Kleider machen Leute / Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe

by Gottfried Keller

Sein Schicksal ist uns zum geflügelten Wort geworden: Der kleine Schneider stolpert samtbekleidet in die Rolle eines Grafen, denn Kleider machen Leute. Ihm wird alles Erdenkliche unterstellt, keinerfragt nach. Und zuerst aus Schüchternheit, dann aus Scham nimmt es der Schneider hin. So verstrickt er sich in Lügen und Missverständnisse. Plötzlich jedoch platzt die Seifenblase, und seine Liebe ist in Gefahr.

Gottfried Keller wurde am 19. Juli 1819 in Zürich geboren. Nach dem Verweis von der Industrieschule Zürich bildete er sich autodidaktisch weiter. Ab 1840 lebte er als Maler in München, 1842 kehrte er nach Zürich zurück und widmete sich, unterstützt von der Mutter, dem Schreiben. 1846 erschien ein Band seiner Gedichte, 1848/49 hatte er ein Stipendium zum Studium in Heidelberg. Von 1850 bis 1855 hielt Keller sich in Berlin auf. Ab 1861 war er erster Stadtschreiber in Zürich, er pflegte Bekanntschaften u.a. mit Paul Heyse, Theodor Storm und Richard Wagner. Er starb am 15. Juli 1890 in Zürich.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1874

About the author

Gottfried Keller (* 19. Juli 1819 in Zürich; † 15. Juli 1890 in Zürich) war ein Schweizer Dichter und Politiker.

Seine Lyrik regte eine Vielzahl von Musikern zur Vertonung an, mit seinen Novellen "Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe" und "Kleider machen Leute" hatte er Meisterwerke der deutschsprachigen Erzählkunst geschaffen. Schon zu seinen Lebzeiten galt er als einer der bedeutendsten Vertreter der Epoche des bürgerlichen Realismus.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Somewhere along the line I got it in my head that I should read Kleider machen Leute (Clothes make People), maybe I read something or heard something, but anyway a copy got into my hands and then lived undisturbed on the shelf until that one day fairly recently when I cracked it's spine open.

The two stories in the volume are from Keller's series Seldwyla Folks. Keller was Swiss, but these stories are set somewhere in eastern Prussia near enough to Polish areas for the lead character in the first story to have worked there, learnt a few phrases and a song. Perhaps by setting the stories, well, almost as far as you could go in the German speaking world from Switzerland, Keller won himself the freedom to write what he wanted. Rural poverty or self deception in Uri or Aargau might have been too close to home.

In the first story a journeyman tailor wearing a fancy Polish style coat that he had made himself, unemployed and hungry, is given a lift to the next town by the driver of a fancy coach.

Well straight away he's mistaken for a Polish nobleman and treated accordingly. His pale, thin features are taken for a sign of fine breeding rather than poverty, his hesitant fear when presented with wine and no means to pay marks him out out as a connoisseur for whom the finest aged Bordeaux in the cellar won't be good enough. So it's a halo effect story. Unlike Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, Keller's contrivance is that the hero never lies (and is never suspected of not being a Polish nobleman until the story's crisis point) but instead is trapped by the wild assumptions that the people around him make.

The central motif of the story is emblazoned on a banner made by the tailors of Seldwyla for a winter celebration: Leute machen Kleider, Kleider machen Leute (people make clothes, clothes make people). Eventually the young tailor has to confess to the young woman who loved him because she thought he was one of those dreadfully romantic exiled Polish noblemen. But we still get a happy ending since she determines to marry him anyway.

I'm hampered in discussing the other story, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (A village Romeo and Juliet), in that I don't know much about Shakespeare's version. And neither have I ever had a true love who sent me her wisdom teeth in the post. Given my ignorance of these deeper matters of the heart I'd best stick to Keller's picture of the countryside.

This is a story with long paragraphs and lyrical moments, the two lovers as children counting each others teeth, a black nosed fiddler's description of of a wandering life of freedom, the vision of the landscape.

At the same time this is tough place. The fathers' of the lovers descend into mutually assured poverty through going to law over the ownership of part of a field. The hero cripples the man who will never be his legal father-in-law with a well thrown stone. The marriage of a poor couple is sneered at as a burden on the community, the poorhouse throws its shadow over everyday conversation. When the couple make their way to a village festival there is social stratification of the different dance spots. The poorest farmers and day labourers keeping apart from their better off neighbours. The heroine's white cloth and no shoes fit to go dancing in, sum up a world of hardship in which a table laid out for a Sunday suggests a world of quiet, decent prosperity impossibly distant to the young couple.

What holds them back is exactly that. A couple of other men from the German speaking world might call their problem false consciousness. Their situation isn't that they can't marry, but that marriage in poverty is an impossible idea for them - a suicide pact instead seems to them to be the only option other than a separation they don't want to have to endure. The unobtainable model of the buergerlich (my dictionary here suggests bourgeois or middle class which isn't quite right in this context, I want the idea of propriety without the strict class association) households they grew up in prevents them from doing the sensible thing. This story doesn't have a happy ending, but at least it does have an unhappy ending of their own choice.

Anyhow I started to think about Thomas Hardy and in particular Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Maybe I'm misremembering but my sense there was that Tess was excluded from a modern Victorian world. She walked long weary miles over the countryside even while the milk she had brought forth from the lowing cows was being whisked up to London at 60mph on the steam train. Spiritually too for her Christ stopped at Eboli and she is trapped in some pre-Christian world of irredeemable sin and ritual pollution.

By contrast Keller's villagers are integrated into a modern capitalist economy, but it's grinding them down. The mother's scarf from Milan, the youth's Manchester jacket, show the villagers being drawn into a cash nexus. Rural self sufficiency and a relative buergerlich prosperity are long forgotten. The rings the couple buy to wed each other with under the autumn moonlight are cheap, gilded things, decorated with green glass. Industrial costume jewellery.

The only alternative offered to them is the life of rural vagabonds, sleeping in the hay, getting by as they can and that comes from the diabolical figure of a black nosed fiddler player. But then I've already mentioned that this isn't a story with a happy ending.

[Thomass17 · Rating 3 out of 5]

HB 1h 43min Audible Abo

[Amalia · Rating 1 out of 5]

„Am Ende ist uns wohler, wenn wir nicht zu viel von der Welt wollen und das, was sie uns freiwillig gibt, als gelegentlichen Fund betrachten.“

Ich habe dieses Buch für die Schule gelesen und mir hat es gar nicht gefallen. Die Sprache und der Schreibstil waren sehr kompliziert und unverständlich geschrieben, weshalb es nicht sehr flüssig lesbar war und man eher auf das Verständnis der Wörter und Sätze konzentriert war als sich mir der eigentlichen Geschichte zu beschäftigen.