The young lady stood by the sea

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The lady stood by the sea is a poem by Heinrich Heine . The poem, composed in August 1832, was first published in the journal Der Freimüthige . Originally from the Hortense cycle , it appeared in the volume of poetry Neue Gedichte in 1844 and is the tenth of 15 poems in the "wreath of songs" Seraphine .

In it, the sentimental admiration for a predictable natural event is ironized. The poem is considered to be an example of the destruction of romantic poetry through the clash of ideal and reality. In its use of irony , the poem belongs to Heine's early and middle work.

text

The young lady stood by the sea

The young lady stood by the sea
And sighed long and anxious,
It touched her so deeply
The sunset.

My girl! be cheerful,
this is an old piece;
Here in front it goes under
and returns from behind.

shape

Structure of the poem
 verse   meter  rhyme 
1  υ - υ - υ - υ  a
2  υ - υ - υ -  b
3  υ - υ - υ - υ  a
4th  υ - υ - υ -  b
5  υ - υ - υ - υ  c
6th  υ - υ - υ -  d
7th  υ - υ - υ - υ  c
8th  υ - υ - u u -  d
-: stressed syllable
υ: unstressed syllable

The poem consists of two four-line stanzas with iambic triples . The sequence of two unstressed syllables on a stressed syllable in the last verse creates a lively tone that unexpectedly discharges in an uplift: " And comes back from behind ", which reinforces the punch line contained in the poem. At the same time, the additional lowering disrupts the metric design of the folk song verse . The cadence is alternately female and male. The cross rhyme can be found in both stanzas. The dialectical structure of the poem results from the illusion in the first and the disillusionment in the second stanza .

interpretation

The short poem begins with an unmarried woman's sentimental contemplation of nature . Lyrical expressions like seas and sehre reinforce the naive picture. The alliteration they see as well as the rhyme of the inner rhyme and fear of the sunset ending with a male cadence are reminiscent of an alliance rhyme . In this way, Heine linguistically caricatures the romanticizing view of a well-known natural occurrence. The fräulein's exaggerated reactions, her sighing and being touched, ironize that limitless feeling. “Like in a kitschy advertising film, everything is accessories: the sea, the sunset, the sighs and the emotion; yes, even the young lady does not seem to come from reality, but from the cliché arsenal of the peep-box ”, judges the Germanist Walter Hinderer. In fact, numerous motifs that were of central importance in Romanticism , such as the sunset as the transition from the finite to the infinite, loneliness in the form of the sea and the motif of longing are parodied .

After the speaker asks the young lady to be lively, he explains in short sentences the reason for the long-lasting crush: a banal constellation . The comedy is already contained in the carefree form of address Mein Fräulein . In contrast, the term old piece , a common phrase for antiquated stage works, is not only mockery , but also refers to the illusion of the sunset, consequently of romanticism itself, which has outlived itself as a poetic concept as a world approach. In the gesture of pointing; the movement of the star is based on the local preposition here in the seventh verse and the adverb from behind in the last verse, the deconstruction of the previous perception is initiated. The direct speech also reinforces the message of the speaker because of their immediacy. In the punch line that sunrise always follows sunset, the romantic image is destroyed. Through the bathos , the majesty of the sunset is confronted here with the general experience of the course of the sun, the comic experiences a further heightening. Unlike the artistry, the sudden change in the second stanza, together with the gain in knowledge, creates a strong humorous effect that can sometimes be understood as cynicism.

Antiromantic poem

The Germanist Walter Hinderer thinks that the poet "clearly targets the wrong notes and emotions of the epigonal natural poetry of the time" and thus deals "critically with a poetic spelling (including his own)". The literary critic Ulrich Greiner sees this as a settlement with the "naive or naive emotional poetry".

In his essay The Romantic School, written between 1833 and 1836, Heine related the image of the sunset to one of the most important thinkers of Romanticism: “ Ms. Schlegel was a profound man. He recognized all the glories of the past and he felt all the pains of the present. But he did not understand the sanctity of these pains and their necessity for the future salvation of the world. He saw the sun go down and looked sadly at the place of this setting and complained about the night darkness that he saw approaching; and he did not notice that a new dawn was already shining on the opposite side. "

In contrast to the romantic doctrine of opposition, according to which two contradicting statements are reconciled by adding the third, here there is a dialectical refutation of the first statement by the second. The message conveyed in the poem can be summarized as a turning away from transcendence. The subject, represented here by the young lady, is now thrown onto itself, with the focus on this world. Manfred Frank rejects equating Heine's irony, "where the sentimentality invested in a poem is laughed at in the poem itself" with romantic irony, which reconciles two opposing positions through relativization. Paul Peters sees in the poem the “sensation of something absolutely contemporary and present”, which is achieved through the degradation of the central heavenly body. The opposition of a sentimental view of nature and the "prose bourgeois present" denies any escapism into harmonious nature.

irony

The irony in the poem was perceived very differently. The means of irony is used through the conversion of meaning, but it is sarcasm due to the destruction of the object. According to Louis Kugelmann's daughter Franziska, the philosopher Karl Marx is said to have recited the poem to prevent the emergence of sentimentality . Kurt Rothmann found: "His verses are intended for readers who like to follow the hovering between seriousness and ridicule and the sliding or surprising transition to joke". The Catholic clergyman Peter Norrenberg attacked poem and poet in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur in 1884 : "He royally amused his blasé audience with such Polish Jewish jokes." However, the anti-Semitic literary historian Adolf Bartels admitted in his pamphlet Heinrich Heine. Also a memorial that the “ Sottißen poem Das Fräulein stood by the sea can at least be addressed as a legitimate satire” With regard to this poem, Karl Kraus assumed in his invective Heinrich Heine and the consequences of the poet a cynicism that did not go beyond the sentimentality of the Fräulein would get out. The philosopher Elmar Treptow saw it as an “ironic degradation of nature” with which Heine at least succeeded in getting students interested in poetry.

