The year of the soul

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The year of the soul

The Year of the Soul is the title of a cyclical volume of poetry by Stefan George published in 1897 . The collection is regarded as the most important work of his first creative period and as an attempt to renew natural poetry under the conditions of modernity . Like the cycle The Carpet of Life and the Songs of Dream and Death , published in 1899 . With a prelude , the book editions appeared in print types derived from George's handwriting and were decorated with book decorations by the painter Melchior Lechter .

With their clear shapes, the exquisite but not precious style and the lyrical reflection of the seasons , the poems are among the most successful Georges, established his fame and have achieved a certain popularity. Many of the autumn poems and some sad dances can be found in German poetry anthologies .

Content and meaning

Stefan George
portrait by Reinhold Lepsius

Like George's previous books, The Year of the Soul , which contains 98 poems, is divided into three parts. The collection begins with a circle of verses of the seasons, which can be assigned to autumn (after the harvest) , winter (catfish in the snow) and summer (victory of summer) .

The middle part contains the headings and dedications , verses, some of which are older, and record encounters and poetic experiences. This is followed by memories of some evenings of inner conviviality and a group of poems with monograms over the stanzas.

The collection ends with the 32 poems of the Sad Dances , the structure of which with three stanzas of four lines each is reminiscent of the season poems of the beginning.

With a few exceptions, the important first group is iambic five-key with mostly three four-line stanzas. They are built regularly and rhymed with female cadence . The evenly carried tone thus produced corresponds to the content-related closure and rounding of the three sections, which are characterized by compression and internalization .

From the vastness of historical educational worlds, as in the previous cycle, the books of shepherds and praise poems, sagas and chants and the hanging gardens , the lyrical self returns to the deeper explored dimension of its own soul. She experiences herself, suffering and hoping, grieving and pondering, in front of nature in the change of the seasons. The year of the soul is far from traditional natural poetry , however, since the ego does not encounter nature in an experience-like manner or merge with it. Rather, it is the background and symbolic correspondence for the conversation of the soul with itself. By evoking the mood of the poem, it is not clearly drawn, but consists of suggestive details, colors and tones. Above all, however, nature appears as a tamed, human-shaped landscape: as a park, pond or bank lined with paths.

This basic trait is already expressed in the first poem, one of George's most famous works, Come to the park that was declared dead and look , the first stanza of which is one of the most beautiful examples of lyrical landscape celebrations.

Come to the park, which has been declared dead, and look:
The shimmer of distant, smiling shores
The pure clouds unexpected blue
Illuminates the ponds and the colorful paths

There take the deep yellow, the soft gray
Of birch and of beech The wind is lukewarm
The late roses weren't quite withering yet
Select kiss them and weave the wreath.

Don't forget these last asters, either.
The purple around the tendrils of wild vines
And what was left of the green life
twist slightly in the autumnal face.

In the fourth poem of the autumn section, We pace up and down in rich tinsel , the park also forms the background of the inner happenings. Nature is tamed, the beeches stand in an orderly row. The beautiful landscaped area is the enclosed, strictly structured district, closed off from the profane outside world with a grid. In this way it becomes a fanum, a sacred area, within the boundaries of which the priestly striding poet separates himself from the ordinary and refers it to the bars with an aristocratic gesture.

background

The name of the collection, which is dedicated to George's sister Anna Maria Ottilie , goes back to Friedrich Hölderlin's elegy Menon's lamentations about Diotima , in which it says at the end of the last stanza: “Where the songs are true, and longer the springs are beautiful / And from a new year for our soul begins “A number of verses were written between 1894 and 1896 and are due to the friendship and enthusiastic love of the poet for Ida Coblenz , who later became Richard Dehmel's wife .

In the preface to the second edition, George contradicted the common opinion that biographical aspects are illuminating for a deeper understanding of a work. Rather, it is “unwise” to “turn to the original human and landscape image” in poetry, since art has transformed it in such a way that it has become insignificant to the creator himself and tends to confuse the reader. Names would only count as a tribute, and especially in this work "I and you are the same soul."

In George's early works, nature has sacred value. In words, this sounds like “Göttertal” or “Paradise” or is shown in hieroglyphically coded script, the “secret of eternal runes”, a beautiful landscape in which the divine reveals itself. Nature is sanctified by the annual rhythm, a circumstance that is also interesting from a mythological perspective, as nature, which dies and rises in the turn of the year, condenses in the form of different vegetation gods. Spring is also the time of resurrection for young and middle George. Autumn takes on the character of the twilight of the year and is reflected emotionally in the elegiac mood, a floating melancholy that also determines the last cycle of the sad dances .

