Castle Gripsholm
by Kurt Tucholsky
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"Castle Gripsholm, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky's publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic show more castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter's buddy Karlchen and with Billy, the Princess's best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?"-- show lessTags
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Although Tucholsky is mostly remembered as a satirist, it seems to be this (mostly-) harmless lightweight summer holiday novella that is far and away his best-known book nowadays, something that probably has a lot to do with the machinations of those who put together reading lists for modern-languages courses, and a little more with our universal preference for comic fiction over hard facts.
Tucholsky plays on this contradiction himself, introducing the story with a (presumably fictitious) correspondence between the author and his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, who points to the difficulty of selling politics books in these troubled times and asks Tucholsky for something light and ironic between coloured boards, preferably a love story. show more Tucholsky responds by saying he doesn't do love stories, but he is just about to go on holiday, so he'll see what he can come up with. But he doesn't see how he can do anything at all if Rowohlt insists on keeping up that ridiculous 15% allowance for free copies that appears in paragraph 9 of his standard contract...
The story itself is a rambling, cheerful account of the narrator's holiday trip to Sweden with his girlfriend Lydia, during which they stay for some weeks in an apartment in a side-wing of Gripsholm Castle (inspired by a real holiday Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias took in 1927). There's no plot to speak of: one of the narrator's friends turns up for a few days, one of Lydia's friends arrives a bit later, they hatch a half-baked plot to liberate a little German girl who is having a miserable time in a holiday home run by the tyrannical Frau Adriani. And that's about it, the rest is, after all, something like a jokey love story, describing the way two people who like each other but haven't quite got to the point of living together cope with the enforced intimacy of being alone together in a foreign country. It's clearly a success, but both seem to feel by the end of the book that it will be nice to return to something less intensive when they get back to Berlin. show less
Tucholsky plays on this contradiction himself, introducing the story with a (presumably fictitious) correspondence between the author and his publisher, Ernst Rowohlt, who points to the difficulty of selling politics books in these troubled times and asks Tucholsky for something light and ironic between coloured boards, preferably a love story. show more Tucholsky responds by saying he doesn't do love stories, but he is just about to go on holiday, so he'll see what he can come up with. But he doesn't see how he can do anything at all if Rowohlt insists on keeping up that ridiculous 15% allowance for free copies that appears in paragraph 9 of his standard contract...
The story itself is a rambling, cheerful account of the narrator's holiday trip to Sweden with his girlfriend Lydia, during which they stay for some weeks in an apartment in a side-wing of Gripsholm Castle (inspired by a real holiday Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias took in 1927). There's no plot to speak of: one of the narrator's friends turns up for a few days, one of Lydia's friends arrives a bit later, they hatch a half-baked plot to liberate a little German girl who is having a miserable time in a holiday home run by the tyrannical Frau Adriani. And that's about it, the rest is, after all, something like a jokey love story, describing the way two people who like each other but haven't quite got to the point of living together cope with the enforced intimacy of being alone together in a foreign country. It's clearly a success, but both seem to feel by the end of the book that it will be nice to return to something less intensive when they get back to Berlin. show less
Ennek a könyvnek az a szerencséje, hogy az öregapjának szólított*. Tucholsky egy fiktív levélváltással indít kiadója, a legendás Rowohlt és saját maga között, amiben az öreg Ernst arra kéri szerzőjét, hogy legyen szíves valami könnyű nyári szösszenetet összedobni, mert azt veszik a népek. Aztán úgy fest, ez a párbeszéd nem is fiktív, mert mintha Tucholsky valóban olyan könnyű nyári szösszenetet dobna össze, amilyet venni szoktak a népek: kedélyes atmoszféraregényt egy svédországi nyaralásról, romantikával, meg minden. Amolyan ujjgyakorlat egy kiváló képességű írótól – kicsit eklektikus, és helyenként meglepően buja. Aztán némi testidegen anyagként beúszik a képbe egy show more kislány, akit ki kell menteni gonosz felvigyázónője karmai közül, és itt mintha kicsit a giccsbe hajlanának a dolgok. Ugyanakkor mégis azt mondom, kell ez a kislány, mert 1.) nélküle aztán tényleg, de tényleg nulla felé konvergálna az, amit parasztosan cselekménynek szoktunk nevezni 2.) ez a szál szolgáltatja a mélyebb tanulságot is, nevezetesen: hogy ha az ember rosszat lát maga körül, akkor nem maradhat passzív, még akkor sem, ha úgymond „semmi köze az egészhez”**. A gondok aztán megoldódnak, a nyár véget ér, hőseink pedig belehajóznak a lemenő napba… Ami nyálas egy dolog, de most speciel jól esett.
