Sappho (from Saar)

Sappho is a frame story by Ferdinand von Saar . It was created in 1904.

content

The narrator visits a writer friend. They are discussing women's emancipation literature. The writer now wants to explain the fate of a woman using a letter. But first he tells how the letter addressed to him came about.

Internal narrative:
25 years ago, the writer was invited to a soirée , at which the hosts asked him to dedicate himself to an invited writer because she knew no one. That's how he brings her home too. On the way home, the two confess their loneliness and agree on a rendezvous the following day. At this encounter, the man's eye is struck by the woman's apparent ugliness and he regrets his confidence from the day before. So he behaves very cautiously.

Nevertheless the writer leans on him the next time she visits the museum, only to come to and run away. In the evening the writer receives a letter in which the writer tells him about her life. She has always suffered from her lack of attraction. She longed for love for a whole life, but all of her relationships are actually none. She is always rejected for her looks. The writer later learns that Martha committed suicide on the Riviera .

literature

• Ferdinand von Saar: Sappho . In: Ders .: Doctor Trojan. Novellas . New edition Reclam, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-15-007632-3 .