Today, feeling too lazy to get up off my coach to look for my hard copy of Ragtime, I briefly searched (in vain) for a pdf online. Though I didn't find what I was looking for, I did stumble across something very interesting: an audiobook of Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist.
At first I was confused as to why this seemingly unrelated German audiobook was mixed into my otherwise disappointing but relevant results. And then I kind of read it out loud in my head. "Kohlhaas", like "Coalhouse" perhaps? We've known that Coalhouse is a weird character: he doesn't seem to be real, but he still has a name that's not a title (unlike Mother, Father, Tateh, Little Girl, and all of Doctorow's other original characters except for Sarah), and he seems to be extra detached from Doctorow's narration. So I thought, "could he be a character that already exists in some other author's universe or vaguely based on a real person?-- something between real and a product of Doctorow's imagination?"
Well, according to Kohlhaas's Wikipedia page, he's based on a real 16th century German dude named Kohlhase who, after having his horses seized unjustly, "sought redress in the Saxon courts but failed to obtain it. Outraged, he issued a public challenge in 1534 and burned down houses in Wittenberg. Even a letter of admonition from Martin Luther could not dissuade him, and Kohlhase and the band he collected committed further acts of terror."
It's pretty obvious that the similarities in the names of the three characters are no coincidence. Our Coalhouse could have been based directly on the historical figure or on the character. (The "hows" instead of a "hays" suggests to me that maybe he was based off of the character, which would mean that we've got some multilayered history-fiction mingling going on. Pretty cool.)
I think it's too bad that the story of the original Kohlhase has no racial or even American significance at all; the analogy ends with the immediate story and misses out on the (very important) political context. But its still a cool allusion, and it makes it clear why Coalhouse has an actual name.
Another parallel between these stories that makes it clear that Coalhouse's situation is based off of Kohlhaas is the fact that in the older book, his wife is killed after being struck by a guard while attempting to deliver a petition to a high-ranking official to help her husband, which almost exactly parallels Sarah's death.
ReplyDeleteI think that your comments on the similarities between Coalhouse and Kohlhase are really insightful. I don't know about 8th hour, but during our discussions for the past day or so we were discussing this similarity in further detail. When we were talking about Ditsky's paper, we were debating whether or not Doctorow's actions were valid; Mr. Mitchel made a really interesting point about this being more widely accepted during the postmodern era.
ReplyDeleteI found it really interesting that Doctorow borrowed the story from a German tale. As we discussed in class, some might argue that there is a distinct lack of originality in adopting a tale but I think that Doctorow's adaptation of the tale of Kohlhase into a modern setting with an emphasis on racial tensions shows a great deal of creativity.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Doctorow borrowed a lot of the themes and plot from the original Kohlhaas and some critics might view this as an act of laziness or originality I actually think it's really interesting that Doctorow was able to incorporate a 16th century story into an early 20th century racial conflict.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read Ragtime, I noticed that Coalhouse was the only fictitious character that's given a name. Now knowing this backstory, maybe Coalhouse is on the border of history and fiction, much like this book.
ReplyDeleteI thought that it was really skillful how Doctorow created Coalhouse's character. He is obviously based off of the 1600's Michael Kohlhaas, yet Doctorow's Coalhouse character has his own persona that seperates him from the real Michael Kohlhaas. In general, since I really like history, I really love reading about a fictional character who is based off of a real character. Its part of the reason why I really liked Ragtime.
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