The Morgenlandfahrt
The Morgenlandfahrt is a story by Hermann Hesse , first published in 1932 , and describes a journey into an intellectual Orient .
History of origin
Hermann Hesse began work on Die Morgenlandfahrt in the summer of 1930, shortly before he moved within Montagnola from Casa Camuzzi to the house that Hans Conrad Bodmer had built for him and shortly before he married his third wife, Ninon Dolbin . His old eye disease had worsened, and Hesse was close to going blind. After painful operations, he had to lie in a darkened room for weeks. He dedicated the work, completed in April 1931, to his patron Bodmer and his wife Elsy. In the same year it was preprinted in the Corona magazine published by Bodmer's son . In 1932 the first edition was published by S. Fischer Verlag . Alfred Kubin designed the dust jacket , the binding and the vignette on the title page .
content
The memory of the covenant
At the beginning of the story , the violin player H. H. reports on his youth. At that time he was a member of the “Bund vom Hohen Stuhl”, with which he embarked on his journey, “as had not been dared by people since the days of Huon and the mad Roland ”. At that time, shortly after the World War, there was an extraordinary readiness for the superreal, the country was “full of saviors, prophets and disciples”, “borders were broken and advances into the realm of a coming psychocracy” had been made. These forays into a “realm of the soul” included the federal migrations.
While the federal government as a whole strived for very high goals belonging to the zone of secrets, the participants also had their own private motives; these motives were one of the requirements for admission to the federal government. While some were looking for the treasure of the “ Tao ” or the snake “ Kundalini ”, it was H. H.'s own wish to see the “ Princess Fatme ” and possibly win her love. Blessed by the spokesman for the covenant as “anima pia”, admonished to faithfulness, heroism and brotherly love, with the federal ring on your finger, you were on your way. Admittedly, the trip was not a singular phenomenon, but part of an everlasting “train of believers and devotees to the East, the home of light”, just a “wave in the eternal stream of souls”.
On the way people celebrated devotions and flower festivals, roamed Swabia, Italy and the Orient , “stayed overnight in the tenth century ” or “stayed with patriarchs and fairies ”. Occasionally the Morgenlandfahrer also met figures such as the giant Agramant , the Pechschwitzer vom Blautopf , Parzival and Sancho Panza , but also the painters Paul Klee and Klingsor . In the vicinity of Urach they came across the " Hohenstaufen crown guards" who tried to instrumentalize the federal government for their goals, "namely the conquest of Sicily ". Occasionally, individual brothers also apostated, turned to the supposedly “real world” and forgot the goals of the covenant. The inconspicuous servant Leo played a special role in the union, who won the hearts of people and animals through his pleasant, modest manner.
A highlight of the company was the national celebration in Bremgarten , when " Othmar " played on the piano and "Pablo" on the reed flute in a lilac-flooded park populated by parrots and other talking animals , and numerous artists, painters and poets gathered together with their creatures . In doing so, H. H. notices "that the imaginary figures (...) appear much more lively, more beautiful, happier and, to a certain extent, more correct and real than the creators themselves". Leo explains this with the “law of service”, according to which those who want to live long must serve.
One day the servant Leo disappears in the gorge of Morbio Inferiore . The federal government then fell into a serious crisis, and the travelers lost faith and confidence. Leo's rucksack, which according to general opinion must have housed a lot of important things, such as the founding charter of the federal government, the so-called federal letter, is also particularly missed. At this point the narrator H. H. has reached the end of his report. He admits that he finds it difficult to adequately tell the story of the covenant. The “bundle of a thousand knotted threads” can hardly be untangled. "Where is a center of events, something in common, something that they relate to and what holds them together?"
