The walk (Schiller)

Friedrich Schiller (1794)

The walk is the title of a poem by Friedrich Schiller , which he wrote in August and September 1795 and published in the same year in his magazine Die Horen under the title Elegie . The first version consisted of 108 elegiac distiches , the second was shortened by 16 verses and appeared in his collection of poems in 1800 under the title known today.

Schiller himself valued the work , which was assigned to the Weimar Classics , as the high point of his poetic work and as the most important result of the resumed lyrical production, which he had postponed for many years in favor of philosophical studies. His assessment met with the approval of many contemporaries, who particularly emphasized the linguistic beauty and the well-structured composition of the poem.

While Schiller's poetry, with its high density of reflection, was often appreciated from an art-philosophical point of view and classified as thought poetry, older research attests to this work in particular a special vividness and proximity to Goethe's poetry .

The elegy , which belongs to sentimental poetry, combines a description of nature with anthropological-historical considerations, which Schiller also intended in the later Bürgerlied and the song of the bell .

Content and form

In 108 rhyming distiches - as in the first edition - Schiller depicts a walk through a poetized landscape and links this with highlights on cultural history . The elegy can be roughly divided into three sections: A landscape-poetic introduction (1 - 64 aF) is followed by a long journey through history (65 - 188), after which the lyrical self awakens as if from a daydream ("But where am I?" ), collects and finds himself in the arms of nature, which embodies something lasting compared to the well-thought-out social change (189-216).

At the beginning, the self praises nature and welcomes the "reddish radiant summit", the sun and the lively hallway. It is the perspective of the walker who has left the “prison of the room” or the “oppressive narrowness of a conversation” in order to be able to breathe freely in the open air.

When he stands in front of an abyss, looks into the gorge and thinks he can see the ether above and below, he is dizzy. The confusion subsides when he sees a path that can safely guide him on his way. The sudden confrontation with the dangers of nature, the literary topos des locus terribilis , introduces the second part of the elegy with longer reflections on phases of human development. The hiker sees the villages and fields of the country people, whose wishes are restricted by the “cycle of the harvests”, and from a wistful distance exclaims : “Happy people of the fields! Have not yet awakened to freedom / Do you happily share the narrow law with your corridor. "

He ponders urbanization and agriculture , the development of the military , trade , transport and science , which have developed in terms of cultural history and are initially described as progressive . The series culminates in the triumph of the Enlightenment : "The mist of madness melts away in front of the wondrous gaze / And the structures of the night give way to the daylight."

After humanity seems to have risen in this way through language and education, a turning point follows with an opposing assessment. Man not only tore the fetters of fear and ignorance, but also the “reins of shame” - not only reason , but also desire calls for freedom . The oasis of light is followed by the desert of violence. In a state of lack of ties and moral neglect , man becomes man's enemy , and from then on lies, deceit and deception determine his fate: “Truth, faith and loyalty disappear from conversation / from life, it lies even on the lip of the oath. "

At the end, finally, the dreaming wakes up as if from a maelstrom of dissolute images and initially sees himself alone in front of a repellent nature: “But where am I? The path is hidden. Sloping grounds / inhibitions with a yawning gap behind me, the step in front of me. / Behind me there was the garden, the company I trusted in the hedges, / Behind me there was every trace of human hands. "

After traveling back in time through the cultural history of mankind, these rugged and inhospitable surroundings are also calming for the hiker. The nature experienced after spiritual change can bridge times in the fulfilled moment and connect the past with the present: “And Homer's sun, see! she smiles to us too. "

Emergence

Schiller wrote the poem in the late summer of 1795 in a state of bad health. He could not leave the house for weeks and had to forego any contact with the outside world. Whenever he felt better during the night, he worked on the elegy. He later told his friend and supporter Körner that, along with his other works, he considered it to be "the one that has the most poetic movement and yet progresses according to strict expediency." When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited him in Jena on October 5th, At noon he read him the poem in the darkened study, which was published shortly afterwards.

By Sophie Mereaus poem Schwarzenburg , the Schiller recently in the Horen had published, were suggestions from the depiction of nature. Like Mereau, Schiller worked with literary topoi such as the locus amoenus , which includes trees that provide shade , flowers and birdsong, wind and water movements. Possibly he had the rising landscape of the Jenzig in Jena in mind when he designed the introduction to his elegy.

