Student novel
A student novel is a novel that chooses events from the student days as its subject . The genre is distinctly German from a global perspective. Production is characterized by two historical focuses: on the one hand, the period from 1690 to 1740 and, on the other hand, that of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The two periods have little in common.
Student novels of the 17th and 18th centuries
It is typical of the student novels of the late 17th and early 18th centuries that in them authors, protagonists and readers essentially belong to the same class; the titles originate from an immediate, scandalous " gallant " interaction between students and their audience in the book market.
Roots in the satirical novel of the 17th century
In terms of genre, the student novels that caused a sensation in the early 18th century have roots in the satirical novel of the 17th century . This becomes clear when you look at Christian Weise's “political novels” and those around him that preceded the production. For them, political means that they teach wise behavior that can be fixed in the maxims of "political intelligence", calculated behavior. The first novel to capture the student milieu more clearly is Eberhard Werner Happels Academic Novel in 1690 , in which student life is educated . However, it does not yet produce what is typical of the student novels of the early 18th century: a rivalry between student writers who come up with their own stories.
The journalistic terrain was explored more clearly by Christian Reuter with the two parts of his Schelmuffsky (1696/97) and even more his “Comedies” about “Frau Schlampampe” L'honnête femme or Die ehrliche Frau zu Plissine (1695) and Der Ehrlichen Frau Schlampampe Life, Sickness and Death (1696). These writings are not student novels, but publications that come from the milieu and focus on it. Halle , Leipzig and Jena come to the fore with stories from students who are quartered in town houses and who publish what scandals they grasp from the urban bourgeois environment. At Reuter, the landlady is the satirical victim. The author's courage in front of his fellow students is savored in the new publications. Reuter, however, lacks the gallant conduite as an award for student behavior. His Schelmuffsky is a coarse "bearskin" and "boor"; he stands with those who have to deal with him and bare themselves at the center of the humor, which draws on Eulenspiegel's stories and picaresque novels in the plot and in the design of the hero .
The modern novel of European novellism determined fashion from 1700 onwards
The novel, which had a decisive influence on the student novels of the first half of the 18th century, was published in the spring of 1700: Christian Friedrich Hunold's Verliebte und Galante Welt , printed by Gottfried Liebernickel in Hamburg , but clearly with a view to sales in the Central German area Universities. Hunold, who just had to break off his studies in Jena for lack of further financial means and fled to Hamburg, looks back from there on the amours of his student environment - this includes side glances at Leipzig and Halle. The novel found huge sales within just two weeks, as a young man in his early 20s celebrates himself as a gallant observer who looks at infidelities and amours with freer morals, knowing full well that his audience shares this morality at best pro forma, making the publication scandalous remains. What is new here is the hero who, unlike in satirical novels of the 17th century, is not himself ridiculous. You have to laugh at rivals who are less confident in the modern, gallant conduite - it becomes the official didactic offer of the new novel, which otherwise lives from the scandalous value of the fact that possibly nothing has been invented about it. In these points, Hunold, alias Menantes, ties in with the French authors who recently let scandalous novels garnished with a life of their own play in high politics. In positioning on the German market, Hunold joins Talander ( August Bohse ), who had brought out his own mix of Asian novels and European chronique scandaleuse , but who had not celebrated himself or the student body as the new generation of fashion. Hunold's pseudonym creates the connection point to Talander; the special way of storytelling, another; the inclusion of letters, poems and dialogue parts (“compliments” that you learn by heart for interactions) a third. At the same time, Hunold subliminally distances himself from Talander: his heroes avoid flowery language, their gallant action is more characterized by the current French esprit and a new tolerance, such as a new competition within the fashionable class.
While Hunold risked the discovery of his pseudonym almost immediately in Hamburg and positioned himself among the gallant as a significant new author (he gives private colleges in the modern Conduite), his novels have a style-defining influence in the university towns of Halle (Saale) , Jena and Leipzig . Students receive it and take part in the fate of the author, who is their age and who will jeopardize his further bourgeois existence for the next six years. The publication of the Satyrical Novel (1706) ultimately forced Hunold to leave Hamburg and return to his homeland in Thuringia. In Halle he is asked by students to give further courses in poetry and gallant conduite; they allow him to make ends meet later, with which he can finance his studies. A reception certificate from the reading of the Menantes novels in student circles can be found in Meletaons ( Johann Leonhard Rost's ) Schau-Platz der gallant and learned world (1711):
"That evening he went to the Raths-Keller to have a glass of wine, where he met a number of Pursche who were engaged in different discourses, and then came to talk about the Romaine that sometimes such funny pranks occurred in the same, but peculiar delicacies They refer to the nice love calendar in Mr. Menante's satyrical novel, about the contents of which, one of them has a copy with them, they laughed at themselves, and that they also made all sorts of glosses that are told here, because of the vastness, are discerned . "
In this, his student novel, the author “Meletaon” poses as a Menantes admirer and student. He claims to have written his own novel under the same conditions as the one described here, in “Compagnie”. The stylistically negligent treatment of the audience and the poetic demands of earlier novels are decisive for the student novel:
"Those who deal with me in this way, or know otherwise, will well know that a lot of things in companies elaborate amid the greatest tumult, as then all of the verses in here are crafted so that I don't bite off my nails and fingers over them."