* A másik szerencséje, hogy Engel Tevan István illusztrálta. Megkapóan. Amiről nekem megint eszembe jut, mennyire hiányoznak a minőségi kísérőképek a mai szépirodalomból. Meg az is, hogy nem először tapasztalom: ami az írott szövegbe a kor cenzori hozzáállása folytán nem fér bele, az egy illusztrációban simán elcsúszik. Vajon miért? (És itt most egész konkrétan a női nemi szőrzetre gondolok. Mármint célzok. Vagy mi.)
** A könyv cselekménye a ’30 években játszódik, valamikor Hitler hatalomra jutása után, de még az Anschluss előtt. Ettől függetlenül magáról a nevezetes degeneráltról meg az egész rezsimjéről csak egyetlen esetben történik említés: a Svédországba tartó kompon utalnak rá a szomszéd asztalnál ülők. Ugyanakkor nem tűnik nagy bátorságnak kijelenteni, hogy Adrianiné, a rábízott gyerekeket embertelen presszúra alatt tartó szörnyeteg tulajdonképpen a fasiszta állam analógiája, akinek a helyére oda kell képzelni a náci tisztségviselőket (esetleg magát a szánalmas főnyomoroncot), a neveltek helyére pedig a megalázottan kussoló néptömegeket. show less
* A másik szerencséje, hogy Engel Tevan István illusztrálta. Megkapóan. Amiről nekem megint eszembe jut, mennyire hiányoznak a minőségi kísérőképek a mai szépirodalomból. Meg az is, hogy nem először tapasztalom: ami az írott szövegbe a kor cenzori hozzáállása folytán nem fér bele, az egy illusztrációban simán elcsúszik. Vajon miért? (És itt most egész konkrétan a női nemi szőrzetre gondolok. Mármint célzok. Vagy mi.)
** A könyv cselekménye a ’30 években játszódik, valamikor Hitler hatalomra jutása után, de még az Anschluss előtt. Ettől függetlenül magáról a nevezetes degeneráltról meg az egész rezsimjéről csak egyetlen esetben történik említés: a Svédországba tartó kompon utalnak rá a szomszéd asztalnál ülők. Ugyanakkor nem tűnik nagy bátorságnak kijelenteni, hogy Adrianiné, a rábízott gyerekeket embertelen presszúra alatt tartó szörnyeteg tulajdonképpen a fasiszta állam analógiája, akinek a helyére oda kell képzelni a náci tisztségviselőket (esetleg magát a szánalmas főnyomoroncot), a neveltek helyére pedig a megalázottan kussoló néptömegeket. show less
This is a strange little book: a weird mix of flippant vacationing and disturbing goings-on, that did a good job of portraying the ease with which all sorts can fiddle while their own respective Romes burn. (OK, so the protagonists did solve a local problem-- but behind it all lurks the coming of WW2, and the lack of overt hinting at the political situation made it all the creepier.)
A glorious summer. Five weeks of vacation. Two friends who may or may not be in love. Nearby Sweden and a closeby castle. Friends, warmth, love, great food and wine, and lots of swimming and hiking. However, on the horizon, a girl's school with a depraved headmistress and a waif who is being abused...and in a larger sense, an uneasiness rising from nearby pre-Reich Germany that permeates this tranquil repast as a dismal fog.
http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=862
This is the perfect summer book and that I read it in November makes my longing for the next summer even stronger. It refutes all prejudices that literature written by German authors has to be serious, heavy, distant, humorless, difficult, and boring.
The narrator - who can very easily be taken for the author - is off for his summer holidays. He is an author publishing for Rowohlt, then and now one of the best addresses for writers in Germany and an - invented - correspondence with Rowohlt who is asking his author to write a light summer story gets the story started.
