Blessing the earth

Knut Hamsun wrote Blessings of the Earth in 1917.

Blessing of the earth , (Original title in Norwegian : Markens Grøde) , is a 1917 novel by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun , for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 . It belongs to the "civilization-critical, utopian-backward-looking, at the same time glorifying the force of nature and the strength of life" of the literature of the time. The language of the narrator is largely of almost the same simplicity as the directly reproduced speeches of the protagonists, with which the novel achieves an overall authentic effect. The German first edition appeared in 1918.

Circumstances of origin

The novel was created under the impression of the First World War , when a general tendency towards self-sufficiency existed out of necessity. The Hamsuns project to farm in Hamarøy also plays an important role . After giving up this project, he wrote the text in Villa Havgløtt in Larvik . Thorkild Hansen points out that in the novel Hamsun also processed his own conflict between his two professions as a writer and a farmer. He quotes him as saying on the occasion of the takeover of the farm in Hamarøy: “All the fine things that I have lived with for years pampered me. I have to study at Bauer again. "

content

The novel takes place over several decades, roughly from 1870 to 1900. The introduction of the crown (1875) during the course of the plot serves as a reference point. In the untouched northern Norwegian wilderness, far away from other people, the tough farmer Isak settles, about whose origin nothing is said. He builds a peat hut, clears trees and exchanges tree bark for food in the village in winter. However, he looks in vain for a woman for his wasteland.

Inger runs to him next spring. She had a difficult youth because of a harelip, but begins a life together with Isak. Through heavy physical work in agriculture and animal husbandry, they achieve modest prosperity with a wooden house, horse and sleigh. Inger gives birth to Isak's two sons, Eleseus and Sivert, every year. She receives regular visits from her distant relatives Oline and the Lappen Os-Anders. During a visit from Os-Anders during her third pregnancy, he brings her a dead rabbit from Oline, which the superstitious Inger takes as a bad omen. Inger also learns from him that Isak does not own the cultivated land and that he should actually buy it.

Lensmann Geissler visits Isak together with his assistant Brede Olsen as an expert and registers his land under the name “Sellanraa”. Geissler loses his position a little later because of financial irregularities and flees legal prosecution - not without advising Isak to purchase neighboring land, as there are other interested parties.

Inger gives birth to her third child, as always secretly in the absence of Isak. It is a girl with the feared harelip that she kills immediately after giving birth. While the child is buried, she is watched by Oline, who tells Isak and then gossips around the village. After a lengthy trial, Inger is sentenced to eight years in prison and taken by ship to Trondheim to a reformatory where she has her fourth child. While in custody she received training, while Isak worked on his land.

Geissler's former assistant, Brede Olsen, becomes Isak's new neighbor with his daughter Barbro. When a telegraph line is to be pulled through the mountains, Brede Olsen takes over the position of inspector.

The former lens man Geissler returns a few years later. On his first visit to Isak, he had seen his children play with stones containing metal, which now turn out to be copper. Geissler buys the land on which the stones were found from Isak for 200 thalers and promises him a ten percent share in the profits. He built a copper smelter there and supported Aksel Strøm, who set up a farm near Isak.

After their release, Isak picks up his wife Inger and their daughter Leopoldine at the steamship landing stage. The area has meanwhile developed, there are six new properties in the neighborhood. Isak and Inger's sons Eleseus and Sivert have grown up. Isak's neighbor Aksel Strøm has an eye on Brede Olsen's daughter Barbro. At the dance on Saturday they get closer, she finally moves in with him.

When the copper mines no longer generate enough profit, Geissler's employees become unemployed. Geissler sells his land and Isak gets his share of 4,000 thalers. Aksel takes over the telegraph post that Brede Olsen loses. Barbro is illegitimately pregnant from Aksel and gives birth to the child secretly in the water. Oline witnesses the crime again and spreads the apparent infanticide in the place. However, Barbro is acquitted in court. She returns to Aksel. Sivert fell in love with Jensine, the new maid on “Sellanraa”.

As in all of Hamsun's Nordland novels, the down-to-earth country life is played off against the detached and unproductive urban life. The merchant Aronson, Brede and Isak's own son Eleseus fail in their agricultural attempts in the north country. Inger is tempted several times to succumb to the influences of city life. Before Hamsun leaves Isak and Inger at the end of their life, old Geissler appears again and speaks a kind of closing remarks in which he praises agriculture, as Isak and his son Sivert, as the only thing necessary on earth.

effect

In Harald Hjärne's award speech on December 10, 1920, the Nobel Prize Committee rated the work as a “classic work” in the sense of “meaningful” in a “form that is still valid even for times to come”, “a reflection of an existence that is everywhere people live and building, which characterizes the existence and development of society ”. It is a "hero's song about work" that wrestles the income from the "stubborn wilderness" in clearing, cultivating fields and fighting the peasantry. Although the committee emphasizes the typical Norwegian way of describing nature, in contrast to the Swedish notions of nature, of "lush and abundant nature" as "rough and unruly", it recognizes the fact that Hamsun's work has been accepted worldwide by "peoples of the most varied of languages, natures and customs" but an overarching “generally human” content of the work.