Emergence

The poem is dated to the year 1832. After the first publication in the journal Freimüthigen , Heine recorded it in the first volume of the Salon in 1834 . Ten years later he was included in the volume Neue Gedichte .

reception

The Icelandic poet Jónas Hallgrímsson translated the poem into his mother tongue in 1845 (Hispursmey stóð við ströndu). Robert Gernhardt alludes to Heine's poem in the memories of an encounter in Duderstadt . In 1905 the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck set the poem to music. In the catalog raisonné it bears the number o. Op. No. 16.

The TV feature film Herr Lenz travels to spring (director: Andreas Kleinert , main role: Ulrich Tukur ) from 2015 uses the poem in full length at a dramaturgically important transition point in the film.

literature

Text output

  • Heinrich Heine: New Poems . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1844, p. 71.
  • Heinrich Heine: New Poems . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1983, pp. 35-36.

Secondary literature

  • Ernst Feise: Heine's poem "A lady stood by the sea" . In: Modern Language Notes Vol. 70, 1955, pp. 350-351.
  • Manfred Frank : Introduction to early romantic aesthetics: lectures . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-11563-4 .
  • Gerolf Fritsch: The German natural poem - reality and utopia. The fictional text as a communication model . Metzler, Stuttgart 1978, pp. 88-91.
  • Walter Hinderer : The young lady was standing by the sea . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie . Vol. 15, Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-458-16327-1 , pp. 87-90.
  • Ursula Jaspersen: The young lady stood by the sea . In: Benno von Wiese (ed.): The German lyric. Form and history. Interpretations from late romanticism to the present . Bagel, Düsseldorf 1964, ISBN 3-590-07011-0 , pp. 144-149.
  • Sandra Kerschbaumer: Heine's modern romanticism . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-74438-0 , p. 226.
  • Bodo Morawe : Heine's World Run. The Lazarus Prologue and the Right to Live . In: International Yearbook of the Bettina von Arnim Society . Vol. 13/14. Saint Albin Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-930293-13-7 , pp. 141-192.

Web links

Wikisource: The lady stood by the sea  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralph Häfner: The wisdom of Silenus. Heinrich Heine and the Critique of Life. (= Spectrum literary studies. Volume 7). Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2006, ISBN 978-3-11-018954-4 .
  2. ↑ See Maren Jäger: The comic short poem. In: Carsten Jakobi (Ed.): Joke and Reality: Comedy as a form of aesthetic appropriation of the world. transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2814-2 , p. 381.
  3. ↑ Walter Hinderer: The young lady stood by the sea . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie . Vol. 15, Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-458-16327-1 , p. 89.
  4. ↑ Walter Hinderer: The young lady stood by the sea . In Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie . Vol. 15, Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-458-16327-1 , p. 89.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Greiner: Ulrich Greiner's lyric seducer. A guide to reading poetry , Beck 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59069-6
  6. ↑ Heinrich Heine: The romantic school . Hoffman and Campe, Hamburg 1836, p. 74.
  7. ^ Manfred Frank: Introduction to early romantic aesthetics: lectures . Frankfurt 1989, p. 348.
  8. ↑ Paul Peters: Heine and Baudelaire or: The alchemistic formula of modernity in: Baudelaire and Germany, Germany and Baudelaire, ed. by Bernd Kortländer and Hans T. Siepe. Tübingen 2005, pp. 23-24.
  9. ↑ Paul Peters: Heine and Baudelaire or: The alchemistic formula of modernity in: Baudelaire and Germany, Germany and Baudelaire, ed. by Bernd Kortländer and Hans T. Siepe. Tübingen 2005, p. 24.
  10. ↑ See Heinrich Heine: Neue Gedichte . In: Manfred Windfuhr (ed.): Complete works . Vol. 2, Hoffman and Campe, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-455-03002-5 , p. 451.
  11. ↑ Kurt Rothmann: Small history of German literature . Reclam, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-15-017685-6
  12. ^ Peter Norrenberg: General history of literature . Vol. 3. Münster 1884.
  13. ^ Adolf Bartels: Heinrich Heine. Also a monument . CA Koch, Dresden and Leipzig 1906, p. 240.
  14. ↑ See Karl Kraus: Heinrich Heine and the consequences . Albert Langen, Munich 1910, p. 29.
  15. ↑ Elmar Treptow: The sublime nature: Design of an ecological aesthetic . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-8260-1938-5 , p. 156.
  16. ↑ See Heinrich Heine: The Salon . Vol. 1. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1834, p. 164.
  17. ↑ See Chris Walton: Othmar Schoeck. A biography . Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, Zurich and Mainz 1994, ISBN 3-254-00168-0 , p. 362.
  18. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnL9jBPw2Vo , accessed September 4, 2016
  19. ↑ "Herr Lenz travels to spring" Fathers and Sons , Frankfurter Rundschau from July 20, 2016, accessed September 4, 2016