Nesthäkchens Jüngste: Nesthäkchen Band 8

Nesthäkchen #8

by Else Ury

Ursel, Nesthäkchens Jüngste, möchte gern Sängerin werden. Aber auf Wunsch ihres Vaters muß sie als Banklehrling beginnen. Die frohen Stunden der Hausmusik mit einem brasilianischen Geschwisterpaar sind ihre größte Freude. Der Musik verdankt Ursel ihr Lebensglück, aber anders als sie gedacht. Sie verlobt und vermählt sich mit Milton Tavares, ihrem Musikpartner, dem Sohn eines brasilianischen Kaffeekönigs. In der gemeinsamen Liebe zur Kunst haben sich ihre Herzen gefunden.

Genres: Childrens, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Classics, Fiction, German Literature

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Else Ury (November 1, 1877 in Berlin; January 13, 1943 in the Auschwitz concentration camp) was a German writer and children's book author. Her best-known character is the blonde doctor's daughter Annemarie Braun, whose life from childhood to old age is told in the ten volumes of the highly successful Nesthäkchen series.
During Ury's lifetime Nesthäkchen und der Weltkrieg (Nesthäkchen and the World War), the fourth volume, was the most popular. Else Ury was a member of the German Bürgertum (middle class). She was pulled between patriotic German citizenship and Jewish cultural heritage. This situation is reflected in her writings, although the Nesthäkchen books make no references to Judaism.
As a Jew during the Holocaust, Ury was barred from publishing, stripped of her possessions, deported to Auschwitz and gassed the day after she arrived. A cenotaph in Berlin's Weissensee Jewish Cemetery (Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee) memorializes her.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

So yes, with Else Ury's 1924 novel Nesthäkchens Jüngste (focussing mostly on Annemarie and Rudolf Hartenstein's youngest daughter Ursel, who at the age of eighteen wants to study music but is being not only discouraged by but also actively prevented from doing so by her physician and now also privy council father who simply does not want his daughter to become either an actress or an opera singer), you really do find (or at least I for one really do find) the sense of time displacement increasingly problematic and uncomfortable (and which I have already mentioned in my introductory musings for my review of Nesthäkchen und ihre Küken with regard to tomes seven to ten of the Nesthäkchen novels). For while Nesthäkchens Jüngste is meant to be set in 1945, not only is there naturally no WWII and National Socialism (no Nazi terror, no Holocaust, no loss of areas such as East Prussia and Silesia) mentioned and depicted (as of course in 1924, no one could have imagined this and no one likely also wanted to either), but indeed, much of the themes presented in Nesthäkchens Jüngste (including Ursel's future career struggles with her father), they in my opinion are also not truly from the late 1940s (at least realistically speaking) but definitely more of the early 1920s, leaving a story that I for one just have not really enjoyed all that much in and of itself.

Because even taking the sense of historic time displacement into account, I just have not found Nesthäkchens Jüngste all that engaging and interesting and indeed and am finding both Ursel and especially her father Rudolf majorly frustrating and annoying, as well as at the same time kind of resenting that Annemarie, feeling majorly horrified and frustrated that Nesthäkchen totally seem to support her husband not allowing their daughter to study the music to which Ursel is obviously suited, forcing her to become a bank teller instead, and that it actually has to take a professor of music and of course also a male professor of music for Rudolf Hartenstein to change his mind and to allow Ursel her chance (and yes, which Ursel then to and for me majorly annoyingly just throws away two to speak to become the pampered wife of a Brazilian coffee plantation owner's son).

Combined with the fact that many of the descriptions of Brazil and of individuals not of German background are at best quite massively exoticising and also at times rather bigoted (but indeed, with any ethnic based nastiness and viciousness always also being shown as negative and as something to be criticised and condemned by the author, by Else Ury), I just have not found and do not find Nesthäkchens Jüngste all that readable and certainly not at all personally relatable either, a novel I am most definitely glad to have finally read but have most definitely not all that much enjoyed with regard to personal reading pleasure. And indeed, I also now totally do understand and appreciate why my maternal grandmother never bothered with reading Nesthäkchens Jüngste and also the final two novels aloud to me when I was a child, why she stopped reading the Nesthäkchen series to me after Nesthäkchen und ihre Küken (but yes, I am still both planning to continue my perusal of the series and also am hoping that perhaps Nesthäkchen und ihre Enkel and Nesthäkchen im weißen Haar will be more enjoyable than Nesthäkchens Jüngste has been).

[Juana Viviane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Musste bisschen heulen am Ende bb
Komm noch nicht drauf klar, dass mein Nesthäkchen jetzt Mutter von erwachsenen Kindern ist aber OKAY. Buch wie immer bissi problematic aber bin nach wie vor unsterblich in Rudolph Hartenstein verliebt also ist ok.

[Josiemaus85 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich konnte mich ja an gar nix mehr erinnern ^^'