Windmills

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Windmühlen is a short story by the German writer Arno Schmidt (1914–1979), which first appeared in 1960 in the student magazine concrete and in 1964 in the anthology Kühe in Halbtrauer .

content

The lifeguard's house in the Hänigsen swimming pool

The location of the action is the municipality of Hänigsen, southeast of Celle , and the swimming pool there. In the story the place is called "Frimmersen". Two men on a car ride interrupt their journey to deliver a letter to the lifeguard there. From the raised lifeguard's house, he watches the sunbathing crowd in the swimming pool, next to him an apparently homosexual is doing the same. During the carelessly relaxed chat of the four men, the homosexual reports on his recent experiences in Italy, then after the lifeguard has read the letter, the latter reports desperately that he has been seconded to Urningsleben for four weeks to represent the lifeguard there. He describes his experiences there last year, where loneliness, poor accommodation, bizarre tavern guests and, above all, six constantly moving windmill models would have excited him so much that he threw them into the pond with the help of two paddlers, but then regretfully took them out again pinned to their old location. After this report, the two visitors leave the swimming pool and continue their journey.

Themes and motifs

The main theme of the story is male homosexuality. This was not recognized for two decades because Schmidt had used the means of dream work to cover up and play down the subject, which was still delicate at the time. The topic is clearly recognizable in the place name “ Urningsleben ”, which can be translated into common German as “Schwulenhausen”. Homosexuality appears personified in the figure of the bather Eugen, who wears brocade swimming trunks and a foot-length black and yellow striped bathrobe with a dragon motif. Another theme, appropriate to the location of the action, the swimming pool, is voyeurism , a behavior that is particularly clearly represented by the homosexual bather "Eugen". He looks at the carnal offerings of the swimming pool through binoculars that the narrator also borrows. “Eugen” with its sonic proximity to “eyes” and “eyes” is an element of the eye theme, the diverse manifestations of which Thomas Baukes has demonstrated in the text of the story. As Goerdten has demonstrated, the entire scene in “Urningsleben” turns out to be a genital landscape in which the phallic windmills form the central motif. The lifeguard's confusion, into which he is driven by the constantly rotating blades of six windmill models, is an expression of the unconscious and repressed same-sex parts that are active in him, which are awakened from their latency by the stimulating sight and mobilize resistance and defense. His inner distress culminates in a dream of "jabos" ( fighter bombers ) flying in circles and shooting at him. Ralf Georg Czapla , whose interpretation aims to provide evidence of historical and mythological structures and motifs, sees the story as a literary implementation of the Barbarossa and Kyffhäuser myths: “With Schmidt, the Kyffhäuser myth becomes insofar through the confrontation with psychoanalysis reinterpreted when the mythical elements combine with those of the dream and become part of a sexual anthropology in which literature and history are equally included. "

people

"The white, sensibly gaunt, tower giant ..." ( Arno Schmidt )
  • The narrator , who remains nameless, and his friend Richard represent the amusingly tolerant attitude towards homosexuality that was widespread (at the time the story was written). They communicate without a word when the narrator sees Eugen's brocaded bathing trunks: “(But Richard, who noticed my confusion, immediately turned his eyes so high; and telegraphed with my whole face so that I understood relatively quickly that I can take a hint .) “At the end of the story, however, they too are affected by the orbit of the prevailing theme:“ <Wrumm: Wrumm!>; (Almost exactly under the bottom; embarrassing.) Slowly gliding away. ”says the two protagonists as they leave . Ralf Georg Czapla suspects that Schmidt conceived the narrator “as a counterfact of the Sultan of Egypt”. In the figure of Richard he sees "one of the outstanding figures of the third crusade, namely King Richard I, the Lionheart of England" embodied.
  • Eugen, the bizarrely dressed handsome boy, whose slender slimness and graceful manner of speaking characterize him as a gay, is always referred to in the story as “The Striped” (after his yellow and black striped bathrobe). His succinct comments on the pool attendant's stories identify him as a psychologically astute connoisseur, who with his objections refers to the hidden meaning of the speeches and the things described. In response to the narrator's statement, inspired by the intense heat of the sun, that there should be millions of degrees inside the stars, he says that this must be very uncomfortable, and alludes to the idea that the "stars" could also mean rounded body parts, in which there are elevated temperatures and in which one is completely or with a small part. Schmidt used the word "unpleasant" with a revealing intention. In his Karl May study, Sitara , it is repeatedly written as "onpleasant", which indicates a masturbatory sexual act. "Eugen" reports on a trip to Italy on which he and "Geert Wilhelm. And Sebastian, and Bübchen-Pauli; and Ernst August - "" above Udine, rented a lonely hunting lodge on a delightful little lake "and other anecdotes such as collecting mushrooms and botanizing in the undergrowth, fish and their particularly tasty eyes and other things that can be understood as a dream-symbolic transformation of sexual ideas. Ralf Georg Czapla sees Pope Eugene III in "Eugene" . (1145–1153), who had called for the second crusade at the time.
  • The lifeguard has "block chocolate-colored shoulders" and a "belly made of old copper sheet, feet like the Blessed Queen Luise ... the right eyebrow twisted martially" etc., he is a "chunk" with a "115 cm chest", so a decidedly masculine one Type. According to Goerdten, he represents the heterosexually oriented type who has repressed a strong same-sex drive component. According to Goerdten's view, the fear of Urningsleben and the panic-like state in which the lifeguard got caught can only be meaningfully explained by the defensive efforts of the ego and the superego against homoerotic impulses. The lifeguard is linked to the Karl May sphere, which is always homoerotic with Arno Schmidt, by adding a very uncertain name attribute: “'Glad me -'; (Was his name Fritz Bartels? His last name was difficult to understand.) “ Fritz Barthel was a bizarre Karl May admirer who, in his 1955 book Last Adventures around Karl May, claimed to have come into contact with May's soul through magical practices be. Ralf Georg Czapla recognizes the emperor Friedrich Barbarossa in the lifeguard and justifies this equation with the fact that the ruler who drowned in the river Saleph is to be equated with the lifeguard who dominates a swimming pool due to his death in water.

