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  • Aus Franzensbad/Das Gemeindekind by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
  • Kathy Brzovic
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aus Franzensbad/Das Gemeindekind. Vol. I. Edited by Evelyne Polt-Heinzl and Ulrike Tanzer. St. Pölten: Residenz Verlag, 2014. 352 pp.

This is the first of a four-volume series, each volume pairing a lesser-known work with a more prominent one by the Austrian author Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. The contrast between Aus Franzensbad, subtitled Sechs Episteln von keinem Propheten, and Das Gemeindekind could not be greater. While the [End Page 131] former betrays signs of a rather clumsy experimentation in satire, the latter represents the full fruition of Ebner-Eschenbach’s narrative powers.

Ambitious and anxious to appear in print, the twenty-eight-year-old Ebner anonymously published Aus Franzensbad in 1858 against the advice of her family. She later confessed to having an aversion to this illegitimate child (13) of her fantasy in which a spoiled young aristocrat is ordered by her doctor to take the cure in Franzensbad. From the resort she sends six letters to her doctor railing against the poor travel conditions, laughing at fellow travelers, deriding transportation workers, ridiculing Goethe’s penchant for scribbling graffiti on café walls, pillorying German literature as “Hecken-Literatur,” poking fun at the pretensions of the high and low. This parade of people, places, and things might have delivered up a humorous critique of nineteenth-century society had it not been for the introduction of additional layers of complexity that place a greater burden on this satire than it can bear. In addition to satirizing the satirist—the bored, eclectically educated aristocrat—and the doctor (male)/patient (female) relationship, Ebner-Eschenbach also parodies the epistolary form and the travelogue, embedding within the letters further stylistic parodies of, for example, Goethe’s poems, literary criticism, the feuilleton, and Romanticism.

Yet what Ebner-Eschenbach later deemed “das tolle Kind einer übermutigen Laune” (12) does form a touchstone against which to measure Das Gemeindekind, published almost thirty years later in Julius Rodenberg’s Deutsche Rundschau to general critical acclaim. This novel continues to be one of the author’s most widely read works for its suspenseful psychological portrayal of Pavel Holub’s moral education. Starved for food, for love, and for parental guidance, Pavel must wrestle with the cruelty of village life and his own inner demons to find a place for himself in a world in which the traditional feudal bonds have given way to the self-interested scramble for existence in the era of liberalism.

Because Pavel and his sister Milada wear the scarlet letter of their parents’ sins—the robbery and murder of the village priest—the villagers are reluctant to house the thirteen-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister. While Milada has the apparent good fortune to be sent to the cloister school at the behest of the baroness, Pavel is left to be exploited by the drunken shepherd Virgil, his wife Virgilova, and their daughter Vinska, for whom he develops a fatal attraction. Only the rough sympathy of the teacher Habrecht alleviates the material and emotional brutality of life among the cottagers. In [End Page 132] the end, Pavel’s destiny will be determined by the interplay of character and action—not only his own but those of others. The narrative suspense hinges on whether the moral sensibilities of the key characters will change, how they will change, and what actions they will take. In the absence of the old social contract, a new moral universe emerges: As Habrecht would have it, “Seid selbstlos, wenn aus keinem edleren, so doch aus Selbsterhaltungstrieb” (307).

This particular volume of paired works, which are so different in style, tone, and substance, will primarily be of interest to students of Ebner-Eschenbach. Although Das Gemeindekind is readily available, Aus Franzensbad is not. Whatever its literary merits, it remains a literary artifact that reflects a stage in the artist’s development—a development that Ulrike Tanzer usefully outlines in the introduction against the backdrop of larger social developments in the period of Franz Joseph’s reign.

Kathy Brzovic
California State University, Fullerton
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