Works by Bruno Frank

Bruno and Liesl Frank with their three black poodles, 1924–1929. Photographed by Alexander Binder .

This article describes the content of the works of Bruno Frank .

Ah, le misérable !, novella (1914)

Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in Bonn in 1958.

The novella appeared in May 1914, a few months before the outbreak of World War I, in the anti-nationalist and pacifist magazine Forum . Volume: 5 pages.

The first-person narrator gets on the train after a boat trip in Barcelona to travel home to Germany. “There are hours when displeasure makes preoccupation with oneself inadvisable.” In this mood, the narrator desperately wants something readable. At a train station, still in Spain, he desperately buys the only book he can get in French.

The “very famous author” of the illustrated book is a member of the Académie Française . He describes an episode in which a senior French officer leads his son on an Alsatian battlefield during the Franco-Prussian War . They watch German soldiers doing maneuvers, and the officer indulges in hateful tirades about the Germans ("On distingue déjà les faces bestiales, mâchoires de dogue, poils roux sous les yeux verts ...").

The traveler bitterly puts the hate writing aside: "So, among developed, highly educated people, writes an author whom they have declared to be immortal, and tens of thousands of those things are hurled today into a European people." He enters into a stimulating conversation with a Frenchman who has got on , and when the language comes to his reading, he says "quietly, through his teeth:" Ah, le misérable "".

For the Francophile Bruno Frank, the reconciliation between Germany and France was a matter close to his heart. He dealt extensively with this subject in 1928 in the Political Novella and in 1940 in the story Sixteen Thousand Francs .

From the golden bowl, poems (1905)

→ Main article: From the golden bowl .

Bibikoff, play (1918)

→ Main article: Bibikoff .

Bigram, novella (1921)

“Pack of dogs. Hunting dogs in the stable ”by Carl Rudolf Huber .

The novella first appeared in 1921 in the anthology Bigram. New stories from Musarion Verlag in Munich. Extent: 38 pages, sections 1–8.

Paul Bigram, the youngest son of a businessman, lives with his mother even after his father's death, with whom he has a very close relationship. He “refuses to live actively” and his mother was right, people talked about him: “Nothing is more incomprehensible in today's society than that a person who has not been lying in a golden and not in a crown-adorned cradle, nevertheless, is on it refrains from letting his life go to waste in acquisition or in ambition. That life itself, the mere existence, could be more important than the gain of its means is a monstrous notion. "

After his mother's death he leads “a life of indulgence without obligation”. He traveled half the world for four years. “Although he has artistic talents, he does not consider them excellent enough to train them and ultimately only become a mediocre artist. Of a livelier nature, he is too unpretentious for art. ”As soon as his inherited resources run out,“ he retires to the island of Bornholm in order to build up a respected Great Dane breed, from whose income he can live. In addition to his dogs, he devotes himself to the study of the world and reads - a supposed eccentric who leads a happy life "and mischievously reads the chapter about dogs to a puppy from the writings of Carl von Linné . In the last three sections, the Berlin doctor Alexander Ruge and his girlfriend spend a short holiday on Bornholm. By chance you get to know Paul Bigram, whose lifestyle astonishes you and challenges you to admire.

"Paul Bigram's life plan bears traits of Frank's own existence." He too came from a secure background without resting on it. “Imagine Bruno Frank, who, just as cheerful and unpretentious, living in the company of a mastiff and a poodle, published only small works in the years of his Feldafing Hermitage, but made plans for the larger works of the following years: a prose, in The autobiographical element soon took a back seat. ”The last two sections of the novella are largely devoted to Paul Bigram's Doggen and his breeding by Bruno Frank. You can tell that a great dog lover is speaking here.

The story “ Conversation on the Altane ” brings together Alexander Ruge and Paul Bigram in Berlin for a conversation about the problems of artistic creation. The painter Stefan Mulzer, with whom Bigram had already briefly talked about this problem on his travels, also joins the “conversation on the balcony”.

Blood test, narrative (1934)

The story first appeared in Cervantes in 1934 . A novel published by Querido Verlag , a publisher in exile in Amsterdam, and was published in 1935 in the camouflage German for Germans , which appeared in the miniature library of the publishing house for art and science, Albert Otto Paul, in Leipzig. "Under the cover of this little textbook for better expression in one's own mother tongue, the German - German literature - was hidden that had been burned and banned by the Nazis." ( Theo Pinkus in the epilogue to the 1978 reprint). Volume: 5 pages.

Poitou donkey by Thomas von Nathusius , around 1900.

As early as 1930, a few years before the Nazis came to power, Frank had ridiculed the racial madness of the Nazis in a pedigree dog parable in his comedy Sturm im Wasserglas . In the story Blood Test, a short insert in his novel Cervantes, he presents the fairy tale The Emperor's new clothes "in a new guise".

Cervantes attends the theater performance of a thoroughly incompetent author who torments the audience with deadly boredom. Cervantes came up with one of the popular interludes, which are usually entertaining. A smear director "without troops, without costumes, without backdrops" promises the audience a "performance full of the rarest wonders". But only he will enjoy it “who is really completely racially pure. Moors descendants, Jewish descendants, they see nothing. ”The fear among the dignitaries is naturally great, because who could enjoy a“ pure ”family tree in the Spanish melting pot? The director shows the biblical Samson tearing down the pillars of the temple, conjures up an angry ox that terrifies everyone, etc., and so on. And everyone pretends to see what cannot be seen. Finally, an actual officer appears who is looking for quarters for his soldiers. The spectators are "completely exuberant with racial happiness" and have fun with him until "the whole pure-blood society gets their beatings".

The audience in the theater breaks out in "shouts of jubilation and laughter". “In the posh seats, people behaved cautiously and disgruntled.” In front of the theater, Cervantes meets the actor who is the director of grease. Together they sing a "simple song, just invented": "Pure race, pure race, every donkey wants to be today."

Chamfort tells his death, fragment of a novel (1945)

Nicolas Chamfort.

The fragment of the novel first appeared in the magazine Die neue Rundschau (special edition for Thomas Mann's 70th birthday) on June 6, 1945, a fortnight before Bruno Frank's death. Then it was in 1957 in the selection volume Selected Works. Prose, poems, plays published by Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg. Extent: 6 pages.

The novel fragment is the first chapter of a planned novel about the French writer and director of the national library Nicolas Chamfort , "a man of two ages" who lived through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution . In a preliminary remark, Bruno Frank describes the planned work as an autobiography by Chamfort "that he never wrote".

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, with which he wanted to evade arrest by the revolutionary regime, Chamfort is placed under house arrest. A medical college is trying to cure his serious injuries. However, on the eve of 1794, he is certain that the coming year will be his last. He is under the supervision of a gendarme who cares for him lovingly. A niece of his “companion in life or death” should help him write down his memories.

Actually, the unpretentious author had no intention of “adding new ones to the attempts of my fifty-year existence during my short additional period. And least of all it occurred to me to leave notes about this existence itself, which I saw as worthless and fruitless, as wasted, bogged down, forfeited and wasted. ”A very good friend assures him, however,“ not entirely become mine Trace pass ". If so, he muses, someone born later might be interested in "learning about the fragile existence [of the author]". He believes that three or four months should be enough "to round off a compact life report". "But if the thread breaks prematurely, if a blood vessel breaks or if the lead ball stuck somewhere in my head stirs, then one more fragment of an entirely fragmentary existence remains and may get lost."

The first chapter of the planned "autobiography", which at the same time remained the last and ended the life of Bruno Frank as a writer, closes with the words: "And so, between dying and death, sitting in the open grave, so to speak, I am giving my report."

On November 23, 1943, Bruno Frank wrote to his publisher Fritz H. Landshoff , the director of Querido Verlag , about his planned new work:

“I'm preparing something new and want to tell you what it is. A very ambitious plan. A big, extensive story from the time of the Restoration (about the time of the young Balzac ). This is a most remarkable period, which has many parallels to ours. All the elements that make up the history of the modern world collide in a small space: feudalism , dying in the last of the Bourbons ; the upper bourgeoisie , the "bank" which, through its exponents Laffitte and Casimir-Périer, brought the revolution of 1830 to failure and created its instrument in Louis-Philippe ; and the European proletariat of this early industrial era, who consciously demonstrated for the first time in the terrible uprisings in Lyon . "

The fragment is also available as an audio book CD: Hans Joachim Schädlich reads Bruno Frank: Chamfort tells his death. Fragment of a novel .

Evil, Novella (1911)

→ Main article: Evil (Bruno Frank) . Volume: 12 pages.

