Association and Disassociation in Storm's Novellen: A Study on the Meaning of the Frame

Abstract

It has not escaped the notice of students of Storm's novelistic art that many of his Novellen employ the device known as the “frame,” nor have explanations been lacking as to its purpose. Most attention has not unnaturally been paid to the frames of the stories laid in the comparatively distant past—the so-called “Chroniknovellen” and the Schimmelreiler. The first systematic investigation of the use of the frame by Storm and his contemporaries is the study by Hans Bracher, Rahmen-erzahlung und Verwandtes bei G. Keller, C. F. Meyer und Th. Storm (Leipzig, 1909). This monograph examines the problem chiefly from the standpoint of the kind of frame encountered in these writers and the technical uses to which it is put. The question of the inner necessity of the frame is left largely unanswered, a fact of which Bracher himself is well aware. Georg Baesecke in a review of the book by H. Eichentopf, Th. St.s Erzdhlungskunst—in Zeitschrift f. deut. Philologie, XLI (1909), 520–531—has advanced the interesting theory that the frame is for Storm a means of freeing his hand and his conscience; the ego thereby shoves the responsibility for the truth of the epic material upon a third person. Baesecke arrives at this point of view by proceeding on the assumption that Storm's novelistic art grew out of his lyrical art, as the poet himself indeed asserted, though it has never been satisfactorily explained just what he meant by this dictum. Baesecke implies that in the lyrical production the ego is free to speak in its own right out of actual experience. That part of Thérèse Rockenbach's study which has been available to me, Th. St.s Chroniknovellen (Diss., Braunschweig, 1916), hardly throws new light on the “why” of the Stormian frame, though the author calls attention to interesting parallels between Storm's technique and that of others, especially Brentano, Stifter, and Raabe. Walter Brecht—“Storm und die Geschichte,” Deut. Vierteljahrss.,iii (1925), 444–462—remarks that the difference between Storm's frames and those of other writers lies not so much in the technique itself as in the “Flut von Stim-mung, die in dem meist unausgesprochenen Nebeneinander in Rahmen und Erzählung steigt.” Storm's central concern, Brecht feels, is the “relation between Then and Now.” The gap between the past and the present is nothing less than the gap between life and death, which is itself a “mysterious connection.” In the frame, which is the instrument by means of which Storm “perspectively elongates” the present into the past, this relationship becomes particularly evident. Franz Stuckert, in his excellent article, “Th. St.s novellistische Form”—Germ.-Roman. Monatss., 27. Jhg. (1939), 24–39—seeks the origins of Storm's narrative art in the oral tradition of storytelling and finds that the frame fulfills for the poet an inner need by creating a situation analogous to that of audience and story-teller.