From 1706: open competition among student authors
The hallmarks of the production, which starts around 1706 in the university cities of Halle, Leipzig and Jena and brings two to five titles onto the market per year, are the partial anonymity of the authors, their student status and their focus on their own class as customers. Talander , Menantes and Meletaon act as central brand names and role models. It is sometimes mentioned that there is money to be made from writing novels:
“Isn't the way of writing too delicate? That it should be the same as those who lead the incomparable Romanists of our time as Herr Talander , Menantes and Meletaon : So I am already satisfied when I get a thousand parts of the comfort of these famous people in writing; [...].
But that I have started to write novels is best known to those who know me, and they know that I have to do this for considerable reasons; In view of the fact that I cannot possibly prosequire my Studia Juridica, so do not take advantage of this remedy, since I had the need to sleep daily at universities. "
Structurally, no development novels are offered here. The narrators tell the best of stories that they have experienced or want to have witnessed; Sometimes the narrators also change - when they move around in company and individual protagonists bring in their love stories. At such moments, novelistic narrative rounds emerge, the subjects of which refer back to the novellas in which Chaucer and Boccaccio used already shrewd students to hear simple-minded citizens.
The academic life of the universities, everyday student life and student customs are consistently hidden in these titles. Above all, this is likely to have something to do with the fact that, for example, lecturing is a reality shared by the authors and the readers. Scenarios of the study locations are also mentioned at best, rarely described in more detail. Here, too, the authors seem to trust that their readers have the right images in mind.
On the other hand, the complications of the amours are described very precisely. The heroes fall in love with the daughters of the houses in which they are quartered and sometimes describe the structural interior. Sexual acts can be stated explicitly, but the " intrigues " are more important . Who betrayed whom? Which young lady from one of the town houses turned out to be dissolute? How did anyone get around a particularly steadfast daughter? How shamefully did he let her sit, what was her ruin afterwards? Here there are often gleeful sketches, sometimes, increasingly from 1713, even rudimentary moral courses of action.
With the novels of Celander in 1709 and 1715 the maximum description of sexual acts was called up. With the interaction that developed from this among the "Romanists", especially between Meletaon, Celander, Sarcander , Menantes and Selamintes , the student novel between 1709 and 1720 gained the format of a journalistic exchange conducted under pseudonyms: One threatens to blow up rivals, acts in her own novels to protect a “woman” who was allegedly shamelessly attacked in another novel, denounces the carelessness or lack of courage of rival authors; In addition to the names mentioned, there are also Amaranthes , Melissus , Adamantes , L'Indifferent , Le Content , Parthenophilus . A turning point in the entire interaction is brought about by Menantes' journalistic exit from fashion in 1713 and his retrospective distancing from the novels he published. Meletaon takes over this - clearly strategic - exit in publications 1714 and 1715. Like Hunold, Rost has to worry about his civil career, while the other authors in the field, who remain under pseudonyms, can act more uninhibited. Nevertheless, from 1713 onwards, the question of morality was raised. The gallant behavior was until now with recourse to Christian Thomasius simply the promising behavior of European aristocratic fashion. There was consensus here before 1713 and the student novel was an essential medium of the conduite to be learned, which was characterized by frankness in all areas of life and thus gained sovereignty. A standard here is the career that one of the heroes sums up for himself in Sarcander's Amor at Universities (1710):
“But as soon as I got out of my cousin's house through a quarrel, my whole conduite turned. So I had worn myself badly in clothes, nor made any other big depressions , but as soon as I got into another room, I began to behave differently. I dressed politer than my studies it required, gienge on the Dantz ground and excercirte the Music, would consider starck companies of my country-people , and was always fun. Dabey now, enclose love in turn. My house host had a daughter, of good build and otherwise gallant, and because she did not need to take care of herself in the house, she had enough time to lie down in gallantries. She played a beautiful harp, spoke French, danced well, had otherwise acquired such a good conversation by reading various romances that it was a pleasure to deal with her. "
The gallant student behavior has a subversive aspect here, insofar as it distinguishes itself from the behavior of the citizens and proves to be superior at all times. It has satirical components where it allows the gallant hero to disqualify other less gallant rivals, also wherever women fall victim to him, whose virtuousness is revealed at the moment of seduction.