Our author is traveling by train with his girlfriend (called the Princess) from Berlin to Sweden. But they have of course a stop in show more Copenhagen. The following quote gives a good idea of the playful tone of the book:
"… We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster. “Lydia!” I called, “Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!”
“The … what?”
“The Polysandrion! You've got to see it. Come along.” It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.
“What is it?” asked the Princess.
“You'll see,” I said. “It's where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can't.”
“And we're going all this way just to see that?”
“No, not exactly. He can't paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” asked the Princess.
“Ask him, he'll be there. And if he isn't, then his friend will tell the whole story. Because it has to be told. It's wonderful.”
“Is it at least improper?”
“Would I be taking you if it were, my raven-haired beauty?”
There stood the little villa – it was unattractive, and it didn't fit in here at all, either; you might have expected to find it somewhere in the south, in Tuscany or somewhere. We went inside.
The Princess' eyes grew round as saucers, and I beheld the Polysandrion for the second time.
Here a dream had become reality – may God protect us from the like! The good Polysander had covered about forty Square kilometers of expensive canvas with paint. There were the youths, standing and reclining, floating and dancing. It was always the same picture, always the same young men. Pale pink, blue and yellow; the youths in the foreground, the perspective at the back.
“Those butterflies!” exclaimed Lydia, and took my hand.
“Shh!” I said. “Not so loud! The cleaning woman is following us round. She'll report everything back to the artist, and we don't want to hurt him.” But really, those butterflies. They fluttered in the painted air, they had landed on the plump shoulders of the young men, and if until now we had thought that butterflies liked to settle on flowers, this was shown not to be the case. These butterflies much preferred to perch on the young men's bottoms. It was all highly lyrical.
“Now I ask you …” said the Princess.
“Be quiet!” I said. “His friend!”
The painter's friend appeared, quite an old, pleasant-looking man. He was very respectably dressed, but he had the air of despising the standard grey clothes of our grey century. And his suit got its own back by making him look like an emeritus ephebe. He murmured an introduction, and began explaining. In front of us was the picture of a young man who stood very upright with sword and butterfly, his right hand raised in salute. In the most beautiful, lilting Baltic tones, with all the r's rolled, the friend said, “What you have beforre you is an entirrely spirritualized verrsion of militarrism.” I turned away – quite appalled. We saw dancing lads, in sailor-suits with floppy collars, and over their heads hung a little lamp with tassels – the kind you have in corridors. It was a sort of furnished version of the Elysian Fields. A whole Paradise had blossomed here, little bits of which so many of the painter's bosom friends carried around in their souls. Whether it was through being unjustly persecuted, or whatever it was, when they dreamed, they dreamed in soft sky blue, the pinkest shade of blue, so to speak. And they indulged in an awful lot of it. On one wall was a photograph of the artist in his Italian phase, dressed only in sandals and a Zulu-type spear. So paunches were all the rage in Capri.
“It takes your breath away!” said the Princess, once we were outside. “They aren't all like that … are they?”
“No, you shouldn't blame the species for that. That house is just a plush sofa stuck in the 1890s; they're not all like that by any means. That man could just as well have peopled his chocolate-box paintings with little elves and gnomes … But imagine what a whole museum would be like, full of those fantasies come true – exquisite!”
“But it's so … anaemic!” said the Princess. “Well, it takes all sorts! Let's drink a schnaps to that!” So we did."
After a few days in Stockholm, the two rent a room in Castle Gripsholm, an old residence near Lake Mälaren (today housing the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden). Sweden with its friendly and polite inhabitants seems just the right place for the two stressed Berliners to enjoy nature, swimming, reading and bantering with each other. The stories the princess is telling about her boss, an obese soap trader and honorary consul are really funny and so are many remarks of the narrator. For a few days, Karlchen, an old friend of the author and a true original, joins them. He and the princess like to communicate in Low German (Plattdeutsch), a language also the author likes even more than High German. After he leaves, the two lovebirds meet Billie, a Swedish girl they both like immediately and who spends the remaining days of the holiday with them (and a threesome night too).
But even Sweden is not paradise. Near the Castle is a boarding school for girls mainly from Germany where a Mrs Adriani is governing with a mixture of strict rules that are ruthlessly enforced, daily verbal and physical abuse, and the absolute absence of empathy and understanding for the children. Mrs Adriani loves only one thing: her absolute power over the frightened children. Especially Ada, a child that the author, the princess and Billie remark on one of their walks, is the favorite victim of this sadistic dictator. How the small team plots to get Ada out of the hands of this cruel woman is exciting and as a reader I hoped very much for a happy end.
