Souvenirs (Holderlin)

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Memento is the title of a hymn written in 1803 by Friedrich Hölderlin . The first printing took place in the Musenalmanach published by Leo Freiherr von Seckendorf for the year 1808 . The background of the poetic consideration of farewell and separation is the Bordelais landscape , which Hölderlin remembered after his time there as a private tutor and which is now visualized in pictures.

Probably the last completed poem to be printed by Hölderlin himself, with its multi-layered text, is one of his best-known works and has undergone numerous interpretations.

Content and special features

Friedrich Hölderlin, pastel by Franz Karl Hiemer , 1792

The poem consists of five rhythmically variable and rhyming stanzas . While the first four stanzas each comprise 12 verses , the fifth stanza ends with the eleventh verse, which is one of the poet's winged words ("What remains, the poets create"). It begins with the visualization of the wind:

The northeast blows,
the dearest among the winds to
Me, because it has a fiery spirit
And promises the sailors good voyage.

The work is determined by opposing structures. If Holderlin speaks personally in the first half up to verse 29 (in the indicative or imperative ) and relates the processes to himself (“I”, “me”), in the second part from verse 30 he presents general statements about other people without pronominal references. Verses 30-36 read:

It is not good to be
soulless from mortal
thoughts. But it is good to have
a conversation and to say the
opinion of the heart, to hear a great deal of
days of love,
and deeds that happen.

Here Holderlin begins to write from a distance about things and processes that he reflects in this way. The first part of the work relates the world to the ego, the second shows it detached from it.

Assuming the division into two parts (two times 29), the last verse 59 would be superfluous. But it is precisely this well-known final line that contains a general statement about the nature and purpose of poetry itself and is thereby highlighted in a surprising way.

In the first part, Hölderlin lets a series of images from the city of Bordeaux and its surroundings rise from memory, an area into which, carried by the north-east wind, he mentally empathizes. From the point of view of the poet in Germany to the east, the favorite among the winds triggers the process of remembrance : the gardens of Bordeaux , the beautiful Garonne with a footbridge on the bank, the stream falling into the stream, the oaks and white poplars appear in the distance the memory that the ego longingly visualizes.

If the first part of the poem ends with the wish to fall asleep in order to extinguish consciousness in sleep ("so that I may rest, because slumber would be sweet under the shadows"), the second part rejects this thought right at the beginning and rejects the wish to withdraw from the world to oneself. The movement to the outside world continues in the fourth and fifth stanzas, in that the sea motif, which is associated with diversity and wealth, is also taken up again. After the poet had paused in Bordeaux, the movement now continues beyond the headland where the Dordogne and Garonne meet to form the Gironde , which finally flows into the ocean.

Origin and background

City view of Bordeaux after a colored engraving from around 1850. In the front right the terraces of the Place des Quinconces can be seen .

The poem sheds light on Hölderlin's time in France, about which comparatively little is known. In December 1801 he traveled from Stuttgart via Strasbourg and Lyon to Bordeaux, where he worked for a short time as a tutor for the children of the Hamburg wine merchant - and since 1797 consul - Christoph Meyer. The harbor and the Garonne, which Hölderlin sang about a little later, were only a few minutes away from the splendid classicist-style house, which is still one of the city's sights today. The wooded hills on the right bank of the river and the many anchored ships could be seen from the upper rooms. It is believed that Holderlin also looked at the surrounding area and perhaps strolled through the gardens occasionally.

Contrary to popular belief, he did not find out about Susette Gontard's death in Bordeaux, but in Stuttgart at the beginning of July 1802, whereupon he returned to his mother in Nürtingen , dejected , and lived there for the next two years.

The work is one of the famous hymns of the later work, which, in increasingly encrypted form, interpret history as a process of divine revelation .

