A Life in the Making

by Franz Michael Felder, David Henry Wilson (Translator)

Overview

The inspiring, meditative classic autobiography of a pioneering nineteenth-century autodidact and writer, in English for the first time

Over the 29 years of his short life, Franz Michael Felder worked with furious productivity to better himself and the lives of those around him. From his humble origins in the Austrian village of Schoppernau, he went on to found workers' cooperatives, a political party and even a public library in his own home, as well as writing many literary works.

A Life in the Making is both the culmination of this extraordinary career and a chronicle of its development. It is a story of early hardship and fortitude, of Felder's relentless zeal for learning and his lifelong effort to reconcile his own expanding horizons with the enforced confines of the community he was born to. Unfolding in prose of limpid beauty, A Life in the Making becomes a deeply moving tribute to Felder's wife Nanni, and to his enduring belief in the possibility of a better world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782276852
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	07/06/2021
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.11(w) x 7.77(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Franz Michael Felder (1839-1869) was born to a farming family in Schoppernau, Austria. Over the course of his short life, he created a towering legacy as a writer and social reformer. Felder was one of the first Austrian writers to document the farming life he was born to, and he earned a reputation as a rebel through his socially critical writing and work in politics and agricultural reform. He began to write his masterpiece, A Life in the Making, shortly after the death of his beloved wife Nanni, and Felder himself died only months after finishing it.

David Henry Wilson is a playwright, novelist and children’s author. He lectured for many years at the universities of Bristol and Constance, where he founded the university theatre.

Read an Excerpt

I
Between six and seven o’ clock in the morning, on 13th May
1839, I arrived in the world at Schoppernau, the last village in the Bregenzerwald. What heavenly sights were to be seen,
and during what phase of the moon I arrived, my father did not record. The day must have been a fine one, though, because our labourers had been sent out to perform their first task in the fields, which was muck-spreading.
My cries, however, were so pitiful, and I was obviously so unhappy to have entered the world, that everyone was seriously concerned that I wanted nothing more than to follow my brother
Josef—who had been born two years earlier—up into heaven,
where I too would turn into a little angel.
Even my godmother would not have liked that because, thanks to my little brother, she already had what every godmother longs for—an innocent advocate to plead her case before God.
My father, however, was even more concerned about the sickly child. He felt no desire at all to go muck-spreading. After breakfast he actually sent the labourers home with a full day’s pay, and the hard-working, stingy neighbours could say what they liked.
Later, when I grew and thrived and behaved like any normal child, apparently he often used to say he thought it was a bad omen that the moment I arrived, I caused so much trouble that
I’d kept him away from his work and shattered his daily routine.
He was afraid that I would never become a proper farmer. This would make him very unhappy. If not by farming, how else could any poor person earn a living amid these mountains in the gloomy confines of the Ach Valley?
Oral tradition has it that the Felder family is descended from a Magyar prisoner who swiftly became extremely popular during his captivity. It appears that he moved from the Swabian side of Lake Constance to the mountains, where he lived from 924
until 954, because he had fallen so deeply in love with a girl from the Black Forest that he preferred to run away with her and live under a German name, in what was then the still-uninhabited
Bregenzerwald, rather than share the fine fruits of hard German labour with his uncivilized fellow countrymen. Of course, evidence of all this would be difficult, if not impossible, to find.
Nevertheless, it is a strange fact that this tale alone has rooted in people’s minds the firm belief that we came originally from the Black Forest. And so even today, anyone whose shirt bears a name beginning with F—that is to say, Felder—is regarded as a peculiar outsider, a maverick from birth.
It may well be that this actually caused some Felders to become peculiar mavericks, because anyone who has been condemned or marginalized by public opinion, and who is not totally lacking in self-esteem, may all too easily try to oppose this almighty force which for so many constitutes the one and only guide for life.
Of the many children whose birthdays my grandfather had recorded on the last page of our 300-year-old Lives of the
Saints, my father was the oldest survivor. At a very early age,
he had to take over from his ailing father the difficult and physically demanding task not only of managing the large,
unwieldy farm, but also of running the household. This was made all the more arduous by the fact that my grandfather was generally believed to have pawned every object he could lay his hands on. The old records appear to offer very little evidence to the contrary. The thickness of the line that my father drew through each paid-off debt suggests just how much blood, sweat and tears it cost him. On the other hand, his hard work increasingly earned him the trust of the villagers and the respect even of those who because of their financial and family status were, not unjustly, known as the “aristocracy”.
And so the man who initially had been looked down on by everyone must have felt a good deal better about himself. All the same, he remained faithful to the poor, hard-working girl who had for so long remained faithful to him, and therefore it was in vain that those born with silver spoons in their mouths now smilingly invited him to enter their fine houses. He was fiercely independent, and for ten years he worked tirelessly, so that he would be able to bring his bride into a household that was fit for purpose.
This finally happened in 1836, just after Easter, when Jakob was thirty-one and my mother five years older. On the back of an old expired bond, in my father’s handwriting, is a list of all those who attended the wedding feast. There is also a note that his first child was born in 1837, but the Heavenly Father had quickly taken him to be one of His angels. This was all the more reason for the fearfulness with which they nursed me,
and Aunt Dorothe, my godmother, has often told me how after practically every meal they would add to their prayer a special
Paternoster for me.
It is from this aunt—my father’s youngest sister—that I have learnt most of what I know about the first years of my life. She lived with us and was my nursemaid when my mother was helping my father out in the fields. She herself suffered from a disease that affected her limbs, and so she could only do things like embroidery or very light farm work. Looking after me might well have been too much of a strain on her at times, but she always took great pleasure in whatever she was able to do.
For someone who had been used to living and working in the open air, it was a real comfort to spend the seemingly endless summer days with me.
Once I had learnt to walk, she would watch each step with the anxiety of the sick person who, in the light of her own weakness, sees stress and danger in someone else’s every movement.
This anxiety increased still further when my ever-watchful observer discovered that I was short-sighted. What was initially just a small white spot in my right eye began to get bigger. At first it remained a family secret. My pious mother said that only
God could help, and during the sleepless nights before my birth she had offered up many a Paternoster and even whole rosaries for me. Because she had long since known that her child would become like the man from Tannberg who had been blinded by the snow. The sight of him had so terrified her that she could never forget him.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Franz Michael Felder has left us something which will always remain both as a record and as a work of art. —Arno Geiger

Editorial Reviews

"One of the masterpieces of 19th-century German literature." — Polis 

"Exhumed from oblivion… blessed with a strange power… The 21st-century reader will never forget this friend from Schoppernau." — Le Matricule de Anges 

From the Publisher