The garden of knowledge

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The Garden of Knowledge is a story by Leopold Andrian from 1895. In addition to a few occasional youth poems, it is the author's only literary work. The sequel Erwin and Elwire remained a fragment and was published from the estate in 1993. Despite its small size, it was published by S. Fischer in 1995 as an independent volume and, despite the young age of its creator, the then nineteen-year-old imperial baron , soon became the cult book of an entire generation.

content

Erwin's life story is told . He was born the son of an Austrian prince whose estates bordered on Germany. The father dies a short time after the birth of the son. In the narrative, Leopold Andrian addresses the conflict of identity and knowledge known for literature around 1900 along the lines of difference, otherness and foreignness along the various stages in Erwin's life. In the end Erwin dies “without having recognized”.

rating

Hugo von Hofmannsthal noted in his diary: The German Narcissus Book. "(...) There are wonderful moments when a whole generation in different countries can be found in the same symbol." The autobiographical references between the hero of the story and the author are striking: from childhood and education and studies in Vienna to homoerotic tendencies and obvious hypochondria . Hermann Bahr praised the text in Die Zeit (Vienna) : In "" Leading from the individual to the idea ", which is otherwise not even attempted today, the meaning of a small treatise by Leopold Andrian seems to me to be".

expenditure

  • Leopold Andrian: The Garden of Knowledge . With an afterword by Iris Paetzke. Zurich: Manesse Verlag 1990. ISBN 3-7175-8165-1
  • Leopold von Andrian-Werburg: The garden of knowledge and other poems. With an afterword ed. v. Dieter Sudhoff . Oldenburg: Igel-Literatur-Verl. x. 2003. ISBN 3-89621-158-7

literature

  • Ursula Renner: Leopold Andrian's "Garden of Knowledge". Literary paradigm of an identity crisis in Vienna around 1900 . Peter Lang Verlag, Bern u. a. 1981.
  • Cathrine Theodorsen: Leopold Andrian, his story The Garden of Knowledge and Dilettantism in Vienna around 1900 . Wehrhahn 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Peter Sprengel: History of German-speaking Literature, 1870-1900: from the founding of the Empire to the turn of the century . CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 294.
  2. ↑ Hermann Bahr: The garden of knowledge. Die Zeit, 2 (1895) # 24, 171-172. (March 16, 1895) Book edition: Renaissance. New Studies on the Critique of Modernity. Berlin: S. Fischer 1897, 41–45.