Poets and their journeymen

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Joseph von Eichendorff

Poets and their journeymen is a romantic novel by Joseph von Eichendorff that was published by Duncker & Humblot in Berlin at Christmas 1833 .

content

The second book leads to Rome. The rest are in Germany.

first book

On the ride to Italy, Baron Fortunat seeks out fellow student Walter from the good old days in Heidelberg. Nothing will come of a trip together. Instead, Walter rides with Fortunat to the neighboring Hohenstein to the seat of Count Victor. There the two riders meet the beautiful Florentine. This is the bailiff's daughter. Fortunat learns the reason for the friend's lack of wanderlust. The civil servant Walter is engaged to the girl and wants to marry her after the next raise. The poet Victor cannot be seen on Hohenstein, but Fortunat meets another poet at the bailiff's table. This is the poetic student Otto, the bailiff's nephew. The young fellow is disgusted by law, but he wants to renounce cheerful poetry first and pass the exam. Walter and Fortunat leave Hohenstein. Walter has to go back to his office. Fortunat, on the way to Italy, meets the wandering theater troupe of the principal Sorti and encounters Kordelchen among the actors. The pretty girl was once kidnapped by a cheeky mime from Heidelberg and is in love with the young painter Guido. The ensemble also includes the first tenor Lothario, the Literatus. At the invitation of the prince, everyone goes expectantly to his hunting lodge. Fortunat had already admired a violinist in Walter's town. Now this strange soloist Dr. Dryander up again. Fortunat's path crosses that of the painter Albert. This is on the return journey from Rome.

The prince is more interested in Countess Juanna, a beautiful huntress who grazes around his castle, than in the actors. Otto, magically attracted by the actors' company, enters the princely park. With a pounding heart, the student reads to Mr. Sorti and a few actors from the manuscript of his tragedy, but meets with disinterest and is laughed at. But Otto is lucky. His uncle, the bailiff, enabled him to travel through Italy with a substantial sum of money. A long-legged lord tells the princely couple the "story of the wild Spanish woman". The prince pursues Countess Juanna in vain in the forest. The painter Albert wants to protect Juanna and follows the ruler - armed to the teeth - into the forest.

The prince dismisses the troops. Fortunat meets Juanna in the wild loneliness of the forest. She warns him. Every approach or even advertising means ruin. Juanna doesn't want to be a man's wife. When Lothario tries to bind her, she falls from the rock to her death. Meanwhile, the actors move on.

Walter, who has become a court administrator, can now marry Florentine.

second book

On the way to Italy Fortunat observed two acquaintances in Switzerland who were fighting with swords - the tall lord and the painter Albert. They got into an argument while looking for the missing Juanna, but they can't harm each other because they are equally strong.

In Rome, Fortunat is accommodated in the palace of Marchese A. The philosopher Grundling, a stubborn Kantian from his time in Heidelberg, had bought the apartment. Lonely in the beautiful stranger of the nocturnal Roman castle park, Fortunat sings to the guitar at the sight of a slender girl returning home:

The tree tops rustle and shudder.
As if at this hour
Around the half-sunken walls
The old gods the round '.
Here behind the myrtle trees
In secret dull splendor,
What are you talking about, like in dreams
To me, fantastic night?
All the stars sparkle on me
With a glowing look of love
The distance speaks drunk
How great happiness in the future! -

The following morning, Fortunat is teased by the little marchess, that slender girl Fiametta, the 14-year-old daughter of the house. Her father, Marchese A., is distantly related to Count Victor von Hohenstein. Fortunat, idly strolling around the city, meets a pair of lovers he knows - Kordelchen and the young painter Guido. The astonished reader learns that Kordelchen was Lothario's lover. After she got the passport from him, she turned to the enthusiastic Guido.

Fortunat immediately meets - as luck would have it - Otto. The poetic student from Hohenheim married the beautiful young Roman Annidi. The re-encounters never end. Fortunat meets Albert. The pale, torn painter is pursued as Karbonaro by the Sbirs . Albert immediately chooses suicide. Otto who leaps over cannot help him. Otto's wedlock is short. Annidi is cheating on her husband. While Fortunat is touring Sicily and Naples, Otto goes back to Germany with Kordelchen. When Fortunat returned to Rome, he learned that Marchese A. had “bankrupted”. The sick Fiametta and her father have left Rome for an unknown destination. Fortunat wants to buy the old, dilapidated palace of the Marchese. Grundling is to become the "castle warden".