The book was published in 1931, a time of crisis. In Germany the Nazis were on the rise, unemployment and misery too. The story of Mrs Adriani shows one thing: the thirst for power is very strong in many individuals - but when you show resistance, their system can collapse. In a boarding school in Sweden and anywhere else.
Kurt Tucholsky was one of the leading journalists of the Weimar Republic and one of the main contributors of the famous journal Weltbühne, a fighter for democracy, civil rights and press freedom, and against militarism - but he was also a poet and a prose writer, whose witty, light and ironic style was unrivaled in German literature. He died 1935 in his Swedish exile (if it was suicide or an accidental overdose of medicine is still not clear) and is buried near Castle Gripsholm.
If you are looking for the perfect summer story, I strongly recommend you this book. show less
This is the perfect summer book and that I read it in November makes my longing for the next summer even stronger. It refutes all prejudices that literature written by German authors has to be serious, heavy, distant, humorless, difficult, and boring.
The narrator - who can very easily be taken for the author - is off for his summer holidays. He is an author publishing for Rowohlt, then and now one of the best addresses for writers in Germany and an - invented - correspondence with Rowohlt who is asking his author to write a light summer story gets the story started.
Our author is traveling by train with his girlfriend (called the Princess) from Berlin to Sweden. But they have of course a stop in show more Copenhagen. The following quote gives a good idea of the playful tone of the book:
"… We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster. “Lydia!” I called, “Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!”
“The … what?”
“The Polysandrion! You've got to see it. Come along.” It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.
“What is it?” asked the Princess.
“You'll see,” I said. “It's where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can't.”
“And we're going all this way just to see that?”
“No, not exactly. He can't paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” asked the Princess.
“Ask him, he'll be there. And if he isn't, then his friend will tell the whole story. Because it has to be told. It's wonderful.”
“Is it at least improper?”
“Would I be taking you if it were, my raven-haired beauty?”
There stood the little villa – it was unattractive, and it didn't fit in here at all, either; you might have expected to find it somewhere in the south, in Tuscany or somewhere. We went inside.
The Princess' eyes grew round as saucers, and I beheld the Polysandrion for the second time.
Here a dream had become reality – may God protect us from the like! The good Polysander had covered about forty Square kilometers of expensive canvas with paint. There were the youths, standing and reclining, floating and dancing. It was always the same picture, always the same young men. Pale pink, blue and yellow; the youths in the foreground, the perspective at the back.
“Those butterflies!” exclaimed Lydia, and took my hand.
“Shh!” I said. “Not so loud! The cleaning woman is following us round. She'll report everything back to the artist, and we don't want to hurt him.” But really, those butterflies. They fluttered in the painted air, they had landed on the plump shoulders of the young men, and if until now we had thought that butterflies liked to settle on flowers, this was shown not to be the case. These butterflies much preferred to perch on the young men's bottoms. It was all highly lyrical.
“Now I ask you …” said the Princess.
“Be quiet!” I said. “His friend!”
The painter's friend appeared, quite an old, pleasant-looking man. He was very respectably dressed, but he had the air of despising the standard grey clothes of our grey century. And his suit got its own back by making him look like an emeritus ephebe. He murmured an introduction, and began explaining. In front of us was the picture of a young man who stood very upright with sword and butterfly, his right hand raised in salute. In the most beautiful, lilting Baltic tones, with all the r's rolled, the friend said, “What you have beforre you is an entirrely spirritualized verrsion of militarrism.” I turned away – quite appalled. We saw dancing lads, in sailor-suits with floppy collars, and over their heads hung a little lamp with tassels – the kind you have in corridors. It was a sort of furnished version of the Elysian Fields. A whole Paradise had blossomed here, little bits of which so many of the painter's bosom friends carried around in their souls. Whether it was through being unjustly persecuted, or whatever it was, when they dreamed, they dreamed in soft sky blue, the pinkest shade of blue, so to speak. And they indulged in an awful lot of it. On one wall was a photograph of the artist in his Italian phase, dressed only in sandals and a Zulu-type spear. So paunches were all the rage in Capri.
