The public slanderer
The public slanderer is the title of a poem by the Swiss writer and politician Gottfried Keller . Created in 1878 for current events, it brought up experiences that Keller had made while working as state clerk for the Canton of Zurich . The "Zorngedicht" was originally supposed to be published in the Deutsche Rundschau , but first appeared in 1883 in Keller's Gesammelte Gedichten . From 1933–1945 it was interpreted in circles of the German resistance as a battle and diatribe against Hitler and disseminated under the palm of the hand. What astonished the readers was that a poet of the 19th century should have foreseen Hitler and recognized defamation as his initial crime and means of seizing power .
text
A vermin rests
in dust and dry mud
, as the flame
does in light ashes.
A rain, a breath of wind awakens
the terrible life,
And from nowhere rise
plagues, embers and smoke.
A thief
drives out of a dark cave
to wander;
He wants to reach for bags
and finds better value:
He finds a dispute
about nothing, an insane knowledge,
a banner that was torn,
a people in stupidity.
He finds where he goes,
the emptiness of poor times,
there he can walk shamelessly,
now he becomes a prophet!
He
puts
his picaresque
feet on a garbage And hisses his greetings to
the amazed world.
Wrapped in wickedness,
Like in a cloud,
A liar before the people, He
soon towers in great power
With his number of helpers, who
stand high and low,
see opportunity,
offer themselves to his choice.
They share his word,
As once the messengers of God
Done with the five loaves,
It goes on and on!
At first the dog alone lied,
Now a thousand of them lie;
And roaring like a storm,
His pound now grows.
The seed shoots up
,
The lands are transformed, The crowd lives in shame
And the deed laughs!
Now it has also been proven
what was first invented:
the good have disappeared,
the bad are gathered!
When once this misery is
broken long like ice,
Then it will be spoken of
As of the black death;
And build a straw man
The children on the Haide,
To burn lust from suffering
And light from old gray.
Explanations
To the form
Each of the seven stanzas consists of eight short, three - iambic lines of verse that are rhymed according to the abba cddc scheme ( surrounding rhymes ). This scheme, which clearly divides the stanza into two quartets , reflects the conceptual structure: What is said in the first quartet is commented on or concretized in the second. With the exception of the fourth stanza, there is a “strong” punctuation mark (full stop, colon, exclamation mark, semicolon) between the quartets.
Go to content
First verse. The first quartet speaks of a vermin that rests and does no harm for the time being. The second quartet says the danger it represents: a rain, a breeze of wind is enough to turn the embers hidden under ashes into a fire and the germs sleeping in dry mud into an epidemic.
Second stanza. A thief occurs. In Luther's translation of the New Testament, the thieves refer to the criminals crucified on the side of Jesus. Outside of the biblical context, the word is seldom used and smacks of poverty: a wretched fellow, a poor devil leaves his hiding place, goes out like a half-starved predator on the prowl. But instead of purses, he finds things that are more valuable to him. What he finds is in the second quartet: a useless argument to interfere in, a crazy ideology to adopt; plus a torn war flag and a people in stupidity . Anyone who was against Hitler and followed his rise could find in these words the situation of the German people after the lost world war: humiliated by the defeat and the Peace of Versailles , the Germans listened to a slanderer whose insane knowledge of a conspiracy of world Jewry the Germans seemed to answer agonizing war guilt question.
Third verse. The emptiness of poor times , in other words: the moral exhaustion associated with the depletion of material resources, the loss of standards of value, paves the way for the slanderer to walk shamelessly . Now he becomes a prophet . Second quartet: The mountain from which he speaks great things is of course a heap of rubbish , and the feet on which he stands are those of a rogue . He hisses his greetings / To the baffled world : his voice is that of a snake and the messages he sends out, like the card player's bluff , serve to confuse and deceive.
Fourth verse. At the peak of power, a decorative robe veils the liar from the people . It is that of wickedness . His building of lies now rises up into the clouds. He certainly didn't build it alone. In the second quartet the gaze falls on his helper number , the opportunists from all walks of life who serve him, who willingly allow themselves to be lied to and who lie to themselves.
Fifth verse. Like the disciples of Jesus when they fed the five thousand with bread ( Mt 14 : 13-21 EU ), so do the helpers with the words of the slanderer. It goes on and on! : the miraculous number of liars works perfectly. At first the dog alone lied, / Now a thousand of them lie . The two closing lines could accuse the poet of mixing up images and the politician of blasphemy . But Keller doesn't care. Once in the course of passionate speech, he relates the event with another experience of the disciples, the Pentecost miracle, and with a parable of Jesus: And roaring like a storm / ( Acts 2,1-4 EU ) So now his pound is rampant ( Lk 19.12 to 27 LUT84 ).
