The paths and the encounters

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal
* 1874, † 1929

The ways and the encounters is a story by Hugo von Hofmannsthal , which appeared on May 19, 1907 in the Viennese weekly “ Die Zeit ” . At the beginning the author quotes from the Spicilège of the symbolist Marcel Schwob .

In search of an answer to the question “Who is Agur ?” The first-person narrator looks back on his earliest childhood.

content

Agur lives in the first-person narrator. But where? Probably “with the secrets” of his “darkest dreams, with the thoughts that” he “behind” his “own back” has ever thought. Regarding the appearance of the Agur, it is said: " I must think of him as Boaz , who had a beautiful white beard and a tanned face, who was dressed in fine linen and in whose cornfields the poor were not prevented from reading the ears." It is pretty clear that our walking, searching and meeting are related to our “ thirst for love ”. The mighty thing is the stranger's cry for the stranger. “The encounter promises more than the hug can hold. It seems ... to belong to a higher order of things, that according to which the stars move ”. Answer to the above question gives a dream. In this, Agur is the king who in his speech swears two secrets - that of embracing with that of flight. Agur camps with his people on the gigantic Asian highlands. The first-person narrator sees the old King Agur breaking free from the embrace of a young woman of dark pallor. The boy wears nothing but wide bangles. The tents are pulled down on Agur's orders. The beautiful woman asks the king to return to the camp with devotion. Vain efforts of the loving woman; the inevitable departure of Agur and his people even chase the clouds in their flight over the mountains.

reception

  • Le Rider admires "the musicality and fluidity" of the language, but calls the "strange forgetting" of the anonymous first-person narrator "secrecy" in line with Heinz Politzer . Hofmannsthal quotes the sayings of Agurs from the above-mentioned French source Spicilège. The sayings in the Old Testament are actually more easily accessible to the German-speaking reader:
"Three things are incomprehensible to me, four I cannot grasp:
the way of the eagle in the sky,
the serpent's way over the rock,
the way of the ship on the high seas,
the way of the man with the young woman. "
  • The source follows the first print. There are secondary ideas in square brackets, which Le Rider calls "digression" and also "free association". Among other things, there is talk of Kant . Hofmannsthal read the chapter “Eroticism and Aesthetics” in Otto Weininger's “ Gender and Character ” . Le Rider points out the dream analysis at the end of the text. In addition, the story is about secrets. One of them is that of Jewish identity.
  • In 1922 Willy Haas interpreted the story in connection with his research into Ahasuerus : "Agur is the open question". Even Ernst Simon examined the text. His analysis from 1967 is entitled "Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jewish legend ". Dieter-Olaf Schmalstieg's consideration “Eros and the flight of birds. Hugo von Hofmannsthal as hermeneut of Old Testament wisdom ”followed in 1969. Katrin Scheffer interpreted the story in 2007 with reference to the symbol“ bird motif ”.

literature

  • Gotthart Wunberg (Ed.): Hofmannsthal in the judgment of his critics . Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1972 (without ISBN, 612 pages)
  • The duty of remembering and creative forgetting: “The paths and the encounters”. In: Jacques Le Rider : Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Historicism and Modernism in Turn-of-the-Century Literature. From the French by Leopold Federmair (= neighborhoods. Human sciences studies 6). Böhlau Verlag Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-205-98501-X , pp. 159-179.
  • Katrin Scheffer: Floating, weaving pictures. Structure-forming motifs and gaze strategies in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's prose writings. Diss. Marburg 2007. Tectum Verlag Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8288-9424-2 .

First book edition

  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The ways and the encounters . Bremer Presse, Bremen at Christmas 1913. Cover design by Rudolf Alexander Schröder . Edition: 200 numbered copies.

Quoted text edition

  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The ways and the encounters (1907) . In: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, ed. by Bernd Schoeller in consultation with Rudolf Hirsch (= stories. Invented conversations and letters. Travel). S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1949 (1986 edition), ISBN 3-10-031547-2 , pp. 157-164.

Web links

Individual evidence

Source means the quoted text edition

  1. ↑ The short text was published in book form in 1913 in the Bremer Presse , Bremen (source, p. 668, last entry).
  2. ↑ Spicilège (French) from spicilegium (Latin): harvest of grain, selection (spica (Latin): ear).
  3. ↑ Source, p. 157, 4. Zvo and p. 669, 4. Zvo
  4. ↑ Source, p. 157, 6th Zvu
  5. ↑ Source, p. 162, 7. Zvo
  6. ↑ Le Rider, p. 162, 11. Zvo
  7. ↑ Politzer quoted in Le Rider, p. 159, 1. Zvu
  8. ↑ The Bible ( Prov 30:18  EU )
  9. ↑ Le Rider, p. 164, 8. Zvo
  10. ↑ Le Rider, p. 164, 21. Zvo
  11. ↑ Source, p. 160, 17th Zvu
  12. ↑ Le Rider, p. 165, 5th Zvu and 10th Zvu
  13. ↑ Le Rider, p. 173, footnote 40
  14. ↑ Willy Haas (1922) in Wunberg (Hrsg.), P. 299, 18. Zvu to 1. Zvu
  15. ↑ Simon quoted in Le Rider, p. 160, footnote 5
  16. ↑ Schmalstieg quoted in Le Rider, p. 160, footnote 5
  17. ↑ Scheffer, pp. 317–347: 6. culminating point: "The ways and the encounters"