“It takes your breath away!” said the Princess, once we were outside. “They aren't all like that … are they?”
“No, you shouldn't blame the species for that. That house is just a plush sofa stuck in the 1890s; they're not all like that by any means. That man could just as well have peopled his chocolate-box paintings with little elves and gnomes … But imagine what a whole museum would be like, full of those fantasies come true – exquisite!”
“But it's so … anaemic!” said the Princess. “Well, it takes all sorts! Let's drink a schnaps to that!” So we did."
After a few days in Stockholm, the two rent a room in Castle Gripsholm, an old residence near Lake Mälaren (today housing the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden). Sweden with its friendly and polite inhabitants seems just the right place for the two stressed Berliners to enjoy nature, swimming, reading and bantering with each other. The stories the princess is telling about her boss, an obese soap trader and honorary consul are really funny and so are many remarks of the narrator. For a few days, Karlchen, an old friend of the author and a true original, joins them. He and the princess like to communicate in Low German (Plattdeutsch), a language also the author likes even more than High German. After he leaves, the two lovebirds meet Billie, a Swedish girl they both like immediately and who spends the remaining days of the holiday with them (and a threesome night too).
But even Sweden is not paradise. Near the Castle is a boarding school for girls mainly from Germany where a Mrs Adriani is governing with a mixture of strict rules that are ruthlessly enforced, daily verbal and physical abuse, and the absolute absence of empathy and understanding for the children. Mrs Adriani loves only one thing: her absolute power over the frightened children. Especially Ada, a child that the author, the princess and Billie remark on one of their walks, is the favorite victim of this sadistic dictator. How the small team plots to get Ada out of the hands of this cruel woman is exciting and as a reader I hoped very much for a happy end.
The book was published in 1931, a time of crisis. In Germany the Nazis were on the rise, unemployment and misery too. The story of Mrs Adriani shows one thing: the thirst for power is very strong in many individuals - but when you show resistance, their system can collapse. In a boarding school in Sweden and anywhere else.
Kurt Tucholsky was one of the leading journalists of the Weimar Republic and one of the main contributors of the famous journal Weltbühne, a fighter for democracy, civil rights and press freedom, and against militarism - but he was also a poet and a prose writer, whose witty, light and ironic style was unrivaled in German literature. He died 1935 in his Swedish exile (if it was suicide or an accidental overdose of medicine is still not clear) and is buried near Castle Gripsholm.
If you are looking for the perfect summer story, I strongly recommend you this book. show less
A young couple from Weimar-era Germany set out on a vacation in Sweden. They rent rooms in Schloss Gripsholm and spend their days swimming in the lake and strolling through the countryside. They also receive visits from German friends as well. During one of their strolls they encounter a distraught young girl living in a children's home. Seeing that the girl appears abused, they decide to intervene and write to the girl's mother setting them against the evil woman who runs the children's home.
The story is a light, summer story and shows a lot of Kurt Tucholvsky's famous wit. The German in the book is, however, somewhat of a challenge since one of the characters regularly speaks Plattdeutsche and the two main characters frequently add show more endings to their German words to give themselves a Swedish accent. show less
The story is a light, summer story and shows a lot of Kurt Tucholvsky's famous wit. The German in the book is, however, somewhat of a challenge since one of the characters regularly speaks Plattdeutsche and the two main characters frequently add show more endings to their German words to give themselves a Swedish accent. show less
http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=862
This is the perfect summer book and that I read it in November makes my longing for the next summer even stronger. It refutes all prejudices that literature written by German authors has to be serious, heavy, distant, humorless, difficult, and boring.
The narrator - who can very easily be taken for the author - is off for his summer holidays. He is an author publishing for Rowohlt, then and now one of the best addresses for writers in Germany and an - invented - correspondence with Rowohlt who is asking his author to write a light summer story gets the story started.
Our author is traveling by train with his girlfriend (called the Princess) from Berlin to Sweden. But they have of course a stop in show more Copenhagen. The following quote gives a good idea of the playful tone of the book:
"… We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster. “Lydia!” I called, “Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!”
“The … what?”
“The Polysandrion! You've got to see it. Come along.” It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.
“What is it?” asked the Princess.