Young Mr Antonio is happily strolling through the streets of Florence. He meets a run-down person who keeps hitting a small dog brutally against the wall while running. After some hesitation, he pursues the animal tormentor, who stabs a red-hot iron in the dog's eye under an archway. Antonio releases the tortured creature with a shot from his revolver. Seized by hatred and a thirst for revenge, he tries to punish the monster. Death would be too mild a punishment; it would have to be tortured as it tortured the dog. But that would be to atone for a crime by a crime! In a supposed hopelessness and after a hard inner struggle, he shoots himself.

The gold mine, novella (1914)

The novella first appeared in the magazine Simplicissimus under the title Kuxe ... Kuxe ... on March 22, 1914. Then it was 1916 in the anthology Der Himmel der Enttäuschten. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen published in Munich. Volume: 9 pages.

Fifty-year-old Ernst von Friemelt, owner of a gold mine and “ruler of dark regiments of leather-clad miners, was on his deathbed” in his hospital bed, looked after by a nurse whom he shooed around in the usual tone of command. Without relatives and without friends, an unscrupulous exploiter and "cold overlord", only one thing is close to his heart: gold, gold, gold. He notices a gold tooth in the sister's mouth and immediately begins to fantasize: “Fabulous business!”. The nurse "winced, shuddered" and went to call the doctor. In his feverish fantasy, the patient thinks he is in front of an auditorium of investors. He urges them urgently: “All gold from the graves!” There are “millions of dead capital”, “thirty-one million deaths annually”. If only every thirty-first is “usable”, a gold mine will open up: “Gold seals. Gold crowns, gold bridges. “The gentlemen should definitely buy Kuxe, otherwise he would do the business alone. As if to underline his speech, he hits his gold teeth with a rock sample. "But here one of the golden sleeves jumped off, penetrated his throat and suffocated him."

In a secondary scene, Bruno Frank pays homage to his future father-in-law Max Pallenberg , one of the most important character comedians in the first third of the 20th century. With the idea of ​​the exploitation of corpse gold, Bruno Frank anticipates an emergence of the criminal Nazi ideology that culminated in the industrial "exploitation" of the concentration camp victims.

The faithful maid, play (1916)

→ Main article: The faithful maid . Volume: 117 pages.

Mathilde's relationship with Hermann Sohnrey broke up 25 years ago. After his marriage, she took on the job of housekeeper for him. As the children's confidante, she helps the daughter Ruth find the longed-for husband and protects the son Günther from a scandal over an unjustifiably issued bill of exchange.

The Sisters and the Stranger, play (1918)

→ Main article: The sisters and the stranger . Volume: 125 pages.

Out of pity, Rudolf becomes engaged to the terminally ill Cordula, whom he does not love, and looks after her during the last months of her life. After her death, her sister Judith Rudolf confesses her love. However, he confesses that he is incapable of love and of no relationship.

The Comforter, play (1919)

→ Main article: The Comforter . Volume: 80 pages.

Sibylle, the happily married wife of the doctor Dr. Landenberger, enters a relationship with the painter Rottacker, who is in a creative crisis, out of pity. When Landenberger found out about the adultery, he was deeply affected, but forgave his wife with resignation.

The hair, novella (1921)

"Jealousy". Excerpt from “Allegory of the Triumph of Venus” by Angelo Bronzino , 1540–1545.

The novella first appeared in the magazine Das Tage-Buch on February 12, 1921 under the title Das Haar. Novelle and in the same year in the anthology Bigram. New stories from Musarion Verlag in Munich. Volume: 12 pages, sections I-VI.

While the Berlin doctor Alexander Ruge is having his first lunch in his holiday hotel, his eyes meet those of a woman, "a lightning-like understanding" that promises him the "approach of an adventure". “The woman in front of him was beautiful. ... Above all, however, her hair rested and shone, a burden, a crown, a helmet of golden hair, a delight to the eye, a mighty curl, an almost poignant charm. "After the evening meal he approaches the woman, and without big words arrange an intimate rendezvous. Alexander, who loves small, no-obligation adventures, visits her late at night in her room. You get closer and closer, and Alexander never tires of praising her hair. She should spread this splendor before him, he asks. She bursts into tears and whispers in his ear: "It's dead."

Four years ago she married an older man, “very rich, also elegant”, who was madly in love with her. But already on the honeymoon he tormented her with terrible jealousy scenes, which got worse and worse as a result. And after every outbreak of his madness he fell upon her with "unbelievable barbaric caresses". Once, "his mouth clenched my forehead, he sucked and drank and munched," he passed out. In her panic she picked up the scissors, cut the strands away from his mouth, and "in my frenzy I cut off all my hair". She resolved to drop all consideration now and to test her effect on other men, also and especially with this wig made from her own hair. But it turned out just as her husband had prophesied. A curse, a “bitter lust” drove her to reveal her secret “at the highest moment”.

Alexander half-heartedly tries to comfort her, but he is frozen inside. “He forced himself to her, and he owned her. ... She lay there with wide-open eyes that looked into space and spoke in a limp voice with no hope: "Go on, go." ... And soon he really was going. "

In the story “ Conversation on the Altane ”, Alexander tells his friend Paul Bigram the experiences of his night of love with the beautiful, branded woman in a short version.

The woman on the beast, play (1921)

→ Main article: The woman on the animal .

The bridegroom, novella (1920)

Marriage proposal, woodcut, around 1815.

The novella first appeared in the Faces Collection in 1920 . Collected short stories in the Musarion Verlag in Munich. Extent: 16 pages.

The old gentleman of Saint-Briac, the “famous old sinner”, shares an episode from his Sturm und Drang days with “a circle of distinguished young people”. A few decades ago, a gambling affair forced him to quickly disappear from Paris. On the trip he met a young man in the mail car who, like him, was on his way to Lyon and was supposed to marry the wealthy daughter of a silk manufacturer there. Saint-Briac “felt contempt and maybe also a little envy” and got it into his head to play a prank on the young snob, who seemed to be completely inexperienced in love affairs, on the eve of his big day.

In Lyon they stayed at an inn and went to "the nice tavern of the widow Tournemain" to have fun. There they picked up two little girls, who obediently followed them to their rooms in the inn. But “the good boy's heart” did not survive the excitement of a wild night, and Saint-Briac had to arrange for him to be laid out. In his own predicament he caught "instead of mercy" displeasure with "the petty comfort of the money bourgeoisie" and "a somewhat frivolous idea" occurred to him.

He decided to slip into the role of the deceased and pay his respects to the in-laws. The young bride would “get a fate” from him, “this experience would, I told myself, without harming her, just enough to create a little romance, to spread the melancholy glimmer of a fate over her existence, which is otherwise in the Side of any stake-bourgeois husband should have been too shameless. ”While tête-à-tête with his“ fiancée ”(“ everything [about her] was delightful at seventeen ”), he confessed in mysterious hints that he could not marry her because his death is imminent. When Saint-Briac returned to Lyon a few years later, he did not meet his “ex-bride”, but he did see her husband because she had meanwhile married: “He looked like a bad engraving from a reprinted novel from Richardson ... "

The Englishman, novella (1924)

The novella first appeared in the magazine Das Tage-Buch on September 20, 1924 under the title Mary Queen of Scots (Mary Queen of Scots). Then it was in the collection Ein Konzert in 1927 . Novellas under the title Der Engländer published by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam. Volume: 7 pages.

Alexander becomes a prisoner of war in England. The prisoners are treated correctly, but "like sixth order people". A new camp commandant deprives the prisoners of all privileges and lets the “barbarians” feel his abysmal contempt. The humiliations arouse in Alexander a "national hatred" for the English. After his release, he fought in vain against this hatred of which he was ashamed. A trip to London is supposed to restore his faith in the English, but the glasses of hatred blind him. In an amusement park he meets the former commanding officer in a glass menagerie. He learns from the overseer that he spends hours and days in front of the glass cage of the fervently praying Maria Stuart . "He thought. He believed in Mary Queen of Scots as he had believed in the barbarians. ”When the captain leaves arm in arm with the Stuart actress, Alexander is reconciled with England.

The fight against national hatred is one of the heartfelt concerns of Bruno Frank, which he thematized in 1928 in his political novella and in 1940 in his story Sixteen Thousand Francs using the example of Franco-German hereditary enmity .

The General and the Gold, drama (1932)

→ Main article: The general and the gold . Extent: 169 pages.

The play depicts the life of the Swiss emigrant Johann August Sutter between the conquest of Northern California in 1839 and his death in Washington, DC in 1880, the story of a man between Michael Kohlhaas and Don Quixote. Sutter built a thriving empire in California with vast estates and farms. As a result of the great run for California gold, Sutter's property was destroyed. In decades of endless lawsuits, he sued for damages before going mad at the end of his life.

