The Nekar
The Nekar is an ode by Friedrich Hölderlin . Born in 1770 in Lauffen am Neckar , he moved to Nürtingen in 1774 after his father's death when his mother remarried with her, his sister Maria Eleonora Heinrike (born 1772) and stepfather Johann Christoph Gok . He spent most of his childhood there until he joined the Tübingen monastery in 1788 . The Neckar , on which Nürtingen and Tübingen are also located, was the river of his childhood and youth.
At The Nekar there is the Main titled precursor poem. The two are closely related in origin, form and content and are reproduced here side by side.
Origin and tradition
In autumn 1798, after breaking up with Jakob Friedrich Gontard-Borkenstein (1764–1843) , Hölderlin left Frankfurt am Main and since then has lived in nearby Homburg on the advice of his friend Isaac von Sinclair . On May 8, 1800 he met Susette Gontard , his Diotima , for the last time. In mid-June he hiked via Nürtingen , where his mother and sister lived, to Stuttgart. There he lived with his friend, businessman Christian Landauer (1769–1845). In January 1801 he took up another position as court master with the linen manufacturer Anton von Gonzenbach (1748–1819) in Hauptwil , Switzerland, but returned to Nürtingen at the beginning of April.
- The prints
British women's calendar : The beginning of the Main
British ladies calendar : The Main end
Aglaia : The Nekar Beginning
Aglaia : The Nekar end
In Frankfurt, Hölderlin had won the Odendichtung championship. The Ode Der Main was written in Homburg and published in ten stanzas together with the Oden Des Mornings and Evening Fantasy, probably written shortly thereafter, in the British ladies' calendar and paperback for the year eighteen hundred . In a draft kept in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, signature "Homburg.H, 23", in which the last two stanzas are missing, Hölderlin corrected the original title Der Nekar zu Der Main .
In Nürtingen or Stuttgart he took the poem again and reworked it into a nine-strophic version, now again entitled Der Nekar . It appeared in the magazine Aglaia. Yearbook for women on 1801 . The Aglaia yearbook also contained Hölderlin's poems Die Götter , Heidelberg and Empedocles . Hölderlin also wrote these four poems in a manuscript, which is also kept in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, signature "Homburg.H, 21-22", in the clean. The relationship between the Aglaia print and “Homburg.H, 21-22” is not certain. One hypothesis is that Holderlin copied the poems from Aglaia again, perhaps for a hoped-for complete edition of his works.
- The manuscripts
The main beginning
The main end
The Nekar beginning
The Nekar end
In this article, if not stated otherwise, Hölderlin is quoted from the historical-critical Stuttgart edition published by Fredrich Beissner , Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann (* 1949) . The Main and Der Nekar are identical there with the British ladies' calendar and Aglaia versions , with the exception of the punctuation and some spelling suspected for Hölderlin's not preserved master copies such as - in Der Nekar - "Wanderer", "Weinstok", "Labyrintischen" and "Schuzgott "( Aglaia -print" Wanderer - vine - labyrinthine - guardian god "). The historical-critical Frankfurt edition published by Dietrich Sattler and the "reading editions" by Michael Kaupp, Gerhard Kurz and Wolfgang Braungart as well as Jochen Schmidt again have slightly different versions.
Texts
Main
well some land of the living earth'd ' I see, and often over the mountain' outpaces the heart of me, and the desires wander over the sea to the banks that gave me five are before others, so I know who praised; But one thing is not dear to me in the distance, like that where the sons of gods sleep, the grieving land of the Greeks. Oh! once there'd at Suniums coast ' 10 I end up, your columns, Olympion! Inquire, there, before the north storm Goes into the rubble of the temple of Athens And their idols also bury you; Because you have long been lonely, O pride of the world, 15 That is no longer! - and O you beautiful islands of Ionia, where the breezes from the sea blow coolly on warm shores, When the grapes ripen under the strong sun, Oh! where a golden autumn turns the sighs of the poor 20 people in songs, When the sad ones izt you lime forest And you pomegranate trees , crimson apples full And sweet wine and pauk 'and Zithar invite you to dance in a labyrinthine manner - 25 To you perhaps, you islands! still once a homeless singer; because he has to wander from strangers to strangers, and the earth, the free one, unfortunately it has to! Instead of fatherland, serve him as long as he lives, 30 And if he dies - but I never forget you, As far as I wander, beautiful Main! and your shores, which were much happier. Hospitable you accepted, proud one! With you I lifted up And brightened the stranger's eyes, 35 And quietly sliding chants You taught me to live noiselessly. O calm with the stars, you lucky one! Do you rush away from your morning to evening, To your brother, the Rhine; and then at 40 he joyfully descended into the ocean!
The Nekar
In your valleys my heart woke up to life, your waves played around me, And all the lovely hills that make you wanderer! know nobody is a stranger to me. 5 On their tops, the air of heaven often relieved the pain of bondage; and from the valley, the bluish silver wave shone like life from the cup of joy. The mountain's springs rushed down to you, 10 With them my heart too and you took us with you, To the quiet Rhine, down to its cities and lusty islands. Yet the world seems to me beautiful, and the August flees calling for the charms of the earth to me 15 At the Golden Paktol to Smirnas banks to Ilion forest. I would also like to land at Sunium often, ask the silent path about your pillars, Olympion! before the storm wind and the age 20 down into the rubble of the temples of Athens And their images of God also bury you, For you have long been lonely, O pride of the world, which is no longer. And oh you beautiful islands of Ionia! where the sea air 25 Hot shore cools and the laurel forest through whispers, when the sun warms the vine, Oh! where a golden autumn turns the sighs of the poor people into songs, When its pomegranate tree ripens, when the green night 30 The bitter orange flashes, and the mastyx tree drips with resin and pauk and cymbals sound for the labyrinthine dance. To you, you islands! maybe bring me to you my Schuzgott once; but out of a true mind gives way to me 35 Even there my Nekar does not with his lovely meadows and banks.
interpretation
The relationship between the two poems extends to form as soon as they arise; both are written in Alkaic meter . After all, it extends to the salary. The main feature of both odes is that, although named after German rivers, they evoke less the German than the Greek landscape. “In considering the native valleys, the subject imagines Greece as his ideal home.” The dialectic of home and foreign is shaped differently.