From 1713 moral concerns emerged increasingly in fringe episodes. At the end of the decade, the criticism of the student lifestyle that is cultivated here is so great that it can articulate itself in a journalistic way. The most extensive reception testimony from a middle-class perspective can be found in George Ernst Reinwald's Academien- und Studenten-Spiegel in 1720 - a merchant sits here with revolting students and tells how students recently teased him with their books:
“But what are there not in front of books that, because they were not made by great scholars, for whom they are wholly unworthy, and yet could not have come from the unlearned, as they do not have the fortune, arise from students have to? [...] The other day, when a lot of Histörichens were told about the simplicity and rudeness of certain young women, a student asked the narrating clerk who might have come up with these snacks? But he got the answer: It is you gentlemen, these whistles come from you and from nobody else; the idle and useful heads among you are so ready to think up such a story [...]. Then, as far as the Romainies are concerned, one looks at the place where they were printed, although the place is also often kept secret, one will realize that it was much more likely to have been produced in such a city, which by a famous high school is very famous, even often, the pressure of the city of her birth will reveal when the place wants to remain hidden. How by such books, such as the Student Confect, the reader is skilfully made to add all sorts of lewd speeches, jokes, prick-talk and foolish statements to the Epicurean laughter of the societies; Thus through Romainen the youth is driven to spooney, lust, impurity, whoring, and bad thoughts, desires and desires, since some are so bad even to inflame the most chaste heart, but all of them, when there is little, are able to worry the same. "
The decline of student novels after 1720
With the fact that at the end of the 1720s the Galante and the student novels were the subject of new poetry criticism (for example with Johann Christoph Gottsched ), their status is put into perspective. As the 18th century progressed, it became more interesting for new student writers to participate in building a new morality and poetry for the nation . The result is a division into subversive and pornographic books and literarily ambitious work. From the 1740s onwards, she threw the student novel into a dilemma in which it lost its power to shape fashions. The novels of Johann Gottfried Schnabel, alias Gisander, are the late offshoots of the early 18th century production.
From a pan-European perspective, it is noticeable that the student novel of this phase remained a specifically German phenomenon. One can narrow down the phenomenon. It was limited to the cities of Leipzig, Halle and Jena, which appear as "Lindenfeld", "Salaugusta" and "Salena" in student novels. A larger European context emerges here if one disregards the students as the bearers of fashion and takes into account that novel readers here take possession of the genre of the novel for themselves. This happens simultaneously in Leipzig Halle, Jena, Hamburg and London . An audience between 18 and 30 uses the novelistic novel, which conquered Europe in the 1670s, for potentially scandalous private self-positioning. From this perspective it is remarkable that in the German-speaking area it was mainly students who had the opportunity to do this. They acted as large but fluctuating groups in the cities mentioned that appeared homogeneous from the outside, with the chance of being able to put manuscripts into print without being recognized. As big cities with 500,000 and 120,000 inhabitants respectively, London and Hamburg offered the elegant urban public similar opportunities. Smaller towns and cities like Munich or Cologne with 20,000 to 40,000 inhabitants that were on a par with university locations, on the other hand, neither had comparably large, fashionably homogeneous and fluctuating groups from which authors could risk anonymous publication, nor a book market that could be served anonymously . The development of national literature, which emerged in the German-speaking countries in the 1730s, made it clearer to take responsibility and thus deprived a short-term unregulated market of the further conditions of existence.
Student novels of the 19th and 20th centuries
The second heyday of the genre coincides with that of the fraternities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This production surge is ideologically more complex. It is partially related to the political importance that students and fraternities gained over the course of the century in the process of nationalizing the German public. The customs of the students are described here, often in transfiguring and retrospectively nostalgic perspectives. In these titles, the study period also gains the status of a character-building phase. This can be shaped positively in the direction of the educational novel or socially critical ; A clearly defined phase and its meaning for life is often seen here.