Sixth verse. High shoots up the seed / Transforms are the country - but to the detriment and to the shame of the amount Schofeltat also laughed. The second quartet takes stock: What was first invented , the lie with which it all began, namely that the masses are firmly in the grip of a "system" of conspiratorial traitors , has now been proven , has become a fact: The good have disappeared / The Bad guys are grouped together , are positioned in an advantageous manner and keep “the ranks tightly closed” .
Seventh verse. How do you become this happening once , judging from a distant point in the future? Then it is spoken of / Like the black death , like the plague pandemic that raged in late medieval Europe. You will remember that it was a dark, sorrowful and horrific time. But do you really understand what was going on when you naïve childishly portray the slanderer as a straw man and burn him effigy ? The poet leaves this question open.
To the formation
The immediate cause of the poem was a press campaign against Eduard Hitzig , the head of the Burghölzli insane asylum in Zurich . It was conducted in 1878 with anti-Semitic undertones. Keller, who publicly supported Hitzig, wrote to Julius Rodenberg , the editor of the Berlin-based Deutsche Rundschau :
- “I am working on a kind of ethical anger poem, which deals with the slander in public matters, as it is rampant in the present [...] in the press and political literature and is practiced with you as with us, and about the title : Calumniator publicus will lead. Here I can now imagine that that would be too cumbersome or too sorrowful or something else for you, maybe too strange in the matter, etc. "
With “with you”, Keller alluded to the anti-Semitism controversy fueled by the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker . Although Rodenberg allayed Keller's concerns, the poem remained unfinished. The seventh stanza is missing in the drafts that have survived. It appears for the first time in the edition of poems from 1883. There there is the harmless-sounding column “Festlieder und Random”. However, this contains a sub-section with the ironic title "Pandora" and the explanatory addition "Antipanegyric" . In this department, a kind of poison cabinet, there are poems that deal with social horrors and political vices, and are thus the complete opposite of celebratory chants and hymns. This is where Keller put the “The Public Slanderer”, along with poems of anger from his politically agitated youth.
The person who served Keller as a model for a public slanderer and whom he had the opportunity to study during his tenure was Friedrich Locher (1820–1911), a lawyer from Zurich who switched to sensational reporting after failures in professional life. With a series of pamphlets , Locher attacked the “system” that had been established under Alfred Escher , the leading politician of the second liberal era in the canton of Zurich , who was gifted as a writer, witty and imaginative as he was . It so happened that in the 1860s a movement had emerged that pushed for direct democracy . Locher's pamphlets against Escher and his followers sparked a storm of indignation in 1867/68, which swept away the government and initiated a revision of the cantonal constitution. Keller, a friend of Escher, is expecting to be released. In a letter to his Berlin friend Ludmilla Assing , he summarized his experiences and expectations:
- “We have had a dry revolution in our canton by means of a very peaceful but very malicious referendum, [...] as a result of which our constitution is now being totally changed. The previous representative system is to be converted into the new and absolute democracy and thus our state building is to be torn down in all parts and rebuilt. Since I am one of those who are not convinced of the usefulness and wholesomeness of the matter, I will walk away completely resigned, without resenting the people, who will find their way around again. In the beginning of the movement we were in eternal trouble because it was started by infamous slander. But the people, who were forced to believe the lies in their boldness, should have been made of stone if they shouldn't have been excited. The slanderers are also already recognized and set aside; but as the world goes, His Majesty the Sovereign nevertheless benefits from the cause and retains his booty, which he calls extended popular rights. "
The letter writer Keller describes the events calmly, apparently as if they only concern him externally. How deeply they touched the poet and narrator Keller can be seen in his 1874 novella Das verlorne Lachen . In it he describes a "demonically strange movement that contained more horror and persecution than many a bloody revolution, although not a hair was bent and not a single blow on the cheek was made." Keller's confidence in human progress was shaken even more deeply by the Hitzig affair when he observed that religious anti-Judaism , which had been believed to have been overcome, began to stir again and, relying on new heresy, rose again as political anti-Semitism . In a letter to his friend Moritz Lazarus he wrote of the "thin cultural ceiling that seems to separate us from the burrowing and howling animals of the abyss."
To the reception
- 1926. Karl Kraus prints in the October issue of his magazine Die Fackel “The public slanderer” together with two other poems from the “Pandora” section. The small flower harvest is entitled: "Contemporary from Gottfried Keller".
