Mediation and brutalisation -: Gottfried!Keller's 'Romeo and Juliet in the Village'

In Gottfried Keller's prose, the problems of social synthesis, characteristic for 19th century's bourgeois societies, are treated in many ways. Basical elements of social coherence, like money, love, labour and art, do appear as institutions and media, whose function is derived from the socio-economic patterns of contract and reciprocity. As this essay points out, Keller's novella Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe is based on a topological structure of three parallel claims, which at the same time connect and separate two farmers, introducing an ambivalent concept of neighbourhood. While the two families get involved into a desperate conflict, their children do fall in love with each other. As both lines of the plot have a tragical ending, Keller shows that there is some regressive and even atavistic bias within the bourgeois concept of mediation itself.