Jeremias Gotthelf: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (HKG)

The 1830s were a time of social crisis in the Emmental region of Bern. The vast majority of rural servants and day labourers lived in grinding poverty. Gotthelf took up this 'Armennoth' in his socio-political writing of the same name from 1840. In it, he propagates the Christian doctrine of the home as a means of combating poverty: the rural landlord should act like a father towards his servants and guide them to later independence; the servants, for their part, should serve obediently and faithfully. The novel 'Wie Uli, der Knecht, glücklich wird' (How Uli the Servant Becomes Happy), published in 1841 in Zurich and Frauenfeld by Christian Beyel, uses the protagonist as an example of the education outlined in 'Armennoth': Under the guidance of his extremely pious master, the orphan Uli succeeds in an unprecedented social rise from poor, indebted farmhand to tenant of one of the largest farms in the entire Bernese region. The novel combines elements of the Bildungsroman with those of the old Christian form of conversion stories. Although it certainly reveals that Uli's career is quite extraordinary, contemporary critics complained that the book made poor maids and farmhands false promises of happiness. After the very successful edition published by Julius Springer in Berlin (1846), which in contrast to the Beyel edition was divided into chapters, 'Uli' became Gotthelf's 'best-known' novel (Hanns Peter Holl). For the longest time, however, the text version of the 'Sämtliche Werke' of 1921 was authoritative for research as well as for licensed and paperback editions, although this edition offers neither the original text of the Beyel nor that of the Springer edition. Although it was based on the text published by Beyel, it adopted the chapter division from the Springer edition; in addition, orthography and punctuation were modernised and dialect spellings standardised. With the HKG edition, the first 'Uli' novel, of which no manuscript has survived, can now finally be read again in the unaltered wording of the first edition published by Beyel.