The free spirit (Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 (photograph by Gustav Adolf Schultze )

The free spirit is the last title of a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche . The verses, written in 1884, arose during his work on the fourth part of the philosophical poem Also sprach Zarathustra .

Nietzsche gave the poem various headings such as Farewell and Homesickness , The Crows Scream , From the Desert and finally Vereinsamt , under which it was first published in an abbreviated form in 1894 in Das Magazin für Literatur .

The work is considered his most famous poem and can be found in numerous poetry anthologies such as the Great Conrady or the Eternal Fountain .

Form and content

The first part of the poem consists of six stanzas , each with four ( two and four-part) iambic verses in simple cross rhyme . The second and fifth stanzas have strong enjambements . Through alliterations in words like “desert”, “winter”, “wandering” or “halt”, “home”, “heaven” and assonances like “scratching”, “screaming”, “buzzing” Nietzsche connects units of meaning within the poem.

While in the first part of his self-talk he describes the gaze of the lonely and homeless winter hiker who looks at his lost homeland, in the sobering answer he as a precaution rejects the assessment that he longed back into the dull "room happiness" that he had left as a free spirit .

The poem begins with the stanza:

The crows are screaming
and whirring to the city:
soon it will snow -
good for those who now - have home!

The first stanza of the sobering answer is:

May God have mercy!
He thinks I longed to go back to
German warmth, to
dull German parlor happiness!

background

Nietzsche also dealt with free spirits several times in his theoretical writings . As a moral critic, he welcomed the spiritual direction: morality was "driven to its extreme and overcome by free spirit , " the thinking of the spirit was liberated . After this liberation, the movement itself can now be recognized as morality, which, as it is said in a postponed script, expresses itself as honesty, bravery, justice and love.

Further passages can be found in the preface to his collection of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human, the book for free spirits with which he gradually began to break away from Richard Wagner . The font, which was only written in 1886, shows a further change in style and content: life is not designed by morality, wants and needs deception. So he invented the “free spirits” and dedicated the “melancholy and courageous book to them.” Nietzsche admits: “There are no such free spirits, there weren't any”. He created them back then in order to have “brave fellows and ghosts” with whom one could talk and laugh “in the midst of bad things” such as illness and loneliness, strangers and inactivity. He himself does not want to doubt that “there could one day be such free spirits [...] our Europe among its sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow” will have such spirits. In fact, he already sees it slowly coming and is doing something to accelerate this development.

Nietzsche's poems can be found in all essential periods of his life and mark the beginning and the end of his work history. His first literary attempts at the age of ten were poetry, his last work a cycle of poems. Many of his verses, which today establish his fame as a poet, he did not release for print, so that they were published later and often with certain changes. Apart from the Idylls from Messina published in 1882, Nietzsche only published poems for architectural reasons, in order to emphasize the artistic lightness within his prose works or to reduce tension.

Special features and interpretation

Flying hooded crow

The poem became known without the second part. It was only after Nietzsche's manuscripts had been thoroughly processed for the Critical Complete Edition that it was understood as a role poem with parting and an answer .

Nietzsche marked only the first part, but not the answer, as direct speech, an irregularity which is not unusual for handwritten versions. Nietzsche intended to incorporate this work together with other poems into a cycle and considered several arrangements for this.

The free spirit illuminates Nietzsche's changed conception of nature, which was already hinted at in the Rosenlauibad poems and henceforth characterized his lyrical landscapes.

While the landscapes of his earlier works are still rooted in the soil of the romantic tradition and nature is viewed as a book that has a decipherable message, the scenes of the poems written in Rosenlauibad are so torn by pain that a traditional landscape is no longer spoken of can be. The lonely one, cursed for winter wanderings, is reminiscent of the hiker from the winter journey who finally seems to accept his strangeness.

For Hermann Kurzke, the poem speaks of the eternal absurdity of love , which is consumed in longing and destroyed in fulfillment. The dreariness of loneliness explains the melancholy of the screaming crows who paw their song in the "desert bird tone". The lonely free spirit and winter hiker be attracted by the world of the city, on which he looks back, with its life, its temptations and its promise of happiness. But this very abandoned world is the gateway to a thousand deserts , an image that stands for the lust for the world, which is addressed by the seductive "daughters of the desert" in Zarathustra or in the second poem of the Dionysus dithyrambs . The painful language of this pleasure is not beautiful, but rattling like the crows of the crows that fly back and leave the wanderer in the cold of solitude. The free spirit, who can endure nothing, rejects longing and armors his heart with winter metaphysics against further deprivations in the superficial world, in which there is no fulfillment without spiritual betrayal.

expenditure

• Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Works. Critical study edition in 15 volumes. KSA. Volume 11: Leftover Fragments, 1884 - 1885 Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich et al. 1988, ISBN 3-423-02231-0 , p. 329.

Secondary literature

• Rüdiger Ziemann: The poems. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche manual. Life, work, effect. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2000, ISBN 3-476-01330-8 , p. 152.

• Jörg Schönert: Friedrich Nietzsche, “Der Freigeist”, in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analyzes of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, pp. 185–196

Web links

• Poetry recitation by Clemens von Ramin on vonramin.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jörg Schönert, Friedrich Nietzsche: "Der Freigeist", in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analyzes of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, p. 186
2. ↑ Rüdiger Ziemann: The poems. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche manual. Life, work, effect. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2000, p. 152
3. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Works. Critical study edition in 15 volumes. KSA. Volume 11: Leftover Fragments, 1884 - 1885 Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich et al. 1988, ISBN 3-423-02231-0 , p. 329
4. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Works. Critical study edition in 15 volumes. KSA. Volume 11: Leftover Fragments, 1884 - 1885 Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich et al. 1988, ISBN 3-423-02231-0 , p. 330
5. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches - A book for free spirits, preface, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt, 1982, p. 10
6. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches - A book for free spirits, preface, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt, 1982, p. 11
7. ↑ Rüdiger Ziemann: The poems. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche manual. Life, work, effect. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2000, p. 150.
8. ^ Giorgio Colli , in: Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung , Critical Study Edition, Vol. 6, Ed .: Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, dtv, p. 455
9. ↑ Jörg Schönert, Friedrich Nietzsche: "Der Freigeist", in: Lyrik und Narratologie, text analyzes of German-language poems from the 16th to the 20th century, de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, p. 186
10. ↑ Rüdiger Ziemann: The poems. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche manual. Life, work, effect. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2000, p. 152
11. ↑ Hermann Kurzke, Tristesse der Lebensgier, Tristesse der Einsamkeit, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Von Heinrich Heine bis Friedrich Nietzsche, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1994, p. 477
12. ^ Hermann Kurzke, Tristesse der Lebensgier, Tristesse der Einsamkeit, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Von Heinrich Heine bis Friedrich Nietzsche, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1994, p. 478