The stroke of luck, novella (1910)

The novella first appeared in two episodes in the March magazine on October 4 and 18, 1910. After that, it was published in 1911 in the refugee collection at Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. The title refers to "the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Volume: 31 pages.

The notary clerk Matuteit from Erfurt wins 45,000 marks in the lottery. He quits the unloved job and travels to Munich for the carnival to have fun. However, since he lacks the streak, he throws himself into a shopping frenzy that doesn't satisfy him either.

“The hoped-for change of fate does not materialize, because the sudden material carelessness does not correspond to a change in the character of the protagonist. He is unable to enjoy the prosperity that has accrued to him. Thus the narrator states "that the elasticity of the human soul is limited and that a tremendous sudden expansion is not the thing that it can best tolerate." The notarial clerk brings through all of his profits within nine months and feels downright redeemed as a result. Socially determined, he remains excluded from the bourgeois class because he neither knows their rules nor is able to understand their art. "

At the end of the story, the story goes nowhere, and Frank cheats his readers out of the punchline by asking them to "add his proper tail piece to the report".

The Golden, Novella (1921)

→ Main article: The Golden (Bruno Frank) . Volume: 29 pages, sections 1–18.

A young man is sentenced to two years in prison for rape. In prison he endures the harassment of the guard, who ultimately kills a little gold beetle, his only joy. The young man vows to take revenge. Freed again, he assaults the guard and almost chokes him to death, but thinks back when he realizes that the guard is a living being like any other, and how questionable the distinction between good and bad is.

The sky of the disappointed, novella (1920)

The novella first appeared in the magazine Jugend on August 29, 1914. Then it was in 1916 in the collection The Heaven of Disappointed. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen published in Munich. Volume: 20 pages.

The first-person narrator sits down on a bench in a park in Paris. A stranger takes a seat next to him. When a sigh escapes his neighbor in the bank, the stranger asks sympathetically about his grief. Now both realize that they are old friends. Years ago they met in the port district of Marseille and together they saved themselves from a dangerous riot. It might seem strange that the former helmsman suddenly spoke to a supposed stranger about his condition, but he wanted to explain his motives to the old acquaintance.

“I work in the service of a comfort institute,” says Mr Barboza. In a big city like Paris there would be "satisfaction for all needs". But "hurt vanity, deceived ambition, unrewarded striving", these are wounds for which there has not yet been a cure. His organization takes care of these disappointed people and offers them the fulfillment of their secret wishes. The unsuccessful politician is offered a podium where he can give his rousing speeches in front of “enthusiastic supporters”. The misunderstood esthete finds a moved audience and the “clumsy and spiritless” can “feel like the center of a brilliant circle”.

In disbelief, the narrator points out that these people undoubtedly saw through the theatrical publicity. Barboza does not accept that: “Oh, dearest friend, how much you underestimate human nature! ... Man has an incredible ability to close his eyes ... ”With the intention of perhaps convincing him, Barboza takes the narrator to one of these events. You meet a “poor fool”, “a small, skinny person with an unsavory cheesy complexion and without hair”, who considers himself a sought-after womanizer and is currently involved in violent fights with his alleged rivals ... - You leave the site again, and Barboza asks his old friend what the reason for his grief is. Yes, he admits he has lost someone, but there is nothing that can be done about it? Yes, Barboza says slowly: "Pray."

The Kaiser, narration (1921)

The story was published in 1921 in the magazine The Guests. A bi-monthly publication for the arts in the first issue of the first year. Extent: 1 page.

On the fiftieth anniversary of his reign, the Emperor of China leaves the Forbidden City and shows himself to his people. A silver eagle descends and brings the message to the emperor: “You, emperor, be granted a wish!” In an effort to do good to his people, he asks heaven that “everyone may be granted what he is in this Wish with all my heart for a moment! ”The wish barely escaped his lips, and already“ his eyes saw the horror of horror ”. All around, his people stand beheaded, because everyone wanted the man in front to be a head smaller so that they could see the emperor better. The emperor calls on heaven again and “everything was as before”. Since then, the emperor has avoided his people and never left the Forbidden City. In his loneliness he played with his tame birds: "with the golden pheasant, with the white peacock and with the pelican who is ready to shed his blood".

The Magician, Novella (1929)

→ Main article: The Magician (Bruno Frank) .

The Marshal, novella (1916)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir : Odalisque, undated.

The novella first appeared in 1916 in the collection The Heaven of the Disappointed. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen in Munich. Volume: 18 pages.

On August 18, 1847, the Duchess of Choiseul-Praslin, daughter of Count Sebastiani , Marshal of France, was found murdered in her palace in Paris . The case made a big stir in the public eye, and suspicion immediately fell on the murdered woman's husband. The chief prosecutor, Paul von Fronsac, who was friends with the dead man's father, had to take over the indictment. - A few days after the murder, Fronsac goes to his friend's house to assure him of his sympathy and comfort. Sebastiani says about the murder: “It's a tough story, Fronsac.” He is amazed at the composed demeanor of his friend and replies: “You wear it well.” Sebastiani counters: “You mean I wear it too well.”

And now he relates an incident from his military career that happened forty years ago when Napoleon sent him to Istanbul as ambassador. There he caused “the death of a beautiful, beautiful young woman”, and since then he has been “prepared for a catastrophe of this or a similar kind”, “and now that it has hit my daughter ... that just comes to me as that most natural and correct, so to speak as the only logical fulfillment of my fear. "

In his capacity as ambassador, he managed to prevent the English attack on the Sultan's empire by diplomatic means. Sultan Mehmet, who wanted to thank him for this, visited him personally in the ambassador's residence and said to him: “Do you have a wish, General? You can have what you want! ”Sebastiani confessed to the sultan that his greatest wish was to be able to see the harem from the inside one day. The next day the Grand Vizier took him through the seraglio, but not a single one of these "banal, fat creatures" suited his taste. Finally they met a Cypriot woman, “a very young, slim and brown creature.” He was “seized by pity and desire” and he kissed “her brown, firm hand on the wrist.” Already in the process of parting, the Grand Vizier asked him on behalf his master, whether he has taken a liking to a woman. Sebastiani referred him to the Cypriot woman and the vizier promised him that he should keep her property this evening.

Fronsac impatiently interrupts the narrator and asks him: “The Sultan had you executed, didn't he?” It was even worse, his friend answers. - In the evening "the black Trabant brought her head" to him and handed him a message from the Sultan: "As a true believer, I cannot leave a woman of my religion to you, a Christian." But Sebastiani could be certain that she would Woman “will not belong to any other man either.” Meanwhile, a clerk brings the prosecutor a message: the murderer, Sebastiani's son-in-law, poisoned himself in prison.

The parrot, novella (1909)

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch , 1910.

The story first appeared in the magazine Arena in 1909 under the title Mr. Komerell and the Parrot . It was then published in 1911 in the refugees collection at the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich under the title Der Paragei . The title of the collection refers to “the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art”. Volume: 14 pages.

Heinrich, the youngest son of the medical advisor Gottfried Komerell, lived in Tübingen for a few semesters after school, "spent his time looking for the truth and fleeing the noise" without studying. He avoided inquiries from his father and spoke of "philosophy as from his heavenly mother". Finally, around 1860, he withdrew to an "insignificant town" in the Württemberg lowlands . Here he found an apartment in the house of the widow Beyermeister, which corresponded to his pathological need for extreme silence.

The ardent admirer of Arthur Schopenhauer worked in seclusion on a philosophical work on the "order of salvation" that he wanted to honor Schopenhauer on his birthday. He immersed himself in the chapter “Pity for the animals”, in which he would absolutely tell the “very profound anecdote” about the Brahmin who would rather die himself than to blame the death of the poorest animal. Lost in his theoretical discussions, he was suddenly frightened to death by a loud scream from the next room. When he was furious, his landlady confessed that an elderly lady had moved into the next room - with a parrot!

When Heinrich wanted to work on the chapter he had started the next day, "it screamed, screamed close to him, loud and yelling, and cut his mind". “A red mist swam before his eyes, he overturned the chair, tore the door open and a second, stood in front of something barred, indistinctly saw the green and red animal flapping its wings, reached through the iron, felt a sharp pain in hand and pressed ... “On the same day he read in the newspaper that Arthur Schopenhauer had died. A few days after this terrible news, he wrote to his father that he was going to finish his law studies "with great strain on his strength".

Henny Porten , silent film star, around 1910.

The shadow, novella (1916)

The novella first appeared in 1916 in the collection The Heaven of the Disappointed. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen in Munich. Extent: 26 pages.

