Hubertus Castle (Roman)
Hubertus Castle is a local novel by Ludwig Ganghofer from 1895. It is about a count who lives out his passion for hunting as an addiction and perishes as a result.
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Graf Egge's purpose in life is hunting. He does not spend the summer in the appropriate Hubertus Castle in the valley, but in a remote hunting lodge in the heights. There he lives with his hunters under the most primitive circumstances, feeds on roux and well water and goes on the hunt. His daughter Kitty and her governess from Munich come to visit the castle and hopes in vain that her father will find the way down to the valley. The three sons who are also arriving are supposed to go up to hunt with their father.
The eldest, Robert, attaches great importance to a befitting appearance and detests the unworthy circumstances in the hunting lodge. But since he needs money from his father to pay off his gambling debts, he goes up. Tassilo, the middle son, is a free spirit who enjoys his profession as a lawyer; he wants his father to approve the inappropriate marriage to the actress Anna Herwegh. The youngest, Willy, is a carefree, light-footed man who has apparently survived tuberculosis over the winter.
On an excursion, Kitty meets the Munich painter Forbeck, whom Tassilo also promotes. Forbeck's teacher had once had a tragic affair with Kitty's governess. Although both are drawn to each other, he renounces her for the sake of class boundaries.
A drive hunt together reveals the inner conflict of the old count, who on the one hand expects his sons to be real hunters like him, but envy them every successful kill. This also leads to a break with the loyal hunter Franz Hornegger, who is released. While Robert receives his money but is humiliated by his father, Egge breaks up with his son Tassilo, who is traveling to Munich alone for his wedding.
Kitty also travels secretly to Munich to be present at the wedding of her brother Tassilo; her brother Willy, who actually wanted to accompany her, died of a hemorrhage in the village that night while looking at the window . The count hurries down into the valley to the funeral ceremonies, which Robert staged pompously in keeping with his status. This also leads to a break with him; On the day of the funeral, Egge hired his hunter Franz as the last remaining loyal loyal and climbed back up to his hunting ground. He shoots obsessively until the start of winter; In addition, he decides to feed a pair of eagles in the nearest rock face so that the next year he can steal the cubs for his eagle cage in the castle.
While Egge travels through half of Europe as a hunting traveler during the winter, Franz Hornegger takes care of the area and always has food ready for the eagles, which promptly nest at the convenient source of food. At the instigation of her governess, Kitty, who has suffered from depression, is sent to southern Italy to recover.
Egge will return to Hubertus in May. His son Robert visits him and, despite the break with his father, demands that his mother's inheritance be paid off in order to be able to pay his new gambling debts. Egge refuses to give him this, but nevertheless transfers the money after Robert's departure. In order to be able to remove the eagle's nest, which lies seventy meters above sea level in an overhanging rock face, the count has a ladder built and climbed. When trying to sway the young birds, caustic eagle droppings fall in his face and blind him.
Meanwhile, Kitty's governess arranges a seemingly coincidental meeting with the painter Forbeck in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy. The two find each other while old Count Egge not only lost his eyesight, but also suffered blood poisoning, from which he dies after he has reconciled with his son Tassilo and allows Kitty to marry Forbeck. The good hunter Franz Hornegger, like Kitty and Tassilo - despite a poaching trap of his adversary - finds happiness with his childhood sweetheart, Mali Bruckner. But Robert, who plunged into enormous gambling debt again, is shot in a duel.
background
The novel is set in the time around its creation, at least after 1876, since the currency unit for payments is the mark . The place of the action is not named, the lake bordered by steep mountain slopes with a village at the top, from which other shore zones can only be reached by boat, shows clear similarities or parallels to the Königssee with Schönau am Königssee . The Hubertus House in Schönau, which today serves as a hotel, is considered to be the model for the eponymous castle . The Mitterkaseralm mentioned by name can actually be found on the Jenner above the Königssee.
Characters and person constellation
The figure of Count Egge is one of Ganghofer's most differentiated characters. The author vividly shows a person whose passion for hunting shows more and more the characteristics of addictive behavior . Egge flees from being overwhelmed by social relationships and feelings into the simple world of hunting trophy-laden game. He expects his surroundings to obey his (sometimes contradicting) hunting rules, and only in connection with hunting is he able to show feelings at all - that's what he calls his youngest daughter Schmalgeiss .
The villain of the story, the rifle wrench Schipper, is driven by greed for money, but also by the concern to defend his well-paid position with the Count against his supposed rival Franzl and by his conscience, since he was shot as a poacher years ago by Hornegger's father, who was also a count's hunter would have.
The positively designed characters, the brave hunter Franzl and the noble son Tassilo, are described more like woodcut and one-dimensional. The old young aunt Gundi contributes to the comic elements, whose urban refinement and formal rigidity meet the coarse customs of the hunters and farmers.
Except for the count, all other people can be classified in a black and white scheme, provided they do not completely absorb their roles (doctor, innkeeper, poor farmer, maid): the good hunter Franz, whose father was shot by a poacher, and the evil hunter Schipper (risen to the rifle wrench), who always knows how to stir up his master's passion for hunting, the good son Tassilo, lawyer and friend of the poor, who also defends poachers, and the evil son Robert, who is completely devoted to conventions, himself but then ruined by his passion for gambling. Finally the good only daughter Kitty, who, at first a completely innocent girl, matures in her love, and the good-natured, but unstable youngest son Willy, who falls to his death while looking at the window. In addition, the artist Forbeck, whom the young countess loves, her old youthful companion von Kleesberg, who for her part had not admitted to her childhood love and now helps the young love.
rating
Despite all the clichés, the plot is told very fluently. The human loneliness of the old count is symbolically worked out through the motif of blindness. The action that grazes the grotesque, in which the blind count insists on personally shooting his caged eagles, ultimately leads to his own death.
The love stories across class boundaries have features that were subsequently taken up, copied and varied in many dime novels. The storyline about the lost painter's son Forbeck also bears elements of colportage novels ; as well as the end of the story, in which the bad are punished in rows and the good are rewarded. Ludwig Ganghofer was criticized and accused of producing trivial literature while he was still alive . At the same time, Ganghofer portrayed the harsh living and working conditions of the small farmers, dairymen and hunters of his time in a realistic and unsentimental manner in Hubertus Castle .
To the environment
It is noteworthy that Ganghofer, for his part, had jointly leased a hunting area of over 20,000 hectares with other hunting tenants and that the hunting lodge built there was called "Hubertus". An edition edited in 2003 by his grandson, the writer Bernhard Horstmann , was shortened in such a way that passages that contradict the current understanding of the roles of men and women have been deleted.
Film adaptations
- Hubertus Castle , Heimatfilm, Germany 1934, directed by Hans Deppe
- Hubertus Castle , Heimatfilm, Germany 1954, directed by Helmut Weiss
- Schloss Hubertus , Heimatfilm, Germany 1973, director: Harald Reinl
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heinrich von Gottfried Keller wrote the passage about the killing of animals in the children's menagerie in the green , but Ganghofer need not have known about it.
- ^ Peter Nusser: Trivialliteratur, ISBN 978-3476102621 , Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991.