Another suggestion came from a treatise by Gottlob Heinrich Rapp on the Hohenheim Gardens , which had appeared in Johann Friedrich Cotta's pocket calendar for the year 1795, for nature and garden lovers . Schiller's short review Ueber the garden calendar for the year 1795 throws a significant light on the nature of the poem. First of all, he critically examines how garden art has long been oriented towards architecture and forced the vegetation “under the stiff yoke of mathematical forms”. The beautiful and independent life of the plants was neglected, even sacrificed to a “mindless proportion”, as the viewer expects from a simple wall. One has strayed from this wrong path, but only to get lost in new labyrinths. Having escaped the severity of the architect, for Schiller poetic freedom now turned into a lack of rules and overwhelmed the eye with an arbitrary flood of phenomena.

The Hohenheim Gardens, laid out by Duke Karl Eugen from 1776, on the other hand, convey order and freedom in a balanced way and pour a deep elegiac tone through the landscape that guides the sensitive observer between rest and movement, reflection and enjoyment and has a long lasting effect. The poetic layout combines rural simplicity with submerged urban grandeur. The "serious feeling of transitoriness is wonderfully lost in the feeling of victorious life." The nature of this garden is "inspired with spirit" and "exalted by art" and not only satisfies "simple people, but even those who are spoiled by culture." "

The Stuttgart Castle with its "grandeur and elegance" to enjoy for Schiller the ideal starting point for hikers whose desire nature will stimulate necessary. The beautiful park, which he visited several times during his trip through Württemberg in 1793/94, seems to embody the almost longingly sought simplicity that the sentimental wanderer of the elegy hopes to find in the landscape.

Influences and historical-philosophical background

Like no other poem, The Walk shows connections but also differences between the theoretical and lyrical world of Schiller. His historical-philosophical aesthetics , which he formulated in the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man and the treatise On Naive and Sentimental Poetry , and arguments with Kant's concept of the sublime, shape the elegy as well as Rousseau's cultural pessimism and traditions of landscape poetry .

In the bucolic idylls of Theocrit and Georgica Virgil, there are hymns of praise for the quiet and secluded country life, which is contrasted with the moral decline and the decadent hustle and bustle in the cities. Even Horace transfigured with his Epodon liber rurality while he distances faced ( "Happy is he who far the affairs of state") the political life of the city. Albrecht von Haller took up this topos with his famous didactic poem Die Alpen , Ewald Christian von Kleist and Friedrich von Hagedorn and combined this with a fundamental criticism of civilization.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour , 1753

Critic of civilization, Rousseau had denounced the delicacy of the epoch praised by the Enlightenment. He interpreted the urban refinement of morals as a sign of insincerity and moral decay and wanted to show that real tenderness (“sentiment tendre et doux”) was only possible in the lost golden age of pre-bourgeois sociability, in which people were still in balance between inner ones Freedom and interpersonal orientation lived. In contrast, the level now reached was determined by a softening that was nothing more than dependence and conventional adaptation.

Schiller did not follow Rousseau on all points. Civilization and (reflexively broken) enjoyment of nature were not contradictions for him, while Rousseau viewed the sensual experience of the landscape merely as an elegiac look back at the sunken joys of life. Based on his academy award publication Discours sur les sciences et les arts from 1750, according to which the Enlightenment and development of the sciences let the urban world cool down and the souls wither away, Schiller also criticized the social and moral development, but did not justify this with Rousseau, but resorted to ancient and Greek mythology .

At the beginning of the middle section there are thoughts about the development of mankind (town planning, duties and rights, trade and religion), which Schiller had already formulated 15 years earlier as a medical student in his dissertation on the connection between the animal nature of man and his spiritual , while the pessimistic vision paints the dark side of the Enlightenment, which, with increasing bureaucratization, has led to alienation from nature. His perception of the French Revolution as it appeared to him from 1792 onwards can already be seen in these gloomy images .

