Book of friends

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal 1910 on a photograph by Nicola Perscheid

The Book of Friends is the title of a 1922 collection of aphorisms by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal . Shortly after the author's death, Rudolf Alexander Schröder published a second edition, which he expanded with texts from the estate .

Hofmannsthal reflects on , describes strange events and presents insights by characterizing historical or literary figures. His inclination towards the anecdotal or his preference for details and memorable formulations is shown several times. When describing unexpected details, he refrains from deliberately pointing and avoids brilliantly witty sentences .

While the speculative breadth of the gaze is comparable to Goethe's maxims and reflections or Novalis ' fragments , Hofmannsthal avoids the pedagogical and cryptic aspects of the great models and - like Lichtenberg  - wants to entertain in a sublime way.

content

Novalis around 1799, portrait by Franz Gareis

The Book of Friends is divided into four groups without headings and combines thoughts that the poet used to record in diaries from his youth with sentences, anecdotes and literary reflections. In addition, Hofmannsthal took numerous excerpts from the works of writers and philosophers and occasionally corrected the translations available to him. In addition to Goethe, Novalis and Lichtenberg, he presented “delicious excerpts” by Moliere and Pascal , Grillparzer and Jacob Burckhardt , Balzac and Shakespeare . Some sayings manage with just a few words in one line, other considerations and French quotations fill half a page.

The book is not a systematic compendium and there are no traces that could lead to the sources of the quotations. The higher unity should come together from the consideration of the whole. An unobtrusive order that goes back to Anton Kippenberg's suggestion can be seen when reading the initially colorful mixture. So the reader is led by general questions of human existence, the individual, love, friendship and marriage through mythical-philosophical speculations on topics of the nation, politics and society and at the end reaches reflections on art and language . Hofmannsthal orients himself towards idealized forms of higher sociability and strives for a critically sound language cultivation , which he also expresses in the short essay Value and Honor of the German Language .

Several times he delves into the relationships and contrasts between German and French culture and way of life, an approach that he continues in his later literary speech. He writes about the French joke and their "surprisingly pleasant way of pronouncing a truth sharply." French prose is "at its highest level [...] more sensual in the spiritual and more spiritual in the sensual than the German at its present." On the basis of Nietzsche , the profundity of the Germans appears problematic to him: “Germans benefit a lot from depth, which is just another word for unrealized form. According to them, nature should let us walk around without skin, as walking abysses and eddies. "

Again and again he comes back to Goethe, who could “replace an entire culture as the basis of education”: “We have no newer literature. We have Goethe and approaches. ”His“ Proverbs in prose are perhaps more educated today than from all German universities. ”“ Goethe is not the source of this and that in our more recent literature, but rather it is a mountain range and the source area of everyone and everything in her. "In his works he combines" conviviality with solitude. "

Emergence

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler

In the summer of 1919 Hofmannsthal considered for the first time to publish his collection of aphorisms as a private print for 300 to 500 friends and reported to Anton Kippenberg about this project. Two years later he reconsidered the plan, since such a compilation “does not hold up” “before one's own judgment, which must be the strictest and most serious.” However, he has around 500 “more or less reasonably well-formed aphorisms […] about objects of all kinds such as spirit and society, politics and nation, as well as small but delicious excerpts from foreign authors ... “Friends of his intellectual existence would like to see them on good paper.

Since the aphorisms were still disordered according to their origin, he first considered dividing them into groups. Since it seemed to him a little later to present them in a mess, he was, encouraged by Kippenberg, persuaded only to a subtle thematic order, because the reading would then be more entertaining. He referred to Novalis, whose fragments might just pull "a spell" out of their disorderly character.

Hofmannsthal later considered adding a motto to the collection ("You can offer anything to friends, they still enjoy being weak") and in 1928 planned another book by the friends , projects that he could no longer carry out. For Hofmannsthal, the depth was hidden on the surface, so that he could do without brilliant jokes in order to let things speak for themselves: “You have to hide the depth. Where? On the surface."

background

From Friedrich Nietzsche's perspective , Hofmannsthal recognized Goethe as the central exception in German-language literature. Hofmannsthal was familiar with a large part of Nietzsche's work and, alongside Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, was one of the few “ neo-romanticists ” who delved deeper into the philosopher. With Nietzsche he opened up the poetic dual nature of Goethe. On the one hand, his early songs, in which he swung himself up to the zenith in Sturm und Drang , in order to, as Manfred Riedel put it, "suck in the bliss of the moment [...] and breath it in the clear ether"; on the other hand, the earthly element of age poems, which for Hofmannsthal were like deep wells a symbol of the world secret.

Goethe had also planned a book by the Friends for his West-Eastern Divan , in which he wanted to thank certain role models and set a memorial to spiritual companions. The Divan , an unfathomable book, is "completely spirit" and "a Bible", even if it does not go in breadth and "in the glory of its assembly was not understood by very many".

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Rainer Noltenius: Hofmannsthal - Schröder - Schnitzler . Possibilities and limits of modern aphorism, Metzler-Verlag, Stuttgart 1969

Web links

Wikiquote: Book of Friends (1922)  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Kindlers New Literature Lexicon , Volume 7, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Book of Friends . Kindler, Munich 1990, p. 992
  2. ^ Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon , Volume 7, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Book of Friends . Kindler, Munich 1990, p. 993
  3. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 275
  4. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 290
  5. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 281
  6. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 281
  7. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 288
  8. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 292
  9. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 297
  10. ↑ Quoted from: Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes , Volume 10, Speeches and Essays III, Bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 646
  11. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Book of Friends . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , volume 10, speeches and essays III, bibliography. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 268
  12. ↑ Bruno Hillebrand: Nietzsche: as the poets saw him , Hofmannsthal - George - Rilke. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2000, pp. 68-69.
  13. ↑ Manfred Riedel: In dialogue with Nietzsche and Goethe, Weimar Classics and Classical Modernism . Fourth part: return of the spirit. Hofmannsthal's dialogue with Goethe and Nietzsche and the idea of ​​a “conservative revolution” . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2009, p. 219
  14. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Goethe's "West-Eastern Divan" . In: Collected works in ten individual volumes , Volume 8, speeches and essays I. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 438