A Countess' Birthday (eBook)

English and German Edition

Fritz Reuter (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
104 Seiten
neobooks Self-Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-7549-8893-0 (ISBN)

Infos

One fine morning, it was 29 May 1842, I saw a carriage stop in front of a friend's house, which my friend was about to board with another friend who belonged to both of us. 'Where to?' I asked. 'To S.,' was the answer. 'What are you going to do there?' - 'Oh,' cried my lively friend Fischer: 'Birthday - Venetian regatta - Bucentaur - little angels - Waren's fishermen's servants - cannons - fisherman's sting - beer and brandy - people - Countess X. - bratwurst.''

Fritz Reuter, actually: Heinrich Ludwig Christian Friedrich Reuter (* 7 November 1810 in Stavenhagen; ? 12 July 1874 in Eisenach) was a German poet and writer of Low German. Together with Klaus Groth, he is considered one of the founders of modern Low German literature. Thomas Westphal lives and works in Rostock, Germany.

Textauszug

Second day.

The post-party to F.

Motto:

We sing and say of the Count so gladly,

But rather of the Countess.

For he who only praises the most gracious lord,

The bitterest rebuke, that doth grieve him;

He hath done much, but she more,

She is worthy of our praise and laud,

For of all that is straight and all that is crooked.

She is but the causa movens.

The following morning, Phoebus and so on, golden chariots and so on, rose-fingered Eos and so on, the silver clouds swam, and so on. In short, it was a gloriously bright day and the sun shone over the whole of Mecklenburg and hopefully, and to all appearances, also over Pomerania and the Ukermark; for we are not such egoists as the subjects of the von Reuß-Greiz-Schleiz and Lobenstein, who only cared for themselves and prayed some 20 years ago:

Lord God, give rain and sunshine

For Reuß-Greiz-Schleiz and Lobenstein,

And if the others want something too,

They can tell you themselves.

Fischer, whom I had arranged to pick up for our festive trip today, came to meet me ready to go and twisted his mouth into a friendly good morning. When I speak here of my friend Fischer's mouth, this is, as I note as a conscientious historian, only a euphemistic phrase, for the poor man does not have what my beautiful readers think of as a man's mouth, but nature has only given him a round hole with leather flaps as a surrogate for it, into which he had put a beautiful rose in full bloom this morning. - After I had reproached him most tenderly for the horrible combination of yellow and pink, we left. I do not want to describe how we hurled through green meadows and groves, through alleyways flowing with grain, left to our own thoughts, I do not want to tell what we told ourselves, I do not want to philosophise about what we philosophised about, but I simply want to report that after a few hours we reached the borders of the estate and crossed its marks.

Passers-by told us that it had "not yet started", and so we decided to fortify ourselves first with a piece of trench lace. My short-legged friend was a bit worn out by the tour - no wonder, since he had always had to take two short steps instead of my one long one, so that we probably appeared to any spectators like a dactylus on the move, since I was leading the way: - ˘ ˘ - ˘ ˘ . We had rested for some time when we saw a cloud of dust swirling in the distance, preceded slowly by a human figure. Fischer, easily finished with the word, said: "Behold, a herd of fat hams, following their leader quite obediently at heel." I found this hypothesis quite plausible, especially as the Berliners are used to having 'wat Jrienes and young Mohrrieben' at this time of year, where even a fat mutton is very 'pleasant'. But we were significantly mistaken; they were not wool carriers, but flat carriers, the flaxen-haired youth of the gentry, who, led by their schoolmaster, were commanded to F. as today's acteurs. Skinny, scrawny, like the seven skinny cows of Pharaoh, the schoolmaster staggered along; luxuriant, fat, like the seven fat ones, the future men of fortune pushed and rolled behind him; they were not costumed, for they played nature, barefooted and bareheaded they resembled eternity, they had no beginning and no end; exuberant joy burst from their brick-red faces, and above them shone the thatched roof of their head hair; merriment twitched in their brown fists, and with the humour that shone in their eyes, I would have wanted to provoke the schoolmasters' guild of all Germany for eternity.

And in front of this boisterous crowd strode their dreaded despot, newly equipped by the grace and favour of the mistress. He wore a grey nanking leggown, a grey nanking skirt, a grey nanking cap, and a grey nanking face; he looked like a schoolroom painted grey in grey, like the walking sample card of a traveller κατ' εξοχην who makes in grey nanking, like a 'Muschüken' dipped in chocolate. Thus he strode along, like the preposition ante before a heap of irregular participia, and excited in me an unnameable mixture of yawning and laughter.