In German-speaking countries, according to Walther Killy's literary dictionary , the novel fascinated a generation of writers "who sought to counter the disintegration of modernity with a conservative insistence on natural values". According to the judgment of Thomas Mann , Arnold Schönberg , Albert Einstein , Maxim Gorkis , Gerhart Hauptmann and André Gides , Hamsun was "one of the greatest epics of the 20th century". In addition, the work was also interpreted and received enthusiastically by the Völkische Movement and especially under National Socialism in the sense of the blood-and-soil ideology in the sense of a description of a "healthy peasantry". In 1943 a so-called “front book trade edition for the Wehrmacht” was published (edition 216th – 220th thousand, made in the Nasjonal Samlings Rikstrykkeri in Oslo ), inside it also reads : “ Produced on behalf of OKW by the Wehrmacht propaganda group at the Wehrmacht commander in Norway. “The translator is still Pauline Klaiber-Gottschau . According to the Ordinance of 1941, the book is now printed in Antiqua .

In 1997 Walter Baumgartner noted a significantly different interpretation of the work by modern literary scholars:

“However, newer Hamsun researchers read Blessings of the Earth differently than the Nobel Committee and Rosenberg . The modernist and ironic Hamsun does not deny himself in this text, despite the dangerous subject - perhaps also despite 'best' resolutions to write an edifying book this time. His notoriously lacking solidarity fictional narrator constantly undermines the seemingly edifying counter-historical and at the time so seductive message. The settlers on Sellanrå reproduce the inhumane conditions of the world whose counter-image they wanted to realize; the prerequisites under which their new beginning should have taken place, if they were not unrealistic from the start, collapsed at the end of the novel, even if Isak walks over his field again as a bareheaded archaic sower on the last page. It cannot be overlooked that his aura is severely injured by the animal, hairy appearance that Hamsun gives him - not only at this point. The blessing of the earth is not a representation of the world before the fall of man, even if the title of the novel seems to promise this [...]. "

Baumgartner stated after examining the reasons given by the committee for the award of the Nobel Prize: "Hamsun owed the Nobel Prize to a grotesque misunderstanding regarding the assessment of the edifying qualities of blessings on earth and the hope for its further literary and ethical development."

According to Hamsun's son Tore Hamsun, he wanted the novel to express his “deepest and most inward feelings for people and the earth” and to preach a “last gospel” to his generation. Geissler speaks in Hamsun's own voice. Tore also refers to the "passionate seriousness" with which Hamsun spoke out against child murder in the novel.

The novel His own Lord (original title Sjálfstætt fólk ) by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness is an alternative to Blessing the earth . Laxness was of the opinion that "the social conclusions Hamsun in blessing the earth are generally wrong".

Film and theater

• In 1921 the Danish director Gunnar Sommerfeldt shot the silent film Markens Grøde in Norway . Leif Halvorsen composed the music for it .
• Sebastian Hartmann staged a theater adaptation of Segen der Erde at the National Theater in Oslo in 2007 .

Web links

• Editions of  Blessings of the Earth  in LibraryThing

Single receipts

1. ↑ Sachlexikon: Scandinavian-German Literature Relations, p. 10. Digital Library Volume 9: Killy Literature Lexicon, p. 26420 (cf. Killy Vol. 14, p. 372)
2. ↑ Individual proof is missing here
3. ↑ Thorkild Hansen, Knut Hamsun: His time, his process, Munich 1978, p. 41
4. ^ From the award speech by Harald Hjärne on the occasion of the solemn presentation of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Knut Hamsun on December 10, 1920; in Circle of Nobel Prize Friends , Vol. 20, Coron-Verlag, Zurich, pp. 17-20.
5. ↑ Baumgartner: Knut Hamsun , Vol. 543 of the Rowohlt Monographs, Rowohlt, 1997, p. 112.
6. ↑ http://www.uni-siegen.de/lili/lösungen/1997/liliheft107/lili107baumgartner.html?lang=de
7. ↑ http://www.uni-siegen.de/lili/lösungen/1997/liliheft107/lili107baumgartner.html?lang=de
8. ↑ Tore Hamsun: My father Knut Hamsun, Munich 1993, pp. 274–278.
9. ^ Halldór Laxness, afterword to the 2nd edition of Sjálfstætt fólk , quoted from: Wilhelm Friese: Halldór Laxness - the novels. An introduction . Helbing & Lichtenhahn, Basel / Frankfurt a. M. 1995, ISBN 3-7190-1376-6 , pp. 34 .
10. ↑ to the TV broadcast on ARTE ( Memento of the original from September 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
11. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
12. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.