Carl Spitteler

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Carl Spitteler, 1905 (Zurich Central Library)
Carl Spitteler, signature.jpg

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler (pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem; born April 24, 1845 in Liestal ; † December 29, 1924 in Lucerne ; resident in Bennwil and Liestal) was a Swiss poet and writer , critic and essayist . He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919 , making him the only native Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature . (Born in Germany, Hermann Hesse is often referred to as the second Swiss Nobel Prize winner for literature.)

Life

Birthplace of Carl Spitteler (1845–1924), at Kasernenstrasse 22 in Liestal, Basel-Land, Switzerland. Location 47 ° 28'57.1 "N 7 ° 44'14.2" E
Carl Spitteler's birthplace in Liestal
Carl Spitteler in Waldenburg
Carl Spitteler in Waldenburg
Die Liegende by Roland Duss (1940), In honor of Carl Spitteler on Spitteler Quai

Carl Spitteler was born as the first of three sons of the rural Protestant judge and land clerk Karl Spitteler and his wife Anna Dorothea Spitteler-Brodbeck in Liestal . His brother was the entrepreneur Adolf Spitteler , inventor of the Galalith . His father was involved in drafting the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1848 as the Liestal magistrate and delegate of the canton of Basel-Landschaft . In his youth he often stayed in the parental home of his childhood friend Joseph Victor Widmann , the Liestal rectory. In 1849 the family moved to Bern , where the father was appointed first federal treasurer, and in 1856 back to Liestal. As a child, Spitteler closely followed his young mother, while he saw his father as an authoritarian power man.

After attending the humanistic grammar school and pedagogy in Basel , where he was strongly influenced by his teachers Jacob Burckhardt and Wilhelm Wackernagel , he studied law in Basel at the request of his father , although it had already become clear to him that his task was literary writing be. After two semesters, he broke off his studies and fled his parents' home. In a three-week “Dionysus Hike” he traveled through northern, northeastern and central Switzerland with almost no money until he found refuge in Lucerne with the family of the chief clerk Julius Rüegger and stayed there for almost ten months. After his reconciliation with his father, he studied Protestant theology in Zurich from 1865 and in Heidelberg from 1867 to 1869 , although he was an atheist (in Spitteler's words he practiced “theology as an anti-theologian”). He escaped a pastor's position in Graubünden in 1871 by accepting a position as a private tutor in the family of a Finnish general, through which he made contact with Finnish and Baltic aristocratic circles in Saint Petersburg and Finland. His impressions from this stay later flowed into the stories Ei Ole and The Bombardment of Åbo . In 1879 Spitteler returned to Switzerland and taught at the residents 'girls' school in Bern until 1881 . Later he worked as a teacher in La Neuveville and as a journalist in Basel and - as a features editor where he commented on cinema, among other things, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung - in Zurich.

In 1883 he married Maria Op den Hooff, who was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Bern and was a former student. Together they had two daughters, Anna (born 1886) and Marie-Adèle (born 1891). Another constant in Spitteler's life was his childhood friend and later “Swiss Literature Pope” Joseph Victor Widmann, who influenced and promoted the younger Spitteler and remained connected to him throughout his life. As the director of the residents' girl school in Bern and later as the features editor of the Bernese Confederation , Widmann enabled his friend to earn a living as a teacher and journalist before he became known as a writer.

When Spitteler became financially independent in 1893 through an inheritance from his late father-in-law, he settled in Lucerne with his family as a freelance writer. In 1905 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich and in 1915 from the University of Lausanne .

In 1915 he was also a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The academy could not agree on a candidate; A Swedish newspaper report noted that Spitteler had "fallen out of favor" in Germany in particular because of his " Entente-friendly " speech from 1914. Verner von Heidenstam , winner of 1916, proposed Spitteler in 1919 for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he - as the first Swiss - in the year It was handed over in 1920, “especially with regard to his mighty epic 'Olympic Spring'”. In the same year he was awarded the Grand Schiller Prize of the Swiss Schiller Foundation. Spitteler died on December 29, 1924 in Lucerne and was buried in the Friedental municipal cemetery .

