Viola Tricolor (Storm)

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Viola Tricolor is a novella by the German writer Theodor Storm (1817–1888). It was first published in Westermann's monthly notebooks in 1874 and a little later in novellas and commemorative sheets .

title

The title alludes to the stepmother problem in the novella: Viola tricolor is the botanical name of the (wild) pansy .

action

The novella is about a forty-year-old man named Rudolf, who remarried after the death of his wife. His new wife is called Ines and is many years younger than him. She wants to be a good wife to him and a good mother to his ten-year-old daughter Agnes, called Nesi.

At first, Agnes behaves very shyly towards her father's new wife. The girl only calls her “Mama” instead of “Mother”, as she once called her late mother. Ines feels uncomfortable and doubts whether a second marriage is right. The beautiful portrait of the deceased in her husband's study and the now overgrown and always closed garden of the deceased also reinforce her feeling of being an intruder. Her husband, saddened by the grief of his young wife, hopes that Ines will find her role better in time.

When Ines finally becomes pregnant, she fears that her child could also be seen as an intruder, possibly even a bastard. After the birth of her daughter, she is so badly off that one has to fear for her life. She asks her husband to bring a photographer to her so that she can leave her child a souvenir photo. Agnes, who loves her stepmother from the bottom of her heart despite the difficult situation, is also worried about her "dear mom". Fortunately, her condition is getting better and after a while the doctors are certain that she will survive.

The thought that her daughter would not have been able to remember her if she, the mother, had died leads her to the realization that the memory of the deceased mother should be preserved for every child. She therefore asks her husband to tell Agnes about her mother and to keep the memory of her alive. She also realizes that it was wrong to be angry with the girl because she was addressed as "Mama". Together with her husband, she opens the locked garden again after a long time and enjoys its wild nature.

background

In the spring of 1865 Storm's wife Constanze died, with whom he had seven children. A year later he married Dorothea Jensen, an old childhood friend. The situation that arose in Storm's own family as a result of these circumstances shows parallels to Viola Tricolor .

literature

  • Theodor Storm: Viola Tricolor . In: Library of German Classics: Storm's works in 2 volumes . Structure, Berlin 1979
  • Jean Firges : Theodor Storm: Idyll and decay in his poetry. Exemplary series literature and philosophy, 6. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2001 ISBN 9783933264114

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