In the critical passages of his elegy, Schiller refers to a legal practice that questions the position of the sovereign and lets the world tumble, but does not offer sufficient alternatives or social equilibrium. “In the tribune the right brags, in the hut unity, / The ghost of the law stands on the kings throne ... Like a tigress who breaks through the iron grating / And suddenly and terribly remembers the Numidian forest / Rises up with the crime Anger and misery mankind, / And in the ashes of the city the lost nature seeks. "

Around 1800 poets often used the tiger metaphor to illustrate revolutionary violence in the context of the September massacres and the Jacobin reign of terror . Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Gottfried August Bürger used the image to brand the consequences of the French policy of occupation. In the Revolution Almanac of 1795, Christoph Girtanner called the Jacobins a "bunch of blood-thirsty Tygers".

Schiller, on the other hand, worked with other nuances of meaning based on his aesthetics and philosophy of history. The animal that breaks through the bars of its cage stands for the natural needs of humans who, despite the celebrated civilization, remain a prisoner and cannot develop their abilities.

Meaning and reception

The work is classified as an elegiac counterpart to the initially designed idyll Das Reich der Schatten ( The Ideal and Life ). For Schiller himself it was an expression of the complaint about the "lost nature as a symbol of unity and innocence".

August Wilhelm Schlegel praised the characteristic line of thought and poetic power of the elegy, but criticized a few metrical weaknesses that Schiller wanted to correct in his second version. The elegy, according to Schlegel, “sings of a great, indeed for us humans the greatest of all objects: the fate of the whole of humanity. In the bold outlines of an ideal face they pass before the spirit of the poet. ”In a letter dated October 10, 1796, Johann Gottfried Herder confirmed that The Walk offered “ a continuous, orderly painting of all the scenes in the world and humanity ”.

For Jürgen Brokoff, Schiller was neither about a mimesis of nature nor a historical reconstruction, but about historical-philosophical ideas, which he poured into poetic forms using different topoi. The movement that begins with the beautiful and sublime nature finally leads the looking ego to freedom, which in turn is illuminated in several layers. The wanderer's awakening in the arms of nature is not an escapist return to the pleasant “natural state” of the pastoral idyll of the first part. Rather, the renewed encounter emerges from the cultural process, the three stages of development of which from child to youth to man describe a step model that has been known at least since Lessing's book The Education of the Human race . In the end there is no enthusiastic union with nature or a regained Arcadia . Man remains separated from it and sees it at a painful distance as the sun , which will shine for all eternity on the human world that has been detached from it. Two paths open up - he can remain a prisoner and abuse his facilities or cultivate himself, orientate himself on nature and gradually develop real freedom.

literature

• Peter-André Alt : The Elegy. In: Schiller, Life - Work - Time. Second volume, seventh chapter, CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58682-8 , pp. 283-293.
• Jürgen Brokoff: Elegy (1795) / The Walk (1800). In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-476-01950-0 , pp. 269-271.
• Jürgen Stenzel : The Prisoner's Freedom: Schiller's Elegy "The Walk". On Friedrich Schiller's: The Walk In: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): Poems and interpretations. Volume 3: Classical and Romantic. Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-15-007892-X , pp. 67-78.

Web links

Wikisource: The Walk  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 284.
2. ↑ Jürgen Brokoff: Elegy (1795) / The Walk (1800). In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 269.
3. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 176.
4. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 177.
5. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 180.
6. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 180.
7. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 181.
8. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 181.
9. ↑ Quoted from: Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 284.
10. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 286.
11. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 286.
12. ^ So Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 286.
13. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 289.
14. ↑ tender; tender. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy. Volume 12, p. 1152.
15. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 290.
16. ^ Anton Hügli : Invention, Invention, Discovery. In: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy . Volume 4, p. 573.
17. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 289.
18. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: The walk. In: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works. Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, pp. 180-181.
19. ↑ Quoted from: Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 289.
20. ^ So Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 285.
21. ↑ Quoted from: Peter-André Alt: Schiller. Life - work - time. Volume Two, Chapter Seventh: The Elegy. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 285.
22. ↑ Jürgen Brokoff: Elegy (1795) / The Walk (1800). In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 270.
23. ↑ Jürgen Brokoff: Elegy (1795) / The Walk (1800). In: Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (ed.): Schiller manual, life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 271.