The child murderer
The child murderer is a poem by Friedrich Schiller from the year 1782. It is about a beautiful young woman who kills her illegitimate child out of longing.
Emergence
The poem was printed in Schiller's anthology for the year 1782 , previously one of his poems, Die Entzückung von Laura , was listed by Gotthold Friedrich Stäudlin in the Swabian Muses Almanac for the year 1782 . Schiller did not want to leave Stäudlin the role of representative of Swabian poetry without a fight and therefore published his own anthology.
content
First verse:
Listen - the bells weep together,
and the pointer has finished its course,
Well, so be it! - Well, in God's name!
Grave companions head to the place of execution.
Oh world, take the last farewell kisses, Oh world, accept
these tears.
Your poisons - oh they smack sweet! -
We are quitt you heart poisoner.
The action begins shortly before Luise, the protagonist, is executed. She hears the bells ring and remembers her crime. She was beautiful and young and let herself be seduced by a man named Joseph. She became pregnant, but he left her. The sight of the child only reminds her of the lost father and her guilt. Your son is a bastard and both are outcast from society. In her desperation, Luise kills her child, which is why she herself is sentenced to death. Finally, she advises all other women to learn from their fate and not be blinded by their own beauty.
Form and language
The poem is divided into 15 stanzas of 8 lines each, trochaic and with cross rhyme throughout. The evenness creates a contrast to the inner restlessness. The whole text is an inner monologue of the lyrical self (Luise), which creates tension with its flashback, while the reader is left in the dark.
There are numerous paradoxes ("Your poisons - o they smack sweet!", Line 7) and Oxymora ("Deadly - lovely", line 61; "Love and - betrayal", line 64).
The language follows the style of Sturm und Drang . "The voice of the heart is crucial for making a sensible decision." ( Johann Gottfried Herder ) The focus is on feelings, reason is pushed into the background. This becomes visible in the text through the desperation of the mother, who only sees her lost love in her child and kills it against reason in order to get rid of the pain.
interpretation
The child itself is not a burden for the young Luise, but the faithlessness of the seducer. The child has its features and suggests to the mother a closeness to the father, although there is no longer any. The "pain of flames" (line 104), which should go out in her, is not the murder of the child, but her lost love. Schiller tries to put the guilt of the perpetrator on the seducer, to show another side. The last line: “Pale executioner do not tremble!” Can be interpreted as an appeal to the reader. Luise is sure of her guilt, but the real killer is love, a paradox.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Georg-Michael Schulz In: Norbert Oellers (Hrsg.): Poems by Friedrich Schiller (interpretations). Reclam, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-15-009473-9 , pp. 15-26.