The guarantee

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Musenalmanach 1799 page 176

The guarantee is a ballad by Friedrich Schiller . It was written in the summer of 1798 at the same time as the ballad The Battle with the Dragon and, like this, was first published in the Musenalmanach in 1799. It is one of Schiller's most famous poems.

Emergence

The ballad is based on the story of Damon and Phintias . Schiller knew it in the version of the Hyginus Mythographus , in which the friends are Moeros and Selinuntius.

“Of those who were most intimately allied by friendship
When the cruel tyrant Dionysius ruled in Sicily and had his citizens executed in agony, Möros wanted to kill the tyrant. The satellites seized him and led the armed man to the king. When asked, he replied that he had wanted to kill the king. The king ordered him to be crucified. Möros asked him to take three days' leave to marry off his sister. He would hand over his friend and comrade Selinuntius to the tyrant, who would guarantee that he would come on the third day. The king granted him leave to marry his sister and explained to Selinuntius that if Möros did not come that day, he would have to endure the same punishment and Möros would be free. When he had married his sister and was on his way back, the storm and rain suddenly made the river grow so that one could neither walk nor swim across it. Möros sat down on the bank and began to cry that his friend should die for him. But the Phalaris ordered Selinuntius to be crucified, because six hours of the third day would have passed and Möros would not be coming. Selinuntius replied that the day was not over yet. When nine hours had passed, the king ordered Selinuntius to be led to the cross. While he was being led there, Möros only caught up with the hangman, after he had finally happily left the river behind him, and called from afar: Stop hangman, I'm here for whom he vouched. The incident is reported to the king. The king had them brought before him and asked them to include him in their friendship, and gave his life to the Möros. "

- Translation by Friedrich Wilhelm Valentin Schmidt (1827)

On December 15, 1797, Schiller wrote in a letter to Goethe :

“I have often wished that among the many literary emulations of such people who cannot do anything other than compilation work, one would also want to go out for poetic material in old books and thereby have a certain tact, the punctum saliens one to discover inconspicuous history. Such sources never occur to me, and my poverty in such substances really makes me more sterile in producing than I would be without it. I think a certain Hyginus, a Greek, once collected a number of tragic fables either from or for the use of the poets. I could use a friend like that. A wealth of materials for possible use really increases the inner wealth, yes it exercises an important force and it is already of great use to animate a material even in thought and to try it. "

The very next day (December 16, 1797) Goethe sent him the book he wanted:

"Here I am sending the Hygin, and at the same time I would advise you to get the Adagia of Erasmus , which are easy to get ..."

Schiller only came back to this with his letter of August 28, 1798:

"What you usually encounter with the Greek proverbs, this pleasure now gives me the collection of fables by Hyginus, which I have just read through. It is a pleasure of one's own to walk through these fairy tale figures, which the poetic spirit has enlivened; one feels moved on home soil and by the greatest wealth of figures. That is why I do not want to have changed anything in the negligent arrangement of the book; one just has to read through it quickly one after the other to see how it comes to feel the full grace and fullness of the Greek imagination. For the tragic poet there is still the most wonderful material in it ... "

On August 31, 1798 he wrote to Goethe:

"... two ballads are finished, which together amount to twenty pages, printed, and the poem I am about now will also have between ten and twelve pages ..."

On September 4, 1798 he sent Goethe the fight with the dragon together with the guarantee and wrote:

“The other story came from Hyginus. I am curious whether I have happily found out all the main motifs that were in the fabric. Think about whether you have anything else; it is one of those cases where one can proceed with great clarity and almost invent according to principles. "

Goethe replied on September 5, 1798:

“In the hope of seeing you tomorrow, I write very little. The ballads follow back, they both turned out very well ... In the guarantee it would not be physiologically quite possible that someone who escaped from the river on a rainy day wants to perish of thirst because he is still quite wet Dresses like. But even the true account, without thinking about the absorption of the skin, does not quite please the imagination and the mood of thirst. Another decent motif that would emerge from the wanderer himself does not strike me as a substitute; the other two from the outside, through a natural occurrence and human violence, are found quite well. "

