From the golden bowl

The collection of poems from the golden bowl includes 54 poems by Bruno Frank . It was the first publication by the 18-year-old budding poet and was published in 1905 by Albert Langen Verlag in Munich.

motto

Bruno Frank completed the manuscript of the collection of poems "From the golden bowl" on July 1, 1905. Was preceded by the date as a motto, a motto of the French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld , the Frank finally not adopted in the publication: "What people call friendship only socializing; [...] an exchange of favors, an intercourse in which self-love always hopes to gain something. ”Instead, he chose a not quite so pessimistic statement by Michel de Montaigne , another French moralist, as the motto :“ Que sçay-je ?" (What do I know?). The choice of the motto "indicates an early confrontation with the French moralists". At the end of his life, Bruno Frank was planning a novel about Nicolas Chamfort , another of the French moralists. However, he could only complete the first chapter. It was published two weeks before his own death under the title "Chamfort tells his death"

Individual poems

The collection of poems consists mainly of two- stanza iambic poems with four lines per stanza in which regular rhyme schemes predominate.

Holderlin

On the 450th anniversary of the University of Tübingen, Bruno Frank remembered in 1927: “... and the most beautiful of these verses were written here in Tübingen, because they were by Hölderlin and Mörike .” Hölderlin was one of the great role models of the poet Bruno Frank, and he also dedicated the eleventh poem in his first volume of poetry to him. In 1795, in his poem "The God of Youth", he conjured up the poet's divine calling:

So look for the most breathy grove in the quietest valley , And pour the happy sacrificial wine from a golden bowl ...

Bruno Frank made Hölderlin's thoughts on the poet profession his own in his poem "Hölderlin":

Whom life's wine swims in the cup , he can probably do without sweet juice: the goddess may defend a cheerful mouth, That he takes from the consecrated drink.

But mild, ready for the act of blessing, lets her poor, feverish lips gladly sip from her golden bowl. One last refreshment of bliss.

“The“ feverish ”poet, completely devoted to creating, maintains an exclusive relationship with art and can enjoy its“ sweet juice ”; the vivacious "cheerful mouth" is denied the drink from the "golden bowl". The title of the collection indicated the central motif: art as a sanctuary that opens up to those who devote themselves to it in the experience of loneliness and suffering. "

In the stream

The awareness of the poet's divine calling did not prevent Bruno Frank from recognizing transience, especially of works of art, for example in the poem "Im Strom", the last poem in the collection:

Not a day gets tired of praising his own work, Everyone believes that he has the last word, And the sexes that overcome each other, they all want to be called the goal and the end.

Of the many songs that ban us today, they are already forgotten by our sons. And then new tunes will sound, To whom we secretly - tighten the strings.

"Humble enough, he contented himself with participating in the passing" stream "of art without even wanting to establish an aesthetic realm with an art priestly attitude."

Before an old portrait

Joaquín Agrasot y Juan : Portrait of a Valencian Woman , 1880.

The collection of 54 poems does not begin with the title poem , but with the poem “Before an old portrait”. - In the 1920s, childhood friends Bruno Frank and Nora von Beroldingen , who had not seen each other for two decades, happened to meet again on a train:

“It was a strange and moving reunion; We had both experienced and suffered a lot, but immediately the mood of our childhood rose between us and the grand seigneur with the Caesar's head turned into a schoolboy who eagerly asked: 'Do you still have my poems from back then, including the last one I was in Your girl album wrote? '

This poem, which he wrote 40 years ago on the lovely picture of my grandmother, which he had often contemplated, lies before me in his distinctive, elegant youthful handwriting. It is said:

"In front of an old portrait."
A young woman in black lace: a fine, pale Nordic face, dominated by large eyes of dark blue, from which breaks a ray of love.		Was she looking at the artist with such a look? Does his wish demand the quick hand? - I stood in the picture room and looked and thought, Until the portrait disappeared in the twilight gray!
Stuttgart, Jan. 1906 "

Alone

According to Sascha Kirchner, Bruno Frank's earliest verses speak “again and again of the consciously sought loneliness experience”, as in the poem “Alone”:

I longed for all of my friends, took a brief farewell to the dearest loved ones, And finally I was left all alone And heard their voices fade away.

Sons of princes

In the poem “Fürstensöhne” he addresses the motif of the artist's choice. "The few" princes of thought "whose eyes are sharpened for" new things "stand opposite the" stupid people "":

The stupid people, in the old fairy tale, hurried past, carelessly, at the thorn hedge, And only the prince, the king's son, lingered, To wake the sleeping princess.

Max Klinger : The Liberated Prometheus, 1888–1894.

Escape

In the poem “Flucht” the poet “withdraws from the crowd that persists in dull superstition in order to take the place of the gods”:

In the temple the crowd lies on their knees and adores with sultry penitential songs, With sacrificial scents that constrict the heart, That pull sweetly and heavily on the marble floor.

But you dare to hurry away from the walls, you climb rejoicing on a lightly harnessed winged horse to the bright cloud castle , where the gods themselves dwell young and naked.

The liberated

Bruno Frank contrasts “living antiquity with religion frozen in blind rituals.” In the poem “Der Liberated” he “logically” sings about the liberated Prometheus based on a picture by Max Klinger :

O light day! Prometheus was saved. The gods of the sea came to his feet, And the mountains resounded their greetings. He sat on his rock, untied.