Meaning and reception

Hugo von Hofmannsthal 1910 on a photograph by Nicola Perscheid .

The year of the soul is probably the most widely read and most received volume of poems by Georges. The volume made him known beyond the limits of the readership of the papers he edited for art and established his contemporary fame as one of the most important German poets of the turn of the century. Many of the poems were set to music (sometimes several times), including by Anton Webern .

Literary scholars explained the success of the collection with George's ability to recognize traditional requirements and to have come closer to the traditional understanding of poetry. Since early romanticism, poets have combined their experiences with the perceived landscape and embedded them in the course of the seasons.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal respected and admired the poet George, even if he was more of his secret antipode, who was reviled in the elitist circle , while Hofmannsthal's admirers criticized the "master". His complicated relationship with him ended in a final break after an unfriendly exchange of letters in 1906.

At the beginning of his fictional conversation about poetry , he quoted some of the season's poems . "It is nice. It breathes autumn ”, said Clemens , one of the interlocutors ... although it is bold to say“ the pure clouds are the unexpected blue ”. His partner Gabriel describes the seasons as the bearer of the other. "Feelings, ... all the most secret and deepest states of our inner being" are "intertwined in the strangest way with a landscape, with a season, with a nature of the air, with a breath." So are other impressions and memories: "A sultry one starless summer night; the smell of damp stones in a hallway; the feeling of icy water spraying over your hands from a fountain “is bound to landscapes. If you wanted to separate them, they would "go to nothing" between your hands. If we want to find ourselves, says Gabriel , we must not go down into ourselves, but have to look outside. “Like the unsubstantial rainbow, our soul stretches over the unstoppable fall of existence. We don't own our self: it blows to us from the outside ... "

Friedrich Gundolf on a photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf .

Friedrich Gundolf , a member of the George Circle and one of George's heralds after the turn of the century, saw his historical task as a “rebirth of the German language and poetry.” Like George, he criticized Romanticism and rejected it as something “parasitic”, as it grew on “orders” that Herder , Kant and Goethe established, “without reaching down with their roots into the ground itself.” While Goethe and Holderlin had a direct relationship to the gods, romanticism had to the dead idols of their own and the prayed recent times and the letters with which "god-bearing age to Goethe written down its law" would have "taken the spirit of those laws themselves." After George the durchseelten him education worlds entromantisiert have to order their ethnic-eternal content for language bring, no increase and compression of the human content was possible and one "Sorrow of fulfillment" weighed on him. This abysmal sadness is the air in which the new poetry has matured, the “climate of fate of the cycle.” The new space that George's soul has shown itself is nature . The title, Year of the Soul , already proclaims an objective process of de-romanticized nature: “the temporal course of natural processes, as the inner life of a person - not to compare nature, but because“ George “nature as soul, as inner strength and most secret state, and the soul as nature, ie as sensual vision and legal change ”. For Gundolf, the work was "the last great poem of European Weltschmerz , which is not pain for the world, but pain of the world."

Gottfried Benn characterized the opening work as “the most beautiful autumn and garden poem of our age.” In his speech to Stefan George , he describes it as an infinitely delicate landscape poem that has something Japanese about it, far from “decay and evil”, towards “quiet collection and inner satisfaction “Set. In other park poems, too, one can find the magical, idyllic and pure image that is "tender in the inner attitude as in the fall". In Nietzsche and Holderlin one can see a lot of destruction; they had fought for their verses against "unspeakable torments" and the image had stepped out of many shadows. In contrast, with George everything is clear and delicate. For Benn it is astonishing enough to find the Apollonian clarity in a country from whose poets the inexpressible has easily rushed out, "naked substance, foaming feeling."

According to Adorno , George combined his high position with Nietzsche's pathos of distance . Despite all reservations about ideology , he valued him as a great poet and praised his principle of stylization, even if some verses were still committed to the art nouveau art nouveau . The "talkative adornment" that disturbs Rilke's poetry and the playful urge to give in to verse and rhyme are largely tamed by George's reflection and much has been purified of ornamental ingredients. Adorno considered the gloomy “You came to the flock”, which belongs to the sad dances , to be George's greatest and most enigmatic poem. In his last line, “It's gotten late”, the “feeling of a world age” is expressed ... “which forbids singing that still sings about it.” Sometimes, like one last time, speak from George “the language itself.”