Third book

Fortunat, having returned to Germany, learns "that the strange Lothario Count Victor himself" is "and has lived for some time ... as Vitalis"; "Cheerful and strict, a hermit without a robe, a hunter, after higher game."

"Pleasure" and "lust" are bad for the prince. The ruler went mad during Fortunat's stay in Italy. The princess rules. This lady, the narrator reveals, also knew about the efforts of Lothario-Victor-Vitalis to help poor Countess Juanna and about his involvement in her sad fate. It continues to die. Otto, who had escaped from Italy, wanted to "go to the theater" at home again. Undecided, he then turned to his forest brother Vitalis in the mountains. Otto could not become a hermit either, "because a godly life requires a good, firm nature." Cast off by strict Vitalis, he still reads from his long cycle of romances , composed in his happiest youth and dies. The poet Dr. Dryander finds a job, enters into a marriage of convenience, but is abandoned by his dear little wife. As a bridegroom, rhymes had flowed like lavender water to him. There was talk of the moon's magical power, "of caressing and whispering gently until the first lark wakes up".

Fortunat finds his dear Fiametta again. Her father had knocked on relatives in Germany in vain and died of grief. The “two lovers” hike to Hohenstein with confidence - “on a footpath between the quietly moving cornfields, the night cools on the horizon with lightning, a quail beats in the distance.” Fiametta, feeling homesick for Italy, picks up the guitar and sings : " The stars seemed so golden ". The bride weeps bitterly. The strict Vitalis wed the couple in the old church.

Quotes

  • "Vanity makes you stupid."
  • Fiametta and Fortunat - a couple: The summer night in the moonlit garden, with fountains rushing in it and, above all, nightingales pounding out of the bushes play the main roles in the book. “So they walked slowly through the tempting night, the nightingales were beating out of all the gardens and countless fountains rushing from afar.” Longing drives the characters in the novel: “The landscape sometimes shone immeasurably in front of them, all the rivers came out, clouds and birds swung after them through the serene blue, and the woods leaned towards the splendid distance in the morning wind. - Do you remember your fairy tale in the tree? said Fiametta laughing, now I really am Aurora. "

shape

The novel staff is more extensive than mentioned in this article. The good-natured reader who follows the omniscient narrator asks himself during some narrative aberrations: Is there a short circuit?

Literal speech, which is quite common, is not enclosed in quotation marks. Despite all the attention, the reader sometimes wavers: Is the author's comment?

Self-testimony

  • In a letter of April 12, 1833 to Theodor von Schön : "... so I am now writing ... on a larger novel that is supposed to depict the different directions of the poet's life."

reception

  • Rudolf Majut: Lothario-Victor-Vitalis renounce poetry and become “God's servant alive”.
  • Volkmar Stein puts his finger on the wound in the novel - the inadequate narrative development. Eichendorff shows his protagonists as if there were the poet Fortunat and the priest Vitalis, “not in their probation”.
  • Christian Strauch: Eichendorff breathes life into his characters by depicting them in opposition.
  • Alexander von Bormann: Otto, who vacillates between Fortunat and Vitalis, stands for the social weakness of natural poetry.
  • Schillbach and Schultz: Otto resembles the young Wilhelm Meister and follows Sternbald . He fails as a poet because he continues to write poetry regardless of the audience. The painter Albert represents "patriotic romanticism".
  • Schulz compares the novel with its predecessor Anung und Gegenwart from 1815 and notes, for example, the change in the concept of freedom. Freedom - a work of the devil - would not have been possible with Eichendorff in 1812.
  • Koopmann: Eichendorff had sadly and soberly admitted the end of Romanticism and bowed to the flow of time with its revolutionary power.
  • Schiwy refers to Gutzkow's review in the Frankfurt literary journal Phönix of January 14, 1835: Although Eichendorff came a little late as a romantic, he at least combined the stricter Weimar classicism with the rather subjective romanticism. In the novel, romantic life plans - more precisely, their failure - would be discussed. The legal scholar Walter ends up as a civil servant and - even more disgracefully - as a Philistine . Fortunat is Eichendorff's shining hero because he writes new poetry in the old way. Albert, on the other hand, stayed with the old man - the Wars of Liberation . Lothario-Graf Victor is the exemplary poet who, after unhappy love, finally continues to fight as a clergyman in the Catholic Church . For the “elitist” Otto, his “inner turmoil” became doomed.
  • The novel could be read as a battle book of the Catholic movement .