A library official, only 32 years old, confesses that his life is "as good as finished", that no further career can be expected, and that marriage would only disturb his sacred tranquility. However, once he felt passion! While visiting a cinematograph en theater, he fell madly in love with the “shadow” of an actress, so that he never missed a performance. He took lessons from a deaf and dumb teacher in order to be able to interpret the mouth movements of his "dumb" loved ones. And he had guessed correctly: his lover did not speak the alleged text, but exchanged hot words of love with her partner, but they were not meant for him, he was convinced, but for him, who was the only viewer to understand her and "herself to be woman instead of shadow took my own! ". Then the catastrophe broke in: the film screenings suddenly stopped. The actress had married and given up her career, and all copies of the film had been destroyed. The beloved shadow was forever gone from his life.

The almost tragicomic story of an obsession is told by the first-person narrator in an exciting, relaxed and easy way and with a pinch of self-irony. Finally, he turns to the readers and asks them, "Are the adventures of my heart so different from yours that nobody laughs at?"

The pride of the private lecturer Kaiser, novella (1908)

Silver hairpin from the Carolingian period, 750–800.

The novella appeared in the magazine Der Schwabenspiegel. Weekly on January 14, 1908. Extent: 2 pages.

Mr. Emmanuel Kaiser, private lecturer at the philosophical faculty, is giving his fifth lecture on French literature in front of a “not least female audience”. It spreads through Maupassant , who he believes was a typical representative of French frivolity in the second half of the 19th century. This man is a salon writer, an “unclean spirit”, “he has the French woman, he has dragged the European woman in the dirt”.

While he railed against Maupassant, his gaze fell "very close to the feet of the catheter on something bright and shiny", a hairpin! “At that moment, the shape of a woman and a movement of this woman created an inner eye for the gem on the dusty hall.” He remembers his student days in Paris, when he “experienced almost exactly the same thing as the young man in Maupassant's tale "Au printemps" ", and when he was aiming" basically only at the heart of a single little Parisian woman ".

It dawns on Herr Kaiser “that you lose something great when you lose all recklessness and - all sensitivity with your youth ”. Almost incomprehensible to himself, “a new way of thinking gains power over him”. He deviates from the prepared manuscript and hears himself saying things that he would not have dared to think an hour ago.

It is not unlikely that the 21-year-old Francophile Bruno Frank, who was still studying in 1908 and was deeply inclined to the opposite sex, also wanted to poke fun at a curmudgeon and morally strict German literary critic on this occasion. His novella was after “In the dark room” his second narrative attempt, with which he went public.

The melody, novella (1911)

The novella first appeared in 1911 in the refugee collection at the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. The title refers to "the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Extent: 38 pages.

"The Dentist" by Gerrit van Honthorst , around 1845.

A young high school student is so moved by a little melody at a symphony concert that he can no longer stand it in the concert hall. At home, Lothar Schmidt expects the home-style security of his family. "I'm supposed to be a dentist" goes through his head. His father, the manufacturer, decided that in a few years he should take over the brilliant practice of his uncle Pelargus. Although the father senses his son's reluctance, he cannot see any particular disposition in the seemingly impotent young man. As with music, he feels drawn to literature, without, however, pursuing his interests with passion. Even the shy admiration for a young girl (“she walks like a goddess”) does not lure him out of his reserve and remains his silent secret. He uses the time between high school and university for a quiet and lonely hike through the Rhön . He enjoys the quiet of these three months, and only rarely "did it happen to him that the distant hum of a dental drill interrupted the silence angrily".

During his studies he met the almost fortune-free Hans Fortenbach, who was exactly the opposite in character, a busy and ambitious young man. When Lothar succeeds in finding an assistant position for his uncle for Fortenbach, the latter joins him more and more closely. At a celebratory event, Lothar shyly approaches Miss Margot Potters, the young daughter of a leather manufacturer, who apparently reciprocates his sympathy. At first very cautious, he slowly feels a strong affection grow within himself. Nonetheless, a strange reluctance to show Margot clearly his passion seems to prevent him.

After completing his studies, Lothar has to do his military service, while Fortenbach joins Uncle Pelargus. When Lothar accidentally catches Fortenbach and Margot having a "love whisper", the world collapses completely for him. During the final maneuver of his unit, "he breathed in the icy and very foggy air without hesitation as he marched". Back from the maneuver, he fell ill with pneumonia. His will to live is broken and after a few days he quietly passes away. "It is quite possible that at that moment he thought he heard a certain melody ... unearthly and indifferent, which he could now endure ... because ... no more difficult life awaited him".

The moon clock, story (1933)

The Sultan of Morocco with the Black Guard , painting by Eugène Delacroix , 1862.

The story appeared for the first time in six episodes in the Vossische Zeitung from 21. – 26. June 1933. It was also printed in the same year in the collection of short stories by contemporary German poets published by Hermann Kesten at Allert de Lange Verlag , an exile publisher in Amsterdam. It was then published in 1937 in the selected volume From Many Years by Querido Verlag , also an exile publisher in Amsterdam. Extent: 26 pages, sections 1–2.

Forty-year-old Ferdinand Purgstaller, professor of Arabic language and literature in Vienna, ends his study trip through Morocco in Rabat to the sultan's palace to witness the sultan's pageantry to the mosque. He piques the curiosity of Black Guard soldiers , and a young hussy walks over to him. Purgstaller looks at his pocket watch: the move will begin soon. The Sussi looks "reverently" at the clock. He will soon be able to buy a watch too, and “then I can let time stand still when I'm happy.” The watch not only shows the time but also the phases of the moon. When the sweetie sees the moon on the clock, he asks in astonishment: “Can you let the moon stand still, sir? Are you that powerful? "

The grand procession begins and the Sussi joins the group again. But "the wonder toy was stronger ... than anything". The sweetie leaves his place to see the moon clock again. Two people from the guard jump over and lead the insubordinate Sussi away. As Purgstaller learns, the delinquent will be sentenced to a bastinado, to beating the soles of his feet. However, through the mediation of the French general president, Purgstaller receives an audience with the sultan and can obtain mercy for Mohámmed ben Mohámmed el Mehenni, his Sussi. He urges his rescuer to take him with him, as he no longer has a future after his wrongdoing in Rabat.

In Vienna, Purgstaller is received by Tini Kreittner, his cook. When she sees the "dark one" and learns that he should take the vacant servant position, she falls from all clouds. But the dark one settles in well, does his job to the fullest satisfaction, and over time Tini gets used to his excessive attachment. Her only discomfort is his strangely ardent relationship with Professor's Moon Clock. He finds out that Mohámmed considers himself to be the dark in the moon circle and Tini to be the light. "The dark was always after the light, and the light fled from him." At the new moon the light disappeared, and the Sussi feared losing Tini because he loved her, "like a man the woman".

Tini meets a nice soldier in a wine tavern, to whom she becomes engaged. One night Mohámmed urges her: "She shouldn't go away ... her life and his life, it's the same thing, it's bound together by magic, and if she breaks the bond, Mohámmed will die." He shows her the moon clock which both halves are the same, "today the light cannot escape the dark". In her fear, she reaches for the watch and hurls it in the kisser's face. Mohámmed freezes, stumbles back - and stabs himself with his large knife. "It fell over like a cupboard," Tini later told the professor.

Erika Mann and Klaus Mann write in their portrayal of German exile “Escape to life” from 1939: “... the masterfully succinct story The moon clock was finished during the first weeks of exile: it was the last work of Bruno Frank that was still could appear in a Berlin newspaper. "

The mother of a whole city, novella (1910)

Tomb of an actor in the Fangelsbach cemetery in Stuttgart, 1869.

The novella first appeared in the magazine Simplicissimus on October 10, 1910. After that, it was published in 1911 in the refugee collection at the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. The title refers to "the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Volume: 8 pages.

The old woman Cornelius is buried. After the funeral oration, a work by the young composer Franz Brodersen will be performed and conducted by himself. The old medical councilor offers Brodersen to take him with him in his car. The conversation between the two turns into a monologue, apparently the Medical Council only wants to speak. He complains that only a few mourners were present. "It is a strange fate for a mother when her many, many children deny them all, Brodersen."

