Seven legends

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The Seven Legends are a cycle of novels by Gottfried Keller , first published in 1872, but designed during the author's time in Berlin. They express the poetological program of a realism that transcends social conditions and yet does not fall back into romantic patterns.

What the legends have in common is that they center on the Virgin Mary , albeit in an interpretation and form that is far removed from both Catholic and Protestant views and dogmatics . In it she becomes

" Magna mater of earthly and gender love (amor), a sister of Juno and Venus and thus a syncretistic mixed deity in which pagan and Christian merge to form a female trinity of love or, as has also been said, to post-Christian mother earth ."

Seven legends

Saint Eugenia, Greek icon

Eugenia

Eugenia, a "fine Roman girl" in Alexandria, by diligent study to a " Blaustrümpfchen " and dismisses the advertising of young Aquilinus by providing the condition that he told her "comprehension and respect intellectual life and striving and participate in the same." Psalm words from a monastery convert her to Christianity, she puts on male clothes, is admitted to the monastery and soon becomes its abbot. When Eugenia hears that Aquilinus had a marble picture set up in her memory, she goes around at night smash it with a hammer. But when she sees Aquilinus coming and kissing it, her strength fails. A widow has fallen in love with the beautiful abbot and invites him (she) to come under the pretext of being sick. When Eugenia indignantly rejects her fiery oaths of love, the widow takes revenge on the model of Potiphar's wife : she cries for help as if the abbot wanted to rape her. Eugenia is arrested and could be sentenced to death. But she reaches a conversation with Aquilinus, who is now consul, reveals her secret to him - and he takes her to his country house to safety after he has reassured the crowd by claiming that the abbot was a demon who has now disappeared. Aquilinus marries her, and when her hair has grown back, he leads her back to Alexandria. He brings her to her astonished parents “with the invention of a clever fable”, celebrates “a brilliant wedding” and is converted to Christianity by Eugenia.

The virgin and the devil

A wealthy count gets into debt and hardship through too much charity and puts Bertrade, his wife, on the devil, who appears to him in the form of a ferryman spraying fire from his eyes, if he only has enough gold again. He finds a book under Bertrades pillow from which pieces of gold fall when he turns the pages. When, as agreed, he wants to hand his wife over to the devil, they come to a little church in which Bertrade is praying in front of a “peculiarly graceful image of Mary”. She falls into a deep sleep, the maiden jumps from the altar, takes Bertrades form, continues at the side of Count Gebizo and is handed over by him to the devil, who awaits her in the form of a black knight at a meeting specially for this meeting of well created for him:

The fountain, however, consisted of a large round bowl, in which some devils, in the way that living pictures are made today, formed or depicted a seductive white marble group of beautiful nymphs. They poured shimmering water from their cupped hands, where only their lord and master knew; the water made the loveliest music, for each jet gave a different tone and the whole thing seemed to be in tune like a string game. It was, so to speak, a water harmonica, the chords of which quivered all the sweets of the first May night and merged with the charming shapes of the group of nymphs; for the living image did not stand still, but shifted and turned unnoticed.

While the devil throws himself to the chest of the apparent Bertrade as "the eternally lonely one who fell from heaven", Gebizo gets lost on the way back and falls fatally into a ravine. The holy virgin wrestles with the devil, although she is unable to defeat him, she humiliates him and returns to her little church. Bertrade wakes up from her sleep, sits on the horse waiting outside, returns home and has Gebizo, for whom all love has been "wiped out of her heart", buried. Her “high patroness” therefore looks around for another man for her, and what she does for it is described in the next legend.

The maiden as a knight

Illustration from Reibisch: Der Rittersaal , Stuttgart 1842

The emperor hears about the unmanned Bertrade and sends the lazy procrastinator Zendelwald to her as a messenger to announce that he wants to visit her and find her a new husband. Zendelwald falls in love with Bertrade, but leaves immediately and returns to his mother, who, unlike him, is very active and decisive. When they hear that a tournament is planned, the winner of which is the beautiful Bertrade, the mother forces the son to take part in the tournament. On the way to Bertrades Castle, he stops at the very little church in which Bertrade has already slept. Zendelwald also falls asleep at the altar, the Virgin Mary descends and puts on his armor. She defeats the ridiculous knights "Mouse the Countless" and "Guhl der Geschwinde", who are ridiculous in their exaggerated masculinity, and at the wedding banquet the real Zendelwald takes the place of his likeness without being noticed, confesses what has happened and becomes "a whole man at Bertrades side in the empire, so that the emperor was just as pleased with him as his wife ”.