In 1931 part of the right bank of Lake Lucerne was named Carl-Spitteler-Quai . The sculpture "Die Liegende" by Roland Duss was erected in 1940 in honor of Lucerne's honorary citizen.

plant

Plaster bust of Carl Spitteler (1845–1925) writer, poet by Jakob August Heer (1867–1922) in Liestal, Switzerland
Plaster bust of Jakob August Heer

At the age of seventeen, after a disappointed love affair, Spitteler decided not to devote his life to the search for private happiness, but rather to his poetry. In 1880/1881 he published the two-volume epic Prometheus and Epimetheus under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem , in which he modernized the ancient Prometheus myth. Spitteler dealt with the subject of outsiders versus the masses: Prometheus as an autonomous individualist who does not submit to any human conscience, but only to his independent soul, is initially cast out of human society, but is ultimately the only one able to fight against the forces of evil, and at least against them partially defeated. In terms of style, Spitteler was outside the general trend of realism ; a relationship to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (with whom he corresponded and whose works he partially reviewed for the Bernese Bund ) becomes apparent. Joseph Viktor Widmann sent the first part of Prometheus Gottfried Keller , which is in a reply:

«The book is full of the most exquisite beauties from cover to cover. Even the truly epic and venerable stream of language [...] envelops us in a peculiar mood [...]. After reading it twice, I don't yet know what the poet actually wants. […] But I am touched and amazed by the independent power and beauty of the depiction of the dark structures.
In spite of the cosmic, mythological and humanly responsible dissolution and impossibility, everything is so brilliantly vivid that one is always fully at the moment. [...] It almost seems to me as if a primeval poet from the time when religions and legends of the gods grew and yet a lot was already experienced suddenly came to light today and began his mysterious and wonderfully naive song. "

- From a letter from Gottfried Keller to Joseph Viktor Widmann dated January 27, 1881.
August Suter (1887–1965) sculptor. His most famous sculpture is the monument - Prometheus und die Seele, (the poet of Prometheus) dedicated to Carl Spitteler (1845–1925) in Liestal, on which he worked from 1926 to 1931. Also human and goddess "soul" - or the poet and the inspiration - the poet and the inspiration. Location, 47 ° 29'16.3N 7 ° 43'47.8E
Sculpture by August Suter . Prometheus and the soul in Liestal

In 1931 the sculptor August Suter dedicated a sculpture to him with the title “Prometheus and the Soul”, which can also be interpreted as “Man and Goddess” or “Poet and Inspiration”.

His debut work, as well as other lyrical works, remained largely without echo. Only his great verse epic Olympic Spring (1900–1905), in which Spitteler transported characters and storylines from Greek mythology into his own, modern world of experience in around 20,000 verses, received a positive response. Embedded in a mythological fairy tale, Spitteler drew a gloomy picture of the universe that corresponded to his pessimistic worldview. In the preliminary remarks on the "Presentation" of Conrad, the Lieutenant , he had already set up a program for the inner monologue or the personal narrative situation in 1898 , without being able to implement this in the work itself. In 1905 Spitteler published twenty aphorisms against the zeitgeist in an encore to his essay volume Lachende Truths: Ein Büschel Aphorisms . In 1906 the strongly autobiographical novel Imago was published, which received great attention in the young psychoanalytic movement around Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and was considered a document of a real artist's soul; the influential journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities was named Imago after Spitteler's work (from 1912, analogously from 1939 American Imago ). Spitteler's story follows Viktor, who returns to his homeland after years abroad to confront a woman he loved but who is now married to someone else. Although Viktor voluntarily renounced her in order to obey his "strict mistress", poetry, he regards her marriage as treason. For in the years of his absence he lived an intimate, if purely spiritual "marriage" with his dreamed lover, whose presence became a reality for him. This dream lover, Imago, seems more real to him than the woman whom he meets again in the small-minded confines of his homeland and baptizes "Pseuda" - the fake. Spitteler himself emphasized the relevance of the work for understanding his life:

“It's not just a work of art, it's heart and soul. So for my life story, for my biographer, it will be the most important document of all. In all my other works I appear veiled and masked, here I show my soul the smallest fibers. "

- Letter from Carl Spitteler to Grete Klinckerfuss dated October 21, 1905. Collected Works, Vol. X, p. 25.

