The red hostel

The red hostel (original in French : L'Auberge rouge ) is a novella by the French writer Honoré de Balzac from 1831, which combines elements of criminal, mystical and moral philosophy. He took them in 1846 in the Department of Philosophy of the Comédie humaine .

content

The novella takes the form of a frame narrative . The general plot, which is not determined in any more precise time, begins with a dinner at a Parisian banker, to which the first-person narrator is invited. The evening's guest of honor is a German merchant from Nuremberg named Hermann, who at the end of the meal is asked by the host's daughter to “tell a German story that scares us” (une histoire allemande qui nous fasse bien peur) . Before Hermann begins, the first-person narrator notices that the appearance of his previously neglected counterpart has changed in a terrifying way. He learns from his table lady that this is a Monsieur Taillefer who has made enormous fortunes as an army supplier.

The internal story, initially told by Hermann as an author, takes place in October 1799, at the time of the Second War of the Coalition . Two prospective field officers in the French army, Prosper Magnan and his trusted childhood friend from Beauvais , whose name the narrator has forgotten, arrive in Andernach am Rhein in the evening , where they want to join their troops stationed there, and spend the night in the eponymous "Red Hostel" ". At dinner a German merchant named Walhenfer appears; Since the hostel is completely overcrowded, he sleeps in the same room as the two young French. Before doing this, he confides in them that he is carrying gold and diamonds worth a hundred thousand francs in his suitcase. Prosper cannot sleep and with increasing intensity he imagines how he could murder the sleeping merchant and lead a happy life with the stolen wealth. Finally he wants to put his plan into action, but is held back by the voice of conscience at the last moment and throws away the murderous instrument. The next morning he wakes up next to a pool of blood; Walhenfer's head was cut off with Prosper's surgical instrument that night, the suitcase and Prosper's friend have disappeared. Prosper is thrown into prison as a suspected murderer, where he meets Hermann, who has been imprisoned as a militant and from then on acts as the first-person narrator of the internal plot. Prosper, who suffers from the worst remorse because of his own murder plans and does not trust his escaped friend, whose name, Frédéric, Hermann now comes to mind, to do the deed, defends himself in court only very inadequately and is sentenced to death for the murder. Before he is shot as innocent, he confides the whole story to Hermann.

The internal narration is interrupted several times by the first-person narrator noticing Taillefer's increasingly nervous reactions and exchanging them with his table lady. Both suspect that Taillefer could be the real killer. In the subsequent card game, Taillefer affirms the narrator's question as to whether he is Frédéric Taillefer from Beauvais; Immediately afterwards he suffers a nervous attack with unbearable pain and delusions. The first-person narrator learns from the landlady that Taillefer has had such terrible seizures since he was in the army thirty years ago. At the same time, Taillefer's only daughter, Victorine, arrives and brings her father home. The first-person narrator recognizes in her a girl he fell in love with a few days ago without knowing her name.

The first-person narrator thus becomes the victim of his own conflict of conscience in the last part of the framework plot: He loves the beautiful and rich Victorine and believes that she will love him again, but cannot bring himself to marry the daughter of a murderer and benefit from the fortune that this creates . A little later Taillefer dies, and in order to overcome his moral scruples, the first-person narrator invites his most reliable friends and takes the case to them, but receives only confused and unclear advice. Finally, there is a bizarre ballotage in which most of those present vote against marriage, whereby the narrator suspects that they themselves have intentions on the rich heiress. The moral dilemma, which was presented in detail at the end, remains unsolved; Instead, the story ends with a cynical question from one of the friends: “Imbécile, pourquoi lui as-tu demandé s'il était de Beauvais! " (" You cattle, why did you ask him if he was from Beauvais? ")

background

Balzac was inspired to write the tale by a former military surgeon whose friend was wrongly convicted and executed. He gave the internal narrative the headline L'idée et le fait (The thought and the deed) and thus indicates a deeper connection between Prosper's “thought crime” and the real act, so that Prosper's tormented conscience despite his legal innocence is metaphysical can have. The part of the framework that follows the end of the internal narrative is entitled Les deux justices (Two Kinds of Judgment / Law / Justice), which refers to the difference between earthly and a higher justice and to the conflict between the narrator and personal Victorine's innocence and the moral reprehensibility of her property. In addition to the crime story, which has the traits of a locked room mystery , and the moral conflict reflected in the internal and framework narrative, the decision of which is left to the reader, Balzac also addresses the German-French relationship : He does not let the story play on the Rhine without ulterior motives , that river, which is shrouded in legend in each of the two countries and which, due to its border location, " reflects [the] literary experience of Germany [in] stereotypical images in the poetry of French Romanticism ". In the 19th century, the Rhine was not only a new privileged travel destination for the upper class, but also the “literary symbol for all those ghosts that the romantic poet liked to see in Germany.” Germaine de Staël wrote: “For the Germans they are The banks of the Rhine are a truly national image ”.

