The Book of San Michele
The Capri- based Swedish poor and fashion doctor Axel Munthe published his memoirs from before and around 1900 under the title Das Buch von San Michele ( English original title: The Story of San Michele ). The book was published in 1929; In 1931 a German translation was published by Gudrun Uexküll-Schwerin, the wife of Jakob Johann von Uexküll . With around 30 million copies sold worldwide, it was one of the most successful books of the first half of the 20th century.
From the last years of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th century, Munthe built his Villa San Michele in Anacapri - typologically following the artist's style of that time . The book is dedicated to their history, among other things. It represents an aesthetically interesting, early form of literary syncretism that is somewhere between fantasy and a sometimes sharp social realism , one often emerging directly from the other. Right at the beginning, the narrator is prophesied of later going blind in a kind of devil's pact .
In the book, Munthe tells of the stages of his unusual career, of the rise to become a fashion doctor of the European nobility, of his encounter with Louis Pasteur , but also of his work against rabies in Paris and cholera in Naples. The discovery of the famous red marble sphinx , looking from the balustrade of Villa San Michele onto the Gulf of Naples , is traced back to a box dream Munthes believes and follows, whereupon the dream is repeated in reality.
The book is actually a fantastic novel , light-footed and with elegant humor, sometimes told with pathos and not without interspersed malice, for example in the direction of various national "colonies" in Rome . Towards the end, the otherwise very bright book becomes extremely gloomy, which has to do with Munthes’s increasing blindness, which leads him to leave the luce of his Villa San Michele and move to the gloomy Torre di Materita , like the Tiberius he admires .
The book met with both approval and disapproval. It was the best-selling non-fiction book in Britain and the United States in 1930 , and the swelling stream of visitors to see Munthe's house in Anacapri led to it being converted into a museum in the 1950s. Conversely, the publisher Kurt Wolff rejected the manuscript because he found it “inconceivably banal, vain and embarrassing”, and after its publication the book attracted large numbers of parodies .
Bengt Jangfeldt and Thomas Steinfeld , who each published a biography of Munthe in 2003 and 2007, respectively, compared the facts of Munthe's life with the memories drawn in the book by San Michele and found numerous differences. Accordingly, Steinfeld provided the biography with the subtitle The art of giving life a meaning . In summary he wrote:
“In fact, read as an autobiography, this work endures historical testing only in a few places. […] [Munthe] is not a con man, but he stacks up, he is not a swindler, but he cheats. He is a dazzler and a blinded man at the same time [...] And he shifts the chronologies, adds and leaves out and always arranges the circumstances so that the light of the headlights falls on him. "
expenditure
- Axel Munthe: The Story of San Michele. Murray , London 1929.
- Axel Munthe: The Book of San Michele. Translated from English by Gudrun Uexküll-Schwerin. Ullstein, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-548-60929-4 .
filming
The book was filmed in 1962 under the title Axel Munthe - The Doctor of San Michele with OW Fischer in the leading role.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Steinfeld: The doctor from San Michele. Axel Munthe and the art of giving life a meaning. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2007, pp. 210, 212 and 94.
- ↑ Bengt Jangfeldt: En usalig ande. Advice from Axel Munthe. Wahlström & Widstrand, Stockholm 2003, ISBN 978-9146204824 ; Thomas Steinfeld: The doctor from San Michele. Axel Munthe and the art of giving life a meaning. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20844-5 . See the reviews of Jürgen Verdofsky: Neuschwanstein auf Capri. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, March 14, 2007 and by Ursula März: Self-staging as a life's work. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, April 4, 2007.
- ↑ Thomas Steinfeld: The doctor from San Michele. Axel Munthe and the art of giving life a meaning. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2007, pp. 231 and 232.