In the first stanza of Der Main , the desire to go beyond "mountain" and "sea" is briefly mentioned and in the second stanza the "land of the Greeks" is called. In “Nekar” the poet lingers for three stanzas, recalling his “waves”, the “lovely hills”, the “bluish silver wave”, “the mountain sources” and the confluence with the “quiet Rhine”, and then in the fourth Verse, without naming the Greeks, with the "golden Paktol (verse 15)", the Paktolos river in Asia Minor, which is considered to be rich in gold , with "Smirna's bank", the bank of ancient Smyrna, today's Izmir , and with "Ilion's forest" , to transfer the forest around Troy to the ideal home.
The following stanzas, three to six from Der Main and five to eight from Der Nekar , are very similar, in parts even identical. They evoke with a dense mention of concrete Greece: "Sunium", Cape Sunion ; "Olympion", the Olympieion , the temple of Zeus in Athens, of which a number of huge "columns" still stand; the "beautiful islands of Ionia", the islands of the Aegean Sea colonized by the Greeks ; the “warm shores”, the “hot shores” and the cool sea air; the poor people, poor because they were under Ottoman rule in Holderlin's time ; the useful plants, namely the “laurel forest”, the “Weinstok” and its “grape”, the “lime forest”, the “bitter orange”, the “pomegranate tree”, the “mastyx tree”, which “drips from resin”, that is the mastic bush with its resin , the mastic ; “A golden autumn” of the harvest; "Pauk 'und Zithar" or "Pauk and Cymbel" and the labyrinthine dance, which belonged to "the orgiastic cults of Asia Minor".
The climax of the golden autumn, music and festival is followed by the reflection of the lyrical self, which is again differently contoured. In Der Main , the self recognizes itself as a “homeless singer” (verse 26), who “has to wander from strangers to strangers”, without a fatherland, “ie without the community that was presented in the Greek ideal”. The thought of death imposes itself "And if he dies -" (v. 30), but - the poet interrupts himself - is broken off, and the poem turns to the memory of the river which is only now mentioned (Verse 31), where Hölderlin lived in Susette Gontard's house from 1796 to 1798. In Der Nekar the reflection of the ego remains pain-free, and the thought returns to the beginning with no effort, to the river, which is only now mentioned, with its "lovely meadows and pastures on the banks."
Overall, both poems complete a turn of the longing from the German landscape to Greece - "wanna '/ I" in Der Main verses 1-2 and 9-10, "wanna do" in Der Nekar verse 16 - and back to the rivers of the Home - "but I will never forget you / As far as I wander, beautiful Main!", "But out of a true mind / my Nekar does not give way either".
Holderlin had similarly described Greek realities in his recently completed epistolary novel Hyperion :
“I also like to think about my hike through the areas of Smyrna. It's a wonderful country, and I've wished for wings a thousand times so that I could fly to Asia Minor once a year.
From the plain of Sardis I came up through the rock walls of the Tmolos.
I stayed at the foot of the mountain in a friendly hut, under myrtles, under the scents of the Ladan bush, where the swans played by my side in the golden tide of the Pactolus. "
literature
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Homburg Folioheft - Homburg.F. Digitized version of the Württemberg State Library, Stuttgart. Retrieved January 4, 2014.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Complete Works. Big Stuttgart edition . Edited by Friedrich Beissner, Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1943 to 1985.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Complete Works . Historical-critical edition in 20 volumes and 3 supplements. Edited by Dietrich Sattler. Frankfurt edition. Stroemfeld / Roter Stern publishing house , Frankfurt am Main and Basel 1975–2008.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: All works and letters. Edited by Michael Knaupp. Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich 1992 to 1993.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems. Edited by Gerhard Kurz and Wolfgang Braungart. Philipp Reclam jun. , Stuttgart 2000. ISBN 3-15-056267-8 .
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems. Edited by Jochen Schmidt. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 3-618-60810-1 .
- Luigi Reitani: explorations of places, spatial transformations. On the poetic topography of Hölderlin. In: Michael Franz , Ulrich Gaier, Martin Vöhler (eds.): Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 35, 2006–2007. ISBN 978-3-86142-434-5 , pp. 9-29.
- Moritz Strohschneider: New religion in Friedrich Hölderlin's later poetry. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2019 (= sources and research on literary and cultural history. Volume 94), pp. 23–62.
- Andreas Thomasberger: Odes. In: Johann Kreuzer (Ed.): Hölderlin Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, pp. 309–319. JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Stuttgart 2002. ISBN 3-476-01704-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 491.
- ↑ British ladies' calendar and paperback for the year eighteen hundred. Goettingen digitization center. Retrieved April 21, 2014.
- ↑ Frankfurt edition, Volume 5, p. 569; see literature.
- ↑ Reitani 2006–2007.
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 674.
- ↑ Thomasberger 2002, p. 315.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 3, p. 20.
- ↑ The Ladan shrub, from the rockrose family , produces the fragrant resin labdanum .