Juno, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, 2nd century BC. BC, Louvre

The virgin and the nun

One day a nun who works as a sexton in her monastery gives in to the temptations of the world, places the keys of her office on the altar of the Holy Virgin and goes out into the world. This world is quickly reduced to a knight who, returning home from the crusade, takes the homeless Beatrix with him to his castle and makes her his lover. Once he throws it up for a neighbor in arrogance, but Beatrix returns to her knight, whereupon he marries her and has eight sons with her. Now she has quenched her thirst for the world and is returning to the monastery, where her absence was not even noticed; for the Blessed Virgin has taken her form and given her service as sexton. When all the nuns prepare presents for the Blessed Mother for a Marian festival, Beatrix cannot think of a present. When the celebration takes place, however, an “iron old man” enters the house of God with his eight adult sons, who “were to be seen as many angels in armor”. Beatrix recognizes them, cries out, rushes to them, reveals herself and reveals her secret: "So now everyone had to admit that she offered the virgin the richest gift today."

The bad-holy Vitalis

Vitalis, himself a monk, goes to brothels and converts whores through ardent prayer. This gives him a bad name for using the services of whores himself - but he remains chaste. One day Jole falls in love with him, the demure daughter of a merchant who lives in the neighborhood of the whore house that Vitalis visits. In order to be visited by him, she buys the whore's house and pretends to be one herself. When he comes, she declares her love to the astonished man. That has never happened to him; he seeks in vain advice in prayer in front of a "beautiful old marble picture of the goddess Juno", which, "with a halo, was set up as an image of Mary". In the end, however, he allows himself to be seduced by Jole into exchanging the monk's habit for secular clothes, with the result that he gives in to her wish to ask her father for her hand and "now (became) an equally excellent and perfect man of the world and husband. when he was a martyr. "

Dorothea's flower basket

Saint Dorothea of Caesarea with a flower basket in a book of hours around 1440

The patrician daughter Dorothea is courted by Fabricius, a "pedantic persecutor of Christians", but has fallen in love with his secret writer Theophilus. The latter holds back out of fear of getting in the way of his master, and when Dorothea once claims that Fabricius gave her a beautifully cut bowl, which she shows her secretly lover, Theophilus takes it at face value and withdraws completely back, although Dorothea only wanted to make him fall in love through jealousy. Sadly, the girl seeks consolation in her parents' Christian faith and provokes Fabricius, who continues to woo her, by saying that she has found a "heavenly bridegroom". When a renewed persecution of Christians was ordered from Rome, Fabricius had Dorothea and her parents arrested and tortured. Theophilus hears that Dorothea is lying on a glowing grate and wants to free her. Dorothea, however, describes the instrument of torture as "the roses of her beloved bridegroom" and looks blissfully at Theophilus. When the embers are kindled again, she begs to be killed. He sees the flash of the ax with which she is killed and collapses. A child angel brings the unconscious person a basket with roses and three bitten apples, which he actually holds in his hands when he wakes up. Seized with longing, he went to Fabricius, confessed to Dorothea's faith and was beheaded in the same hour. The last paragraph describes the togetherness of the two lovers (“like two doves”) in the realms of the blessed, in which there is also the “crystal house of the Holy Trinity”, into which they go and “like twins under the heart of their mother “Fell asleep.

The dance legend

Musa is such a passionate dancer that when she is not praying she is dancing, yes she even dancing prayers. When she is dancing a prayer to the Holy Virgin, King David appears to her , dances with her and promises her that she will be allowed to dance in heaven for ever if she just renounces it completely on earth. Your doubts are overcome by a heavenly melody. She lives solitary in her parents' garden and even lets her feet be forged together with a chain. When she dies, nature becomes more beautiful, the sky opens up and Musa floats away dancing into eternal bliss. But this is disturbed only once, when on a high heavenly holiday the nine muses , who as pagan deities languish in hell, are graciously invited to join. They start a chant out of gratitude. But this sounds in the heavenly realms

so gloomy, almost defiant and rough, and at the same time so heavy with longing and complaining that at first there was a terrified silence, but then all the people were seized with earthly suffering and homesickness and broke out into general weeping. An infinite sigh rushed through the sky; All the elders and prophets hurried up in dismay, while the muses, in their good opinion, were singing louder and more melancholy and the whole of paradise with all patriarchs, elders and prophets, everything that had ever walked or lain on a green meadow, was disconcerted. At last, however, the very highest Trinity itself came to see what was right and to silence the Zealous Muses with a long thunderclap. Then calm and equanimity returned to heaven; but the poor nine sisters had to leave it and have not been allowed to enter it since.