- 1933. On January 1st, the cabaret Die Pfeffermühle is founded in Munich . In the same year the members of the ensemble had to flee. When he emigrated, Keller's poem became an integral part of the repertoire. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Czechoslovakia it reaches a wide German-speaking audience; not so in Prague, where the censors are removing the poem from the program.
- 1934. In exile in Switzerland, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary on December 8th: “Lunch with Erika and the goat . Reading of an extremely striking and very beautiful poem by Keller, which E. is now speaking in the "Pfeffermühle" and which seems to be aimed at Hitler's Germany. "
- 1942. Hans Scholl reads “The Public Slanderer” at his sister Sophie's birthday party . Nobody guesses the author at first, but everyone is of the opinion that the poem should be distributed as a leaflet throughout Germany. This never happened: in 1943 the members of the resistance group were arrested, sentenced to death and executed.
- 1943. The painter Bernhard Huys is sentenced to two years in prison by the Hanover Special Court for eavesdropping on enemy broadcasters and despising the Führer. The copy of the poem found in his home serves as evidence for the second charge.
- 1933-45. Pastor Josef Hog, Eschbach, remembers: “In the spiritual opposition of that time, help was also sought from the spiritual men of the past. One day in the rectory in St. Märgen, Professor Engelbert Krebs recited Gottfried Keller's poem 'The Public Verleumder' from the collection of poems 'Pandora' by heart. [...] The text was temporarily hidden by me in the church, but was often taken out and read to friends in Pforzheim and especially in Karlsruhe. "
literature
- Gottfried Keller: Collected poems . Published by Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin 1883.
- Gottfried Keller: Complete Works . Vol. 1 critically edited by Jonas Fränkel , Verlag Benteli, Bern and Leipzig 1931.
- Ursula Amrein (ed.): Gottfried Keller-Handbuch. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-476-02327-8 .
Web links
- Ulrich Jung: to Friedrich Locher . Website of the Alfred Escher Foundation (accessed January 17, 2017).
- User Mercy: to Gottfried Keller, the White Rose and Thomas Mann . History forum website (accessed January 17, 2017).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Keller to Julius Rodenberg, February 18, 1878, Collected Letters , ed. by Carl Helbling, Vol. 3.2 (Zurich 1953), p. 356.
- ↑ Quoted from the edition by Jonas Fränkel : Gottfried Keller Complete Works , Vol. 1, Bern and Leipzig 1931, pp. 338-340.
- ↑ "In December 1878, Keller, in agreement with friends, wrote a leaflet in which Hitzig's respect and regret for the incidents are expressed." Keller page of the University of Zurich (accessed January 17, 2017).
- ↑ Rodenberg to Keller on February 20, 1878: "[...] neither the 'Rundschau' has to take the priests into consideration, nor any obligations towards the Calumniatores" Keller page of the University of Zurich, letters (accessed February 17 2017).
- ↑ Jonas Fränkel in the editorial appendix to Complete Works , Vol. 2.2 (Bern and Leipzig 1938), pp. 150–152.
- ^ "The public slanderer" immediately follows "Jesuit procession", which was published in 1843 as an illustrated leaflet. (see “They are coming, the Jesuits!” ).
- ↑ For Friedrich Locher see also under web links.
- ↑ June 12, 1868, Collected Letters , Vol. 2, p. 122 f.
- ↑ See all works , vol. 8 (Zurich and Munich 1927), pp. 375–379.
- ↑ December 20, 1881, published in: Electronic Historisch-Kritische Gottfried Keller Edition (accessed January 17, 2017).
- ^ Die Fackel , Volume 28 (1926), Issue October 10, pp. 156–160.
- ↑ Romana Bečvová: “Participate - it's about your earth”. The tours of the political-satirical cabaret “Die Pfeffermühle” in Czechoslovakia and analysis of selected texts . Master's thesis, University of Brno 2007. PDF, 0.5 MB . (accessed January 17, 2017).
- ↑ Quoted from Der Gottfried-Keller-Rabe (= Der Rabe No. 61, edited by Joachim Kersten , Zurich 2000, p. 88.)
- ↑ Based on the report by Inge Aicher-Scholl: The White Rose , Frankfurt / Main 1952.
- ↑ Hameln's story - apart from the Pied Piper (accessed January 17, 2017).
- ↑ Website of the municipalities in the Dreisamtal ( memento of the original from January 19, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed January 17, 2017).