Already his middle creative phase from around 1797, in which a large part of the oden work was created, was accompanied by aesthetic and philosophical reflections, which form the theoretical basis for his later work. This became apparent from around 1800 with a break in his historical-philosophical thinking. Until then, the poet had seen the French Revolution as a prelude to the divine, which was supposed to awaken the peoples prepared by the poets, the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte put an end to this political hope. Even after the separation from Susette Gontard, his Diotima , he held on to a redeeming hope - for example in Patmos ("Near is / And God is difficult to grasp. / Where there is danger grows / That which saves too."), postponed the time of a possible rescue into the unknown.

Along with Goethe's and Schiller's poetry, Hölderlin's poetry is characterized by neo-humanism , which shares a love of classical antiquity with humanism of the Renaissance , but differs from it in its philosophical foundation as well as in a longing for Greece that arises from the inadequacy of the times and from Winckelmann was promoted.

With Hölderlin and Hegel , and later with the Hölderlin interpreter Martin Heidegger , memory is found as a philosophical motif (mnemosyne), as can be seen from the title of an unfinished hymn, which also belongs to the later work. Hegel, who received important impulses for his own work from Holderlin, knows mnemosyne in his phenomenology as a certain form of the self-consciousness of the spirit in ancient Greek times. It can be understood as the singer's pathos , not as a deafening natural power, but as a reflection on inwardness and memory of an immediate being . In this hymn (as well as the unfinished poem Mnemosyne ), Holderlin determines the poet's profession: he has to preserve the memory of the past and the foreign.

Interpretation and reception

Martin Heidegger: Poetry is a worthy foundation of being

The seafaring motif connects the first with the last stanza. The warning not to surrender to soulless gloom does not only refer to individual thoughts that revolve around mortal things, but to human existence and its finitude, which one has to accept. This acceptance corresponds to the confidence expressed at the end of the long hymn The Rhine , dedicated to Isaac von Sinclair . It is true that only the gods are eternal, but humans too can "keep the best in memory / and then experience the highest."

According to Bart Philipsen, the initials S and G ( soulless from mortal thoughts ) refer to the beloved Susette Gontard, who died on June 22, 1802. However, it remains problematic to clearly identify the individual references of the plant by personnel. This applies not only to the allusions to Diotima, but also to the consideration that Bellarmine refers to his friend Sinclair. It is just as uncertain to interpret the line “In the courtyard, however, a fig tree is growing” as an intertextual sign related to Francesco Petrarch or Augustine , which indicates a conversion. The actual object of the memory is hidden in the structure of the quotations and only a trace of the renunciation remains.

For Heidegger, the memento had a draft character. In this context he spoke of the "law of the poetic becoming at home in one's own from the poetic passage of being unhomely in the foreign".

In the aftermath of Heidegger, the reception understood the last verse as a poetological thematization of an original statement of being . What remains, however, the poets create revolves around the well-known topos, according to which only art perpetuates the hero and gives him lasting afterlife. Knowing about finitude, only the poet can create memory as something lasting .

Theodor W. Adorno , who had polemically dealt with Heidegger several times, was bothered by his absorbing interpretation. The sensual verses of the "brown women" walking on the "silk floor" would be misinterpreted. Heidegger refuses to admit that Holderlin was fascinated by the beauty of the French women. So he evades German women and their praise, of whom there is no mention in the memory and who are here "dragged by the hair". Apparently, when Heidegger interpreted the poem in 1943, he “feared the appearance of French women as subversive”, but did not change his views later either. If one reads the corresponding passage in Heidegger's lecture held in the winter semester of 1941/42, the question arises to what extent Adorno's polemic is justified: “[...] women. This name still has the early sound that means the mistress and determiner and guardian, but this now in a single essential and at the same time always historical respect. In a poem that was written shortly before the beginning of the hymn time and in the transition to it, Holderlin himself said everything that we need to know here. The poem is entitled: "Gesang des Deutschen" (IV, 129 ff.). The eleventh verse begins: Thank the German women! they have kept our spirit friendly to the images of the gods, - The truth of these verses, which is still veiled from the poet himself, only comes to light in the hymn "Germania". The German women save the appearance of the gods so that it remains an event in history, the moment of which of course eludes the calculation of time. The German women save the appearance of the gods in the mildness of a friendly light. [...] The women are named because the poet thinks of the festival. In the poem "Remembrance" alone, the German women are not mentioned , but "the brown women" - this is specifically reminiscent of the southern country, where the light of the sun is intensely transparent and the glow is overwhelming. [...] The response of gods and people is different in the southern country. The festival has a different character. When Holderlin calls "the brown women there", that is, those of southern France, then they and everything they have a part in, that is, everything that is greeted with, stand for the Greek world and that is for the festival that has been [...] "