Explanations

To the meaning

The story of little Musa is about art and artistry in line with the (later) Sigmund Freudian theory of sublimation, i. H. the transformation of the energy of failed instinctual wishes into spiritual achievements. In the field of art, Keller is ready to grant the religious doctrine of heavenly bliss as a reward for earthly renunciation. Originally, he wanted to have the "little dance legend" close with the fact that the Virgin Mary promised the nine muses that she would get them permanent residence in heaven. The current ending occurred to him during an organ concert by Theodor Kirchner in St. Peter (Zurich) . He repeats and confirms Keller's position on art and religion in the Seven Legends in a concentrated form : there is no art without renunciation; but no radiance from heaven can replace the heavenly inhabitants, insofar as they were once human, the beauty of the earth.

Origin and reception

Keller was inspired to write these novellas by the legends of Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten , which were collected in two volumes , admittedly in a negative sense: he discovered among Kosegarten's rather “ridiculously pious” texts a “formerly more profane love of narrative” (Keller's preface), which he carelessly discovered surrendered.

Gottfried Keller, who was converted to renouncing belief in God and in the immortality of the soul through his encounter with Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy of criticism, saw no impoverishment in the consequent this-worldliness: “For me the main question is: will the world become more prosaic and meaner according to Feuerbach ? So far I have to answer the most definitely: No! on the contrary, everything becomes clearer, stricter, but also more ardent, more sensual. ”In his work, the poet attempted to withdraw poetry from the tutelage of religion. It is not without reason that the Seven Legends are called the key work of Keller's storytelling. Psychoanalytically versed interpreters understand them as prime examples of a poetry of wish fulfillment, and refer to the fact that the poet, who is always persecuted in love and marriage matters, founds marriage after marriage in his legends .

Texts

Secondary literature

  • Albert Leitzmann : The sources for Gottfried Keller's "Legends" . Niemeyer Verlag, Halle 1919 (source publications on modern German literature; 8).
  • Arthur Henkel : Gottfried Keller's “Tanzlegendchen” (Göttingen inaugural lecture 1955, updated). In: Hartmut Steinecke (ed.): To Gottfried Keller . Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-12-398200-9 , pp. 108-121.
  • Adolf Muschg : Gottfried Keller . 4th edition. Kindler Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-463-00698-7 .
  • Wolfgang Riedel : The wonderful in realism ( Droste , Gotthelf , Keller, Storm) . In: Sabine Schneider, Barbara Hunfeld (Ed.): The things and the signs. Dimensions of the realistic in narrative literature of the 19th century; for Helmut Pfotenhauer . Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, ISBN 3-826-03717-0 , pp. 73-94.

Opera

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Kaiser quoted from Riedel, p. 88
  2. ↑ Eugenia of Rome in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
  3. ↑ Dorothea in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
  4. ↑ For Musa see http://www.antiochian.org/node/18618
  5. ↑ Jonas Fränkel, editorial note on the seven legends , p. 380 f.
  6. ↑ Leitzmann, passim, Jonas Fränkel p. 348, Adolf Muschg p. 104
  7. ↑ “I found a collection of legends by Kosegarten told in a ridiculous, pious and simple-minded style (doubly ridiculous by a North German Protestant) in prose and verse. I took seven or eight pieces from the forgotten book, started them with the sweet and holy words of Kosegärtchen and then made an erotic-secular history out of it, in which the Virgin Mary is the patron saint of those who love to get married. "Keller on April 22, 1860 Ferdinand Freiligrath , quoted from Fränkel, p. 349
  8. ↑ Keller to Baumgartner, January 28, 1849, quoted from Muschg, p. 209
  9. ↑ Riedel p. 86
  10. ↑ “In this sense, the legends are the graceful and extreme Summa Kellerscher psychology. Here she fulfills her wishes, imagines characters that are only hinted at in less naive fiction because they are threatened with disclosure. "Muschg, p. 106