The 1914 speech

Somewhat reluctantly, Spitteler expressed his opinion on politics at the beginning of the First World War , when a linguistic rift drew through the country and Spitteler spoke out in favor of consistent neutrality for Switzerland and popular reconciliation. He gave his widely acclaimed controversial speech Our Swiss Standpoint on December 14, 1914 in the Zunftsaal zur Zimmerleuten in Zurich in front of the New Helvetic Society . In it he clearly opposed the sympathy of many Swiss for German nationalism and the war rhetoric of all parties involved. Instead, he voted for a rational, neutral stance on the part of Switzerland, which should strengthen the country's internal cohesion:

«Wherever you listen with your heart, […] you hear the sobbing of sorrow and the sobbing sobbing sound the same in all nations, there is no difference in language. Well, in the face of this enormous amount of international suffering, let's fill our hearts with Swiss emotion and our souls with devotion, and above all we take our hat off. Then we are on the right, neutral, Swiss point of view. "

- Carl Spitteler, Our Swiss Viewpoint 1914.

Spitteler was aware that this speech would greatly reduce his popularity in Germany. Indeed, it caused a storm of indignation, but in France and Belgium the poet won many followers.

In 1992 the speech was given great topical importance. On the question of Switzerland's accession to the EEA, the German-speaking parts of the country overruled the French-speaking parts, which resulted in a clearly perceptible gap between the parts of the country. For this reason, an agreement committee of the Council of Estates and the National Council was set up in 1992. The Commission's rapporteur, National Councilor Ruth Grossenbacher , placed Spitteler's 1914 speech at the center of the considerations in 1993 and quoted from it: "In order to be able to understand each other better, above all we have to get to know each other better." Subsequently, 23 recommendations and a motion text were passed by both councils for referral to the Federal Council.

In the anniversary year of the Nobel Prize in 2019, the festivities, which were spread over a year, began in spring in various locations: Liestal, his birthplace, Lucerne, where he spent many years, and on December 14, 2019 in Zurich, exactly 105 years after his speech. The Zurich event was connected with a panel discussion, which was again organized by the New Helvetic Society, which Spitteler had convinced to give his speech in 1914. The senior president of the National Council, the Basel bidder Maya Graf , recalled Spitteler's speech at the opening of the new legislature on December 2, 2019.

estate

Carl Spitteler (1845–1924) writer, poet, essayist, critic, Nobel Prize for literature, grave in Friedental cemetery, City of Lucerne. Location: 47 ° 03'37.8 "N 8 ° 17'30.2" E, Marie Spitteler-Op den Hooff (1865–1929)
Spitteler's grave in the Friedental cemetery

Carl Spitteler's estate is in three institutions: in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, in the Zurich Central Library and (through a gift from his daughter Anna) in the Poet and City Museum in Liestal. In the Liestal Poet and City Museum, objects left by Carl Spitteler can be seen in the permanent exhibition, including the Nobel Prize medal and certificate and Spitteler's original desk. Spitteler's manuscript for the commissioned work Der Gotthard is in the archive of SBB Historic in Windisch .

