The oak trees (Hölderlin)

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(1) First print in Die Horen , year 1797, tenth item

The oak trees is a hexameter poem by Friedrich Hölderlin . Designed in 1796, it appeared in Friedrich Schiller's magazine Die Horen in 1797 . (1) If the German Germanist Joachim Wohlleben (1936–2004 ) calls it a modest lyricism, an inconspicuous poem, it made an epoch in Hölderlin's poetry. After Momme Mommsen , it is the first significant poem that carries Holderlin's own tone.

Emergence

In 1793, Hölderlin's studies at the Tübingen Abbey ended . At the end of the year he became tutor in Waltershausen for Fritz von Kalb, the son of Charlotte von Kalb, who was friends with Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . He worked intensively on his novel Hyperion . At the beginning of September 1794 he sent the early version Fragment von Hyperion to Schiller, who published it in his journal Thalia in November . With his pupil in Jena , he met Schiller and Goethe personally for the first time in November 1794. In mid-January 1795 he separated from Kalb's house by mutual agreement. Back in Jena, he listened to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's lectures, often met Schiller and Goethe, and made friends with Isaak von Sinclair . But at the end of May or beginning of June he suddenly left Jena and returned to his mother's house in Nürtingen . The reasons for the "flight" are not entirely clear; Apart from the longing for home, the feeling that Schiller and Fichte was overwhelming, certainly contributed. The verses "An expelled wanderer / who fled from people and books" from the draft of the Heidelberg poem are seen as a reflection of this experience. In January 1796, Hölderlin took up his next tutoring position for Henry, the son of the Frankfurt merchant Jakob Friedrich Gontard-Borkenstein (1764–1843). A deep affection soon developed between Holderlin and Susette , Gontard's wife and Henry's mother. Susette became Hölderlin's Diotima , and in a letter of January 15, 1796 to his friend Christian Ludwig Neuffer , he was probably an image of "eternal beauty".

The spiritual background of the poem The Oak Tree is not the love for Diotima, but the work on Hyperion and the discussion with Goethe and even more Schiller. Schiller was already an admired and beloved role model in the Tübingen monastery, both in the thought of a liberated humanity, in the idea of ​​a cosmic harmony and in the form of the rhyming hymns. Hölderlin sought this ideal in the hymns Das Schicksaal from 1794 and An Herkules from 1796. The three traditional versions of the poem Diotima from 1796 to 1797 are also rhyming hymns with many stanzas.

The strength of the dependence on Schiller and the struggle with this dependency (Hölderlin writes "attachment") speaks from an attempted explanation by Hölderlin to Schiller for his removal from Jena:

“Nürtingen near Stutgard. d. Jul 23, 1795.

I knew well that I would not be able to move away from you without noticeably damaging myself. I experience it more vividly every day.

It is strange that one can find oneself very happy under the influence of a spirit, even if it does not act on one through oral communication, simply through its proximity, and that with every mile that is removed one has to do without it more. I would hardly have won over myself with all my motives for leaving, if this closeness had not so often worried me from the other side. I was always tempted to see you and only saw you to feel that I couldn’t be anything to you. I can see that with the pain which I so often carried with me, I necessarily atone for my proud demands; because I wanted to be so much to you, I had to tell myself that I was nothing to you. <...>

It is strange that I gave you this apology. But precisely because this attachment is in fact sacred to me, I seek it in my consciousness to separate it from everything that could degrade it through an apparent kinship, and why should I not express myself about it before you, how it appears in front of me because it belongs to you?

I am in eternal respect

your
Admirer
M. Hölderlin "

On June 20, 1797, Holderlin wrote to Schiller: "I depend on you insurmountably." To this letter he enclosed the first volume of his Hyperion , published in April, as well as manuscripts of the poems An den Aether , Der Wanderer and - probably - The oak trees .

  • (2) First draft page 1

  • (3) First draft page 2

  • (4) Second draft page 1

  • (5) Second draft, page 2

Lore

Three manuscripts are preserved in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart and are available as digital copies. The manuscript template for printing in the Horen (1), however, has been lost.

(6) Copy from the hearing on page 1
(7) Copy from the hearing on page 2
  • A first draft, in the Stuttgart bundle “Dejanira an Herkules - Cod.poet.et.phil.fol.63, I, 32”, comprises 12 verses on two sheets. The headline was initially "The Oaks". (2) The draft ends with “Each of you is one world”. (3)
  • An alternative to verses 14 to 17 is attempted in a second draft in the bundle "Homburger Quartheft - Homburg.B". (5)
  • Hölderlin copied the poem from the hearing again , probably at the end of 1799. This third manuscript version, in the bundle “Stuttgarter Foliobuch - Cod.poet.et.phil.fol.63, I, 6” immediately after Hölderlin's copy of the first version of his Elegy The Wanderer , bears the note “to be used as Proëmium” under the title . (6) Verses 14 to 17 are in brackets, and underneath there is a prose text, probably a draft of an alternative for the bracketed verses. (7)

Hölderlin is quoted here after the historical-critical Stuttgart edition of his works that Friedrich Beissner , Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann (* 1949) provided . The historical-critical Frankfurt edition published by Dietrich Sattler , the "reading edition" by Jochen Schmidt and (except for the condensed writing "re-maintained" verse 3) the "reading edition" by Michael Knaupp thus offer identical texts.

