Novel
Fenn Kaß
Not translated into English
Batty Weber · 1913
Synopsis
Ferdinand Kaß, known as Fenn, only son of the sacristan of Wiesing, a village on the road of the Three Cantons, leaves the presbytery where he carried firewood to go and study at the college in Luxembourg. Half under constraint, half of his own free will, he chooses the priesthood and spends three difficult years at the seminary. Appointed curate at Brebach, where his childhood friend Fritz Lampert has taken over the mill and married the schoolteacher Marjänni, he clashes with his parish priest and with some of the conservative peasants over his new ideas on faith, politics and farming.
Context
The novel first appeared in 1912, in thirty-one instalments, in the Kölnische Zeitung, thanks to a Luxembourger who worked there, then in 1913 in volume form from Rütten & Loening in Frankfurt, revised and expanded. With Norbert Jacques's Der Hafen, it counts among the first novels to look at Luxembourg society realistically; its hero owes much to Father Franz Gaspar. Read as a document of the quarrel between Catholics and liberals, it was rejected or acclaimed depending on the critics' camp, and the author refused to have it reduced to a thesis. The Centre national de littérature published a study edition of it in 2001.
Who it is for
For those interested in the life of a Luxembourgish village at the turn of the century, seen by a young priest.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by critics as its author's most important novel, it split the press into two camps on its publication.
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