The paddlers

With the paddlers who suddenly appear in Urningsleben, an element comes into the narrative that contradicts realistic narration. Like the lifeguard, they get irritated by the windmills and help break off and reattach these penis equivalents and then disappear from the narrative just as suddenly as they appeared. In a pond with duckweed, bog soil, willow and alder thickets that have no inflow or outflow, paddle boating makes little sense. According to Goerdten, the paddlers are a (superficially) nonsensical element that can similarly only appear in dreams, and only if it is linked to the dream topics by other links. In the case of paddlers, Goerdten suggests an etymistic explanation of their appearance. He puts the word “paddler” in relation to the English slang word “to paddle”, which in German can be translated as “caress”. Furthermore, all “pud” and “ped” derivatives are added, such as the “pudenda”, the “pederast” and “pedicator”. Being busy one behind the other in the boat gives further links to homosexuality, which, as in the entire story, is also about the paddlers. The paddler motif is an indication of the dreaminess of the entire Urningsleben episode.

reception

For a long time the story was seen as a realistic portrayal of reality. Heinrich Vormweg wrote in 1989 of “everyday reality”, “which is almost frighteningly vivid in Schmidt's drawing. And in its real isolation it becomes an example, as it were, of disoriented life, all the more directly imposing. ” Hans Wollschläger described the story in 1962 as“ the only piece of rank, of great sovereignty over the small form ”within a prose collection. In an essay by Ulrich Goerdten, which appeared in the Viennese journal protocols in 1980 , the complexity and variety of meanings of the story was described for the first time. In the subtitle of this essay, reference was made to the use of dream structures in the story: Arno Schmidt's story Windmühlen read as a dream text . In Goerdten's anthology published in 2011 (see bibliographical references), this dream structure, which was only suspected at the time, is confirmed by a message from a letter from Hans Wollschläger to Goerdten, which confirms that the Urningsleben episode in Windmühlen was a real dream of Arno Schmidt . Ralf Georg Czapla has expanded this interpretation to include mythological and historical aspects by presenting the Barbarossa and Kyffhäuser myths as the reference background for the story. Thomas Baukes takes a close look at the eye motif and its appearances in the story and establishes a connection between Schmidt's text and Edgar Allan Poe's story The Tell-Tale Heart . In his interpretation, Gregor Strick follows a remark by Helmut Heißenbüttel , who does not perceive conventional narrative dynamics in Windmühlen , but rather a language-associative dynamic. Windmühlen is a fictional text about perception, signaling and understanding, an experiment that reflects elementary literary conditions.

expenditure

Text contained in:

  • Klaus Wagenbach (ed.): The studio. Contemporary German prose . S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1962.
  • Ernst-Peter Wieckenberg (Ed.): The world tells . GB Fischer, Frankfurt 1966, pp. 28-40.
  • Arno Schmidt: windmills. 16 pieces of prose . Edited by Karsten Diettrich. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1974.
  • Arno Schmidt: tails. Five stories . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1976.
  • Arno Schmidt: windmills. Narratives . Edited by Heinrich Vormweg. Reclam, Stuttgart 1989.

