The gate and death

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Data
Title: The gate and death
Original language: German
Author: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Publishing year: 1894
Premiere: November 13, 1898
Place of premiere: Theater am Gärtnerplatz , Munich
people
  • The death
  • Claudio, a nobleman
  • His valet
  • Claudio's mother
  • A lover of Claudio
  • A childhood friend
Angelo Jank , illustration in: Die Jugend , Heft 6, 1899

The Thor and the Death (later: The Gate and the Death ) is a short drama in verse (" lyrical drama ") by Hugo von Hofmannsthal , written in 1893. It was first published in 1894 in the "Modern Muses Almanac" under the author's pseudonym " Loris ”, the first book edition in 1900. The premiere on November 13, 1898 took place under the direction of Ludwig Ganghofer .

content

According to the author, the play is set in the 1820s and is about the encounter between nobleman Claudio and death. Death comes to Claudio to lead him out of life and confronts him with important people from his life who have already died - his mother, his former lover and a childhood friend. In the encounters it becomes clear to him that he has not developed any deeper bonds with these people. He lived like a dandy to other people in an aesthetically distant attitude, without getting involved with them or letting them get close to him. The moment he has to die makes him aware of this deficit and paradoxically only the hour of death is full of emotional liveliness. "Since dead was my life, be you my life, death". Claudio sinks down dead at the end; the last verses of death read:

How wonderful are these beings
Who interpret what cannot be interpreted,
Read what has never been written
Binding confused things dominantly
And find ways in the eternal darkness.

Conception

Hugo von Hofmannsthal combines elements of impressionism with those of symbolism in his piece . The symbolist drama with its imaginative language is more suitable for evoking images and sounds in the reader's imagination than for constituting a concrete event on the stage. Symbolistic dramas are poor in action.

Unlike the theater of naturalism , which also flourished at the end of the 19th century, the symbolist theater is not an illusion theater . In this, the viewer is deliberately put into the illusion that he is observing (as if through a keyhole) a “real”, “now” process, and the observed are not aware of the fact that “voyeurs” are watching them. Such an illusion can not arise with The Gate and Death , and that is because death as a “real person” does not exist and because the dead cannot “really” speak. The assumption that Claudio could have a dialogue with one of the three characters presented by death is absurd, since they do not come from the same level of fiction as the “now dying” Claudio. They are already dead, but speak anyway and appear in the form they remembered Claudio.

The gate and the death at the same time contain elements of overcoming the symbolism, which Gero von Wilpert characterizes with the following words:

The language of s [symbolism] strives for extreme musicality; it wants to "win back from the music what the (earlier realistic ) poets had lost in it" and deepens by reflecting on the actual linguistic means of poetry such as rhyme, rhythm, melody, even in vocabulary (especially synaesthesia ) and Sentence structure the linguistic articulation through to a [a] magical-mystical aestheticism , which addresses a select group and is later exaggerated in a decadent manner, but in the Roman [is] countries leads to a renewal of high verse art.

Hofmannsthal's lyrical drama does not propagate Claudio's aestheticism in the manner of symbolism, but criticizes him.

Biographical references

In his essay Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit , which was mainly written in 1947 and 1948, Hermann Broch claims that the entire work of Hofmannsthal “with its narcissistic central figure, which appears for the first time in The Gate and Death , is a single accusation, a knowing accusation against the aestheticizing middle class whom he had grown up and brought up, and which he was hardly able to escape despite all the knowledge about them. "Because in Vienna, the final phase of the Habsburg monarchy , Hofmannsthal's hometown," Broch said, "a minimum of ethical values ​​[...] should be implemented A maximum of aesthetic values ​​that were no longer were covered up, and they could no longer be, because the aesthetic value that has not grown on an ethical basis is its opposite, namely kitsch . And as the metropolis of kitsch, Vienna also became that of the value vacuum of the era. "

Natalia Karczewka also states that for the young generation of heirs in Vienna who were not dependent on gainful employment at the turn of the century, “beauty became a protective wall against truth and art a substitute for morality” and that Hugo von Hofmannsthal did just that wanted to criticize with his work Der Tor und der Tod .

literature

  • Peter Matussek: Intertextual Dance of Death. The reanimation of the memory space in Hofmannsthal's drama “The Gate and Death” . In: Hofmannsthal yearbook 1999 . Rombach, pp. 199-231, ISBN 3-7930-9219-4 , ISSN  0946-4018 .
  • Hinrich C. Seeba: On the criticism of the aesthetic man. Hermeneutics and morals in Hofmannsthal's “The Gate and Death” . Gehlen, Bad Homburg 1970 DNB 458929867 (also dissertation at the University of Tübingen ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Impressionist theater . User publisher
  2. ^ Symbolistic theater . User publisher
  3. ↑ Gero von Wilpert : Specialized Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). 5th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1969, DNB 458658170 , pp. 755-756.
  4. ↑ Hermann Broch: Hofmannsthal and his time . Frankfurt / Main, Library Suhrkamp, ​​1974, p. 81
  5. ↑ Hermann Broch: Hofmannsthal and his time . Frankfurt / Main, Library Suhrkamp, ​​1974, p. 69
  6. ^ Natalia Karczewska: Karl Kraus and his time. Fin de Siècle Vienna - metropolis or cosmopolitan province . In: Studia Posnaniensia Germanica . Poznań, 2001, p. 75