“You'll see,” I said. “It's where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can't.”
“And we're going all this way just to see that?”
“No, not exactly. He can't paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” asked the Princess.
“Ask him, he'll be there. And if he isn't, then his friend will tell the whole story. Because it has to be told. It's wonderful.”
“Is it at least improper?”
“Would I be taking you if it were, my raven-haired beauty?”
There stood the little villa – it was unattractive, and it didn't fit in here at all, either; you might have expected to find it somewhere in the south, in Tuscany or somewhere. We went inside.
The Princess' eyes grew round as saucers, and I beheld the Polysandrion for the second time.
Here a dream had become reality – may God protect us from the like! The good Polysander had covered about forty Square kilometers of expensive canvas with paint. There were the youths, standing and reclining, floating and dancing. It was always the same picture, always the same young men. Pale pink, blue and yellow; the youths in the foreground, the perspective at the back.
“Those butterflies!” exclaimed Lydia, and took my hand.
“Shh!” I said. “Not so loud! The cleaning woman is following us round. She'll report everything back to the artist, and we don't want to hurt him.” But really, those butterflies. They fluttered in the painted air, they had landed on the plump shoulders of the young men, and if until now we had thought that butterflies liked to settle on flowers, this was shown not to be the case. These butterflies much preferred to perch on the young men's bottoms. It was all highly lyrical.
“Now I ask you …” said the Princess.
“Be quiet!” I said. “His friend!”
The painter's friend appeared, quite an old, pleasant-looking man. He was very respectably dressed, but he had the air of despising the standard grey clothes of our grey century. And his suit got its own back by making him look like an emeritus ephebe. He murmured an introduction, and began explaining. In front of us was the picture of a young man who stood very upright with sword and butterfly, his right hand raised in salute. In the most beautiful, lilting Baltic tones, with all the r's rolled, the friend said, “What you have beforre you is an entirrely spirritualized verrsion of militarrism.” I turned away – quite appalled. We saw dancing lads, in sailor-suits with floppy collars, and over their heads hung a little lamp with tassels – the kind you have in corridors. It was a sort of furnished version of the Elysian Fields. A whole Paradise had blossomed here, little bits of which so many of the painter's bosom friends carried around in their souls. Whether it was through being unjustly persecuted, or whatever it was, when they dreamed, they dreamed in soft sky blue, the pinkest shade of blue, so to speak. And they indulged in an awful lot of it. On one wall was a photograph of the artist in his Italian phase, dressed only in sandals and a Zulu-type spear. So paunches were all the rage in Capri.
“It takes your breath away!” said the Princess, once we were outside. “They aren't all like that … are they?”
“No, you shouldn't blame the species for that. That house is just a plush sofa stuck in the 1890s; they're not all like that by any means. That man could just as well have peopled his chocolate-box paintings with little elves and gnomes … But imagine what a whole museum would be like, full of those fantasies come true – exquisite!”
“But it's so … anaemic!” said the Princess. “Well, it takes all sorts! Let's drink a schnaps to that!” So we did."
After a few days in Stockholm, the two rent a room in Castle Gripsholm, an old residence near Lake Mälaren (today housing the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden). Sweden with its friendly and polite inhabitants seems just the right place for the two stressed Berliners to enjoy nature, swimming, reading and bantering with each other. The stories the princess is telling about her boss, an obese soap trader and honorary consul are really funny and so are many remarks of the narrator. For a few days, Karlchen, an old friend of the author and a true original, joins them. He and the princess like to communicate in Low German (Plattdeutsch), a language also the author likes even more than High German. After he leaves, the two lovebirds meet Billie, a Swedish girl they both like immediately and who spends the remaining days of the holiday with them (and a threesome night too).
But even Sweden is not paradise. Near the Castle is a boarding school for girls mainly from Germany where a Mrs Adriani is governing with a mixture of strict rules that are ruthlessly enforced, daily verbal and physical abuse, and the absolute absence of empathy and understanding for the children. Mrs Adriani loves only one thing: her absolute power over the frightened children. Especially Ada, a child that the author, the princess and Billie remark on one of their walks, is the favorite victim of this sadistic dictator. How the small team plots to get Ada out of the hands of this cruel woman is exciting and as a reader I hoped very much for a happy end.