Numerous authors known in their time have tried their hand at student novels. Special mention should be made here of Walter Bloem , who has processed his own student experiences, and Rudolf Herzog , who describes a largely fictional story in The World in Gold . Both, like most authors, describe corporate student life in all its facets. The classic among the student novels is Walter Bloem's 1906 student novel Der krasse Fuchs . It was made into a film by Conrad Wiene in 1924/25 . On the other hand, novels from freelance students are rarer, such as Die Hochwächter by Hjalmar Kutzleb , who describes student life in a Wandervogel group. Wilhelm Raabe's novel On the Old University in 1858 was also an obituary for the now closed University of Helmstedt .
With the end of the Second World War , the phase in which student novels were written also ended. Only a few works on this subject can be found after 1945, such as B. The Students of Berlin by Dieter Meichsner (1954), Between Castle and Österberg: A Student Story from Tübingen in the 1950s by Bert Riecker or The Ugly Manifesto: A Uni-Hamburg Revolt of a Different Kind by Detlef Klobiger.
See also
literature
17th and 18th centuries
- Herbert Nimtz: Motifs of student life in German literature from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century , dissertation, Berlin 1937. Würzburg 1937.
- Olaf Simons: Marteau's Europe or The Novel Before It Became Literature . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2001, ISBN 90-420-1226-9 , pp. 98-112 and 259-349.
- Olaf Simons: On the corpus of 'gallant' novels between Bohse and Schnabel, Talander and Gisander . In: Günter Dammann (Ed.): The work of Johann Gottfried Schnabel and the novels and discourses of the early 18th century. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004, ISBN 3-484-81025-4 .
19th and 20th centuries
- Rudolf Kleissel: The German student novel from Romanticism to the outbreak of the World War , dissertation, Vienna 1932.
- Heinz Kurt Kays: O Goldne Academica. Corporation Students in Literature , Volumes I to III, Würzburg 1996 to 2009.
- Jörg-Dieter Gauger: Couleurroman and Sittenspiegel - attempt on a sunken genre , in: Hubertreiber ; Karol Sauerland (Ed.): Heidelberg at the intersection of intellectual circles. On the topography of the "spiritual sociability" of a "world village" 1850–1950 . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1995, pp. 485-514.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The following remarks are a summary of Olaf Simons: Marteaus Europa or The novel before it became literature. Rodopi, Amsterdam 2001, pp. 98–112 and 259–349, as well as by Olaf Simons, “To the corpus 'galanter' Romane between Bohse and Schnabel, Talander and Gisander”, in: Günter Dammann (Ed.): Das Werk Johann Gottfried Schnabel and the novels and discourses of the early 18th century (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).
- ↑ For more in- depth information , see our own subchapter Scandalous attacks in history, 1600–1750 in the article Roman .
- ↑ See on this in the article Roman the chapter "Petites Histoires": The Novelle as an Alternative, 1600–1740 .
- ↑ What is meant is the secret diary that Tyrsates stole from one of the Hamburg opera singers in the Satyrisches Roman (Hamburg: Benjamin Wedel , 1706), pp. 207-214, and in which she noted which lovers she fobbed off in which way in return for which services in return .
- ↑ Johann Leonhard Rost , Schau-Platz der galanten und learned world […] by Meletaon , vol. 1 (Nuremberg: J. Chr. Lochner, 1711), p. 318, quoted from Olaf Simons (2001), p. 302– 303
- ^ Johann Leonhard Rost, show place of the gallant and learned world [...] by Meletaon , Vol. 2 (Nuremberg: J. Chr. Lochner, 1711), Bl.) ( 7r , quoted from Olaf Simons (2001), p 302.
- ↑ See the article on Meletaon with an attempt to calculate the annual income that Johann Leonhard Rost must have achieved.
- ^ The vindictive Fleurie [...] by Melisso (Franckfurt / Leipzig: J. Hofmanns Erben, 1715), p.) (2 r-v .
- ↑ See, for example, Chaucer's " Miller's Tale " in the Canterbury Tales for a relevant pattern.
- ↑ Amor at Universities […] von Sarcandern (Cöln, 1710), pp. 12–13, quoted from Olaf Simons (2001), p. 316.
- ↑ See the Raisonnement über die Romanen (1708) on the considerations of how the gallant novel takes over options from the satirical when it asserts superior behavior towards inferior ones.
- ↑ Interesting here are the novels by Selamintes, L'Indifferent and Adamantes.
- ↑ George Ernst Reinwalds Academien- und Studenten-Spiegel (1720), pp. 424-427, cited from Olaf Simons (2001), pp. 319-320.
- ↑ On the European perspective, see Olaf Simons (2001), pp. 98–112 and 259–389, in more detail.