Rosmersholm
Rosmersholm is a drama in four acts by Henrik Ibsen . The book was published on November 23, 1886 in Copenhagen and Kristiania by Gyldendalske Boghandel and received mostly poor reviews in Sweden and Denmark ; The response in Norway was even more negative . Accordingly, sales of the original edition of 8,000 copies turned out to be poor. The piece was therefore only reprinted in Ibsen's Collected Works (1888–1890).
The first performance took place on January 17, 1887 at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen , directed by Gunnar Heiberg . There, too, the response was rather negative; the audience was just as unenthusiastic as at the German premiere on April 6, 1887 at the Augsburg Theater .
action
The main character Johannes Rosmer, a former pastor, owner of the Rosmersholm estate and the last descendant of a long-established family that produced clergy, military and state officials, has lost his wife Beate, who has gone mad from grief over her childlessness and drowns herself in the river Has.
Rosmer's former tutor Ulrik Brendel, an idealist and philosopher, had a major influence on his thinking, and when a young woman, Rebekka West, gained access to Rosmer on Rosmersholm through Beate's brother, Rector Kroll, he fell in love with her. Since he can also talk to her about life and world views, he finally feels strong enough and encouraged to get actively involved in the left wing of politics. However, this leads to an open conflict between him and the conservative Rector Kroll, his longtime friend and confidante. However, he tries to save him from this "camp".
In the further course of the play Johannes Rosmer not only discovers that Rebekka manipulated him himself, but that she also drove his wife Beate to suicide by claiming that she, Rebekka, was expecting a child from Rosmer. This makes Rosmer feel guilty, who fell in love with Rebekah. Rebekka discovers that her supposed adoptive father, Doctor West, was in fact her illegitimate biological father.
Finally Rebekka admits her partial guilt for Beates suicide because she wanted to become mistress on Rosmersholm herself. However, she now rejects Rosmer's offer of marriage, and both drown themselves in the raging Mühlbach - like Beate Rosmer before.
Performances
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The play has so far been staged 325 times worldwide. The play was last performed in 2016 under the direction of Christian Fries in the Studiotheater Stuttgart and shown as a guest performance in the Theater im Pumpenhaus Münster.
On November 15, 2019, the premiere of a new production under the direction of Daniel Karasek took place at the Schauspielhaus Kiel.
The penultimate Rosmersholm premiere in Germany took place on September 16, 2011 in the Volksbühne Berlin under the direction of Leander Haußmann .
In 2001, Peter Zadek's Rosmersholm production at the Vienna Akademietheater was nominated for five Nestroy theater prizes and won three of them. This makes it one of the most successful productions in this regard.
The drama was filmed several times for television in various countries between 1947 and 2001.
Psychoanalytic reception
Sigmund Freud used Rosmersholm to illustrate psychoanalytic character types. He describes Rebekka's life, reconstructed from the play, and focuses on the reasons for her rejection of Rosmer's marriage proposal, since Freud does not find the reasons for rejection sufficiently convincing. His interpretation leads to the thesis that is supposed to make the dramatic events easier to understand:
“Rebekka's guilt arises from the source of the incest accusation […]. If we reconstruct the past, indicated by the poet, in an elaborate and supplementary manner, we will say that she cannot have been without an inkling of the intimate relationship between her mother and Doctor West. It must have made a great impression on her when she succeeded this man's mother, and she was under the rule of the Oedipus complex , even if she did not know that this general fantasy had become a reality in her case. When she came to Rosmersholm, the inner violence of that first experience drove her to use active action to bring about the same situation that had happened the first time without her involvement, to get rid of the wife and mother in order to take their place with the husband and father. "
According to Alfred Lorenzer , this connection is “the unconscious core of the drama.” According to Lorenzer, Freud's interpretation reveals Rebekka's motifs, which are unconscious both for the figure and for the poet and the audience: This second motif level “is for the reader / viewer sympathetic. Not least on this is the effect of the piece. ”Accordingly, Rosmersholm is not a“ flat enlightenment and reflection piece ”, but a drama that still contains a“ latent sense of text ”below the manifest, obvious level:
“It is not moral purification, not even the mixing of love and murder, that deprives the adventurer Rebekka of the reward of her endeavors, but rather the horror of becoming aware of the archaic bottomlessness of her impulses, of being surrendered to the uncontrollable constraints that undermine all self-confidence from within . […] Formulated for the position of the viewer: Participation in the manifest drama entangles him in an experience whose profundity suddenly grips him, whereby manifest and latent meaning come into relationship. "
expenditure
- Henrik Ibsen: Rosmersholm . In: Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Verker (Hundreårsutgave) . Volume X, Oslo 1932.
- Henrik Ibsen: Rosmersholm . In: Henrik Ibsens all works in German . Eighth volume, S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1902.
literature
- Merete Morken Andersen: Ibsenhåndboken (Ibsen Handbuch). Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1995.
- Janet Garton: "Are you really going to have this person in your living-room?" Ulrik Brendel's difficult entry into Ibsen's Rosmersholm . In: TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek 27, 2006, No. 2 ( online ).
- Christian Tanzmann: The silence of sexual abuse in Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm . In: European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, ed. by K. Böldl, L. Rühling, H. van der Liet, Issue 1, pp. 107-114.
Web links
- Rosmersholm on Ibsen.net
- Rosmersholm in the Gutenberg-DE project
Individual evidence
- ↑ Repertoire database on Ibsen.net, May 20, 2010
- ↑ Westfälische Nachrichten: Shapes out of the dark . In: Westfälische Nachrichten . ( wn.de [accessed December 8, 2016]).
- ↑ Sigmund Freud: Some character types from psychoanalytic work . In: Sigmund Freud: Collected works . Vol. X, p. 370ff.
- ↑ Sigmund Freud: Some character types from psychoanalytic work . In: Sigmund Freud: Collected works . Vol. X, p. 387.
- ↑ Alfred Lorenzer: Deep Hermeneutic Culture Analysis . In: Alfred Lorenzer (ed.): Culture analyzes . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 11–98, here p. 37.
- ↑ Alfred Lorenzer: Deep Hermeneutic Culture Analysis . In: Alfred Lorenzer (ed.): Culture analyzes . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 11–98, here p. 36.
- ↑ Alfred Lorenzer: Deep Hermeneutic Culture Analysis . In: Alfred Lorenzer (ed.): Culture analyzes . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 11–98, here p. 37.