The book was published in 1931, a time of crisis. In Germany the Nazis were on the rise, unemployment and misery too. The story of Mrs Adriani shows one thing: the thirst for power is very strong in many individuals - but when you show resistance, their system can collapse. In a boarding school in Sweden and anywhere else.
Kurt Tucholsky was one of the leading journalists of the Weimar Republic and one of the main contributors of the famous journal Weltbühne, a fighter for democracy, civil rights and press freedom, and against militarism - but he was also a poet and a prose writer, whose witty, light and ironic style was unrivaled in German literature. He died 1935 in his Swedish exile (if it was suicide or an accidental overdose of medicine is still not clear) and is buried near Castle Gripsholm.
If you are looking for the perfect summer story, I strongly recommend you this book. show less
This is the perfect summer book and that I read it in November makes my longing for the next summer even stronger. It refutes all prejudices that literature written by German authors has to be serious, heavy, distant, humorless, difficult, and boring.
The narrator - who can very easily be taken for the author - is off for his summer holidays. He is an author publishing for Rowohlt, then and now one of the best addresses for writers in Germany and an - invented - correspondence with Rowohlt who is asking his author to write a light summer story gets the story started.
Our author is traveling by train with his girlfriend (called the Princess) from Berlin to Sweden. But they have of course a stop in show more Copenhagen. The following quote gives a good idea of the playful tone of the book:
"… We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster. “Lydia!” I called, “Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!”
“The … what?”
“The Polysandrion! You've got to see it. Come along.” It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.
“What is it?” asked the Princess.
“You'll see,” I said. “It's where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can't.”
“And we're going all this way just to see that?”
“No, not exactly. He can't paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” asked the Princess.
“Ask him, he'll be there. And if he isn't, then his friend will tell the whole story. Because it has to be told. It's wonderful.”
“Is it at least improper?”
“Would I be taking you if it were, my raven-haired beauty?”
There stood the little villa – it was unattractive, and it didn't fit in here at all, either; you might have expected to find it somewhere in the south, in Tuscany or somewhere. We went inside.
The Princess' eyes grew round as saucers, and I beheld the Polysandrion for the second time.
Here a dream had become reality – may God protect us from the like! The good Polysander had covered about forty Square kilometers of expensive canvas with paint. There were the youths, standing and reclining, floating and dancing. It was always the same picture, always the same young men. Pale pink, blue and yellow; the youths in the foreground, the perspective at the back.
“Those butterflies!” exclaimed Lydia, and took my hand.
“Shh!” I said. “Not so loud! The cleaning woman is following us round. She'll report everything back to the artist, and we don't want to hurt him.” But really, those butterflies. They fluttered in the painted air, they had landed on the plump shoulders of the young men, and if until now we had thought that butterflies liked to settle on flowers, this was shown not to be the case. These butterflies much preferred to perch on the young men's bottoms. It was all highly lyrical.
“Now I ask you …” said the Princess.
“Be quiet!” I said. “His friend!”
The painter's friend appeared, quite an old, pleasant-looking man. He was very respectably dressed, but he had the air of despising the standard grey clothes of our grey century. And his suit got its own back by making him look like an emeritus ephebe. He murmured an introduction, and began explaining. In front of us was the picture of a young man who stood very upright with sword and butterfly, his right hand raised in salute. In the most beautiful, lilting Baltic tones, with all the r's rolled, the friend said, “What you have beforre you is an entirrely spirritualized verrsion of militarrism.” I turned away – quite appalled. We saw dancing lads, in sailor-suits with floppy collars, and over their heads hung a little lamp with tassels – the kind you have in corridors. It was a sort of furnished version of the Elysian Fields. A whole Paradise had blossomed here, little bits of which so many of the painter's bosom friends carried around in their souls. Whether it was through being unjustly persecuted, or whatever it was, when they dreamed, they dreamed in soft sky blue, the pinkest shade of blue, so to speak. And they indulged in an awful lot of it. On one wall was a photograph of the artist in his Italian phase, dressed only in sandals and a Zulu-type spear. So paunches were all the rage in Capri.
“It takes your breath away!” said the Princess, once we were outside. “They aren't all like that … are they?”