He thinks he has misheard, because the old lady had "been a widow for forty years and died childless". “The city was a nest back then, a provincial slip, absolutely nothing. ... Then this woman fled to us and improved the whole dull race. ”Ms. Cornelius was“ the most beautiful woman at the time ”in the place, and everyone succumbed to her magic. "Everything that has soared here in the last decade, has risen with vigor, I mean, not in the old, felty, crooked way - they are all children of Mrs. Cornelius." And the Medical Council hears not to rave about Ms. Cornelius, who in his opinion is due to "the immeasurably increased working capacity in these last years, the abandonment of all petty traditions in trade and commerce, the move towards cosmopolitanism". Arriving in front of Brodersen's apartment, the medical advisor remarks: “By the way, so that I won't forget - your funeral choir outside made an impression on me. Really atmospheric, really solemn. "

The deed, novella (1921)

Nanny with Child by Mary Cassatt , 1895.

The novella was published in 1921 in the anthology Bigram. New stories from Musarion Verlag in Munich. Volume: 25 pages, sections 1–6.

Gabriel, a mediocre German painter, lives lonely in Paris. A Russian doctor reveals to him with brutal frankness that he has galloping consumption and fourteen days to live. The small eatery that Gabriel visits as usual is teeming with life. Horror seizes him when he notices that he is sitting right next to the Russian, who is fixing him with a "stone cold face". “I don't want to die,” he hisses, and a stream of blood pours out of his mouth.

At home, between sleep and wakefulness, he twitches: he won't leave anyone in the world to mourn him. But he is free now that he is to die, "free for good" and "free for evil", "free for crime". The next day he gets up for a walk in the park. He sits down on a bench where a little girl and her governess are already sitting. Tonight, "this little princess" is going on vacation with her mother to Biarritz, he learns from her chat with the nanny. Gabriel filled with envy and hatred, hatred for the whole world, there will be no more future for him . He begins to cough, and the governess and the child run away.

Gabriel buys a large file in the department store and goes to the elegant Hotel Crillon to “cause a vicious scandal”, but he lacks the courage. He was chauffeured to Ivry by taxi and got off near the railway embankment. This is where the pampered little girl's train will pass. He pulls out his file and, with extinguishing strength, manages to loosen a splint. The train is approaching: “Yes, holla, little lady, now there will be nothing more with the beautiful long life. Off, off. ”On the tracks he runs towards the train, but the machine operator sees him and brakes, but for him“ a moment too late ”. And the mother explains to her little daughter: "A rabbit must have been sitting on the track and the engine driver didn't want to run over it."

The unknown, novella (1921)

Marionette, Skopje Puppet Theater .

The novella first appeared in 1921 in the anthology Bigram. New stories by Bruno Frank at Musarion Verlag in Munich. Extent: 24 pages.

The forty-year-old narrator writes a letter to his friend, an overly long letter that degenerates into a self-confession. No, he cannot follow the good advice of his friend. He will not connect with Fraulein von Römhild, he will never get married at all. In lengthy philosophical discussions he tries to prove to himself and his friend how vain all striving for happiness for two is.

He tells his friend an experience that happened to him many years ago during a train journey lasting several hours. “The door opened at some station and she came in,” accompanied by her husband. "I lifted my eyes and saw her and knew: this is the woman of my life," he claims. On four sides of the letter writer sings the praises of unknowns. He knows nothing about her, except what he sees or thinks he sees, not unlike the Greek sculptor, "who found the hand of a Greek statue and added the goddess to it".

The book she reads, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks , captivates him even more, and he is completely convinced of their affinities when they drive through a train station and she complains violently: “Now you are building your ugly train station hard on the bank and spoil everything ”. And then it happened: suddenly “her gaze fell on me”, “now she recognized the friend who was advertising, now she leaned down, now she sank down, now she gave herself up, now she was mine for the minutes, the quarter of an hour we stayed ”. Not a word is spoken between them, and when the strange couple gets out, the letter writer realizes to his horror that he lost the beautiful stranger before he owned her. Today, he writes to his friend, he would “no longer find the wonderful and the great shy and paralyzed. ... But nothing more comes. "

Irene Ferchl recalls in her book Narrated City. Stuttgart's literary places share a very similar story that happened to the poet Joseph Victor von Scheffel . In his Venetian Epistle , he tells of " a missed and never-to-recover opportunity " that presented itself to him in 1855 on a train trip to Venice. He discovered a “fine little girl's face” in his compartment, which was by no means unknown to him. A lively eye flirtation ensued with the young lady who was wedged between mother and aunt. However, he did not understand her silent reference to the approaching tunnel - and after driving through the tunnel it fell like scales from his eyes: "Her lips had looked for mine and not found them".

The Forbidden City, play (1940)

→ Main article: The Forbidden City (Bruno Frank) . Extent: 164 pages.

China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing. The “young emperor” wants to convert China into a modern state in a snap (“ hundred-day reform ”). The conservative forces around the empress widow, his aunt, thwart the reforms. Finally the dowager empress seizes power and has the young emperor arrested. The boxer movement has set itself the goal of driving the foreign powers out of China and restoring the country's “harmony”. In a real assessment of the balance of power, the Viceroy Jung Lu tries to persuade the Empress widow to suppress the boxers. However, the latter takes the side of the conservative forces around Prince Tuan, and Jung Lu falls out of favor. The Boxer Rebellion is crushed by the overwhelming power of foreign powers, and the Empress Dowager has to flee the imperial residence of the Forbidden City . She reconciles with the emperor and accepts the so-called " Boxer Protocol ", through which the emperor is reinstated in office under degrading conditions. The loyal advisor Jung Lu is rehabilitated and his underage grandson is chosen to succeed the childless emperor.

An Adventure in Venice, novella (1911)

The novella first appeared in 1911 in the refugee collection at the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. The title refers to "the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Scope: 81 pages.

In 1911, the writer Jakob Schaffner hardly left a good hair on the novella:

"The" Adventure in Venice "has very strong elements, but Frank didn't know what to do with the elements and preferred to get bored; maybe he was also afraid of his own genius and avoided the fabric until he was cold. "

The theater critic and playwright Julius Bab judged the novella in 1918:

"The bank director, carried by a non-bourgeois need for intoxication, who experiences his" adventure in Venice "among impostors, is, although somewhat ironically, only a less gifted cousin of the writer Aschenbach, whom Thomas Mann had to die in the same Venice."

The writer Herbert Günther, on the other hand, found the novella to be “virtuoso” in 1930. The literary historian Erwin Ackerknecht , a brother of Bruno Frank's childhood friend Eberhard Ackerknecht , wrote in the afterword to the Reclam edition of Bruno Frank's political novella in 1956 :

"The book of novels, The Refugees, proves that the young narrator also mastered the form of the novella."

"In the two best, the beginning story pantomime and the final story Adventure in Venice (written before Mann's novella" Death in Venice "), we are dealing with refugees who are just about to escape their ruin and return to their everyday lives in good time."

In 1982, the Weimar German scholar Konrad Paul wrote in the afterword to a selection of stories by Bruno Frank:

"His affinity for these themes and subjects [Thomas Manns] even led to one of the less successful stories -" Adventures in Venice "- being published in 1911 before the publication of" Death in Venice ", like a parody of Mann's masterpiece presents itself: a bored industrialist tries to escape from the familiar. In Venice he ends up among the robbers he takes for "aesthetes". When they 'unmask themselves', one revives lively to 'normal business'. "

A more detailed review can be found in #Kaffenberger 2008 .

A concert, novella (1927)

The novella first appeared in 1927 in the anthology Ein Konzert, Novellen published by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam. Volume: 12 pages.

The old concert and theater agent Heuduck tells a friend the story of two baritone singers.

Carra was a "quiet, serious man", and Aldringer was "a violent rascal". Both singers were equally famous, but Carra had what Aldringer lacked: "the magic". In his hatred, Aldringer tried to harm his rival at every opportunity. At a glamorous concert by Carra, a man sat in the middle of the front row, who remained silent and motionless in his seat even with the most impetuous storms of applause. "Carra was sensitive, he was downright skinless," and his wounded soul only saw this one spectator who refused to applaud him. Finally, he smashed Figaro 's bravura aria from Rossini's opera “ The Barber of Seville ” down the ramp to the silent man, “He only sang for the one there”, and the two verses “I'm being tortured too much, really! / All at once, I can't go on ”had not yet faded when Carra suddenly threw herself off the stage, threw herself at the feet of his enemy - and exhaled his life in great excitement.

Yes, he was right in his assumption, Heuduck confirmed to the incredulous listener, that Aldringer was behind all this. He had used a deaf and dumb man as an innocent tool in his diabolical plan.

Mrs. Ethel Redgrave, novella (1914)

The novella first appeared in the magazine Der Greif. Cotta'sche monthly on April 7, 1914. After that it was in 1920 in the anthology faces. Collected short stories published by Musarion Verlag in Munich. Volume: 31 pages.

