Shooting at Elephant

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Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographically influenced essay by George Orwell from 1936.

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Burma was conquered by Great Britain over a period of 62 years (1824-1886). These three were Anglo-Burmese wars (ger .: Anglo-Burmese Wars ) out, then divided the UK the country in its Indian empire (ger .: Indian Empire ) a. Burma was then ruled as a province of India until it became an independent, self-governing colony in 1937. The independence was the result of the " Aung San - Attlee agreement" (English: Aung San - Attlee agreement ), which should guarantee Burmese independence. Aung San was murdered after the agreement was finalized and before it went into effect. Burma finally gained independence on January 4, 1948.

George Orwell , who was born in India in 1903 to a middle class family but grew up in Great Britain, held the post of Assistant Superintendent in the British Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927 . He showed a keen interest in working class life. Committed to implementing the laws of the Empire and at least initially animated by a strong British imperialist patriotism, it was here that his aversion to repressive and totalitarian regimes developed when he was confronted for the first time with the morally questionable methods of imperialist politics. His critique of totalitarianism, which in his works 1984 and Animal Farm (ger .: Animal Farm ) was expressed, has a high probability of their bases in his years of life in Burma.

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In the plot, the protagonist or the first-person narrator is a police officer in Moulmein who is doing his duty during a period of anti-European sentiment among the population. Although all his sympathies lie with the Burmese, he is forced in his official role as representative of the oppressive imperial state power (ger .: imperial power to serve). As such, he is permanently despised by the Burmese, especially by the Buddhist monks, whom he describes as "the worst of all". After receiving a call about a normally tame but now in the musth elephant, he rushes to the bazaar on a pony, armed with a rifle. The elephant was spotted there. After arriving in one of the poorest neighborhoods, he is faced with conflicting reports. He is considering returning home, believing the event has been invented, but then sees a village woman who pulls back some children who are looking at the corpse of a coolie that the elephant has trampled to death. He asks for an elephant rifle and, followed by a crowd of about two thousand people, heads towards the rice field where the elephant has stopped to eat. He actually only carries the elephant rifle with him for his own protection. When he sees the now peaceful elephant, he no longer has any intention of shooting it.

However, the crowd expects him to kill the elephant. He's also afraid of being seen as a coward. He also represents the British Empire as the bearer of power and order. The narrator shoots the elephant several times but fails to kill it. Since he is unable to watch the elephant's agony any longer, he leaves the scene. It takes another 30 minutes for the elephant to die. People take his meat with them for food, and within hours only the skeleton is left. The event makes the narrator completely averse to imperialism , and he wonders if his colleagues would ever understand that he killed the elephant just to avoid appearing as a fool.

German translation

The German title is “shooting an elephant” and is published in the following volume: Master Tales by George Orwell, Hardcover (11th edition), paperback - 218 pages - Diogenes Verlag, published January 2003, ISBN 3257219350 .

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