Fonts (selection)

Rudolf Löw's cover for Imago (1906)

Anthologies

  • Carl Spitteler: Our Swiss point of view. Reading book. Selection and epilogue by Dominik Riedo. Pro Libro, Lucerne 2009, ISBN 978-3-9523406-9-1 .
  • Carl Spitteler: The Gotthard. With Carl Spitteler through the traffic and cultural landscape. Edited and commented by Fritz Schaub. With an afterword by Dominik Riedo. Pro Libro, Lucerne 2016, ISBN 978-3-905927-46-7 .
  • Carl Spitteler: poet, thinker, speaker. An encounter with his work. Edited by Stefanie Leuenberger, Philipp Theisohn and Peter von Matt . Nagel & Kimche, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-312-01122-3 .
  • Carl Spitteler: Critical writings (= classics of criticism). Edited by Emil Staiger . Artemis, Zurich 1965.

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Carl Spitteler  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Carl Spitteler  - Quotes
Wikisource: Carl Spitteler  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Stauffacher (ed.): Carl Spitteler - Joseph Viktor Widmann. Correspondence (= Martin Stern, Hellmut Thomke, Peter Utz [Hrsg.]: Swiss Texts - New Series . Volume 11 ). Paul Haupt, Bern / Stuttgart / Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-258-05679-X , p. 12 .
  2. ↑ Dicher- and City Museum Liestal: Station 3: The house Widmann. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Dominik Riedo: Epilogue to: Carl Spitteler. Our Swiss standpoint (=  culture in Central Switzerland: 20th century literature ). Pro Libro, Luzern 2009, ISBN 978-3-9523406-9-1 , p. 380 .
  4. ^ Werner Stauffacher: Carl Spitteler. Biography . Zurich / Munich 1973, p. 320 .
  5. ^ Carl Spitteler: Carl Spitteler and the "Kinema". Schweizer Film = Film Suisse: official organ of Switzerland, accessed on June 10, 2020 .
  6. ^ The literary Nobel Prize. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 20, 1915, page 1 of the evening edition.
  7. ↑ Carl Spitteler. In: Les Prix Nobel en 1919–1920. Les Lauréats. PA Norstedt & Söner, Stockholm 1922, p. 134.
  8. ^ Keller - Widmann correspondence at the Gottfried Keller portal of the University of Zurich .
  9. ↑ Dicher- and City Museum Liestal: Station 5: The Spitteler monument. May 8, 2019, accessed May 8, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Jan Wiele: Conrad, the lieutenant Gustl? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 29, 2012, p. N3.
  11. ↑ Dominik Riedo: Foreword to: Carl Spitteler. Our Swiss standpoint (=  culture in Central Switzerland: 20th century literature ). Pro Libro, Luzern 2009, ISBN 978-3-9523406-9-1 , p. 405 .
  12. ^ A political speech almost cost Carl Spitteler the Nobel Prize for Literature , AZ, April 1, 2014; "As reluctantly as possible I step out of my loneliness in public"
  13. ↑ Carl Spitteler - the great unknown , SRF Context, March 31, 2019
  14. ↑ Our Swiss standpoint (reprint in: Zeit -fragen , 2011, No. 16/17, April 20, 2011, accessed July 27, 2013)
  15. ↑ Gottfried Bohnenblust: Carl Spitteler in the memory of his friends and companions. Conversations - testimonies - encounters . Ed .: Leonhard Beriger. Artemis, Zurich 1947, p. 186 .
  16. ↑ https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/verhandlungen-92083-1992-df.pdf
  17. ↑ Alain Berset heralds the anniversary year for Carl Spitteler , Telebasel, April 4, 2019
  18. ^ Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft, NHG: “We are Carl Spitteler” - The poets and thinkers in Swiss politics, 14 Dec. 2019, 2 p.m. - 6 p.m., Volkshaus, Zurich ( Memento from 3 December 2019 in the Internet Archive )
  19. ↑ Special broadcast for the session opening , Tagesschau Spezial, December 2, 2019
  20. ^ Monograph "Der Gotthard" by Carl Spitteler; Original concept, newspaper reports, 1894–1896. VGB GB SBBGB03 099 04. Retrieved on October 9, 2018 (dossier).
personal data
SURNAME Spitteler, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spitteler, Carl Friedrich Georg (full name); Tandem, Carl Felix (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Liestal
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1924
Place of death Lucerne