“Winter Bees” by Norbert Scheuer

Topics: NatureWinter

Anyone who reads this multidimensional novel is drawn into a gentle microcosm from the outside – where mortal danger threaten – is more violent buffeted. The protagonist relates peace, strength and orientation of the small world of the bee state, which renews itself according to eternal laws again and again and whose members live alone for their predetermined function.

In time, the author stressed the plot of 1945 to return to the Middle Ages, spatially from the Eifel to Ticino, and thematically it’s about life and death, desire and love, war and flight, home and exclusion, hope and disappointment, attack and protection, God and the world.

This wide field enlivened by delicate motifs and interwoven with all kinds of symbolism, offers plenty of space for wandering thoughts and bold interpretations.

The narrative core is the diary that Egidius Arimond led from January 1944 to May 1945. As dramatic and dangerous the reported events for himself and his fellow citizens, his tone is still quite calmly and factually, as though he knew in a safe, quiet place off fierce battles and merciless oppression.

Peace and quiet but only in its interior.

Egidius (in Scheuer’s nine novels bear some hero’s surname Arimond) was born in the mining town Kall near the Belgian border (and near the birthplace Scheuer). Seizures accompany him from childhood and make him an outsider. After graduation he was drawn to the study in the distance, and he qualifies as a high school teacher of history and Latin. In Nazi Reich but his illness is a stigma “unworthy life”.

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It is labeled as a physically and mentally disabled people forcibly sterilized and released as a teacher. After the death of the caring mother, he returned to Kall to stand the now obsolete father aside. The two have to make do with the meager revenue that achieves Egidius by selling honey products in the surrounding markets.

In the local library meets the enthusiastic reader to life testimonies of an ancestor, the Benedictine monk Ambrose, as he the “crazy sickness” is said to have suffered, and in 1492 agriculture and beekeeping business that has been passed down from generation to generation that Egidius admission to an institution and certain death in escapes euthanasia program, he has thanks to the protective hand of his brother. He’s pilot was seen as a “hero of Nazism” with his squadron even in the newsreels, and can it provide them with medication.

In addition, the war seems distant and impassable Eifel for the Allies not of interest , You can hear their bombers from afar come before pulling away over Urfttal to the big cities and industrial areas. In sleepless nights, it attracts Egidius for apiary, where he soothes of the sums of the little creatures falls to sleep and is woken by the swarming insects. Only when a B-25 driven into the ground on January 3, 1944, the fighting approaching. Meanwhile, Egidius’ situation is getting worse. As “public enemy”, he does not receive a doctor’s prescription, the local pharmacist requires a lot of money for the dwindling inventories procured by Brother medicine is running low, the seizures are piling up, and with each dying nerve cells in his brain from. In the fight against its own Forget Egidius begins with the bomber crashed his diaries.

In his plight comes Egidius a concealed been transmitted offer handy. With the help of his bees, he brings persecuted Jews across the border to Belgium. In the refined unique, adventurous and dangerous enterprises play charity and ethos rather not matter, for it but money, curlers and the love of lonely soldiers ‘and officers’ wives who Egidius are literally at your feet. Detail he considers the perfect elaborate escape plans in his diary, knowing that the leaves should they fall into the wrong hands, not only for him but also for those to whom it helps and he loves to mean a deadly risk.

In November 1944, the war machine reaches the Eifel and the place Kall. People from the bombed cities flee into Urfttal. The Red Cross is directed in the ballroom of the restaurant up a military hospital. The Gestapo is everywhere and takes Egidius firmly on suspicion of escape aid for three weeks. But he has to write simple, albeit with pain and content more confused. “The only thing left are my notes. They keep me alive, are my only memory.”

In his thanksgiving at the end of the book explains Norbert Scheuer readers about the background to the story. He got a stack of loose manuscripts by an elderly gentlemen in Kall who have found his barn in an old hive a farmer. The author of the text is a distantly related with the author man was from that in the region well known that he saved Jews during the war. Captured by the scent of wax and honey clinging to the paper, and fascinated by the closely typed sheets full of fine drawings showing insect wings and -beinchen meet him fall, to make the author of the literary work. A bibliography testifies of his research. In the end he formed from his material an extraordinary, readable fictional story of the darkest times the end of the II. World War. “That is still the bees Arimond the flowers of Urfttals pollinate”.

Deposed italic are inserted in the diary fragments from the late 15th century: not everything is true, he suggests, but one certainly. The finds from Egidius’ Genealogy tell a legend. The body of the highly respected and well-traveled polymath Nicholas of Cusa was buried in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. His heart, however, he had determined it should be buried in his hometown Kues on the Mosel. The transfer of the Alps was a tedious business. It was accompanied by the Benedictine Ambrose Arimond who knew how the heart of the Cardinal could be protected by the antibiotic effect of propolis, a resinous composition prepared by bees from decay. In the Eifel, the monk found a new home and the love of a peasant girl, and his knowledge of the bees he brought.

Norbert Scheuer’s novel is easy and fluent to read despite its breadth, depth and density. We follow the workaday life of the protagonist, as he listens intensely to the bustle of his bees, watching them and care about them. The throughout the year through well organized, peaceful, but fortified beehive stands as a living vision of the propaganda of the Nazi state against whose also well ordered, however brutal suppression and destruction takes its people into buying or even intended.

A very peculiar effect exert thirteen miniatures Erasmus Scheuer, the son of the author, has made. They show bomber and fighter types of the Allies and the air force in the run through the night clouds. The fine black and white drawings of the aircraft (are their specifications indicated on each page) are almost covered by the interplay of black blurred night sky, the blinding searchlight beams, muzzle flashes and reflections. So tiny, the illustrations are, they still produce ghostly impressions of a mysterious threat of hostile humming utopian insects.

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“Winter Bees” by Norbert Scheuer. (2019, Nov 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/winter-bees-by-norbert-scheuer-my-review/

“Winter Bees” by Norbert Scheuer
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