The Eleusian Festival

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The Eleusian Festival is a poem by Friedrich Schiller . The poem, composed between August and September 1798, was published under the title “Bürgerlied” in the Musenalmanach 1799. A year and a half later Schiller renamed it “The Eleusian Festival”.

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Illustration by Schiller, "The Eleusian Festival" by Johann Martin Wagner. In the center Apollo with lyre.

The poem has the form of a hymn to the Eleusian festivals , with which Ceres was celebrated as the goddess of the fertile earth and agriculture. In search of her daughter Persephone , who was stolen by Hades , Ceres gets to know the people in the state of homeless nomads and wild hunters with bloody victims. The theme of the poem is the introduction of agriculture as the basis and starting point of civilization, i. H. social and cultural advancement. With agriculture man becomes settled; property is formed and a legal system is established, trades develop, fortified settlements emerge with a bourgeois spirit, a sense of community among their residents. Ceres calls on the gods to cultivate man. The "harmony / and the lovely measure of times / and the power of melody" teaches Apollo with his string playing and thus provides the impetus for aesthetic education. The “miracle building” of the temple, the center of a humane cult of the gods of the “new citizens”, is created through the hands of the gods. As the “queen of the gods” leads the “most beautiful shepherdess” and Venus adorns “the first couple” of the new world, to whom all the gods bring gifts, the institution of marriage is introduced as the core of civil society. Ceres, “the tamer of wild customs, / who joins people with people / and in peaceful fixed huts / walked the movable tent”, formulates the motto of the festival: people “should line up with people”, “solely through their custom / Can he be free and powerful ”.

shape

The poem “consists of two main sections with the same number of stanzas [stanzas 2-13, 15-26]; each contains twelve stanzas in trochaic meter ; they are separated from one another by a dactylic stanza [stanza 14], and two other dactylic stanzas form the beginning [stanza 1] and the end of the poem [stanza 17], so that the whole has a perfectly symmetrical structure. The first section represents the establishment of agriculture, the transition from hunting and nomadic life to permanent settlements; the second shows the development of morality, the arts and sciences as they emerged from the changed way of life of people. The dactylic stanzas are more lyrical, the Trochaic more epic in character, and so the whole thing is somewhat related to the ballad , in which the lyrical and the epic are combined, albeit more intimately. The interruption and setting of the entire plot by choral stanzas is reminiscent of the ancient drama. "

Origin and title change

Schiller was inspired by the compilation of Greek myths, such as those handed down under the name Hyginus . He writes about his reading experience: “It is a pleasure to walk through these fairy tale characters, which the poetic spirit has enlivened, you feel moved on your home soil and by the greatest wealth of figures.” Of course, he also saw that the citizen's song “ not of general interest ”; "But that is more due to the dry material than to the mythical machines - these are rather the only living thing in them: because the devil makes something poetic out of the most unpoetic of all materials". To this day the “Eleusinian Festival” has been overshadowed by the so-called “philosophical poems” such as The Gods of Greece .

We are grateful to Wilhelm von Humboldt for pointing out that the “Eleusinian Festival” takes up one of Schiller's favorite thoughts, namely the “education of the raw natural man” through culture and art. “Even at the beginning of civilization in general, the transition from nomadic life to agriculture, in which, as he so beautifully puts it, a covenant founded in faith with the pious, motherly earth, his imagination preferred to linger. What mythology offered in relation to this he held on with avidity; Remaining completely true to the traces of the fable, he trained Demeter, the main figure in this circle, by allowing himself to be human feelings with divine husbands in her breast, into an apparition that is as wonderful as it is deeply moving. "

Why Schiller changed the title "Bürgerlied" to "Das Eleusische Fest" cannot be said for sure. The term citizen can be related to the use of the term (in the sense of citoyen ) in the French Revolution. In 1792 the pro-revolutionary poem “Bürgerlied der Mainz” by Friedrich Lehne was published . Schiller's poem on the emergence of civil society can be read as an alternative to the revolutionary upheaval in society and propagates a different understanding of civil freedom. The new title “The Eleusian Festival” can therefore be owed to the effort to distance the topic from the revolutionary discourse.

literature

  • Peter-André Alt : Schiller. Life - work - time. Vol. 2nd 2nd edition Munich: CH Beck 2004, pp. 299-301. ISBN 3-406-53128-8
  • Rolf Füllmann: Bright Hellas as a didactic model for life: from authoritative popular education (Schiller's 'Bürgerlied') to liberal self-education (Thomas Mann's Felix Krull). In: Gabriele Sigg, Andreas Zimmermann (ed.): Emotional education. The forgotten side of the education debate. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač 2018. pp. 71–94.
  • Heinrich Viehoff : Schiller's poems explained in all respects and traced back to their sources, together with a complete review and collection of variants on them. For the friends of the poet in general and for the teachers of German in higher schools in particular. 5th part. Stuttgart: P. Balz'sche Buchhandlung 1840, pp. 69-100. (Digitization by Google)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich Viehoff : Schiller's poems explained in all respects and traced back to their sources. 5th part. Stuttgart 1840, p. 72f.
  2. ↑ Schiller to Goethe, August 28, 1798
  3. ↑ Schiller to Körner, October 29, 1798
  4. ↑ Wilhelm von Humboldt : About Schiller and the course of his intellectual development (1830). In: Wilhelm von Humboldt : Works in five volumes. Edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel. Vol. II. Stuttgart 1961, pp. 357-394. Here p. 372 f.
  5. ↑ German Jacobins. Republic of Mainz and Cisrhenans 1792-1798. Vol. 2: Bibliography. 2nd edition Mainz 1982, p. 17.