Die Erzählung "Pan učitel" von Božena Němcová zwischen Texten und Kontexten

In this paper, I focus on the intertextual relations and contexts of Božena Němcová's short fiction "Pan učitel" [Our Teacher], especially in relation to František Mošner's educational story "Pěstounka" [Foster-mother] (1851) and the piece of prose "Philosophie für die Ewigkeit. Skizze aus dem Leben eines Dorfschulmeisters" [Philosophy for Eternity] (1855) by A. F. Liebelt, a now forgotten German-language author. It is very likely that Němcová read the story in Album der Erinnerungen [Book of Memories] (1855). The Album belonged to the Prague magazine Erinnerungen, where Němcová published a part of Babička [Grandmother] in German. She became acquainted with Mošner's "Pěstounka" on the recommendation of friends who knew the author personally. Němcová published her story "Pan učitel" in Sborník – kalendář učitelský [Teachers' Calendar] for 1860. The collection was a part of the educational magazine Škola a život [School and Life], edited by the Catholic priest and teacher F. V. Řezáč. Contrary to biographical interpretations, it is confirmed that the contemporary Czech-German literary field contained texts that Němcová knew and fictionalized in a specific way, using the plot devices and key values of patriotic romanticism and Biedermeier. Liebelt's story is a celebration of the rural teacher and his work, but it is not, unlike Němcová's, a Biedermeier idyll. It also contains a critique of society in the spirit of the ideals of the movement Junges Deutschland [Young Germany], setting the stage for the practices of ideal realism that German-language literary criticism repeatedly thematized in the 1850s.