The search for the covenant
Nevertheless, H. H. was not discouraged and started to write, if not the history of the Federation, at least that of the Morgenlandfahrt. First he seeks out his childhood friend, the newspaper editor Lukas. However, he meets this with friendly irony and tries to dismiss the company as an eccentric, now long-forgotten current of the post-war years that has nothing to do with real life. At least he shows understanding for H. H's difficulties in remembering the events of that time sufficiently. As a participant in the World War, he had had a similar experience when writing his war diary . Nevertheless, he wrote it because it was necessary for him and his existence. In addition, Lukas H. H. helps to find a certain "Andreas Leo, Seilergraben 69a" who may have a connection to the Leo from H. H's memories.
After some hesitation, H. H. went to the address mentioned and found out that Andreas Leo, who lived there, worked as a masseur, herbalist and dog trainer. For a long time, H. H. kept returning to Leo's address to meet him. One evening he gets lucky and clings to Leo's heels. It immediately becomes clear that it was indeed the servant Leo, who at that time had apparently left the union in the gorge of Morbio Inferiore. In a park he engages him in a conversation that is disappointing: Leo no longer wants to know his former fraternity, and on top of that, condemns him for having sold his violin without any financial difficulties. Even the wolfhound Necker, who is so familiar with Leo, growls deep in his throat whenever his gaze meets H.H. At home, H. H. wrote a letter to Leo in consternation, "twenty pages of complaint, repentance, pleading".
Finding the covenant again
Shortly afterwards Leo appears at H. H.'s home and explains that the Bund, the High Chair, is waiting for him; let him be sent to fetch him. On winding, H. Hs joyful impatience for a hard test “detours, encircling and zigzag walks” across the city, Leo H. H. leads to a quiet building in a sleepy suburban street; in it over endless corridors, stairs and corridors, past archives and studios into the Bundessaal, where the superiors have gathered to judge the "self-prosecutor H. H.".
Intimidated, he confesses the allegations of having been unfaithful to the Bund and wanting to write a history of the Bund on top of that. The entire federal archive is then made available to him for his work. There he came across not only his own fragment of the manuscript, which seemed increasingly insignificant to him, but also the long-missing federal letter and the catalog entries about Leo, about Princess Fatme, whom he admired, and about the painter Paul Klee. Very soon H. H. realizes that he “was not able to decipher or even understand a thousandth of these millions of writings, books, pictures and symbols in the archive”.
Ashamed, he realizes his foolish presumption to want to write the history of the covenant. He returns to the superiors' congregation and unconditionally submits to their judgment. This is proclaimed personally by the “chief of the superiors” - the “servant” Leo. Relentlessly, he reveals to H. H. his many misconduct, but admits that H. H.'s apostasy and aberration were a test. A test that drove him to the desperation that is part of every human maturation process. H. H. gets his lost federal ring back and becomes aware of "a thousand incomprehensible omissions".
In the end he is acquitted and accepted into the circle of superiors on condition that he dares to question the archives about himself. H. H. takes this on himself and not only finds out that it was he himself who had committed “desertion” in Morbio Inferiore, but also finds a strange double sculpture. It depicts Leo and himself, with Leo constantly growing and gaining weight at the expense of his poet.
interpretation
The theme of the story is, according to Hesse's own admission, "the isolation of the spiritual person in our time and the need to classify his personal life and actions into a supra-personal whole, an idea and a community, longing for service, search for community, liberation from the sterile lonely virtuosity of the artist. "
In reality, it is about Hesse's own loneliness, despair and spiritual journey into hell, which he went through after breaking away from his friend and master Gusto Gräser and which he tries to overcome through this public letter of remorse and self-accusation. In his story he confesses his secret beliefs - poetically veiled and cleverly camouflaged by misleading accessories. As he admits to a friend: "Up until the 'Morgenlandfahrt', I testified in most of my books almost more of my weaknesses and difficulties than of the faith that made my life possible and strengthened despite my weaknesses. ... To formulate I only tried it poetically in the 'Morgenlandfahrt' ". (From a letter to HM on November 19, 1935; AB 148–149, quoted from Martin Pfeifer: Hesse commentary on all works. Munich 1980, p. 205.)
