The Premature Burial
The Premature Burial ( The Premature Burial , even buried alive ) is the title of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe , which on 31 July 1844 in dollars Newspaper The Philadelphia was published and the elements of horror and black humor contains.
In the development of the nameless narrator lit Poe in Victorian spread fear , buried alive and to be reached on a subject which he also stories like The Fall of the House of Usher , Berenice and The Cask of Amontillado processed and him for their own Fears preoccupied for a long time.
content
The action is preceded by essayistic remarks with which the narrator introduces and reinforces his own story. Horrible subjects can only be represented in literary terms "where the seriousness and majesty of truth sanctify them". He enumerated a number of catastrophes such as the earthquake in Lisbon and the Great Plague of London , only to state that the "most terrible disaster [...] affects the individual, not the community".
The greatest horror is to be buried alive. The pressure on the lungs, the smell of damp earth, the confinement of the dwelling, the blackness and silence of the surroundings, "the invisible, yet so tangible presence of the conqueror Wurm" - nothing is more horrific. Because of the shadowy and vague boundaries between life and death , these personal catastrophes often occur with the seemingly dead . In order to prove this, the narrator refers to authentic cases of premature burials, from which he could easily pick out "a round hundred".
The wife of a respected lawyer suffered “the most terrible anguish” when she was thought to be dead one day after recurring episodes of illness. With its marble pale lips, the cooled body and fell silent pulse no doubt seemed to exist more, and when after three days seemingly progressive rigor mortis the decay appeared to begin, you put them in a hurry in the family vault at. When the husband opened the vault three years later, a skeleton clad in white fell towards him . An investigation showed that the woman woke up two days after the burial , freed herself from the coffin that had fallen to the ground and broken there, and hit the iron portal with a fragment of the container. She probably lost her senses or died out of sheer desperation, and as she sank her corpse robe caught in the door and held her until the widower released her from the grotesque position.
A medical journal reported on an officer who had seriously injured his head when he fell from a horse, who was believed to be dead after a few days and was quickly buried because of the humid weather. The following Sunday, a visitor felt the earth move strangely beneath the grave, as if someone was struggling to survive. When after some hesitation part of the earth had been shoveled away, the head of the prematurely buried man emerged. The desperate man had pushed open the lid of the coffin, in which he now sat upright and slowly came to. It was learned that he one hour after its consciously experienced funeral in fainting fallen and of the steps on the cemetery paths had been awakened.
The narrator himself has suffered from catalepsy for many years and falls both insidiously and out of the blue into the "state of half-consciousness" from which he can sometimes see through a veil how the family members are standing around his bed. Sometimes there are sudden attacks, after which he lies there in blackness for weeks and only slowly wakes up. Physically healthy, he increasingly suffers from mental anguish and a morbid imagination, indulges in "death dreams" and feels that the misfortune described will hit him too. If he goes to sleep, he dreads waking up in a coffin. From his many nightmares he captured a grave vision of the lot of humanity , which showed him that only a few of those buried rest peacefully in the earth. Most of them are in a different position from their original position, and wailing sounds can be heard from the graves.
Tormented during the day by the fear of having a seizure away from home, he no longer rides because he could be buried by people who do not know his suffering. He has the family crypt rebuilt so that it is easy to open and has an air supply and food supplies. His comfortably padded coffin can be easily opened from the inside and is connected to a bell on the roof of the crypt building via a rope.
But everything seems in vain. One day he wakes up on a hard surface and thinks he has had a seizure. Horror seizes him, he remains frozen for minutes. When he finally opens his eyes, it remains dark as in “black, radiant night that lasts forever.” He cannot scream, feels the pressure on his lungs and notices that his chin is like at Deceased is tied up. After a long hesitation, he throws up his arms, which were crossed over him, and comes across a solid wooden floor just above his face. When he cannot find the rope on his wrist to ring the bell and smells of damp earth, his fate seems sealed that he was buried in a simple coffin far away from the family crypt. He tries to scream again and now lets out a piercing scream. Then he hears four different, angry voices, is roughly grabbed and shaken. It turns out that he had gone down the James River with a friend on a hunting trip and, when a storm was approaching, sought shelter in the cabin of a sloop, of all places , which was laden with fresh garden soil. In the narrow bunk , reminiscent of a coffin , he had tied a scarf around his head to replace his nightcap .
