Snow on Kilimanjaro

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Hemingway on safari, 1934

Snow on Kilimanjaro is a short story by Ernest Hemingway , which was first published in Esquire in August 1936 under the English title The Snows of Kilimanjaro and was included in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories in 1938 . The story has been anthologized several times since then . The only authorized translation into German comes from Annemarie Horschitz-Horst and was first published in 1949 together with other Hemingway stories in parallel by Steinberg-Verlag Zurich and Rowohlt-Verlag Hamburg. The Rowohlt editions alone achieved a circulation of 359,000 copies between 1961 and 1999.

In 1952 the story of Henry King was made into a film. With Gregory Peck , Susan Hayward , Ava Gardner and Hildegard Knef in the lead roles, the film became a Hollywood classic (see Snow on Kilimanjaro ). In 1997 an audio book read by Otto Sander was published .

Plot and interpretation

The short story is about the writer Harry, who is dying in the East African wilderness.

Harry has been stuck with his wife Helen and two servants far away from any settlement for two weeks. On the photo safari, he scratched his right knee on a thorn and didn't immediately deal with the little thing properly. Now crawling gangrene up the leg. The car is also broken. The plane from Arusha would be the salvation. The staff are preparing a makeshift runway. Helen - the nice, loving woman who never causes trouble - takes care of Harry, tries her best to cheer him up and occasionally goes hunting.

Harry is dying and lets review the topics that were so valuable to him that he repeatedly delayed writing them down: the war experiences in the Balkans and northern Italy, his life in beloved Paris , in the Alps , in the Black Forest and of course in his own North American homeland. There is hardly any time left to write. Harry's leg is poisoned up to the thigh. The writer is not sure whether the jumble of images kept in his head can be written down so quickly in an acceptable form. Actually, Harry realizes, the precious topics that have been put on hold are a mere pretext, mere window dressing. He should have just kept writing when there was still time. About the lives of poor but interesting people. Instead he preferred the comfortable life by the side of the rich widow Helen. His frustration over this becomes clear again and again in the conversations with Helen and culminates in the saying: "Love is a dung heap, [...] and I am the cock that steps on it and crows."

When Harry feels death is approaching, he asks Helen to let him spend the night outside so that he can die in the open air. But Helen, who does not want to admit his death, lets him into the tent against his express request. As Harry dies, he has a vision: the plane to save lands on the makeshift runway, picks him up and takes off for the return flight. Amputation of the leg appears to be possible. But then the pilot turns and sets course for Kilimanjaro . There, in the immeasurable white expanse, Harry's path leads, there, near the summit, where he discovers the skeleton of a leopard that once got lost in the snow and froze to death, is Harry's travel destination. What did the animal want at this height? And what is the person looking for up there? Harry's fever illusion ends with his death, and only now does Helen realize that Harry was really dying.

Symbolism and meaning of the entrance passage

The short story begins with an enigmatic introductory section in italics in the original text, the meaning of which can only be understood in connection with the entire story: "Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngàje Ngài', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. " (Eng .:" Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain at an altitude of 6000 meters and is considered the highest mountain in Africa. The western peak is called 'Ngàje Ngài', the house of God . The parched and frozen skeleton of a leopard lies just below the western summit. Nobody knows what the leopard was looking for at that altitude. ").

Hemingway himself also provides an “attempt to explain” what the leopard was looking for at this altitude. He was looking for "the house of God", that is, immortality. However, he failed to fully reach the summit; trying to get up he failed and was killed. His skeleton is parched and frozen. The renowned Hemingway interpreter Philip Young interprets this introductory passage to mean that the leopard died trying to "save its soul, as must do all who try to do so". However, the leopard stays "forever" at the altitude and the temperatures that prevail there. It cannot “spoil” and thus points to the complete contrast to the protagonist of the story, who with his gangrene leg is not only “very mortal and quickly wastes away in the heat of the lowlands”.

Harry is a writer, however, and when he manages to make something very “clear and pure”, when it is written “ clean enough ”, then what is written is “frozen” and cannot spoil; the writer becomes immortal at the same time. At the end of the narrative, the protagonist dreams of the arrival of the rescue aircraft and, in his dream, rises into the air with the pilot. From there he sees, “great, high and unimaginably white in the sun [...] the flat summit of Kilimanjaro and then he knew that it was where he was going.” (In the original text: “ great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun […] the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going. ") It is precisely at this point in the story that the author leaves his hero, who" hopes to do the bigger things himself , could not achieve. ”The protagonist of the story remains under the mosquito net with the woman,“ who is in a certain way a symbol for all the things that spoil him ”. He only leaves "the covering of his stained skin"; As the story goes, he had forced his leg out “and it was hanging from the bed. The bandage had come off completely and she couldn't look ”. (In the original text: "[...] somehow he had gotten his leg out and it hung down alongside the cot. The dressing had all come down and she could not look at it.")

Literary role models

The unusual structure of this story by Hemingway, which is narrative considered one of his best works in literary criticism, goes back to a model by Ambrose Bierce , whose short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge , written in 1891, is also about a man who is dying to save himself imagined so vividly and realistically that the reader gets the deceptive impression that the rescue is actually taking place. Both narratives begin with the situation of approaching death, then fade back to describe how it came about, then fade out with imaginary rescue, and finally end in shock with the objective statement that death has actually occurred.

The symbolic content of the story is fed by a number of other sources, as the literary scholar Timo Müller explains. The designation of Kilimanjaro as "House of God" refers to the Greek Olympus and thus to the transcultural scope of history, but also to Harry's futile wish of the writers to climb to Olympus. In popular translations, the leopard is the first of the three animals that stand in Dante's path when he starts the ascent out of the “dark forest” at the beginning of the inferno . With Dante as with Hemingway, it stands for lust, the first of hellish sins. The summit flight at the end of the story is interspersed with biblical motifs. The plane first traverses a swarm of locusts, which biblically not only recalls the plague sent by God, but also the years it lost (Joel 2:25) .The scene also alludes to the ascension of the prophet Elijah (2 Kings 2: 11 ), which is known in the English-speaking world for the gospel song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot .

Book and audio editions

Book editions
  • Ernest Hemingway: Snow on Kilimanjaro . From the American by Annemarie Horschitz-Horst. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1952, DNB 451947789 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: Snow on Kilimanjaro. 6 stories. From the American by Annemarie Horschitz-Horst. (= Rowohlt Taschenbuch 22604). 9th edition. 1999, ISBN 3-499-22604-9 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: The Capital of the World. Stories. (= Rowohlt Taschenbuch 22975). 2001, ISBN 3-499-22975-7 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: Snow on Kilimanjaro. Stories . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. 1st edition, July 2015, ISBN 3498 03018 3 .
reading
radio play

More radio plays

Secondary literature

  • Baker, Carlos: Hemingway - The Writer as Artist. 4th edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
  • Müller, Timo: Ernest Hemingway, Snow on Kilimanjaro / The Snows of Kilimanjaro . In Great Works of Literature XIV , ed. by Günter Butzer and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Narr, 2017. pp. 157–72.
  • Young, Phillip: Ernest Hemingway . Translated by Hans Dietrich Berendt. Düsseldorf: Diedrichs Verlag, 1954.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Baker, pp. 412 and 415.
  2. E. Hemingway: The Complete Tales. Rowohlt, 1966, DNB 573740798 , p. 199.
  3. Young, p. 53 f.
  4. Young, p. 54.
  5. Young, p. 167 f.
  6. Müller, p. 159ff.

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