This topic is processed in an artful, autobiographically founded style that takes up several motifs from world literature and skilfully interweaves them , which makes the Morgenlandfahrt into a very special gem in Hesse's extensive oeuvre .
Maturation process
A central motive is the search for the ideal, the striving for moral and spiritual maturity beyond the world of everyday life and the material security of existence, the development of the development and growth potentials inherent in man, individuation and incarnation. The focus is not only on one individual, the violin player H. H., rather the search is understood as a movement that includes all the chosen, yearning and enlightened people of mankind. Accordingly, the plot of the narrative takes place largely beyond space and time, rather Upper Swabia and Damascus , the Sea of Moon and Bremgarten Castle slide effortlessly into one another, real people from all ages meet literary figures, and yet the time after the First World War is with them their "railways, steamships and telegraphs" always present in the background.
The maturation process is, however, associated with considerable resistance, with melancholy and despair. "Despair is the result of every serious attempt to understand and justify human life, (...) to exist with virtue, with justice, with reason and one's own To meet demands. On this side of this despair the children live, on the other side the awakened ones. Defendant H. is no longer a child and has not yet fully awakened. "
At the end, among other things, H. H. has the insight into the "law of service" - formulated by the servant Leo in Bremgarten. Leo had explained that literary figures seem more alive than their creators, saying that if you want to live long, you have to serve. Whoever wants to rule does not live long, however. Ignorance of this law brings people not called to rule into nothing, for example in sanatoriums . It is the same with the mothers. If they had given birth to the children and given them their milk and their beauty and strength, then they themselves would be inconspicuous and nobody would ask about them anymore. This is summed up symbolically in the double figure of Leo and himself found by H. H. in the final scene of the story, in which the power flows steadily from the poet to his creature, leaving it withered and pale.
Orient trip
The whole thing is interwoven with the ancient literary motif of the trip to the Orient , the return to the roots, on which the protagonists usually experience purification . Starting with the old French knight episodes via Wieland and Novalis to Flaubert's report on Egypt , the departure to the East has a tradition of literary history. And so the Holy Land , Damascus and Africa , patriarchs and caliphs , Princess Fatme and the tomb of the Prophet keep appearing in Hesse's story .
Secret society
The third literary motif is that of the “ secret society ”. From time immemorial, elitist circles of all kinds have exercised considerable fascination, sometimes turning into rejection, and have accordingly experienced diverse literary processing, from the Arthurian epics of the Middle Ages to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain . In its rites , institutions and symbols in particular , the League of Orientals shows clear echoes of “secret societies” such as Freemasons , Illuminati and Rosicrucians . The “Assembly of the Superiors”, the federal letter, the extensive archives , the vows , oaths and statutes, the ring with the four stones are mentioned. The motif of the federal government appeared in Hesse's early Monte Verità stories. Then again in the Demian novel, which is about a union or order of the future and the marked. Years later, Hermann Hesse was to take up the topic again in his main work Das Glasperlenspiel with his "Order of Castalia", the forerunner of which is the Bund der Morgenlandfahrer.
Autobiographical
The various autobiographical references of the story stand in attractive contrast to the exoticism of the Orient, the search for meaning and the secret societies: behind the initials of the protagonist, those of the poet are of course not difficult to recognize; In addition, a large number of people appear from Hesse's real world. To be mentioned are Max and Tilli Wassmer as the lords of the castle of the Bremgarten festival . Then there are the painters Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet , who are friends with the author and who, by the way, went on their own journey to the East in 1914 with their historically significant trip to Tunis . Behind the astrologer Longus is Hesse's psychiatrist , the Jung student Dr. Josef Bernhard Lang. Finally, Hesse's third wife, Ninon Dolbin, the composers Hugo Wolf and Othmar Schoeck , the writer Hans Moser ("Hans Resom"), Hesse's friends Hans C. Bodmer and Georg Reinhardt and many others.
