Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran circa 1918.

Edith Irene Södergran (born April 4, 1892 in Saint Petersburg , † June 24, 1923 in Raivola / Karelia ) was a Finnish-Swedish poet and writer .

Edith Södergran is considered the founder of Finnish-Swedish modernism . It was mainly influenced by French symbolism , German expressionism and Russian futurism . During her lifetime she was hardly known as a writer, partly because of her early death, but her influence on later poets was great. Today she is seen as the main character in Swedish-language modernist poetry . Followers of this direction were Elmer Diktonius (1896–1961), Gunnar Björling (1887–1960) and Rabbe Enckell (1903–1974).

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childhood

Edith Södergran was born into a middle-class household in Saint Petersburg. She was the child of a Swedish father and a Finnish-Swedish mother, Matts and Helena Södergran. She was the only child to reach adulthood because both Helena and Edith had brothers who died at a young age. This arguably strengthened the position of women in the family and was possibly one of the reasons for Edith's later feminism . When she was just a few months old, the family moved to the town of Raivola , where their maternal grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, bought a villa for them. Shortly afterwards, the father got a job as a manager in a sawmill. Three years later the company went bankrupt and the family went into debt. Only the legacy of Helena's father brought relief, part of which was lost in Matts' unsuccessful business.

Helena Södergran was often nervous, excited and restless. Edith had a very special relationship with her mother and spent a lot of time with her, because the father had broken off contact with his relatives - including her cousins ​​of the same age. Edith lived in Raivola until 1902, when she was ten years old. After that she lived in a school in St. Petersburg. Edith never had many friends, which worried the mother. So she took on a girl of the same age from Raivola named Singa to replace Edith's sister. However, she only stayed with Edith during the holidays. One day she ran away from the Södergrans and was run over by the train in an accident, apparently on the way home. Edith later dedicated a poem to her. In 1904 Matts Södergran fell ill with tuberculosis and in May 1906 he was taken to the Nummela Sanatorium in Nyland . Discharged by doctors with no hope of a cure, he died in October 1907.

schooldays

From 1902 to 1909 Edith Södergran attended the German girls' school St. Petri. The school years were marked by unrest and social tension. Among the poems in Vaxdukshäftet (The Oilcloth Notebook ), which describes Edith's school years, there are also poems with political motifs. At school there were classmates of all possible nationalities, including Germans, Russians, Finns, German-Balts and Swedes. The focus of the lessons was on modern languages: she learned both German, French, English and Russian, but she did not receive lessons in her native Swedish. German was spoken the most, both at school and with her and her friends. She was a smart, quick-witted student and never spent much time studying. One of her classmates described her as the most gifted student in the class. She was most interested in French lessons , which was probably due to the teacher Henri Cottier, to whom a large part of the love poems in the Vaxdukshäftet are addressed.

During her school days Edith wrote over 200 poems, most of them in German, some also in Russian or French. In 1908 she decided to make Swedish the main language of her writing. She stopped writing poetry in German. This was not a natural decision, because she had no close contact with Swedish literature and Finnish-Swedish poetry was also in a depression. She received an important impetus for her decision from her relative, the Finnish-Swedish linguist Hugo Bergroth . A few years later she published the poem Hoppet in a members' magazine of the Swedish People's Party in Helsinki and through this made contacts with some Finnish-Swedish writers. The transition to Swedish also marked the turn to poetry.

illness

In 1908 Edith fell ill with pneumonia . The following year, tuberculosis was diagnosed. A month after this finding she was taken to the Nummela Sanatorium, where her father was also treated before he died. At that time, the chances of recovery from tuberculosis were slim, 70–80 percent died within ten years. Edith did not feel comfortable in Nummela, as the place was too closely connected with the death of her father. She felt like a prisoner there and dreamed away to exotic countries, which earned her the reputation of being insane. In the first half of the year, her health improved and she was even able to go home, but then in autumn her condition worsened and she was admitted to Nummela again. In the next two years things got so bad that the family sought help abroad.

At the beginning of October 1911 Edith and her mother traveled to Arosa, Switzerland . Three doctors who examined her recommended three different treatments. A few months later in the Davos -Dorf sanatorium , with the doctor Ludwig von Muralt, she felt better. He suggested performing a left-sided therapeutic pneumothorax . However, the punctured lung became unusable. After May 1912, no more tuberculosis bacteria could be detected. In 1914 she returned to Finland. She would die of a relapse nine years later.

Literary revolt

The literary debut Dikter , which appeared in the fall of 1916, did not attract much attention, although some of the critics were amazed at it. Because even here Södergran works with associative free verse with a stronger eye for details than for large perspectives. On Endreime they abandoned largely used and instead, many anaphora . The expression of a feminine, young and modern consciousness, such as B. in Dagen svalnar… and Vierge modern were something completely new in Swedish-language poetry.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Edith and her mother's assets were worthless because they had invested in Russian securities. At the same time, the Karelian Isthmus became a war zone from the spring of 1918. People were shot dead in Petrograd without trial, and Södergran knew that some of her schoolmates had fled the city. She read Friedrich Nietzsche and through him found the courage to face a sometimes adverse and humiliating everyday life.

