Frau Sorge
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''Frau Sorge'' ( “Dame Care”) is the first of
Hermann Sudermann Hermann Sudermann (30 September 1857 – 21 November 1928) was a German dramatist and novelist. Life Early career Sudermann was born at Matzicken, a village to the east of Heydekrug in the Province of Prussia (now Macikai, in southwestern ...
's complete
novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...
s (1887) and the work which brought him his fame as a writer of fiction.


Theme

The story is conceived around the imaginative legend of Frau Sorge, with which the story ends. It is the story of a mother so poor and lonely that she had no one to act as godmother for her son except Dame Care, who offers to see that the boy grows up to be a good man who shall never go hungry if his mother will give the boy's soul, with his youth and his hope of happiness, as a hostage to Dame Care.


Critique

The rending of the charm by the power of a woman's love and the solemn, but never tragic, quality of the story, are distinguishing characteristics of Sudermann's work. As an art work it is the most perfect, and it is the one which shows least the wear and tear of a generation of social change. Those may be merely two ways of saying the same thing; namely, that in a writer who combines, as Sudermann does, the qualities of a poet and a realist, the more highly imaginative works have a more permanent value than the controversial ones. Into this grim tale of
East Prussia East Prussia was a Provinces of Prussia, province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1772 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 1871); following World War I it formed part of the Weimar Republic's ...
n peasant life, with its hint of autobiography in the spirit and the scene, if not in the story, Sudermann has infused something of the spirit of the epic: the narrative of a toiler battling against the forces of nature.


Notes


References

* 1887 German novels Novels by Hermann Sudermann {{1880s-novel-stub