expenditure

L'Auberge rouge . In: Revue de Paris , 1831
L'Auberge rouge . In: Nouveaux contes philosophiques , Ch.Gosselin, Paris 1832
L'Auberge rouge / The red hostel . Bilingual edition; Translation: Wilhelm Brude, Aegis-Verlag , Ulm 1947
In: L'œuvre de Balzac , Paris 1952, vol. 12 (editor: A. Béguin)
In: Œuvres complètes , Paris 1961, vol. 20 (publisher: Société des Études Balzaciennes)
L'Auberge rouge . Éditions Rencontre, Lausanne 1962. Available online in La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec. Collection à tous les vents . Volume 811: version 1.0
In: Œuvres complètes , Paris 1968–1971, vol. 16 (editor: M. Bardèche)
In: La comédie humaine , Paris 1980, vol. 11 (publisher: P.-G. Castex) (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade)

Translations

The red inn . A. v. Czibulka, Vienna 1924
The red inn , P. Mayer, Hamburg 1958
The red hostel . W. Kabus, Ulm 1947
The red tavern. In: Honoré de Balzac: Mystic Stories , Goldmann, Munich 1958. Translation: Georg Goyert .
The Red Hostel. In: Honoré de Balzac: Mystical stories . With illustrations by Hans Fronius . Bertelsmann, Gütersloh o. J. Translation: Ernst Sander.
The red hostel. In: Honoré de Balzac: The human comedy , construction, Berlin / Weimar, 2nd edition 1977, vol. 19. Translation: Wilhelm Rückert.
The red hostel. In: Honoré de Balzac: The red hostel. Fantastic stories. With illustrations by Klaus Schiemann . Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1982, ISBN 3-404-72011-3 .

Film adaptations

1912: L'Auberge rouge . Silent film, France; Script and direction: Camille de Morlhon, actors: Jean Worms (Frédéric Taillefer), Georges Saillard (Prosper Magnan)
1923: L'Auberge rouge . Silent film, 66 minutes, France; Script and direction: Jean Epstein, actors: Jean-David Évremond (Jean-Frédéric Taillefer), Léon Mathot (Prosper Magnan), Marcelle Schmidt (Victorine)
1965: A vörös vendégfogadó (The Red Inn). TV film, 48 minutes, Hungary; Script: Gabriella Horváth, director: Sándor Szönyi, actors: Imre Sinkovits (Taillefer), Lajos Cs. Németh (Prosper Magnan), Ferenc Ladányi (Walhenfer), József Gáti (Herman)

literature

Hans-Joachim Lope : Honoré de Balzac: L'auberge rouge. In: The French Novelle , Wolfram Krömer (Ed.), Bagel, Düsseldorf 1976, pages 123-132, 356-358.
Thomas Amos: “Une histoire allemande qui nous fasse bien peur.” Metafictionality in Balzac's L'Auberge rouge. In: Bernd Kortländer / Hans T. Siepe (eds.): Balzac and Germany - Germany and Balzac. Narr, Tübingen 2012 (= Transfer 22), ISBN 9783823366683 , pp. 45-62

Individual evidence

↑ Frederick Lawton: Balzac. Grant Richards, London 1910, p. 81; Digitized in the Internet Archive
↑ Ingrid Peter: Article L'Auberge rouge . In: Kindlers Literatur-Lexikon, dtv, Munich 1974, Vol. 4, pp. 1244f.
↑ Peter Götz : The image of the Rhine in the poetry of the French Romanticism (1810-1852) . In: Languages of Poetry. Festschrift for Hugo Friedrich , P. Erich Köhler (Ed.), Frankfurt a. M., Klostermann 1975, pp. 164-187.
^ Willi Jung: "L'Auberge rouge" et la vision balzacienne de la Rhénanie . In: L'Année balzacienne 2000/1 , pp. 205–222.
↑ Germaine de Staël : De l'Allemagne. De Pange (ed.). Paris 1960, Volume II, p. 162.

[1] Frederick Lawton: Balzac. Grant Richards, London 1910, p. 81; Digitized in the Internet Archive

[2] Ingrid Peter: Article L'Auberge rouge . In: Kindlers Literatur-Lexikon, dtv, Munich 1974, Vol. 4, pp. 1244f.

[3] Peter Götz : The image of the Rhine in the poetry of the French Romanticism (1810-1852) . In: Languages of Poetry. Festschrift for Hugo Friedrich , P. Erich Köhler (Ed.), Frankfurt a. M., Klostermann 1975, pp. 164-187.

[4] Willi Jung: "L'Auberge rouge" et la vision balzacienne de la Rhénanie . In: L'Année balzacienne 2000/1 , pp. 205–222.

[5] Germaine de Staël : De l'Allemagne. De Pange (ed.). Paris 1960, Volume II, p. 162.