Her poetic reorientation with Septemberlyran met with little public understanding. She herself spoke up in a notorious letter to the editor in Dagens Press , a Helsinki newspaper , trying to explain her intentions. Södergran declared that her poetry was not intended for the general public, but would only be accessible to a select few. It only provoked the first debate about the incomprehensible modernist poetry in Swedish, a debate that took place in connection with e.g. B. Birger Sjöberg , Peter Weiss and Erik Lindegren should repeat. The newspaper debate was rather rough - none of the debaters had any idea of ​​the conditions under which the poet lived: hunger, lung problems, threatened with displacement or death in the civil war. But she gained a friend and vital ally, the young critic Hagar Olsson (1893–1978). Several poems in the rose altar are dedicated to her, “the sister” . Otherwise, this third collection of Södergran's poems is still strongly influenced by Nietzsche's thoughts, but it also has a religious component. The lyrical self sees itself as a prophet.

In the collection of poems Framtidens skugga - the first suggestion for the title was Köttets mysterier (Mysteries of the Flesh) - Södergran's warning vision and almost cosmic glow culminate in the poems that speak of a new world after the present, of war and catastrophes. Their expression points back to Walt Whitman and Sappho , but also ahead of Jim Morrison , when the poet disguises himself as a seer, military leader or as the mediator chosen by Eros:

Jag känner dig, Eros:

you are icke man och kvinna,

you are the strength

som sitter nerhukad i templet

för att resa sig, vildare än ett skran,

changes in activity

slunga ut förkunnelsens träffande ord över världen,

ur det allsmäktiga templets dörr.

- Eros hemlighet

(I know you, Eros: / you are not a man, not a woman, / you are the strength / who sits bowed down in the temple / to rise, wilder than a roar, / hotter than a stone thrown / throw out the right word the proclamation over the world, / from the almighty door of the temple. Eros' secret )

Despite the visionary tone, Edith Södergran was an atheist during this exalted period and, according to friends and neighbors, made a difference between her own person and that of the shimmering queens and prophets, in whose role she put herself in her poetry. The transformation she wrote about should come from a new humanity, led by “the strongest others” (Nietzsche's Übermenschen, see poems Botgörarna (The Penitents) and Först vill jag bestiga Chimborazzo (First I want to climb Chimborazzo)).

As she gradually gave room to a more positive trust in nature and God in her poems, it meant a certain relief from the ecstatic hopes that she had raised over the gray everyday life, an expectation that could not be maintained, but it was also a beginning farewell to Nietzsche's visions of the future.

From summer 1920 to late summer 1922 she gave up poetry. During the autumn and winter she wrote her last poems, which she published in their magazine Ultra for the sake of her friends Hagar Olsson and Elmer Diktonius . She had given up expectations of a leading role for herself, but not her daring imagery.

Edith Södergran was buried in the village cemetery in Raivola. The mother lived there until 1939 and died during the evacuation during the winter war . Due to the peace in Moscow in 1940, Raivola remained Soviet territory and is still part of Russia today. Her grave can no longer be found, but in 1960 a statue was erected in Raivola.

Works

Edith Södergran wrote seven collections of poetry:

• Dicters (poems) 1916.
• Septemberlyran (The September Lyra) 1918.
• Brokiga iakttagelser (Colorful Observations) 1919.
• Rose Altar (The Rose Altar) 1919.
• Framtidens skugga (Shadows of the Future) 1920.
• Tankar om naturen (Thoughts on Nature) 1920.
• Landet som icke är (The land that is not) 1925. (published posthumously)

These collections of poems are freely accessible in electronic form in the Runeberg project , see link below.

In German translation

• Edith Södergran: Hostile Stars. Collected poems . Munich: Limes, 1975. ISBN 3809020834 .
• Edith Södergran: Claw trail. Poems and letters . Leipzig: Reclam, 1990. ISBN 3379005827 .
• Edith Södergran, Sieglinde Mierau, Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke: Sharp as diamonds . Berlin: Gemini, 2003. ISBN 3935978154 .
• Edith Södergran, Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke: The key to all secrets . Berlin: Gemini, 2003. ISBN 3935978081 .
• Jag själv är elden / I myself am fire (bilingual selection, translated and edited by Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke , Münster 2014). ISBN 978-3-930754-90-8

literature

• Jutta Rosenkranz: “I am nothing but an immoderate will.” Edith Södergran (1892–1923). In: Rosenkranz, Jutta: Line by line my paradise. Eminent women writers, 18 portraits. Munich 2014. ISBN 978-3-492-30515-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Edith Södergran in the catalog of the German National Library
• E. Södergran in the Runeberg project