The God and the Bajadere
The God and the Bajadere (Indian legend) is the title of a ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , which he wrote between June 6 and 9, 1797 in Jena . He published it in Friedrich Schiller's Muses Almanac for 1798 , which was also known as the Ballad Almanac and included the publisher's own works.
Alongside poems such as The Sorcerer's Apprentice or The Bride of Corinth, it is one of the most important classical works of this genre, which Goethe wrote at short intervals during the ballad year .
With its painted sensuality and religious references, it has been received in a diverse and controversial manner. What is striking is the motif of the “ fallen woman ” who, in Goethe's poetic design, discovers love with her humanity and longing for the true and genuine and is redeemed even without remorse or penance .
Content and form
The god Mahadöh (an epithet of Shiva ) wants to test the people again and visits a city as a wanderer . When he is about to leave her, he meets a beautiful Bajadere , who lures him into her house, dances for him and promises him a night of love. While she alleviates his "hypocritical suffering ...", he realizes "... with joy / through deep ruin a human heart." She gives herself to him, weeps and for the first time feels real love. The next morning Mahadöh plays dead. In desperation, the dancer is willing to join with him in spite of the statements of the priests burn to leave. She jumps into the fire , the god rises from the flames and floats with her into the sky .
For his Indian legend , Goethe chose an unusually high-contrast metric structure. The first part of the total of nine stanzas consists of eight trochies in four parts and rhyming crosswise with alternating female and male endings, while the second part consists of rhythmically moving, four-part dactyls . With the exception of the fourth stanza, the longer verses begin with a prelude, the first two rhymes in pairs and end feminine, the third rhymes with the last verse of the troche and ends masculine. The contrast created in this way between the carried first part and the, as it were, dancing second part creates a tension that can be felt throughout the poem and reflects its content.
Background and origin
Goethe's ballads
A specific theme can be identified in Goethe's ballads just as little as a uniform level of style. The works, which were created over a long period of time, were aimed at a broader readership, so that the language remained popular despite all the choice. With a largely fluent narrative style, he often played virtuoso with the verse and used sound painting means. The mood of his ballads ranges from the dark, even gruesome to the humorous sphere. In his late work Paria , the subject of which occupied him for a long time, Goethe once again took the ballad "beyond the limits of the genre."
Inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder , he was already collecting orally handed down folk ballads from Alsace in 1771 and was initially encouraged to sing simple, popular works. He described manageable lyrical situations in which it was often about love beyond class classification, but the suffering associated with it was not concealed and often described in fabulous embedding. They include works as diverse as Heideröslein , Das Veilchen , Der unfaithful Knabe and The King in Thule , while in his early Weimar period motifs of the uncanny , the ghostly and the magical came to the fore, seductive, even deadly magic of natural and magic Elemental spirits to which humans are at the mercy, as described in the famous ballads Der Fischer und Erlkönig .
After a long break of around 14 years, there were conversations and correspondence with his friend Friedrich Schiller in May and June 1797, in which they discussed questions of genre and nature of the ballads - an exchange that became more important in the so-called ballad year 1797 Works of the two resulted, which were presented in the Muses-Almanac . While Schiller was primarily concerned with philosophical questions - the free moral decision in which people take action on their own initiative - Goethe concentrated in his often very powerful works on mysterious relationships or the influences of higher forces on people.
Indian legend
As in the recently completed ballad The Bride of Corinth, the theme does not come from his imagination, but has legendary roots. The most important source was probably the German translation of the travelogue Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine (Journey to East India and China) by Pierre Sonnerat , published in 1783 . It contains the legend of the god who spends a night of love with a temple girl, a model that Goethe changed and intensified in several places. While in Sonnerat's portrayal the god merely fakes his death, he is clearly emphasized in the ballad ("... she finds the much-loved guest in her heart / death.") In Goethe's poem, the girl jumps into the fire, so she goes through the test imposed on her to the extreme, but at the time of the sun the god wakes up and confesses the deception when she wants to sacrifice herself .
Goethe had studied the culture of India for a long time before putting the poem on paper. In his essay Significant Supporting through a single witty word from 1823 he went into the anthropology of the medical doctor Johann Christian August Heinroth and, in addition to the Bride of Corinth and other poems, explicitly mentioned The God and the Bajadere as examples of how " Certain great motifs, legends, ancient history so deeply into the mind ”that he carried around“ for forty to fifty years alive and effective within ”before they take shape.
Meaning and reception
Within the research it was often asked how the two sensually painted ballads The Bride of Corinth and The God and the Bajadere can be classified in the context of the Weimar Classic . The noticeable criticism in the vampire ballad of the anti-body tendencies of certain branches of the written Christianity (“One becomes invisible only in heaven / and a savior is worshiped on the cross”) seemed just as in need of explanation as the inclination of a god towards a prostitute.