“There are stories that at first glance look so sentimental that you don't really dare to tell them; but if you give your male heart a push and tell it anyway, they get a different face. ”With this sentence the narrator opens his story and surprisingly anticipates the“ punch line ”that she is about a young lady who“ stands up for her white miniature poodle sacrificed ”. The narrator begins with a slightly ironic undertone, which also comes up again later, as if he had to apologize for the “sentimentality” of his story. Nevertheless, he tells compassionately and sensitively of the life of a woman who loses everything she loves.

The nineteen-year-old Englishwoman Ethel married Allan Redgrave, a lieutenant in the Indian army. She follows her husband to India, where they "briefly lead a life like two happy children". Ethel gives birth to a son who is baptized Freddy. After just two years, Allan fell in the "terrible battle on the Khybar Pass ". Ethel returns home with her young son, who "was an oddly serious baby". The family doctor attests that the child is in very poor health: "Bad story: the lungs". The mother gives the four-year-old, ailing son a white miniature poodle, which he calls Beauty and begins to love with idolatry.

When the child's health deteriorates dramatically, Ethel, on the recommendation of the doctor, goes on a boat trip to Palma with Freddy, Beauty and their maid Peggy , where they rent a room in the former Valdemosa monastery and where their son is looked after by an English doctor. Freddy is wasting away ("he went out slowly like a candle towards morning") and seems to devote all his love to his puppy. Even the prayers of the desperate mother ("My God, leave him to me, leave him to me, I only have him!") Are in vain.

After his imminent death, Freddy is buried in a local cemetery, and Ethel returns to England with Beauty and Peggy. On the ship, a malicious officer snatches the dog away from her because it is against the "service regulations" to stay in the cabin and has her locked in a dungeon-like hole. All the pleading and pleading of the battered mother rebounded on the officer: “The officer was basically no worse person than the big dozen that nature releases from their factory. ... But you have to know what a tremendous temptation there is to be allowed to show power. ”In scanty clothing, raging from the wild showers, she watches all night long on deck over the dungeon of her pooch after the loss of hers Husband and her son is the only bond that still connects them to the world. After the ship arrives in Barcelona, ​​Ethel is admitted to hospital seriously ill and dies six days later. Peggy begins the return journey to Ethel's home with Beauty.

Frederick the Great as a Human, Source Collection (1926)

The work was published in 1926 by the German Book Association in Berlin. Volume: 306 pages.

The full title of the collection of sources reads: Frederick the Great as a person reflected in his letters, his writings, contemporary reports and anecdotes. The collection consists of the following chapters:

• Letters and letter stations
• From his writings
• Contemporaries about his person
• Conversations and encounters
• Anecdotal
• The King's Testament
• Frederick's fame. A speech by Johannes von Müller
• swell

The collection offers some of the sources that Bruno Frank himself used when writing the stories Days of the King (1924) and Trenck (1926) as well as the play Twelve Thousand (1927). In the foreword, Bruno Frank explains his motivation for publishing the collection:

• "In the last few years since the lost war, a lot of arrogant mischief has been done with the figure of the king."
• "These sheets show the royal homo humanus, Friedrich den Menschen."
• The documents do not glorify Friedrich, but rather show him in all his contradictions, his light and his dark sides.

Conversation on the arbor, story (1922)

“Man on the Balcony” by Gustave Caillebotte , 1880.

The story appeared in the magazine Styl in July 1922 . Sheets for fashion and the pleasant things in life . Volume: 8 pages.

Alexander is sitting with his friend Paul Bigram on the balcony of his Berlin apartment (both were protagonists in Bruno Frank's novella “ Bigram ” in 1921 ). “They looked across into the lush green garden of an exotic embassy.” During the conversation, her gaze pans like a camera over and over again into the embassy garden, where a summer evening reception takes place. Alexander tells Bigram the harrowing story of a night of love. “A wonderful woman” with alluring, gleaming golden hair had stripped of her beautiful hairstyle out of anger at the maddening jealousy of her husband, and now, with a wig of her dead hair on her head, she was saddened to death over her loss (this story Frank had already published in 1921 as an independent novella under the title " Das Haar ").

One word results in another, and so they come to speak of their friend Stefan Mulzer, the painter (he also made a small appearance in the novella “ Bigram ”). "He has a name, Alexander, a contested one by the way: but he is not what he wants to be," says Bigram. Mulzer had just married, and the friends speculated that perhaps his wife should help him over his dissatisfaction with himself ("so that there may be a being who says totally yes to him"). Mulzer joins them. He complains that as an artist he is “missing something”, something last, and Alexander agrees that “all imagination and art [comes] from this source”. Paul Bigram uses a quote from Goethe on the other hand: "Life is the meaning of life." If you are halfway well on one day, "then you should whistle a song of praise and not think that something better will ever follow".

And if you are dissatisfied, you have to keep in mind "what happens to others". Bigram hands Mulzer the newspaper in which it is reported that Kirrmanns' main work fell victim to a fire. "Unstoppable crossed his face, a twitch, a flame of triumphant joy." Mulzer recovered immediately and felt deep remorse for his hideous derailment. This Kirrmanns had everything that he lacked and that he would never achieve. His friends did not miss his treacherous mine game, "but he only read seriousness and understanding on their faces." "There was a silence between the three, but it was a silence of mildness."

Elevated Railway Ride, Novella (1924)

Hugo von Habermann : Portrait of a woman from Munich, 1875.

The novella first appeared in 1924 in the anthology Die Melodie published by Fleischhauer & Spohn in Stuttgart. Volume: 11 pages.

A young widow is traveling in a crowded Berlin S-Bahn. Wera is filled with anticipation, because today she finally wants to give in to the wooing of a man who has been trying for her for months and who apparently has no intention of her money. She didn't really want to trust any man anymore, but a few days ago they got so close that she no longer has any doubts about his honest affection. And yet, for a brief moment she thought she had discovered an unmasking look in his mine game, but that must have been a mistake.

On the train, a man offers her his seat between a coarse businessman and a “pale young person” who is apparently mumbling a poem in front of him. She starts talking to him, and he enthusiastically recites a few verses from Holderlin. The people sitting next to them soon leave the train, and when she gets out herself, she discovers that her handbag has disappeared. Sizzling hot, she realizes that she has become the victim of a staged game: while listening to the delighted Holderlin adept, his accomplice stole her handbag. All of a sudden the memory of the one unmasking look of her friend flashes through her again - and she turns her steps back into the city.

Honor thy Father and thy Mother, short story (1943)

The novella appeared in 1943 in the anthology The Ten Commandments. Ten short novels of Hitler's war against the moral code published by Simon & Schuster in New York. Extent: 45 pages.

Second World War. Barbara, the daughter of a high- ranking Nazi official , has secretly got engaged to Heinrich, the son of a former concentration camp prisoner fighting on the Eastern Front . Since she refuses to marry a henchman of her father, he has her forcibly impregnated in a Lebensborn home. Heinrich stands by his fiancée, who, however, has sworn off life and chooses to commit suicide.

The story, which depicts the inhuman cruelty of the Nazi terror, was translated from German into English. Nothing is known about the whereabouts of the German original. Honor thy Father and thy Mother was one of ten stories in the anthology that were intended to illustrate the subject of the Ten Commandments . In addition to Frank, other international authors contributed to this work of exile literature , including Thomas Mann , Franz Werfel , Jules Romains , André Maurois , Sigrid Undset and Louis Bromfield .

Coptic must be, story (1923)

Adriaen Brouwer's “Farmer's Tussle at Card Game” , around 1855.

The novella first appeared in the magazine Das Tage-Buch on February 24, 1923. Then it was published in 1926 in the collection of stories at Rowohlt Verlag in Berlin. Volume: 13 pages.

In Berlin during the inflationary period , the first-person narrator and his companion Ruth go to a gambling den in Charlottenburg. To his greatest surprise, the operator of the gaming room is a former college friend from Tübingen days long past. The narrator, whom he “once looked at pityingly like a madman” when he raved about his nocturnal games, was amazed with astonishment. Ironically, this man, "the quietest of the quiet, the bravest of the brave", acted as a henchman for shady subjects so that they could let off steam. “Man has to live, even in this bleak, wild time”, the old friend tells the narrator. His guests enabled him to live his science, especially since his subject area, Coptic , is one of the most fruitless arts in the world. It is certainly not nice to run a gaming room, but the friend must understand: "Coptic must be".

