The Victory Festival

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Victory Festival is a 13-verse poem that waswrittenby Friedrich von Schiller in May 1803and was soon published. According to the intention of the then 44-year-old, it was intended as a "table song", that is, as a thoughtful society song for an educated group of men. His topic, from the oldest European epic, from the Iliad of Homer to arise is correspondingly serious: the staleness (hollowness, frailty) military victories.

Go to content

Schiller portrays this at a fictional victory festival, which the Greeks who travel home victoriously with their fleet after the Trojan War celebrate after they have finally conquered, burned and plundered the mighty city of Troy after ten years of siege, slain the men and enslaved the women:

Priam's fortress had sunk,
Troy lay in rubble and dust,
And the Greeks, drunk
with victory, richly laden with robbery,
sat on the tall ships,
along the Hellespontos beach,
on the merry journey
to beautiful Greece.
Vote to the happy songs!
For the
ships have turned towards the father's hearth ,
And home again.
And in long rows,
the trojans sat complaining, clapping painfully
on their breasts,
pale, with loose hair;
In the wild festival of joys they
mixed the song of woe,
Weeping for their own suffering
In the fall of the kingdom.
Farewell, beloved soil!
Far from the sweet home
we follow the strange master.
Oh, how happy the dead are!

Every stanza adheres to this meter, first eight lines long (in female, then male cross rhymes ) an aspect of fate is addressed, then followed, separated from this, by four résuming lines in embracing rhymes . One can assign a special motif to each of the individual, often moving, stanzas: Few of them return at all - many are no longer welcome at home. - Whoever has lost only reaps what he has sown. - The best stayed - and not infrequently they killed themselves. - No one will stay with life, at best the great name, - and only this honor for those who wanted to protect his own. - Only wine helps with the ghastly memories - and deliberate forgetting.

The doctrine of the final stanza is placed in the mouth of the captured Trojan seer Kassandra , on whom - as Schiller's readers or singers of 1804 knew very well - lay the curse of always foreseeing everything correctly without anyone believing her.

And seized by her God ,
now the seer
lifted herself , looked from the tall ships
towards the smoke of home:
Smoke is all earthly being;
As the column of steam blows,
all earthly greatnesses vanish,
only the gods remain.
Around the horse of the rider float,
Around the ship the worries;
Tomorrow we can't do it anymore, so
let's live today!

Schiller lets Kassandra say it, and with it: Nobody will heed this.

To the reception

According to the great German tradition of the Protestant hymn in the 16./17. In the 18th century, which had given voice to many feelings, the secular song of reflection had been a readily accepted form since the Enlightenment , for example in Freemason and student songs . Not only did Schiller's verbal power, his fame, which was then at its height, and his imminent death (1805), give this poem a great echo, but also the warlike times. The winner of these years was Napoleon , after the triumph of Marengo he had ended the 2nd coalition war for France in 1802 with a victory peace - but more and more wars were to follow.

The pacifist impulse of the poem was incompatible with the rise of German chauvinism and imperialism in the late 19th century ; so his message resigned; after severe defeats, however, it was read again.

source

  • Georg Kurscheidt (Ed.): Schiller. Works and letters in twelve volumes. Volume 1: Poems. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-618-61210-9 , pp. 343–347

Remarks

  1. ↑ In: Pocket book for women to the year 1804. P. 116–121
  2. ↑ According to Schiller's letter of May 24, 1803 to Goethe for his so-called "Wednesday wreath" (cf. Georg Kurscheidt (ed.): Schiller. Works and letters in twelve volumes. Volume 1: Poems. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992 , ISBN 3-618-61210-9 , p. 1104); In this respect, Schiller compared it with his own song An die Freude, which he wrote shortly afterwards (ibid.).
  3. ↑ Homer's "Iliad" ends before the city of Troy is conquered.
  4. ↑ On this motif cf. The Trojans of Euripides.

Web links