The shocking misunderstanding has a cathartic effect - it strengthens his soul, he can travel again and with the "fear of the grave" also loses the "catalepsy, which was perhaps less its cause than its consequence."
background
In The Premature Burial, you can see references and takeovers from your own works. The phrase from "conqueror worm" can be found in his favorite story Ligeia and in the poem The Conqueror Worm . The long passage about the horror of darkness, loneliness and the smell of damp earth comes from his only novel The Report of Arthur Gordon Pym and was taken from there almost literally.
With the essayistic to matter-of-fact tone and the interspersed references to documented cases and medical reports at the beginning of the short story, Poe brought the horror into noticeable proximity. He suggested that the danger was real and that the fear was well founded, so that some gullible readers were worried about being hit by such a fate.
If there were actually cases of "premature burials" at the time of Poe, they were not to the extent that he indicated in the mock documentary. Some of the events that Georg Alfred Walker listed in "Gatherings from Grave Yards" were probably due to insufficient medical examinations. In order to prevent premature burials and to save the unfortunate from a cruel death, coffins with ventilation and ringing were built , as was the case with Nathaniel Parker Willis, whom Poe had targeted in his early satire The Duc de L'Omelette on November 18, 1843 reported in The New Mirror newspaper . In 1829 it was ordered in Frankfurt am Main that medically trained staff had to be present in morgues who could revive the pseudo-dead. Crypts were equipped with storage facilities, bell towers stood in cemeteries, the ropes of which were connected to the coffins lying in the depths. Wilkie Collins and Hans Christian Andersen also suffered from the fear of falling victim to an early burial, which was widespread at the time . They gave their family members specific instructions in the event of possible death in order to spare them that fate.
The primal fear described by Poe in numerous stories plagued him himself. Since childhood he suffered from claustrophobic ideas which, unlike the first-person narrator of this story, he could not overcome.
German translations (selection)
- 1896: unknown translator: How to be buried too soon. Hendel, Halle / S.
- 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The apparent dead. JCC Bruns, Minden.
- 1922 by Gisela Etzel : Buried alive . In: Theodor Etzel (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe's works, Volume 5: Fantastic journeys . Propylaea Publishing House, Berlin 1922.
- 1922: Hans Kauders : premature burial. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
- 1927: Julius Emil Gaul : The Buried Alive. Rhein-Elbe-Verlag, Hamburg.
- 1930: Fanny Fitting : The Apparent Dead. Fikentscher, Leipzig.
- 1948: Ruth Haemmerling and Konrad Haemmerling : buried alive. Schlösser Verlag, Braunschweig.
- 1955: Arthur Seiffart : Buried alive. Tauchnitz, Stuttgart.
- 1966 by Hans Wollschläger : The premature burial . In: Kuno Schumann, Hans Dieter Müller (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe. The entire work in ten volumes, volume 3: Fantastic journeys 1 . Walter-Verlag, Olten, Freiburg im Breisgau 1976.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. The black cat. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 241
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. The black cat. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, pp. 249-250
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. The black cat. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 242
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. The black cat. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 257
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. The black cat. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 260
- ↑ Kuno Schuhmann: Notes on The Premature Burial. In: Edgar Allan Poe: The Black Cat , Collected Works in 5 Volumes, Volume III. From the American by Arno Schmidt and Hans Wollschläger, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1999, p. 623
- ^ Frank T. Zumbach : EA Poe - A biography. Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 524
- ^ So Frank T. Zumbach: EA Poe - A biography. Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 525
- ↑ Stephen Peithman: The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Avenel Books, New York 1986, p. 149
- ↑ Stephen Peithman: The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Avenel Books, New York 1986, p. 157
- ^ Frank T. Zumbach: EA Poe - A biography. Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 525
- ^ So Frank T. Zumbach: EA Poe - A biography. Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 526
Web links
- Full text online in the Gutenberg project