SOURCE: "The Ambiguous Explosion: C. F. Meyer's Der Schuss von der Kanzel" in The German Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, March, 1970, pp. 210-22.

In the following essay, Jennings offers a psychoanalytical interpretation of Meyer's novella.

Der Schuss von der Kanzel is at once the least pretentious of Meyer's Novellen and the one which best captures the contemporary tone of bourgeois realism. Yet in reading it we have the feeling of moving in an uncanny private world of the author amid submerged fears and portents; it is the type of story which, despite its overt claim to prosaicness and innocuousness, seems to demand some degree of psychological subtlety in its interpretation. Indeed, Meyer, while hardly a spontaneous writer, seems unable to edit out a strong component of the unconscious in his works. His statements of artistic purpose are notorious for their lack of insight into his true strengths and weaknesses...