's laughter at the violinist's grotesque appearance.
  53. ↑ Koebner, “Research into the causes of a love death”, p. 219 f.
  54. ↑ See also Opium Poppy # Origin and History .
  55. ↑ Klaus Jeziorkowski in the afterword to Romeo and Juliet in the village , Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 122
  56. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 96. From Heines Romanzero , Hebräische Melodien, Jehuda Ben Halevy II.
  57. ↑ See Switzerland and its conditions. Travel memories , Hanover 1847, by Theodor Mügge . Keller was friends with the author. Cf. also Thomas Dominik Meier and Rolf Wolfensberger: One home and yet none. Homeless and non-settled people in Switzerland (16th – 19th centuries) , Zurich 1998.
  58. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 129.
  59. ↑ Helmut Rehder: “Romeo and Juliet in the village. An Analysis ", in: monthly books for German teaching , (Madison / Wisconsin), 35 (1943), p. 423 ff.
  60. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 167.
  61. ↑ See Helmut Rehder: “Romeo and Juliet in the village. An Analysis ”, in: monthly books for German teaching , (Madison / Wisconsin), 35 (1943), p. 429.
  62. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 158. Cf. also Kaiser, “Sündenfall, Paradies und himmlisches Jerusalem”, p. 237, and Dickerson, “The Music of This Sphere”, p. 50 f.
  63. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 93.
  64. ↑ See Honold, "Vermittlung und Verwilderung", p. 477.
  65. ↑ Anton Reyntjes: Example of a family model from literary realism (July 2012)
  66. ↑ Kaiser, "Fall, Paradise and Heavenly Jerusalem," p. 271.
  67. ↑ Complete Works , Vol. 7, p. 123.
  68. ↑ Kaiser, "Fall, Paradise, and Heavenly Jerusalem," p. 274.
  69. ↑ Kaiser, "Fall, Paradise and Heavenly Jerusalem", pp. 259 f.
  70. ↑ Cf. Herbert Anton in the afterword to: Romeo and Juliet in the village , Ferdinand Schöningh-Verlag, Paderborn 1982, p. 72 ff.