Twelve Bismarcks
Twelve Bismarcks is a cycle of novels by Walter Flex in which he depicts important epochs in the family history of the Brandenburg aristocratic family of the Bismarcks in seven stories .
Conditions of origin
From 1910 to 1913, Flex was employed as a private tutor for the grandchildren of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in Varzin and Schönhausen . There he got to know the family tradition and found material for literary design in it. He dedicated a drama to the most important representative of the family in the Middle Ages, Nikolaus von Bismarck (The Chancellor Klaus von Bismarck) . From the following family history he picked out individual persons and tried to have several representatives of the family appear in one story.
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The Huguenot Cornet Abraham Bismarck
A French Catholic finds the cornet Abraham Bismarck on the battlefield after the Battle of Montcontour , in which he fought on the side of the Huguenot army under Coligny , and takes him into care. When she realizes that she has fallen in love with him, she decides to kill him so that he does not fall into the hands of the Inquisition.
This novella also mentions Ludolf von Bismarck, the founder of the Schönhauser line of the Bismarcks, who also fought as a cornet under Coligny.
Two Bismarcks under Swedish driving
Here Flex links the fate of Valentin Busso von Bismarck with that of his son Christoph Friedrich. When he brings the flags captured by Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in the Battle of Fehrbellin to Berlin, he meets a war comrade of his father, who fought with him in the Thirty Years' War under the Swedish general Torstensson . Christoph Friedrich hears that his father was almost killed by the peasants whom he had tried to save from the attack of the Swedish general.
The Siberian days of Mr. Ludolf August von Bismarck
Ludolf August von Bismarck , who killed his servant in anger, went to Russia because, although he was not punished in Prussia, he was no longer promoted.
In Russia he was promoted to general and governor, but then fell from grace and was banished to Siberia. There he meets a preceptor with whom he easily argues about the merits of active life in the big world and thinking in a small corner, each describing the other's life situation as the one worth striving for.
He incites the preceptor to burn down the governor's palace and then to flee undetected and start a new existence. He tries to do that, but then shrinks back from the act. Ludolf August can - as he had foreseen - soon return to his position of honor, but he has now gained more distance from himself. But the Preceptor renounces Bismarck's offer to free him from Siberia. He doesn't want to get out of the small corner because he's now afraid of “the world”.
August Friedrich and the field preacher
August Friedrich complains that he is a soldier and that he has no access to God. On the day of the battle, the field preacher is so caught up in the action that he shows the troops flowing back the enemy and calls out: “There is God!” Like the other soldiers, August Friedrich is carried away by the call, storms forward and falls. In the end, the chaplain envies his soldier death.
Two days in the life of Carl Alexander
On the first day, Carl Alexander prays with his son Ferdinand, before he goes to the soldiers at the age of twelve, and obliges him to never harm the honor of his mother, who died early in his life.
On the second day, his nephew comes to visit to ask the hand of his daughter, who died 19 years ago. His son Ferdinand takes full advantage of the comedy of the situation.
The Lützower in Schönhausen
In May 1813, officers of the Lützower Jäger and gymnastics father Jahn were sitting in Schönhausen with the Ferdinand von Bismarcks family. It is reported that when a son of the Bismarck family was baptized in 1809, a young woman had a vision of Schill , who was executed on the same day. Theodor Körner remembers that he had such a vision when young volunteers were sworn in.
Hans Leerkamp and Major von Bismarck's squad of hussars
Hans Leerkamp saw how a marauding Frenchman killed his four-year-old nephew in 1813 and was prevented by his grandfather from taking revenge on the Frenchman.
He joins the Mecklenburg Hussars under the leadership of Major Leopold von Bismarck. His role model helps him, after many months in which he clung to his thoughts of revenge, to finally feel like the brother of all fighters in the wars of liberation.
Classification and assessment
Although Walter Flex describes all seven stories as novellas in his preliminary remarks, not all of them meet the usual criteria. While the stories Two Bismarck under Swedish flags, Die Siberischen Tage des Herr Ludolf August Bismarck and Hans Leerkamp, and Der Hugenottenkornett (first published in the Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung) can be addressed as novellas, they are the other for stories of different characters. What they all have in common is that, although they refer to episodes from family history, they are designed quite freely.
In Hans Leerkamp , on the one hand, the glorification of war and, on the other hand, the striving for a soldier's ethos emerge particularly clearly, both of which are characteristic of his main work The Wanderer Between Two Worlds . On the one hand, the war is given religious consecration, on the other hand, Flex speaks of the “phrase about a 'just war'” and has Leopold Bismarck say that debt should be paid off.
Single receipts
- ↑ The family branch for which Walter Flex worked as a private tutor also belonged to this line.
- ↑ “At that hour the father's house was given to him; he became a member of a people that was itself only in the process of becoming. For the second time Leopold Bismarck made him responsible for the Prussian flag. ”(Walter Flex: Zwölf Bismarcks , Leipzig 1925, p. 223)
- ↑ Evening prayer to the mother and sentimental journey of two cousins Bismarck are published in Westermanns monthly , August Friedrich von Bismarck in the daily review .
- ↑ “He was an intruder who had reached for clean weapons with dirty fingers, he had tasted the spirit of the time like an unworthy one who reaches for the cup of the Lord with unclean thoughts, and in the Lord's Supper becomes aware of the divine power that holds him damned. The wild spirit, previously its support and justice, was now transformed into leprosy. "(Walter Flex: Zwölf Bismarcks , Leipzig 1925, p. 216)
- ↑ "He found the contagiousness of the pure, good spirit that went through the squadron and wanted to make the phrase of the 'just war' a living truth." (Walter Flex: Zwölf Bismarcks , Leipzig 1925, p. 201)
- ↑ "We rode out to pay off our own and others' debts, not to make them bigger." (Walter Flex: Zwölf Bismarcks , Leipzig 1925, p. 223)