“No, you shouldn't blame the species for that. That house is just a plush sofa stuck in the 1890s; they're not all like that by any means. That man could just as well have peopled his chocolate-box paintings with little elves and gnomes … But imagine what a whole museum would be like, full of those fantasies come true – exquisite!”
“But it's so … anaemic!” said the Princess. “Well, it takes all sorts! Let's drink a schnaps to that!” So we did."
After a few days in Stockholm, the two rent a room in Castle Gripsholm, an old residence near Lake Mälaren (today housing the National Portrait Gallery of Sweden). Sweden with its friendly and polite inhabitants seems just the right place for the two stressed Berliners to enjoy nature, swimming, reading and bantering with each other. The stories the princess is telling about her boss, an obese soap trader and honorary consul are really funny and so are many remarks of the narrator. For a few days, Karlchen, an old friend of the author and a true original, joins them. He and the princess like to communicate in Low German (Plattdeutsch), a language also the author likes even more than High German. After he leaves, the two lovebirds meet Billie, a Swedish girl they both like immediately and who spends the remaining days of the holiday with them (and a threesome night too).
But even Sweden is not paradise. Near the Castle is a boarding school for girls mainly from Germany where a Mrs Adriani is governing with a mixture of strict rules that are ruthlessly enforced, daily verbal and physical abuse, and the absolute absence of empathy and understanding for the children. Mrs Adriani loves only one thing: her absolute power over the frightened children. Especially Ada, a child that the author, the princess and Billie remark on one of their walks, is the favorite victim of this sadistic dictator. How the small team plots to get Ada out of the hands of this cruel woman is exciting and as a reader I hoped very much for a happy end.
The book was published in 1931, a time of crisis. In Germany the Nazis were on the rise, unemployment and misery too. The story of Mrs Adriani shows one thing: the thirst for power is very strong in many individuals - but when you show resistance, their system can collapse. In a boarding school in Sweden and anywhere else.
Kurt Tucholsky was one of the leading journalists of the Weimar Republic and one of the main contributors of the famous journal Weltbühne, a fighter for democracy, civil rights and press freedom, and against militarism - but he was also a poet and a prose writer, whose witty, light and ironic style was unrivaled in German literature. He died 1935 in his Swedish exile (if it was suicide or an accidental overdose of medicine is still not clear) and is buried near Castle Gripsholm.
If you are looking for the perfect summer story, I strongly recommend you this book. show less
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Kurt Tucholsky was the most renowned journalist of Weimar Germany, a poet, lyricist, satirist, and storyteller, a democrat, a fighter, a lady's man, a theater-lover, and a political animal. Tucholsky vehemently and early on opposed WWI militarism. The war, in which he was drafted, turned him into a lifelong pacifist.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Castle Gripsholm
- Original title
- Schloss Gripsholm
- Original publication date
- 1931
- Important places
- Gripsholms slott, Sweden
- Epigraph*
- Wir können auch Trompete blasen / Und schmettern weithin durch das Land; / Doch schreiten wir lieber in Maientagen, / Wenn die Primeln blühn und die Drosseln schlagen, / Still sinnend an des Baches Rand. [Storm]
- Dedication*
- Für IA 47 407
- First words*
- Lieber Herr Tucholsky, schönen Dank für Ihren Brief vom 2. Juni.
- Quotations*
- Wat is he denn? Sin Mors hat man ook bloß twee Hälften!
(rororo TB-Ausgabe 1950, S. 110)
Die langen Stunden, in denen der verschleierte Blick ins Wasser sah, die Blätter zischelten und der See plitschte ans Ufer; leere Stunden, in denen sich Energie, Verstand, Kraft und Gesundheit aus dem Reservoir des Nichts, a... (show all)us jenem geheimnisvollen Lager ergänzten, das eines Tages leer sein wird. 'Ja', wird dann der Lagermeister sagen, 'nun haben wir nichts mehr...'. Und dann werde ich mich wohl hinlegen müssen. (rororo TB-Ausgabe 1950, S. 143) - Last words*
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"Up dat es uns wohl goh up unsre ohlen Tage -!" sagte sie.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 833.912 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures German fiction 1900- 1900-1990 1900-1945
- LCC
- PT2642 .U4 .S313 — Language and Literature German, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures German literature Individual authors or works 1860/70-1960
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- 10 — Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 71
- UPCs
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- 30
