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  • Jeremias Gotthelf's Business:Economic Didacticism and "Der Besenbinder von Rychiswyl"
  • Gail Hart

Johannes Klein, one of the few scholars ever to comment critically on Jeremias Gotthelf's "Der Besenbinder von Rychiswyl" (1851), wrote the following brief description in his 1950s history of the German Novelle:

Der Besenbinder von Rychiswyl hat wieder den [Gotthelf's] kennzeichnenden Gegenstand: den Lebenslauf eines Menschen, der sich trotz grosser Armut strebsam hocharbeitet. Durch eine Erbschaft tritt die überraschende Wendung ein. Aber der Mann ändert sich nicht. Er bleibt bescheiden und wechselt seinen Beruf erst, als er die Erbschaft in die Hand hat.

(182; emphasis in the original)

The tale, originally written for a Volkskalendar, does not sound very exciting, but for Klein it does fulfill several criteria of the Novelle genre (length and a turning point at the very least). Subsequent and previous critics have more or less ignored the piece - there are no hits in the MLA Bibliography; entries in other bibliographies are mostly editions, some Erläuterungen, references in biographies of the author, and so forth. Inasmuch as the story has been widely disseminated in collections of Gotthelf's short fiction and even in an inexpensive Reclam Universalbibliothek volume it shares with "Elsi, die seltsame Magd," it is rather odd that few have attempted any analysis. "Besenbinder" may not be the unknown text, but it is very much the uncommented or unanalysed text, and this is likely because of the near-absence of action and interiority, as well as the limited space it provides or leaves for supplementary interpretive comment. Thus, it tends to be merely described or merely mentioned when it occurs at all in the secondary literature. This article proposes to read the tale as a business model aimed at economic improvement and also at sparking a reconsideration of pre-industrial economic conditions and the possibility for incorporating them into contemporary practice. "Besenbinder" draws our attention away from love and human conflict in order to focus on the accumulation of money and property, and from this platform it teaches us that honesty, patience, and hard work are essential both to a Christian life and to success in business. Beginning with a business problem, the tale works its way slowly and assiduously to the solution of that problem. [End Page 459]

Albert Bitzius/Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854) was no stranger to business problems. The son of an evangelical minister, he was himself ordained in 1820 but had tremendous difficulties establishing himself in a post. He is said to have had a poor speaking voice, limited abilities as a singer, and an approach to his work that was "excessively conscientious rather than inspired" (Waidson 8). He had hoped to succeed his father as pastor of Utzenstorf, where he was an assistant, but lost the post to a more attractive candidate. He then had a succession of assistant jobs at small, rural parishes with only one major urban assignment, in Bern, where he was dismissed after eighteen months. Finally, in 1832, he was elected pastor of Lützelflüh, a lesser congregation where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1835, he took on extra work as a school inspector but lost that post in 1845 for political reasons.

Whereas Bitzius's pastoral efforts often brought disappointing returns, the parallel literary endeavours of Jeremias Gotthelf were extremely well received, bringing the message of Christian living and honest hard work to a far wider public than the author enjoyed in his parishes. What Bitzius lacked rhetorically as an orator was more than compensated for in literary talent - the poor speaker became an excellent and influential writer who promoted Christian morality in an impressively long series of didactic novels and tales. Today, Gotthelf is both celebrated and shunned as a moral-didactic writer, whose fiction presents itself as a corrective both to moral failings and, the issue here, to bad business practices. He was a highly ambitious and enterprising author who provided a great deal of practical advice in his texts, while adopting a pseudonym to prevent his employers from noticing his literary moonlighting. From the finer points of cheese-making to the proper care of livestock, Gotthelf's readers learn much more...

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