Hölderlin's last and well-known verse is "pure of hubris" because, for reasons of grammar alone, he is concerned with something "that exists and the memory of it", but not with a being transcendent to the temporal. "What, however, is indicated in a verse by Holderlin as the danger of language: to lose oneself in its communicative element and to hawk its truthfulness, Heidegger ascribes it as a 'very own possibility of being' and splits it off from history". Heidegger separates himself from historical reality in that, in the opposite interpretation, he understands danger as a threat to being through beings. But Holderlin speaks precisely of the beings of real history. For him the particular is threatened, the substantial in the sense of Hegel and not, as for Heidegger, a "sheltered arcanum of being."

The renaissance of Hölderlin in the 20th century followed on from the profound hymns and elegies. In addition to impetus from Friedrich Nietzsche , the rediscovery of the poet can be traced back to Wilhelm Dilthey and Stefan George and his circle . Holderlin is particularly important for understanding George's last collection of poems - Das neue Reich (1928).

Günter Eich's poem Latrine , published in 1946, quotes Hölderlin's hymn and contrasted the poet's high style with the reality of a primitive latrine during the Second World War or in the immediate post-war period. Latrine was understood as an antithesis to souvenirs , but also as a "poetic compensation" to Holderlin, who was ideologically cannibalized during the Nazi era .

literature

  • Peter Hühn, in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analysis of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, pp. 99–112.
  • Dieter Henrich : The course of remembrance. Observations and thoughts on Hölderlin's poem , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3608914293

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bart Philipsen, Gesänge (Stuttgart, Homburg), in: Hölderlin-Handbuch, Leben Werkffekt, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2011, p. 374
  2. ↑ a b Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Works and Letters, Volume 1, Poems, Ed. Günter Mieth , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1995, p. 491
  3. ↑ Peter Hühn, in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analyzes of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, p. 111
  4. ↑ Peter Hühn, Friedrich Hölderlin: "Andenken", in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analyzes of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, p. 106
  5. ↑ Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, France (December 1801 - June 1802), in: Hölderlin-Handbuch, Leben Werkffekt, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2011, p. 47
  6. ↑ Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, France (December 1801 - June 1802), in: Hölderlin-Handbuch, Leben Werkffekt, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2011, p. 48
  7. ↑ Hölderlin, Das lyrische Werk, in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 7, Kindler, Munich, 1990, p. 927
  8. ^ Mneme, Mnemosyne in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Volume 5, p. 1442
  9. ↑ a b c Bart Philipsen, Gesänge (Stuttgart, Homburg), in: Hölderlin-Handbuch, Leben Werk, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2011, p. 375
  10. ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Rhein, Complete Works and Letters, Volume 1, Poems, Ed. Günter Mieth, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1995, p. 462
  11. ↑ Quotation from: Mneme, Mnemosyne in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Volume 5, pp. 1442–1443
  12. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Parataxis, to late poetry Hölderlin . In: Ders: Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11, pp. 447–491, here p. 457
  13. ↑ Martin Heidegger: Complete Edition, Section II: Lectures 1923-1944, Volume 52 Holderlin's hymn "In memory". 2nd Edition. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 79-80
  14. ↑ a b Theodor W. Adorno: Parataxis, Zur late Lyrik Hölderlin . In: Ders: Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11, pp. 447–491, here p. 459
  15. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Parataxis, to late poetry Hölderlin . In: Ders: Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11, pp. 447–491, here p. 460
  16. ^ Michael Kohlenbach: Günter Eichs late prose. Some characteristics of the moles. Bouvier, Bonn 1982, ISBN 3-416-01679-3 , pp. 92-96.