Bruno Frank is one of those writers who revealed little about himself, and autobiographical traces in his work are also rare. In this story (and in his political novella ) he allows memories of his student days in Tübingen and Tübingen to flow into it, yes, he even mentions a school friend, the later orientalist Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1885–1963), whom he met and probably did at the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart had met again in his time in Munich in the twenties. It is not surprising that Bruno Frank, who in his twenties indulged a passion for gaming, reveals the players and their behavior at the gaming table in vivid images in front of the reader's eyes in his polished language. The novel Passions , which appeared a decade earlier, is also dedicated to the passion for gaming that dominated a gambler's messed up life.

La Buena Sombra, novella (1916)

Europe, Africa and America by William Blake , 1796.

The novella first appeared in 1916 during the First World War in the collection The Heaven of Disappointed. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen in Munich. Volume: 14 pages.

An early summer evening during the First World War. The first-person narrator and his comrade Hildebrand have camped a little apart from their unit. Actually, Hildebrand says, he doesn't really know why he signed up for military service. In Buenos Aires he recently had a good job as an emcee in a nightclub, the La Buena Sombra, a kind of music hall where singers from all over the world performed. Everyone was satisfied with him, "because I really knew something to say about each of the ladies". He had had a colorful and adventurous life, and bourgeois straightforwardness had never been his thing. There was actually only one thing in life that gave him joy and strength: beautiful women. He loved them all, all of them, all of them - and they loved him. "You have to be so kind to these poor, sweet creatures, you have to tell them again and again that they are charming, each one of them, each one of them the meaning of the world."

But there were also the ugly ones, and he worried that they didn't get a piece of the big cake of life, "and at this point I always thought I could pay my debt a little". And so he asked a wallflower to dance every now and then, or when he passed women who “looked unnoticed, abandoned, forgotten”, he said softly “how lovely, how delightful” or “como bonita, como bonita” etc. In his restaurant there was a singer who was also one of the disadvantaged, and when he tried to make her “a little happy” in his own way, she said: “How tender you are to me, Herr Hildebrand, to me and to little Ellen Blaker, who has nothing to do with either, just like me. ... Actually, Mr. Hildebrand, should you so hot as our whole establishment is: La Buena Sombra ". The next morning Hildebrand met his fate, and it “remains strange that he chose this very last evening to tell so much about himself”.

Passions, Novella (1914)

"The Card Players" by Florent Willems , around 1880.

The novella first appeared in the magazine Simplicissimus on August 17, 1914. Then it was in 1916 in the anthology Der Himmel der Enttäuschten. Novellas in the publisher Albert Langen published in Munich. Extent: 16 pages.

The first-person narrator , a doctor, represents his colleague Kuffner, who works as a doctor for the poor “out of pure enthusiasm for his job and for helping” and who became critically infected. One evening the doctor is called to a little girl who, without actually being sick, is dying. Her parents were "extremely consumptive" and had married "although it was foolish and pernicious". “Everything,” he thought, “what passion does ends badly.” “That poor gray body! This is now the fruit of a red-hot love. Slag, slag! "

On the way back through the quarter, where poor whores huddle in the corner of the gate, he is surprised by the rain and he escapes into a seedy dugout in which three men surrender to the game of cards. He recognizes one of the men, it is the Swede Count Söderborg, once notorious as an "uninhibited hazard and pathologically inclined spendthrift". They start talking and Söderborg brags about his achievements in famous European venues.

Despite his shabby appearance, you can still tell the old player his sophistication. Soon “the ladies of the quarter” will arrive. They also take a seat at the gaming table, and the twelve-person round begins a lively game in which Söderborg usually loses. When the doctor turns to go, Söderborg accompanies him to the door. Yes, he is a “passionné”, one who is obsessed with gambling, and is therefore rarely lucky. The small sums he lost to "these people" every evening didn't matter. A deceased friend had invested money for him as a precaution and he could live comfortably with the pension.

The narrator concludes his report with a melancholy outlook: “I thought of Kuffner, who ... perhaps paid for his medical passion with death, I saw the poor gray body of my little patient in front of me; Slag of passion, I thought .... My path was crowded with swarms of spirits who had not been able to submit ...: people happy, scholars and poets, to whom passion and devotion prevented the success of mediocrity. "

Bruno Frank, who was also passionate about gambling in his twenties, knew what he was talking about when he wrote this novella. Almost a decade later he wrote the novella Koptisch muss sein , which also revolves around the passion for gaming, albeit from a different point of view.

Lies as a State Principle, essay (1939)

→ Main article: Lies as a state principle .

Nina, Comedy (1931)

→ Main article: Nina . Volume: 155 pages.

The celebrated film diva Nina Gallas is tired of her fame and the stress of work, especially since there is hardly any time left for life with her husband. She leaves her career to her film double without the public realizing it, and withdraws into private life.

PQ, the critic, short story (1914)

The story was published in the March magazine on July 4, 1914. Length: 3 pages.

The writer A. W. U. is on his last legs, surrounded by his friends. His last work, the novel “Mute Forces”, had just come off the printing press. "If he just tears you down ..." he pleadingly speaks to himself. What is meant is the critic “P. Q. the Feared! He, on whose pen the eye of all German writers has hung for so many years, by whom to be praised means eternal damnation, and whose curse is bliss. ”A young poet rushes to the newspaper and begs the editor, in PQ's To leave a review copy of two miserable chapters uncut and thus to give his friend a salted slap. After three days the criticism appears with the longed-for slap. A. W. U. reads them, and with the "expression of the most intimate bliss" he breathes his life out.

Pantomime, novella (1910)

The novella was published in 1910 in the magazine Licht und Schatten. Monthly magazine for black and white art and poetry and in 1911 in the anthology refugees in the publisher Albert Langen in Munich. The title of the anthology refers to "the central motif of the collection of novels, the protagonists' attempts to escape - the flight into life, the flight into death, the flight into art". Volume: 21 pages.

On an inhospitable March night, a young couple strolls close to the railway embankment and sits down on a nearby bench.

Alexander had met Clara at a dance, and her enchanting smell evoked feelings of love and devotion in him. He got into a passion and moved into an apartment with Clara. The young woman, "this big creature, slow in thinking and all movements", was not up to his onslaught, so that her blood finally caught fire "from the frenzy of this unscrupulous boy". Alexander sank "in his sensual and at the same time sublime passion", neglected everything and piled up debt upon debt. His relative, who was funding his studies, got wind of this and ordered him to break off the relationship on the spot. The situation seemed hopeless to Alexander, and his blindness led him to believe that the only solution was to commit suicide together. Clara could not avoid it, because the separation from her lover was unthinkable for her. "A hidden law seemed to have stipulated that Alexander and his mistress should complete a certain crowd of young people, foolish young people scattered in pairs across the globe, who, as in every month in this month of March, were poor numbers of a predetermined number, had thrown away their lives ... And as a tool of their deed they had to use a train, the train D 25. "

They lie across one of the rails and wait for the horror of their painful death. In their last moments they think: “Did I love you? Did I really love her ...? How it thunders and roars! ”And:“ How that thunders and roars! I never loved him - a green boy ... But he chatted me. ”When the thunder of the express train is over, both find themselves - alive. The train had passed on the other platform. Both rise and each walk away in a different direction.

Pearl Comedy, Acting (1929)

The marriage of the manufacturer Siethoff is in a serious crisis. He is secretly keeping a lover, and his wife Wera feels that she has lost her husband's love. The architect Peter Mack, an acquaintance of the family who is in love with Wera, has found out that Siethoff has a relationship with Cora Peters and that she wears the same black pearl necklace as Siethoff's wife. He suspects that Siethoff gave the real necklace to his lover and put a copy on his wife. Mack invades Wera undetected as a burglar and forces them to surrender the (false) chain. Invited by Cora, he swaps the wrong necklace for the real one without being noticed. He brings the real chain back to its original owner and confesses his love, which Wera reciprocates. Siethoff, willy- nilly, takes the wrong necklace to worship his Cora.

Political novella, novella (1928)

→ Main article: Political novella .

Requiem, poems (1913)

→ Main article: Requiem (cycle of poems) .

Brother-in-law Kronos, novella (1916)

The hurrying time (depicting Chronos) by Eberhard Encke , 1919–1922.

The novella was published in the second year of the First World War in the magazine Jugend on May 19, 1916. Length: 19 pages.

The first-person narrator , a German soldier in World War I, sees death in a dream face after the “bad fire” of the day (“he wasn't wearing the bony dress in which you think you know him, but black civilian clothes”). Death sardonically asks the soldier: “We were afraid today?” He cannot forgive the soldier for how he once fearlessly ridiculed him. After initially denying it and under intense pressure from death, the soldier slowly remembers the long-forgotten incident.