First printing

  • Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff: Poets and their journeymen. Novella. Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1834. 380 pages. Half-linen with gold-embossed title on the back ( digitized version and full text in the German text archive )

literature

  • Ernst L. Offermanns: Eichendorff's novel 'poets and his journeymen' . P. 373–387 in: Helmut Arntzen , Bernd Balzer , Karl Pestalozzi, Rainer Wagner: Literary studies and the philosophy of history . Berlin 1975
  • Ansgar Hillach, Klaus-Dieter Krabiel : Eichendorff comment. Volume I. On the seals. 230 pages. Winkler, Munich 1971
  • Helmut Koopmann : Joseph von Eichendorff. P. 505-531 in Benno von Wiese (ed.): German poets of the romantic. Your life and work. 659 pages. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1983 (2nd edition), ISBN 3-503-01664-3
  • Wolfgang Frühwald : Poetry and the poetic person. To Eichendorff's poem 'Sehnsucht'. S. 380–393 in: Wulf Segebrecht (Ed.): Poems and interpretations. Volume 3. Classic and Romantic. Reclam UB 7892, Stuttgart 1984 (1994 edition). 464 pages, ISBN 3-15-007892-X
  • Gerhard Schulz : The German literature between the French Revolution and the restoration. Part 2. The Age of the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration: 1806–1830. 912 pages. Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-09399-X
  • Günther Schiwy : Eichendorff. The poet in his time. A biography. 734 pages. 54 illustrations. CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46673-7
  • Otto Eberhardt: "Poets and their journeymen". Poets and poetry of the epoch of modern romanticism in the overall panorama . In: Otto Eberhardt: Figurae. Roles and names of the people in Eichendorff's narrative . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4439-7 , pp. 234-318

Quoted text edition

  • Poets and their journeymen. Novella. Pp. 105–353 in Brigitte Schillbach (ed.), Hartwig Schultz (ed.): Poets and their journeymen. Stories II. In Wolfgang Frühwald (Ed.), Brigitte Schillbach (Ed.), Hartwig Schultz (Ed.): Joseph von Eichendorff. Works in five volumes. Volume 3. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993 (1st edition), ISBN 3-618-60130-1 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The publisher Duncker chose - with consideration for the reader's taste of the time - the term novella ; Eichendorff spoke of Roman (source, p. 739, entry 106.2; see also in this article under # Self-testimony ).
  2. ↑ With the year 1834.
  3. ↑ Schillbach and Schultz in vol. 3 of the six-volume Eichendorff edition (pp. 682–796) offer information on the first printing, the origin, interpretation and reception - together with a commentary on the passage.
  4. ↑ Eichendorff took Warmbrunn as a model.
  5. ↑ The spelling follows the source, p. 227, 30. Zvo
  6. ↑ Source, p. 209, 4. Zvo
  7. ↑ Source, p. 247, 11. Zvo
  8. ↑ Source, p. 353, 2. Zvo
  9. ↑ von Schillbach and Schultz cited in the source, p. 682, 12. Zvo
  10. ↑ Rudolf Majut in 1952, cited in Hillach and Krabiel, p. 130, 19. Zvu
  11. ↑ Volkmar Stein anno 1964, quoted in Hillach and Krabiel, p. 130, 9th Zvu
  12. ^ Christian Strauch anno 1968, quoted in Hillach and Krabiel, p. 130, 1st Zvu
  13. ↑ Alexander von Bormann in 1968, cited in Hillach and Krabiel, p. 131, 14. Zvo
  14. ↑ in the comment of the source, p. 602
  15. ↑ Originated around 1812 (p. 613 below in Wolfgang Frühwald (Hrsg.), Brigitte Schillbach (Hrsg.): Joseph von Eichendorff. A Glance and Present. Stories I. in Wolfgang Frühwald (Hrsg.), Brigitte Schillbach (Hrsg.), Hartwig Schultz (Ed.): Joseph von Eichendorff. Works in five volumes. Volume 2. 843 pages. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985 (1st edition), ISBN 3-618-60120-4 )
  16. ↑ "... the devil in sparkling knight jewelry rides along the ranks and shows the peoples through the crack of clouds the glory of the lands and calls to them: be free, and everything is yours!" (Source, p. 352, 13th Zvo)
  17. ↑ Koopmann, p. 507 below
  18. ↑ Koopmann, p. 516, 6. Zvo
  19. ↑ Schiwy, pp. 510-517
  20. ↑ to the freedom-loving Countess Juanna
  21. ↑ Frühwald in Segebrecht: Interpretations