"Don't laugh!" said Fischer, "for know that this poor man is originally a lion of the cat race called man: primus inter pares et fruges consumere natus, born to a red collar and red rashes, he has ended up with grey Nanking; an envious fate has neutralised the advantages of birth and forced him to realise that even the thoroughbred must dry up for lack of nourishment; in short, he is an impoverished nobleman:

It is an old story,

But it remains eternally new,

And to whom it just happens

His trousers are torn in two.

"But don't think," Fischer continues seriously, "that I want to pour out my ridicule on the old man, my ridicule is only directed at the dilemma into which wicked time has led him, it is directed at the way in which a comrade of his class has pulled him out of it. Out of deep distress he cries out to the mistress of the local estate; she also takes care of him and makes him a village schoolmaster, - but he must renounce his innate nobility, his birthright, for this dish of lentils and the little word: of, it is taken from him, so that it is not stained by the school dust, just as one takes off one's Sunday skirt when one goes to do dirty work."

""Fischer! Fishermen!" I exclaimed, "that's unbelievable, that would be the most fantastic inconsistency and principlessness, that would mean overthrowing the whole doctrine of blood, which has been upheld with great difficulty for centuries and is based on inbreeding. No, how could a nobleman by the grace of God be induced, even by a nobleman by the even higher grace of God, to abandon the little word "of" before his name, the little word "high" before his well-born? and then: how should he deny his physical characteristics, such as short ears, small hands and others? That is to say, to open the eyes of us canaille, to make us see how money is a necessary ingredient of nobility, how nobility is therefore nothing immanent, sacramental, indebile! that would be, as Talleyrand says, more than a political crime, that would be a political mistake!""

"But, my dear child," Fischer replied, "are you so much of yesterday that you do not see how Principlessness has penetrated even into the venerable institution of the nobility and is destroying it by mesalliances and bourgeois acquisitions? Nowadays, life and above all good life are more important than all principle; a schoolmaster's post of 200 thalers is preferred to the nobility, because the latter can no longer be sent to the mint of historical prejudices and receive its bare hard thalers in return, as was the case in former times. And as far as the doctrine of the full blood and of mixed marriages is concerned, one has come to the opinion, together with the English, that the half-blood is better suited to practical use, and that the marriage of the word "of" with a full bourgeois purse provides a product which helps most easily over the troubles of life. Look, my boy: convictions no longer exist; the Jew who has fallen in love with a Christian woman lets himself be baptized without further ado - of course, such a fellow then seems to one like the white page between the Old and New Testaments - and the nobleman throws his nobility overboard without further ado when he entertains him, for first comes the money and then the nobility. That's why they don't ennoble anyone who has no money, even if they transfer him among the saints while he's still alive, but only knights of manors, of which we have many warning examples in the country."

Anxiously I had looked round during this diatribe, and with a grateful shove sigh I exclaimed, "Gottlob! The Gensd'armen are not here!" while Fischer continued to make his speeches, which were offensive to everything honourable, even to feudal law; but in my heart I tried to erase these speeches with thick censorship lines, so as not to lose all respect for the reciprocated nobility and its virgin monasteries. The so-called native nobility and the received nobility, who are equal to them by virtue of the Reception, claim the enjoyment of the income of the three Mecklenburg virgin monasteries of Malchow, Dobbertin and Ribnitz alone. With great vehemence, this fisherman contested my view that certain physical advantages, such as short ears, small hands, congenital epaulettes, etc., had developed among the nobility; he cited several examples, which unfortunately could not be denied, of quite ordinary, even extraordinarily long ears among this race of people, the latter phenomenon being especially to be found in a great stiffness of the neck.

"In your simplicity," continued Fischer, becoming warm and coarse, "you seem to think that, just as a German who emigrates to Texas will always be recognised as such, so a nobleman who, as the Freemasons say, has covered up and calls himself Mr Fischer, for my sake, should always be able to be found out among the commoners, like a merino among the greasy sheep. This is an enormous simpering on your part, for I tell you that I have seen the Cavalier most perfectly represented by waiters and barber's assistants travelling as crooks, who pretended to be noblemen, and on the other hand I have met born noblemen...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.1.2023
• Verlagsort: Berlin
• Sprache: deutsch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Birthday • Countess • Geburtstag • Gräfin
• ISBN-10: 3-7549-8893-X / 375498893X
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7549-8893-0 / 9783754988930