In addition, artists from all eras who have long since died and are valued by Hesse join the group as “brothers in the spirit”, along with the figures they created, such as ETAHoffmann and his “Archivarius Lindhorst” from the Golden Pot , but also Hesse's own creation, the painter Klingsor from the story Klingsor's last summer of 1919.
The central figure, however, is the servant and porter Leo, in whom Hesse created an imitation of his friend and role model Gusto Gräser . It was grasses who undertook a hike through Upper Swabia to Urach after the war. It was also grasses that inspired the ecstatic procession of the "new crowd" under the leadership of the wood turner journeyman Friedrich Muck-Lamberty through Northern Bavaria and Thuringia, who spoke at their campfires and whose poems were distributed on their leaflets. Twenty-five young men and women went singing and dancing through the country, celebrated in public places and in churches with flowers and chants, dragged tens of thousands with them into their “crusade of love”, which is also mocked as a “children's crusade” and with the goings-on of the so-called Anabaptists was compared. The storyteller Lisa Tetzner and her friend Kurt Kläber visited the crowd and were able to tell Hesse about them. Another intermediary was the Stuttgart lecturer Martin Lang, an acquaintance of Gusto Gräser, who appears in the story under his nickname "Lukas". The actual subject of the story is Hesse's apostasy from the “Bund”, the Monte Verità Bund, and from his friend and guru Gusto Gräser. The Morgenlandfahrt is one big confession about his betrayal of the friend from whom he had turned away in 1919 and whom he seeks to regain with this long letter of repentance.
Language and symbolism
The Morgenlandfahrt renounces the sublime style that characterizes Das Glasperlenspiel or Siddhartha . Rather, it is written in a fresh, poetically magical, sometimes almost youthfully naive language, a fairytale-like poetry that speaks to the reader directly. The story is full of symbols , metaphors and similes that are often incomprehensible to the reader without detailed knowledge of the biographical and historical background . Hesse himself wrote in a letter to Alice Leuthold: “The symbolism itself does not need to be 'clear' to the reader, he should not understand in the sense of 'explain', but rather let the images inside him and their meaning, what they contain in the allegory of life, swallow at the same time, the effect then sets in unconsciously. "
Book editions
- The Morgenlandfahrt. A story. Fischer, Berlin 1932.
- The Morgenlandfahrt. A story. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1951; 24. A. ibid. 2001, ISBN 3-518-01001-8 (= Library Suhrkamp , Volume 1).
- The Morgenlandfahrt. A story. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-37250-5 (= st 750).
literature
- Anni Carlsson : Poetry as a hieroglyph of the age: Hermann Hesse's "Morgenlandfahrt" . In: Thanks to Hermann Hesse . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1952, pp. 90-96.
- Bernhard Zeller : Hermann Hesse in personal reports and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1963; ibid. 1990, ISBN 3-499-50085-X , pp. 120ff.
- Martin Pfeifer: Hesse commentary on all works . Winkler Verlag, Munich 1980; ISBN 3-538-07034-2 , pp. 204-216.
- Joseph Mileck: Hermann Hesse. Poet, seeker, confessor . Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-570-01555-6 , pp. 213-238.
- Luise Rinser : Hermann Hesse and the Far Eastern philosophy . In: Friedrich Bran and Martin Pfeifer (eds.): Hermann Hesse and religion . Verlag Bernhard Gengenbach, Bad Liebenzell 1990, ISBN 3-921841-40-2 , pp. 17-31.
- Ralph Freedman: Hermann Hesse. Pilgrim of Crisis . Jonathan Cape, London 1978, ISBN 0-224-01675-X .
- George Wallis Field: Hermann Hesse. Commentary on all works . Akademischer Verlag, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-88099-023-9 , pp. 116-122.
- Mark Boulby: Hermann Hesse. His Mind and Art . Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1967, ISBN 0-8014-0046-5 , pp. 245-321.
Individual evidence
- ^ "The treatment altered Hesse's life as decisively as marriage and house" (Ralph Freedman, p. 336)