Capri, magical island

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Capri, magical island is the title of a book by Werner Helwig . It is a collage of biographical essays, literary history, travel diaries, personal memories and poems. It was first published in 1973.

content

The author visits Capri with his wife Yvonne . As a young person, Helwig spent some time on this island between the two world wars, and while memories of earlier times emerge and he visualizes the people he met there, everything is new for his wife. Capri had long held a mysterious attraction for artists, poets and scholars as well as eccentrics and individualists, and the protagonist tried to reveal to Yvonne the almost inexplicable magic of the island. With her, he visits the former homes of these people, meets people who still know him from past stays on the island and above all follows in the footsteps of the poet and visionary Theodor Däubler , who left the island seriously ill a few months before his death in 1933. He searches in vain for the “ Anacapreser Tagebuch” that Däubler is said to have written for Nike Peterich in 1932/33.

In the course of his explorations of Capri, Helwig inserts numerous portraits of people who have already been forgotten and who lived on the island, for example of the art expert, discoverer of later famous painters, private scholars and patron Albert Kollmann or of the do-gooder Willy Kluck, the lived in his "cube of loneliness" and founded the first international private state (IPS). He recalls Ernst Fuhrmann , for example , tells the life stories of the reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach , Eckart Peterich and the painter Raffaele Castello in essays , visits, among other things, the villa Jupiter of the Roman emperor Tiberius with his wife and tells of his luxury life on the island. The author describes the Caprese and the scenic beauties and deals with famous island guests. For example, Rilke was there too, he was initially skeptical about the island, but, as Helwig counted, he wrote 36 Capri poems.

structure

Helwig had already written books and essays about Capri for decades and was considered a connoisseur of the island. In this book, he juxtaposes two perceptions: while the author tries to conjure up the earlier times and the magic of their strange island guests, his true-to-life wife remains realistic and, in discussions, skeptically doubts that it will have relevant effects on the present. “Well composed, this results in the dissenting voice on the subject. The reader can choose whose side he takes and with whose eyes he wants to look at the island. "

Helwig has woven a second work into his Capri picture, namely a reflection on the life, work and death of the poet Theodor Däubler , the author of the three-volume visionary and linguistically difficult to access verse epic Das Nordlicht (1910). The search for the lost Däubler diary is only the pretext to deal with Däubler at all stages of his research, who, according to Helwig, has disappeared from the “present literary consciousness” and is to be made “visible” again. He tells of his earlier encounters with the poet and remembers their conversations, especially a long one about Rilke, which brought them apart because, in contrast to Däubler, he considered Rilke to be a poet. For Helwig, Däubler was "a teacher, friend and, in a certain sense, super-ego, without, of course, lacking critical distance on both sides."

Quote

One reads Werner Helwig's book [...] like the gripping report of a poet who experiences a past piece of his own development and experiences a second time, who has temporarily lost the temporal gaps and who feels transported back to his years on the spot Youth "in which the world still happened to me". "

- Gerhard Mahr

expenditure

  • 1973: Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1973
  • 1979: With photographs by Benedikt Blatter. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
  • 1990: With photographs by Benedikt Blatter. Insel-Taschenbuch 390, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-458-32090-3

literature

  • Anton Böhm : Journey into the past. Capri and German literature . In: Rheinischer Merkur of December 7, 1973.
  • Paul Hübner : Capri journey in Däubler's footsteps . In: Rheinische Post from September 15, 1973.
  • Karl Krolow : From Tiberius to Axel Munthe . Karl Krolow's book diary. In: Darmstädter Echo from October 15, 1973.
  • Gerhard Mahr: Werner Helwig: Capri - Magical Island . In: New German Issues . No. 1/1974, ISSN  0028-3142 .
  • Erik Martin : Capri, magical island . In: Clams . No. 26 A, special edition Werner Helwig. Viersen 1991, ISSN  0085-3593 .
  • Erik Martin: Capri for advanced . In: Clams . No. 21/22. Viersen 1974.
  • Karl Christian Müller : Capri, magical island . In: Keyword . Heidenheim. No. 4/1973
  • Heinz Piontek : Island paradise with strange saints . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from November 1, 1973.
  • Edith Overhoff: Werner Helwig: Capri, magical island . In: Frankfurter Hefte . No. 7/1981, ISSN  0015-9999 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. u. a. Capri. Lovely mischief of the gods . Diederichs, Düsseldorf / Cologne 1959
  2. z. B. The Thief Baccho on Capri . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 20, 1970
  3. Edith Overhoff: Werner Helwig: Capri, magical island . In: Frankfurter Hefte . No. 7/1981
  4. ^ Gerhard Mahr: Werner Helwig: Capri - Magical Island
  5. ^ Gerhard Mahr: Werner Helwig: Capri - Magical Island . In: New German Issues . No. 1/1974, page 195, ISSN  0028-3142