Quotable edition

  • Arno Schmidt: Rural narratives . Bargfelder Edition, Werkgruppe 1, Vol. 3. Haffmans, Zurich 1987, pp. 281–292 (also published as a study edition, there volume 3.2, also pp. 281–292).

literature

  • Thomas Baukes: The lifeguard and the “Tell-Tale Heart”. Thoughts on Arno Schmidt's windmills. In: Bargfelder Bote . Delivery 85-86, 1985, pp. 26-37.
  • Ralf Georg Czapla : The Barbarossamythos in WINDMILLS . In: Ralf Georg Czapla: Myth, Sex and Dream Game. Arno Schmidt's prose cycle cows in half mourning (= literature and media studies , volume 15). Igel, Paderborn 1993, pp. 47-87.
  • Ulrich Goerdten: Symbolic in the genital area. Arno Schmidt's Windmühlen read as a dream text . In: Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidts Rural stories. Six interpretations . Bangert & Metzler, Wiesenbach 2011, pp. 9–39.
  • Günter Jürgensmeier: 'Windmills' reread . Published in the Arno Schmidt mailing list of April 22, 2013 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20160304133957/http://www.asml.de/data/GJ__Wml_I.pdf PDF).
  • Gregor Strick: Circling willlessly. A reading by Arno Schmidt's Windmühlen. In: note box. Yearbook of the Society of Arno Schmidt Readers 21, 2002, pp. 47–63.
  • Manfred Zieger: Bloomsday in Frimmersen: a holiday in hell . In: note box. Essays and works on the work of Arno Schmidt. Yearbook of the Society of Arno Schmidt Readers 28, 2011, pp. 120–143.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidt's rural stories. Six interpretations . Bangert & Metzler, Wiesenbach 2011, p. 15.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidt's rural stories . P. 16.
  3. ↑ Thomas Baukes: The lifeguard and the "Tell-Tale Heart". Reflections on Arno Schmidt's “Windmühlen” . In: Bargfelder Bote . Delivery 85-86, 1985, pp. 26-37.
  4. ↑ Ralf Georg Czapla: The Barbarossamythos in WINDMÜHLEN . In: Ralf Georg Czapla: Myth, Sex and Dream Game. Arno Schmidt's prose cycle cows in half mourning. Igel, Paderborn 1993, p. 79.
  5. ^ Arno Schmidt: Rural stories . Bargfelder Edition, Werkgruppe 1, Vol. 3, Haffmans, Zurich 1987, p. 284.
  6. ^ Arno Schmidt: Rural stories . Bargfelder Edition, Werkgruppe 1, Vol. 3, Haffmans, Zurich 1987, p. 292.
  7. ↑ Ralf Georg Czapla: Myth, Sexus and Dream Game . Igel, Paderborn 1993, p. 56.
  8. ↑ Ralf Georg Czapla: Myth, Sexus and Dream Game . Igel, Paderborn 1993, p. 55.
  9. ^ Arno Schmidt: Rural stories . Bargfelder Edition, Werkgruppe 1, Vol. 3, Haffmans, Zurich 1987, p. 284.
  10. ^ Arno Schmidt: Rural stories . Bargfelder Edition, Werkgruppe 1, Vol. 3, Haffmans, Zurich 1987, p. 285.
  11. ↑ Czapla, p. 54
  12. ^ Schmidt: Ländliche Erzählungen , p. 283.
  13. ↑ ibid p. 291.
  14. ^ Goerdten: Rural stories . P. 24.
  15. ↑ Arno Schmidt, Ländliche Erzählungen , p. 283.
  16. ↑ Czapla, p. 49ff.
  17. ^ Arno Schmidt: Windmills. Narratives . Edited by Heinrich Vormweg. Reclam, Stuttgart 1989, p. 77.
  18. ↑ Hans Wollschläger: Another anthology. From the workshop of German authors . In: concrete , November 11, 1962, p. 18.
  19. ^ Hans Wollschläger : Letter to Ulrich Goerdten . In: Bargfelder Bote , Liefer 367–368, August 2013, pp. 5–6.
  20. ↑ Ulrich Goerdten: Arno Schmidt's rural stories . P. 114.
  21. ^ Gregor Strick: Circling willlessly. A reading by Arno Schmidt's Windmühlen . In: Zettelkasten 21, pp. 47–63.
  22. ↑ Helmut Heißenbüttel: The language of Arno Schmidt . In: Hans-Michael Bock (Ed.): About Arno Schmidt. Reviews from Leviathan to Julia . Haffmans, Zurich 1984, pp. 138-139, here p. 139.
  23. ^ Gregor Strick: Circling willlessly. A reading by Arno Schmidt's Windmühlen . In: Zettelkasten 21, pp. 47–63, here p. 58.