The Eternal Well
The book Der Ewige Brunnen contains a collection of German poems from eight centuries. It was first published in 1955 . Ludwig Reiners collected and edited the poems. A fully worked out and expanded edition appeared as early as 1959. For five decades the publisher has kept the book unchanged.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary in 2005, Albert von Schirnding updated and expanded the collection. According to the publisher, about a quarter of the slightly more than 1,600 poems have been exchanged.
The anniversary edition contains a foreword by Albert von Schirnding and the foreword by Ludwig Reiners from 1955. The poems are arranged in 25 chapters or books :
- Childhood book
- Youth and friendship
- Book of love
- Book of marriage
- Age and impermanence
- Book of Farewell and Death
- Book of nature
- Myths, sagas and legends
- from history
- Do you know the country
- Book of Courage and Valor
- Voice of fate
- Everyday life
- From eating and drinking
- Human, monster, superman
- Loneliness and sadness
- A book of proverbs
- Book of joy and nonsense
- Strange incidents
- A little ridicule
- Book of riddles
- Book of the art of living
- Symbols and dreams
- Book of Faith
- Book of the poet
The appendix includes a list of rights holders, the beginnings and headings of poems, and a list of poets.
The artist Andreas Brylka created the book decorations , which expressively visualize the content of the individual sections.
Schirnding explains his idea of the book in the foreword:
- A house book is part of everyday existence (almost like the Bible), is always ready to hand, is used on a wide variety of occasions, donates that other water of life, like the well, which provided a large family with the most essential element in the past: poetry. It becomes an inexhaustible source of finding and rediscovering linguistic works of art, but above all the first encounter with them.
A collection that includes poems from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century contains works by well-known poets such as Goethe , Schiller and Heine as well as numerous works by little-known or even now unknown authors. In his foreword, Schirnding names some poets that Reiners did not know or could not have known in 1955: Nelly Sachs , Paul Celan , Ingeborg Bachmann , Günter Eich , Karl Krolow , Johannes Bobrowski , Hilde Domin , Wolfgang Bächler , Hans Magnus Enzensberger , Robert Gernhardt , Reiner Kunze , Christoph Meckel and Sarah Kirsch .
Other 20th century poets are represented, including: Horst Bienek , Wolf Biermann , Elisabeth Borchers , Heinz Czechowski , Heinrich Detering , Hugo Dittberner , Walter Helmut Fritz and Harald Grill . This documents the development of German poetry in the second half of the 20th century.
Georg Britting is one of the poets who have been included by the editor with 18 works.
expenditure
- Ludwig Reiners, Albert von Schirnding (ed.): Der Ewige Brunnen - A house book of German poetry . 2nd edition of the 2006 anniversary edition. Verlag CH Beck oHG, [Munich] [1955] and [2005], ISBN 978-3-406-53638-0
literature
- Johannes U. Lechner: Book of the Month December 2005 . In Marburger Forum , vol. 6 (2005), issue 6