“At that time immemorial, when there was still peace, in Paris, on a May day” the soldier met a woman “with whom I was longingly familiar from Germany”. He manages to arrange a rendezvous with the lady for the afternoon. But as he prepares for the exit, "a rushing rain came down". In this storm, if at all, he could only reach his destination with a cab, but the streets were deserted and there was no car in sight. Suddenly an empty hearse came galloping up. In his desperation, he throws himself in the way of the car and gets the driver to drive him to the restaurant that has been arranged. When he enters, everyone is horrified, as if he were a bringer of death, or as his friend Agathe puts it: "Your heroism is gloomy enough for the people anyway." And he asks in horror: "Heroism?" he "wanted to mock death with it".

Death does not seem to hold the soldier against his former thoughtlessness. He complains about the supposed heroism of the war participants and that they seem to have lost all respect for him. The soldier wakes up and “a piece of paper crackled in my tunic. ... No paper on earth crackles like the rough, bluish paper in Agathe's letters! "

The novel title “Brother-in-law Kronos” alludes to Goethe's poem “To Brother-in-Law Kronos”, in which “Brother-in-law Kronos ”, the Greek god of time, steers the stagecoach on a journey that is reinterpreted as the journey of life. In Frank's novella, three stanzas from Goethe's poem underline the journey with the hearse, while the soldier fears for his long-awaited rendezvous in a race against time.

Sixteen thousand francs, novella (1940)

The novella first appeared in 1940 in the January / February issue of the exile magazine Maß und Wert, co-edited by Thomas Mann . It was then published in the same year by Querido Verlag , an exile publisher in Amsterdam. Volume: 37 pages, sections 1–11.

“The carnivores of the battlefield”, drawing by Herbert König , 1866.

Before the First World War, the family of law student Michael Raumer was very wealthy. The father ran a traditional export business in Berlin. When the war broke out, the business collapsed and the family lost all of their fortune. In order to ensure the livelihood of his family, Raumer took a job as a representative at a windy insurance company. His superior, a gambler with an adventurous biography, had left his daughter Marion from his relationship with a Cuban woman, a classy beauty that Raumer fell in love with. A year after the outbreak of war, shortly before his draft, both married.

Three years later, shortly before the end of the war, Raumer found sixteen thousand-franc notes from a captain during a routine search of fallen French soldiers. Instead of delivering his find according to regulations, he keeps the money. “In this way he became a robber of a dead enemy.” The exertions of the last few weeks had severely affected his health and he was admitted to a field hospital with meningitis. After several months of convalescence, he resumed his law studies at the end of the war. He allegedly makes his living through a "friend's loan", but actually with the stolen money.

After completing his studies, Raumer takes on a job as a criminal judge. He is the author of a textbook on a major criminal law reformer that has attracted widespread attention. The young Weimar Republic also endeavored to humanize the penal system, and Raumer, "who had so decidedly qualified himself through his book and his performance in office," was transferred to the Department of Justice, where he soon became the second man in the penal system . The emotional wound that he has inflicted on himself by his own crime does not let go of him and drives him to tireless activity. He fills his office with great conscientiousness and publishes other specialist books. More and more he neglects his wife and a few years after the birth of a son she leaves him. His son, who idolizes and admires him, stays with him.

After the Nazis came to power, Raumer, as a figurehead of humane penal systems, quickly became the target of the injustice system. To avoid the threat of arrest, he flees to Paris with his young son. There he visits the grandfather of the fallen captain whom he robbed in the war, with the intention of paying off his debt. From the well-to-do, aristocratic grandfather he learns that on the eve of his death his grandson had won "a nice sum" in a card game that the dead man no longer carried with him. Raumer leaves his grandfather and "he would have liked to cry and laugh at the same time about the strange late gift that his fate had given him."

Verses in War, Poems (1915)

→ Main article: Stanzas in war .

Days of the King, narrative (1924)

→ Main article: Days of the King .

The suitcase, novella (1943)

" Heracles at the Crossroads " by Albrecht Dürer , 1498.

The novella appeared in 1943 during the Second World War in the anthology Heart of Europe edited by Klaus Mann , which brought together authors from 21 countries. The printed text is only available in the English translation by Barbara Hallewell. The German manuscript "Der Handkoffer" is kept in the Monacensia, the literature archive of the Munich City Library. Volume: 11 pages.

On one of his regular trips from the provinces to Berlin, a businessman stays in his usual hotel. When he opens his suitcase, he notices that it has been swapped at the train station. Enchanted by the scent of the perfume that flows towards him and delighted that the contents of the suitcase must belong to a woman, the image of a beguiling young woman emerges in the inner eye of the honest man who enjoys a happy family life with his wife and sons . Initially willing to return the suitcase, an astonishing change takes place inside. He keeps the suitcase, the next day the chambermaid arranges the contents of the suitcase in the room, waiting for the lady to whom the suitcase belongs. These circumstances increase his imagination, and in the coming days he sinks deeper and deeper into his longing for the beautiful stranger.

When he wakes up one morning, he realizes that his day and night dreams were just an excuse to distract him from himself. Apparently he is at a fateful crossroads. He will run away from his previous life, leave everything and everyone behind, in order to face the adventure of an uncertain future. When he returns to his room in the evening, he hears quiet weeping - his wife has come to pick him up. Completely upset, he sways back and forth on how to explain the grotesque situation to his wife, how to make her understand what is really wrong with him. But the woman's things lying around seem all too clear, and the real truth is so unlikely and so much worse that he doesn't even try to defend himself. "An unbearable pity overcame him, and he said what any man would have said in his place:" There was no other woman here "". And the most unexpected thing in the world happened - she believed him and took him in her arms. “She believed him. All the steadfast evidence that caught her eye under the bright electric light was nothing against his word. ”And he realized that this was the most wonderful experience of his life and would always be.

literature

See: Bruno Frank, literature .

Footnotes

1. ↑ You can already see the bestial faces, great dane bites, red stubble under the green eyes ...
2. ↑ Oh, the wretched!
3. ↑ # Frank 1921.1 .
4. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 112.
5. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 112.
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 113.
7. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 112.
8. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 112.
9. ↑ # Frank 1934.1 .
10. ↑ # Frank 1935.1 .
11. ↑ # Frank 1957.1 .
12. ↑ #Landshoff 2001 , page 352.
13. ↑ #Frank 2010.1 .
14. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
15. ↑ Eckhard Ullrich points to the almost prophetic anticipation of the Nazi system of extermination: "As if Bruno Frank had foreseen the death factories of German fascism, the inconceivable bestiality of the" recovery "of the mass murder victims of that regime ..." ( #Ullrich 2015.1 ).
16. ↑ A Kux was a share in a mine.
17. ↑ # Frank 1921.6 .
18. ↑ # Frank 1921.1 .
19. ↑ # Frank 1920.1 .
20. ↑ # Frank 1924.5 .
21. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
22. ↑ # Frank 1910.1 .
23. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
24. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
25. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 47.
26. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
27. ↑ # Frank 1921.5 .
28. ↑ According to an old belief, the pelican should nourish its young with its own blood. See also: pelicans, iconography .
29. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
30. ↑ The murder is historically guaranteed.
31. ↑ # Frank 1909.2 .
32. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
33. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
34. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
35. ↑ # Frank 1908.1 .
36. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
37. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
38. ↑ # Frank 1933.1 .
39. ↑ # Frank 1933.2 .
40. ↑ # Frank 1937.1 .
41. ↑ # Mann, Erika 1991 , pages 315-316.
42. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
43. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
44. ↑ # Frank 1921.1 .
45. ↑ # Frank 1921.1 .
46. ↑ #Ferchl 2015 , page 122, #Scheffel 1916 , page 195–197.
47. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
48. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.
49. ↑ #Schaffner 1911 , page 1768.
50. ↑ #Bab 1918 , page 413.
51. ↑ The protagonist was not a bank director, but a director of an industrial company ( #Frank 1911.1 , page 171).
52. ↑ # Günther 1930 , page 512.
53. ↑ #Ackerknecht 1956 , page 130.
54. ↑ #Frank 1982.1 , page 384.
55. ↑ #Frank 1927.1 , page 384.
56. ↑ # Frank 1920.1 .
57. ↑ # Frank 1926.2 .
58. ↑ # Frank 1922.2 .
59. ↑ # Frank 1924.1 .
60. ↑ # Frank 1943.1 .
61. ↑ # Frank 1923.1 .
62. ↑ # Frank 1926.1 .
63. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
64. ↑ La Buena Sombra = The good shadow.
65. ↑ # Frank 1916.1 .
66. ↑ # Frank 1914.2 .
67. ↑ # Frank 1910.3 .
68. ↑ # Frank 1911.1 .
69. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 48.