Rogue of mountains
Der Schelm von Bergen is a ballad by Heinrich Heine (* 1797, † 1856). It is published in the Historien, the first book in the Romanzero . The ballad was printed for the first time under the title Herr Schelm von Bergen in the Kölnische Zeitung on May 30, 1846.
tradition
There is a legend that is supposed to explain the origin of the strange name of the noble family of rascals from Bergen . This gender has been documented since the end of the 12th century, but in this period up to the 17th century rogue was a dirty word and meant something like "villain". Wilhelm Smets worked on this legend. In his poem, a queen is dishonored for unknowingly dancing with an executioner at a masked ball. The executioner , however, has a solution for the problem: you should him the Knights beat what then happens. In an older adaptation of the legend by Isaac von Sinclair , it is an imperial couple who make the executioner a knight. Here the goodness of the rulers is brought into focus.
Quite different with Heine. With him, the active part is the duchess, who tears the mask off the face of the reluctant hangman, as it were, although he wanted to leave the ball to keep his dishonorable identity a secret. It is then not the executioner, but the clever duke who finds the solution to the problem and takes away the dishonor of the wife through the accolade. He says:
- " With this sword stroke I will make you
- Now honest and knightly "(vs. 45f.)
This gives the ballad political expressiveness. Because it focuses on the arbitrariness of class differences and the opportunism of the nobility . In order to preserve the exclusivity of the nobility, the duke admitted a dishonest man to him.
content
There is a masked ball in the castle in Düsseldorf. The party is exuberant and happy, the laughing Duchess is dancing with a man wearing a black velvet mask. When the music stops playing and the dance is over, the masked man asks the Duchess to let him go, but she really wants to see his face. More and more urgently he begs her to let him go and finally even makes an allusion to his dishonorable profession: " I belong to night and death " (v. 30). Then the lady tears the mask off his face and the crowd in the hall immediately recognizes the " executioner of Bergen " (v. 37). This dishonors the retreating Duchess, but her husband immediately finds a solution and knights the executioner. With the accolade, the family von Bergen was born. So the last stanza concludes:
- " So the executioner became a nobleman.
- And ancestor of the rogues of mountains.
- A proud sex! it bloomed on the Rhine.
- Now it sleeps in stone coffins. "(Vs. 49ff.)
Edition and literature
- Heinrich Heine: Romanzero . With an afterword, a chronological table on Heinrich Heine, explanations and bibliographical references by Joachim Bark, Munich 1988.
- Hartmut Laufhütte : On some poems from Heinrich Heine's Romanzero , in: Essays, reviews and reports from German research 2, ed. v. Ralf Schuster Verlag, Passau 2008.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hartmut Laufhütte: On some poems from Heinrich Heine's Romanzero, in: Essays, reviews and reports from German research 2, ed. v. Ralf Schuster Verlag, Passau 2008, p. 18.