Friedrich Sieburg praised the work. It also speaks powerfully to distant readers, but without historical or symbolic disguise it reproduces the “vibrations of a heart.” His language is new in Germany and carries the “touch of purity.” Everything is “like the seventh day of creation and yet full of melancholy which is the real essence of poetry “by grieving over the separation of man from creation . The first poem in the collection is a "rebirth of German poetry." Nobody will ever forget the shudder these verses caused in him. "Everyone who didn't shut himself up felt: See, everything has become new."

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • JMM Aler: A gleaning and a new beginning. On the publication of Verwey's “Dichtspel” and George's “Year of the Soul” , Amsterdam 1983, pp. 59–75
  • Heidi E. Faletti: The seasons of the fin de siècle. A study on Stefan Georges The Year of the Soul. Francke, Bern / Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7720-1557-3 .
  • Thomas Karlauf : Stefan George. The discovery of the charism. Karl-Blessing-Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-89667-151-6 , pp. 206-209

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Year of the Soul , in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 6, Stefan George, Kindler, Munich, 1989, p. 228.
  2. ↑ The Year of the Soul , in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 6, Stefan George, Kindler, Munich, 1989, p. 22.
  3. ↑ Rainer Gruenter, Autumn of Feeling , in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. 1000 German poems and their interpretations , Insel, Frankfurt 1994, p. 119.
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Stefan George: The year of the soul. Leaves for Art, Berlin 1897, p. [1]. In: German Text Archive , accessed on June 13, 2013
  5. ↑ Hans Wysling, Solitude Pathos and Self- Glorification, in: From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke, 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Insel, Frankfurt 1994, p. 122.
  6. ↑ a b Wilpert, Lexikon der Weltliteratur, Das Jahr der Seele, Kröner, Stuttgart 2008, pp. 642–643.
  7. ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin, Menons Klagen um Diotima , Complete Works and Letters, Volume 1. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1995, p. 372.
  8. ↑ Stefan George, preface to the second edition, in: Werke, edition in two volumes, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, p. 119.
  9. ^ Hansjürgen Linke, The cultic in the poetry of Stefan Georges and his school, The language as a criterion, Helmut Küpper, Munich and Düsseldorf 1960, p. 25.
  10. ^ So Thomas Karlauf : Stefan George. The discovery of charisma , Karl-Blessing-Verlag, Munich 2007, p. 362.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl: Hofmannsthal, sketches for his picture. Scientific Book Society, Vienna 2005, p. 114
  12. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl: Hofmannsthal, sketches for his picture. Scientific Book Society, Vienna 2005, p. 187
  13. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The conversation about poems . Collected works in ten individual volumes, short stories, invented conversations and letters, Reisen, Fischer, Frankfurt 1979, p. 497.
  14. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, George, Age and Task, Second Edition, Goerg-Bondi-Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 1
  15. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, George, Age and Task , Second Edition, Goerg-Bondi-Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 5
  16. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, George, The Year of the Soul , Second Edition, Goerg-Bondi-Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 125
  17. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, George, The Year of the Soul , Second Edition, Goerg-Bondi-Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 130
  18. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, George, Das Vorspiel , Second Edition, Goerg-Bondi-Verlag, Berlin 1921, p. 157
  19. ↑ Gottfried Benn, Problems of the Poetry , in: Essays and Essays., Gesammelte Werke , Ed. Dieter Wellershoff, Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt, 2003, p. 1072.
  20. ↑ a b Gottfried Benn, Speech on Stefan George , in: Essays and Essays. Collected works , Ed. Dieter Wellershoff, Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt, 2003, p. 1035.
  21. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Notes on Literature: Speech on Poetry and Society. Collected Writings, 11, p. 64.
  22. ^ Sven Kramer, in: Lyrik und Gesellschaft, George, Adorno-Handbuch, Leben, Werk, Effect , Metzler, Stuttgart, 2011, p. 204.
  23. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Notes on Literature. Collected Works, Volume 11, p. 529.
  24. ^ Friedrich Sieburg, Stefan George , Zur Literatur, 1957–1963, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz, Stuttgart 1981, p. 28.