Green Henry

Green Henry by Gottfried Keller is a partly autobiographical novel, which applies not only to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and founder Nachsommer as one of the key training novels of German literature of the 19th century. 1993 he has been filmed in Switzerland.

• 8.1 First Edition First Edition
• 8.2 Current Issues
• 8.3 secondary literature

Formation

Gottfried Keller began his novel to plan, after he failed in 1842 as a painter, had returned from Munich to Zurich. With the minutes he started only seven years later, when a scholarship enabled him to stay in Heidelberg and Berlin. 1854 published the first three volumes ( 396, 456 and 359 pages), in 1855 the fourth volume ( 483 pages), all in the Braunschweig Vieweg Verlag. Keller was never happy with his novel; he lamented his " Unförmlichkeit " and wanted to eradicate them. Therefore, he developed the late 1870s, a second version of the novel; she appeared 1879/80 in Stuttgart publishing Goschen. The original version has since been referred to as the first version of the Green Henry.

Action in the first version

The first version of the novel begins with the exodus of Henry from Switzerland. His mother packed his suitcase, he takes leave of the artisans who live in the house widowed mother; it is clear that she is single. On the journey Heinrich encountered in southern Germany a count with his wife and daughter, " about civil nature " that fascinate him. In Munich, he finds a room, unpacking his suitcase - and is in the same manuscript, in which Henry has captured his childhood memories, and the menus will be shown ( de facto back dazzled, as it is today in almost every biopic ).

Henry Art History

The protagonist, Henry Lee, nicknamed the "Green Henry " because its children's clothing was cut from the green uniforms of his early deceased father. He grows up with his mother in a humble background to, visited several schools and referenced at the age of fifteen years as a result of a student prank the school. His mother sends him leaving school without qualifications one summer in the country to relatives so that he can be clear about its future. This visit is marked by two events that are intended to influence his later life. For one, he makes the decision to become a landscape painter, on the other hand he learns two women know: Anna, the daughter of a teacher, a girl in the age of Henry, and Judith, a beautiful widow about thirty years. Between the two women, the young Henry is torn. The delicate, angelic Anna met him with a romantic, transfigured and idealized love, the fun-loving, seductive Judith brings his sensuality. Henry may be neither of the two women forge a relationship and the episode ends without finding a resolution by Anna died two years later and Judith emigrates to America.

Back in his hometown, Henry begins his training as a painter in the studio Habersaat, in which images are produced by industry, which is why Master Habersaat shows relatively little interest in the artistic. Only by chance encounter with a German, once successful artist named Roman and after several months in his teaching learning Heinrich, more to see and paint pictures which can be sold. However, Romans suffers from delusions and living on borrowed money, which he can not repay. He therefore stands in tensioned relation to its environment, which is why he can not sell images despite great talent. When he succeeds but the one after half a year, he traveled to Paris, where he is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It is worth mentioning that his troubled relationship with money has already shown in his youth.

Henry uses the time of his military service, to write his youth history, and then leaves Switzerland to seek his fortune as a painter in Munich.

Henry's stay in Germany and return

In Munich, Henry realizes that he does not possess the necessary talent and also does not meet the desired art direction, to make a living from painting. As in life, he's also in the painting so that he can not distinguish between fantasy and reality. As his mother the money runs out, Henry makes in one year debt which he can settle by re- sending money to his mother. When he makes a further year debt now, his mother mortgaged her house to also settle this. Heinrich now realizes that he can not live on debt, and makes for lack of income, his possessions to money: First he sold his flute, then gradually his eighty drawings, yet arisen partly in Switzerland, far below market value, everything to a junk dealer, among other things, also deals in cabaret and apparently for Henry drawings has a good customer. As also assume this, Heinrich earned his living by painting the bars of the countless flags that can be produced on a commercial during a hard day for the sale of second-hand dealer. Ironically, Henry has become instead a landscape painter Anmaler of flagpoles. Its survival is now more difficult, and as him to his mother a desperate letter reached with the request that he come home, and when he is additionally driven from his apartment, he takes the way home on foot.

Henry's stay in Munich took a total of seven years. After two days march toward home, he meets, starved and wet, on the house that counts, he has already met him on his outward journey. Henry finds out that this Count bought all his drawings. The Count paid him now subsequently a high price for it and ordered two more large images. While Henry is working on this, he falls in love with Doris, the adopted daughter of the Count; but also for her, he can not establish a relationship. After a half year stay he arrives back in Zurich and arrives just in time to attend his mother's funeral. This has now been referred to her house and her perpetual existence in great poverty. The pain of this loss and the heartache to overwhelm Doris Henry so that he dies. On his grave is growing " green grass ", which once again takes up the color theme and at the end.

Differences in the second version

The second version (meaning the above-mentioned last time revised) differs from the first inter alia, that it is told through chronological and that the entire novel is written in first-person perspective, and not just Henry's youth history. But above all, takes the place of the tragic end - Keller spoke of the " dark cypress -circuit" of his novel - a versöhnlicheres: After her mother's death, Henry gets a regular, but undemanding office. However, he suffers from his guilt and plays with the idea to leave this life, as Judith unexpectedly returns from America who has heard of his misfortune and wants to help him. Both spend time together, sometimes close together, separated by a long time locally - up to Judith's death after 20 years.

Construction

The novel Green Henry told the Bildungs-/Lebensgang a young man. The course of life is depicted as a meaningful succession related development. This building form is called a unidirectional survival curve. In the first version of the Green Henry of 1854/55 the chronological order of actions is changed by the inserted youth history. The first version begins with the eighteen- year-old Henry Lee, who breaks to Munich, and then his childhood and youth is returned across says. In the second version of the Green Henry of 1879/80 and the chronological order of actions is maintained throughout. Gottfried Keller is thus meet until the second revision of the structure of one form of intimate life curve.

Political

In both versions expresses the hero on returning home to Switzerland, given the diversity of their confessional cantons and the 1847/1848 made ​​changes, thoughts about the reciprocal relationship between majority and minority in democratic society structures:

" [ ... ] And spry it out is to help hunt down the noble game of the majority, of which he was a part, but why is not it dear, as the minority who he defeated because this its turn, by the same majority flesh and blood. [ ... ] The fact that large majorities can be poisoned and corrupted by a single person and of re- poison honest individual people to thank and spoil, - that a majority who lied once, may continue to want to be lied to, and always raises new liar on the shield, as she would have only one conscious and determined villain - that finally the awakening of the citizen and peasant man from a Mehrheitsirrthum by which he has deprived himself is not so rosy when he stands in his damage - all considered and knew I do not. "

Paralipomenon and interpretation

The author writes in an exposé to the publisher Vieweg on May 3, 1850

( Taken from: Cellar, Green Henry, German Klassiker Verlag, ISBN 978-3-618-68023-9, pp. 905 f )

The commentator of the edition of the German classics publisher provides to Henry's career following causal chain:

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Reception

Green Henry was inducted into the TIME library of 100 books.