text

00000000000000000000The oak trees

0000 From the gardens I come to you, you sons of the mountain!
0000From the gardens, there nature lives patiently and at home,
0000caring and again caring for the hardworking people.
0000But you, you splendid ones! stands like a people of titans 5 In the tamer world and belongs only to you and to heaven, who nourished and educated you, and to the earth that gave birth to you. None of you has yet gone to men's school, and you push yourselves happily and freely, from the strong roots, up among each other and, like the eagle the prey, 10 with mighty arms the space, and against the clouds you are the sunny crown is bright and bright. Each of you is a world, like the stars of heaven. You live together, each a god, in free union. 'I just can endure slavery, I never envied 15 this forest and gladly snuggled me to the social life. Just no longer fettered my heart to the social life, That does not give up love, how I would like to live among you!
000
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interpretation

Hölderlin had written hexameters before, most recently in 1792 in the canton of Switzerland . The predominant lyrical form of his time in Tübingen, however, were the rhyming hymns based on Schiller's model. Last but not least, the work on Hyperion made it clear to him that he could not develop his poetic peculiarity in this way. His experience of language, sharpened by the Hyperion , "called for the rhyming verse based only on the effect of the meter, based on the models of antiquity". The oak trees marked the turning point. Shortly afterwards he wrote the hexameter poem An den Aether and the first elegy The Wanderer . In Hyperion's song of fate from the second volume of Hyperion , Hölderlin experimented with a free rhythm . Above all, he won the championship as a poet in Frankfurt . "With The Oak Trees , Hölderlin made a creative turn to the ancient forms of poetry."

With this new classicism, Holderlin remains close to Schiller and Goethe, but at the same time breaks away from them. Just as the departure from Jena's attempted emancipation from the revered, so the poem tries, not only through its form, but also through its content. It juxtaposes two forms of existence.

Two spheres of existence

One form is that from which the lyrical self comes, which leaves it, the tamer world (verse 5) of the "gardens", in the first draft of the villages (2) , where garden plants are tended by "hardworking people", where things are sociable Life (verse 15) prevails. The ego feels this existence as “bondage”.

The other form of existence is described much more emphatically, in a rushing cascade of verses. It is that into which the lyric self enters, the “forest” (verse 15) of the “sons of the mountain”. Hölderlin has corrected the title "The Oaks" in "The Oak Trees", (2) named individuals instead of the anonymous generic name. The oak was chosen because of its mythical importance among Greeks and Germans. In the hymn to the Genius of Youth "sought and rushes of the oak grove," and in free rhythmic poem by the end of 1803 or early 1804 from 1792 age sits the ego "under / Well Decorated oaks". The mythical connotations pave the way for the transformation of the oaks from mere tall plants to mythical beings, a "people of titans / In the tamer world". It is the form of existence of creative self-sufficiency that the lyrical ego with verse

0000None of you has yet gone to human school, <...>
0000Each of you is a world, like the stars of heaven.
0000You live together, each a God, in free union.

almost strikingly evoked. Holderlin wishes his poetic future "in free league" (verse 16).

Homage to Schiller

If the poem emphasizes emancipation and autonomy, it remains at the same time a homage to Schiller; for the main metaphor corresponds to that of Schiller's elegy published in 1795 in Die Horen , where the lyrical self leaves “the prison room” and rises into the solitude of the sublime mountains. Mommsen points out the similarity of a style figure. In emphatic repetition it says in The Oak Trees

0From the gardens I come to you, you sons of the mountain!
0From the gardens, nature lives patiently and domestically,

and in the elegy

0Behind me was the garden, the company
0I was familiar with, and behind me there was every trace of human hands.

Balance the spheres

Hölderlin made special efforts to address the last four verses. In the Horen version, they indicate that renouncing the "social life" is painful, while in the concrete biography renouncing being with Schiller was painful because "the heart <...> does not give up love". In an earlier version, namely the second version of the manuscript (5) , he decides without hesitation in favor of the oak tree:

0000You live together, each a god, in free covenant.
0000Social life is more closely united down in the valley,
0000Vester exists here and is more carefree and proud,
0000because that is how the eternal spirit wants it,

Finally, from the prose draft at the end of the copy of the Horen version (7) , there is a desire for a balance between the spheres of sociable togetherness and the free, autonomous individual:

"Oh, that I never do not grow old, that the joys that the thoughts among people, the signs of life do not become unworthy of me, that I am ashamed of them, because the heart needs everyone so that it can name the unspeakable."

The note “to be used as a proëmium” (6) perhaps indicates that Holderlin wanted to revise the poem in the direction of this compensation; perhaps also that he wanted to place it at the beginning of a collection of poems that he “who never <could> shake off humble submission to almanac editors” was not allowed to create.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joachim Wohlleben in the online directory of the university German studies. Retrieved July 1, 2014.
  2. ↑ Wohlleben 1987, pp. 129, 138 and 136.
  3. ↑ Mommsen 1984, p. 145.
  4. ↑ For example Beck and Raabe 1970, pp. 41–42.
  5. ↑ Stuttgarter Ausgabe Volume 6, 1, pp. 199-200 and 6, 2, pp. 779-780.
  6. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 6, 1, pp. 175–176. There is no form of address to Schiller in the entire letter.
  7. ↑ Stuttgarter Ausgabe Volume 6, 1, pp. 241–242 and 6, 2, pp. 838–841.
  8. ↑ Frankfurt edition, Volume 3, p. 51.
  9. ↑ Mommsen 1984, p. 145.
  10. ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 489.
  11. ↑ Wohlleben 1987, p. 134.
  12. ↑ Wohlleben 1987, p. 129.
  13. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 1, 1, p. 169.
  14. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 115.
  15. ^ The walk (later version of the elegy ) in the Gutenberg project . Retrieved July 2, 2015.
  16. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 1, 2, pp. 501–502.
  17. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 1, 2, p. 502.
  18. ↑ Wohlleben 1987, p. 139.