Carl Wilhelm Diehl

Portrait of Carl Wilhelm Diehl, 1872, photography atelier E. Bieber, Hamburg

Carl Wilhelm Diehl also Carlos Guillermo Diehl-Bleer (born August 5, 1824 in Hamburg , † October 17, 1885 in Buenos Aires ) was a German-Argentine merchant and poet.

Life

Diehl was born as the son of the sergeant in the citizen military Friedrich Diehl and his wife Dorothea Diehl, born in Denmark, from Denmark. Bleer born in Hamburg . He spent his childhood in Hamburg, where he completed a commercial apprenticeship after attending the Johanneum School of Academics .

After completing an apprenticeship in 1845, he emigrated to the Río de la Plata . Diehl lived and worked for several years in Rio de Janeiro , Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where he died on October 17, 1885.

Diehl worked as a businessman in South America. Between 1854 and 1879, in addition to his commercial activity, he held the offices of consul or general consul almost continuously - one after the other for Argentina , Austria , the North German Confederation and the German Empire .

Since his youth, Diehl had been interested in poetry and wrote poetry himself. From 1861 he began to publish his work. Its publisher in Germany was primarily the poet and editor Ignaz Hub who worked with Ferdinand Freiligrath , among others . Diehl's re-poetry of key works of young South American poetry is of particular importance to this day.

From the Spanish Diehl translated the epic La Cautiva (1837) by Esteban Echeverría and parts of the Cantos del Peregrino (1847) by José Mármol , from the Portuguese parts of the epic A Confederação dos Tamoios (1856) by Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães . These works were created after the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in 1816 from Spain and Brazil in 1822 from Portugal. What all three poems have in common is that they are now counted among the founding documents of Argentine and Brazilian national literature; they are romantic works with which a young generation of authors confidently turned away from old Europe and turned to the new world. In Mármol's words, which sound like an echo to Goethe's lines "America, you have it better / than our continent, the old one":

"On the world wide stage / America, the young ... / Silence, Europe, aged mother / old, bygone times [!]"

Diehl had been married to Adelaida Casilda Tornquist since 1854, one of the younger daughters of Jorge Pedro Ernesto Tornquist and Rosa Camusso y Alsina and sister of Ernesto Tornquist . His grandson, Carlos Guillermo Miguens Diehl, was an important Argentine diplomat.

Works (selection)

• Cisatlantisch, St. Gallen 1861, published by Scheitlin and Zollikofer. (Published under the pseudonym Wilhelm Walther)
• Black and white red, Berlin 1869, Reinhold Schlingmann publishing house
• From Brazil (fragment). In: German poet gifts. Album for Ferdinand Freiligrath. A collection of previously unprinted poems by the most famous German poets. Edited by Christian Schad and Ignaz Hub . Leipzig (published by Duncker & Humblot) 1868, pp. 413-418.
• Selection of Diehl's poems. In: Ignaz Hub, Ed .: Germany's ballads and romance poets. A selection of the most beautiful and peculiar from the treasure trove of lyric epic, together with the biographies and characteristics of the poets, taking into account the notable critical voices. Third volume, section II. The presence. Fourth, revised and greatly increased edition Würzburg (publisher of the author) and Karlsruhe (commission from W. Creuzbauer) 1873, pp. 570–579.

literature

• Eva Mertes, Oranna Dimmig, Michael Mertes : I think of the far north with sadness. Carl Wilhelm Diehl's cisatlantic poetry , Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn, 2016, ISBN 978-3-9816420-3-2

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eva Mertes, Oranna Dimmig, Michael Mertes: I think of the far north with sadness. Carl Wilhelm Diehl's cisatlantic poetry , Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn, 2016, ISBN 978-3-9816420-3-2 .