Like the vampire poem, this work also found a mixed response among contemporaries. If Wilhelm von Humboldt praised its high artistic quality, the passages in the text that were critical of religion led other readers to irritation and rejection. So wrote Johann Gottfried Herder to Goethe's friend Karl Ludwig von Knebel polemical, Priapus games in two poems "a major role, even as God with a Bayadere, [...] the second time as a heathen man with his Christian bride as a ghost to him comes and which he, a cold corpse without a heart, priapisiret to warm life - these are hero ballads! "
The British Germanist Eliza Marian Butler wanted to determine the interpretation of the work from the perspective of the culture to which Goethe had resorted in his choice of material. During her study trips through India , she spoke to scholars and learned how deeply the poem is permeated with an occidental-Christian spirit from an Indian perspective.
In the opinion of Karl Viëtor , Goethe hardly ever told more beautiful verses, so that one wonders whether one should admire the "poetic mastery" or the "height of intuition" more highly. He gave the legend a shape “which makes it a glorious example of belief in man's innate desire for good and genuine”. The union awakens “in the lost the hidden spark, the ability for true love; The light burns brightly and strongly in the violated. ”Because of their loyalty in“ voluntary sacrificial death ”,“ God lifts the purified to himself. The love union of God and creature, of I and all, is glorified here as the mystery that forms the core of all great religions of redemption. "
For some time, the meaning of gender roles for the poem has been examined and critically questioned, as it is about an extremely difficult, even superhuman test of a woman by the male god.
This is how Bertolt Brecht reacted with his sonnet on Goethe's poem “Der Gott und die Bajadere” . The poem is part of a series of socially critical studies that Brecht called literary sonnets and in which he also referred to works by Dante and Shakespeare , Schiller, Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche . As he explained, they should "not thwart the enjoyment of the classical works, but make them purer." The first stanza reads:
O bitter suspicion of our Mahadöhs.
The whores in the houses of pleasure would
not be honest
when they utter the prescribed delight
. But that would be bad.
In his explanation, Brecht wrote that Goethe's poem describes “the free union of lovers as something divine, that is, beautiful and natural, and opposes the formal union of marriage, which is determined by class and property interests.” But he turns away with his verses clearly against the sacrifice "that is required here before the prize is to be awarded."
Karl Otto Conrady does not want to conceal how "dubious man and woman are assigned to one another in Goethe's ballad, rather: how they are subordinate to him." Even in the intimate encounter, the man still appears as the ruler who demands slave services while love is of the girl in submission.
As Reiner Wild explains, a narrow concept of the classical period, which was based solely on antiquity, prevented an appropriate interpretation and led to the special qualities of the work not being recognized. The poem describes a myth that the narrator recites in high priestly style and with the claim to be binding. The playful and ironic distance associated with this does not call into question the seriousness of the events and thus enables traditions and beliefs to be viewed critically.
The philanthropic-Christian background is recognizable, but complex, ambivalent and not easy to classify. With the descent of Shiva , Goethe alludes to the incarnation of God at the beginning and enriches this with love and sensuality that are part of humanitas . The figure of the Bajadere is clearly reminiscent of the “ holy sinner ” Mary Magdalene ; the Ascension at the end of the poem, on the other hand, has an “unchristian” note in that it is not the girl's penance that is rewarded but her thoroughly sensual love. This inclination goes against the external duty claimed by the choir of priests and emphasizes that humanity requires sensuality, which to suppress would contradict human nature. It shows how humanity can prove itself within a fringe group and gives sexuality an almost divine legitimation.
literature
- Karl Otto Conrady : Ballads. Experiments with the narrative poem . In: Goethe, Leben und Werk, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-491-69136-2 , pp. 672–673.
- Reiner Wild: The God and the Bajadere . In: Goethe manual. Edited by Bernd Witte et al., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01443-6 , pp. 291-293.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ So Gero von Wilpert : The God and the Bajadere . In: ders .: Goethe-Lexikon (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 407). Kröner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-520-40701-9 , p. 416.
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 273
- ↑ So Reiner Wild, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte…, Volume 1, Poems, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 291
- ↑ So Erich Trunz . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's works, notes, Hamburg edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 665
- ^ Gero von Wilpert: Ballads . In: ders .: Goethe-Lexikon (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 407). Kröner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-520-40701-9 , p. 73.
- ↑ Reiner Wild, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte…, Volume 1, Poems, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 291
- ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Significant support through a single, witty word . In: Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Volume XIII, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 39
- ↑ Quoting from: Reiner Wild, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Poems, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 292
- ↑ Erich Trunz, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's works, notes, Hamburg edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 665
- ↑ Quoted from: Erich Trunz, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's works, notes, Hamburg edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 665
- ↑ Quoted from: Bertolt Brecht's poems in one volume , notes, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 1290
- ↑ Bertolt Brecht, About Goethe's poem "Der Gott und die Bajadere" . In: Bertolt Brecht's poems in one volume , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 612
- ↑ Quoted from: Karl Otto Conrady , Goethe, Leben und Werk , Balladen. Experiments with the narrative poem, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 673 673
- ↑ Karl Otto Conrady, Goethe, Leben und Werk , Balladen. Experiments with the narrative poem, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 673
- ↑ Reiner Wild, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Poems, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 292
- ↑ Reiner Wild, Der Gott und die Bajadere . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte…, Volume 1, Poems, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 293