Basic idea

Even more than in the ancient story of Hyginus, Schiller is about an absolute ideal of amicable love and loyalty, which also claims validity and asserts itself when it no longer seems to have any practical use. Möros' return to Syracuse was delayed by all sorts of adversities: floods that destroyed the bridge over a raging river and forced Möros to swim through it at risk of death, an attack by robbers that he had to fend off, and finally such heat that Möros died of thirst threatens. When he finally reaches Syracuse, he must expect that his friend's execution has already begun. Philostratus, “the honest keeper of the house”, implores him to at least save his own life after that of his friend has been lost anyway, from whom “the mockery of the tyrant” could not take away the trust in Möros' return until the end. Nevertheless Möros is sticking to the promise made:

“And if it is too late, and if I cannot seem
a savior welcome
to him, death shall unite me to him.
Let the bloody tyrant not boast,
That the friend broke his friend's duty,
He slaughtered the victims two
And believe in love and loyalty. "

Contrary to expectations, he manages to face his execution just in time for his friend's. The tyrant is so touched by such loyalty to friends that he pardons Möros and asks to join the two friends.

Dubbing

Franz Schubert set Die Bürgschaft 1815 to music as a song ( German directory 246) with a duration of a good 16 minutes. In 1816 he began to work the material into an opera in three acts (D 435), which, however, remained unfinished. For an unknown reason, the manuscript breaks off in the third act after only two pieces of music have been worked out.

Wilhelm Busch: New reading of the guarantee (1863)

Texts suggested by Schiller's guarantee

Like many of Schiller's poems, the guarantee was often satirized and parodied, among other things. a. 1826 by Carl Theodor Müller (called "Saumüller", 1793–1875), 1863 by Wilhelm Busch ( new reading of the guarantee ) or 1924 by the Saxon dialect poet Lene Voigt (" De Bärchschaft "). Bertolt Brecht's mocking sonnet "O noble time, o human behavior" (1940) was given the title song about Schiller's poem "Die Bürgschaft" in the setting of Hanns Eisler (Opus 54, No. 2) . The German lesson that Uwe Johnson in his debut work Ingrid Babendererde. The school leaving examination 1953 describes it, is decisively influenced by the presentation of Brecht's poem by the student Klaus and the reply to this interpretation of Schiller's guarantee by the title character Ingrid. In 1940, Dazai Osamu published a short story 走 れ メ ロ ス Hashire Merosu ( Run, Möros! English: Run, Melos! ) Based on Schiller's ballad, which became a subject matter in Japanese schools and was used in 1981 and 1992 to make anime films of the same title.

Literature / web links

Wikisource: The Guarantee  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 7th place among the most famous German poems , as determined on the basis of 200 poetry collections in 2004 by Hans Braam. ( The most famous German poems ), H. Braam (Ed.), Alfred Kröner Verlag Stuttgart (2004), ISBN 3-520-84001-4 .
  2. ^ Hyginus, Fabulae 257 (Qui inter se amicitia iunctissimi fuerunt) .
  3. ↑ Note from the translator: “The older interpreters have rebuked the author, who forgot that he was speaking of Dionysius, not of Phalaris. The more recent note that the proper name Phalaris stands for "the tyrant", [...] "; see Phalaris , tyrant of Akragas about 570 to 555 BC. Chr.
  4. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Valentin Schmidt: Ballads and romances by the German poets Bürger, Stollberg and Schiller. Explained and traced back to their sources by Ms. Wilh. Val. Schmidt. Nauck's Buchhandlung, Berlin 1827, p. 228 ( Google Book ).
  5. ↑ Achim Aurnhammer : Lyrische Schiller-Parodien , in: Schiller. Work interpretations, ed. v. Günter Sasse, Heidelberg 2005, pp. 243–263, Dieter Hildebrandt (ed.): Hole in earth, bronze rin: Schiller parodies . Sanssouci Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8363-0163-3 , p.
     96 .
  6. ↑ C. Th. Müller: The guarantee
  7. ^ Wilhelm Busch, New Reading of the Guarantee zeno.org
  8. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EZsik-75g
  9. ↑ Friedrich Schiller Project: "Brechtfestival Augsburg" (2015) - archive ( Memento from December 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on February 16, 2018)
  10. ↑ Cf. Nicola Westphal: The friendship in times of tyranny. Considerations for a school lesson in Ingrid Babendererde . Johnson Yearbook Volume 10/2003, pp. 95-108 pdf