Emergence

In 1946, Nora von Beroldingen (1889–1953) reported in a magazine article about her childhood friendship with Bruno Frank:

“If someone, soon after the turn of the century, had watched the schoolchildren of both sexes flowing home in Stuttgart, he would have seen, far behind the others, a twelve-year-old girl with flying pigtails next to a strikingly beautiful boy of 15, who was listening to the devotedly child from a little book, chanting violently, pre-declaiming verses, while his deep blue eyes shone and he threw back his unruly locks. Sometimes the child would stop and say: 'That's nice, Bruno!' or also: 'No, I don't like that at all!' Half angry, half embarrassed, he would reply: 'Just wait, once I'm a poet, I'll make all the poems just for you, you have to love them!' "

“Unfortunately, over time, the budding poet became so reckless as to address a few poems, which might unconsciously sounded a bit fiery, to the skinny backfish himself. He even entrusted one of them to the post office, since he was just studying for his Abitur. It was intercepted and a terrible judgment fell upon us poor sinners. "

Because of "insubordination" Bruno Frank had to leave the Karls-Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1902 . His parents then sent him to Haubinda , a kind of secondary school, in the Thuringian reform pedagogical rural education home . In 1904 he returned to his hometown Stuttgart. He attended the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and passed the Abitur in mid-1905. In his spare time, the prospective high school graduate forged verses, which he combined under the title "From the golden bowl" and completed on July 1, 1905 in manuscript. In the same year his first volume of poetry was published by Winter Verlag in Heidelberg . Bruno Frank's second volume of poetry “Poems. Second, greatly increased edition ”from 1907 contained all the poems of the first volume and 53 new poems.

reception

The first work of the young Stuttgart poet enjoyed a benevolent response in the press, including newspapers from his Swabian homeland such as the Stuttgarter Neue Tagblatt and the Schwäbischer Merkur .

In December 1905, shortly after the publication of the collection, the actor and author Ferdinand Gregori spoke highly of Bruno Frank's work in the “ Literary Echo ”:

“It is with unusual pleasure that I show the little book of an eighteen-year-old, Bruno Franks, as to whether I otherwise estimate the poetic value of my high school student days to be very low. This Mulus certainly did not pull fine poetry straight out of his own breast, but his helpers are noble people like Holderlin. There is culture in it, which of course does not promise much new, but avoids any lack of taste. ... It doesn't often go beyond two verses of four, never over a small printed page: evidence of outrageous youthful self-discipline. A tendency to loneliness, a striving for the general and the unknown, a thirst for the sacred drink, the holiness of women and an intimate love of nature make him appear on the best path that a poet can walk. "

In 1907, Hermann Hesse was amazed at the young poet's seriousness:

“A very small volume 'From the golden bowl' by Bruno Frank (Karl Winter, Heidelberg) contains nothing but short, concise poems, for the most part sententious fragments of a young worldview, but partly also small pictures of reliable drawing and noble form, how the whole thing is pleasantly free from addiction to originality and speaks a calm, unperturbed language. At first glance, the still very young poet appears strangely serious and measured, but then you discover quite happy things in between. For example:

One too
In the morning my pastime is a scuffle with other rags, in the afternoon the full tankard, and at night a hot woman.		If I were lame and tame, I would have to travel away, because the seven wise men also died at that time. "

However, Hesse had to admit that this little poem is one of the few exceptions in the collection: "But it would be wrong to present this kind of rascality as a typical example for the valuable booklet."

The literary historian Erwin Ackerknecht , a brother of Bruno Frank's school friend Eberhard Ackerknecht , judged Bruno Frank's first volume of poetry in 1956:

“His lyrical precociousness was astonishing: as early as 1905 he had a volume of poems saturated with mood appear under the title From the golden bowl ; and it was mainly not love songs, but rather thoughtful, mostly two-trophic structures that testified to a high level of linguistic discipline. It should be said at this point that Frank confirmed his will to an unmanaged simplicity in his later books of poetry, namely in the volume Die Kelter published in 1919. "

expenditure

First edition

• From the golden bowl. Poems. Heidelberg: Winter, 1905.

Other issues

• Poems. Second, greatly increased edition. Heidelberg: Winter, 1907. - Contains: #Frank 1905.1 and 53 new poems.

literature

• Erwin Ackerknecht : Afterword. In: Bruno Frank: Political Novella . Stuttgart 1956, pages 127-136, here 127.
• Ferdinand Gregori : Lyrical walks. In: Das literäre Echo , 8th year, 1905, issue 6, December 15, 1905, column 401–406, here 404.
• Hermann Hesse : poetry books. In: March . Semi-monthly publication for German culture , 1st year, 4th volume, October 1907, pages 86–90, here 88.
• Friedrich Hölderlin : The god of youth. In: Friedrich Schiller (Editor): Muses Almanac for the year 1796. Neustrelitz 1796, page 152-155, online: .
• Nora Winkler von Kapp : My childhood friend Bruno Frank. In: Hochlandbote for the districts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Miesbach, Schongau, Tölz and Weilheim , supplement “Der Frauenspiegel”, volume 2, number 62, August 2, 1946, page 7.
• Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887–1945) - life and work. Düsseldorf 2009, pages 24–26.

Web links

• Bruno Frank, digital works, poems

Footnotes

1. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 24, 347, footnote 31.
2. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 24.
3. ↑ Bruno Frank Frank # 1957.1 , #Kirchner 2009 , the 340th
4. ↑ Bruno Frank # Frank 1927.4 .
5. ↑ # Hölderlin 1796 .
6. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 26.
7. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 26.
8. ↑ #Kapp 1946 .
9. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 25.
10. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 25.
11. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 25.
12. ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 25.
13. ↑ #Kapp 1946 .
14. ↑ # Frank 1905.1 .
15. ↑ # Frank 1907.1 .
16. ↑ Bruno Frank # Frank 1906.1 , 3rd cover page .
17. ↑ #Gregori 1905 .
18. ↑ # Hesse 1907 .
19. ↑ #Ackerknecht 1956 , page 127.