Eichendorff's poetry

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Joseph von Eichendorff 1841

Eichendorff's poetry is one of the most widely read texts in romantic German poetry. It has a small supply of motifs and, with its mixture of recurring lyrical formulas and symbolic elements of magical power, is characterized by an elusive and yet specifically German tone. In terms of content, she has a conservative element, the melancholy desire to preserve and to recall from memory what lies in distant childhood and lost homeland . The eternally sung rushing forests, the beautiful trees that rhyme with dreams , the mountains and valleys, fields and meadows, rivers and streams, the beautiful landscapes over which the starry sky arches - this world shows itself in a manageable treasure trove of images which is enriched by original metaphorical expressions and ciphers , such as the “shimmer of flowers” ​​and the daring image of the sky kissing the earth on the moonlit night .

In Joseph von Eichendorff's work there are also poems in which he synesthetically mixes certain areas of the senses with one another, for example in the two journeymen : "Sirens [...] pulled / him in the wooing waves / colorful sounding throat." With the repetition of lyrical-magical formulas his poetry anticipates symbolism .

History of ideas background

His lyrical work is an expression of (subjective) idealism and progressive universal poetry in the sense of Novalis , in that it combines knowledge and belief , religion and philosophy and makes the connection between the self and the infinite tangible. The soul spread “its wings”, “as if it were flying home”, as it is called on the moonlit night . With his will to close the gap between sublime modern poetry and popular poetry and to poetize all of life, Eichendorff turns against the Enlightenment . He criticizes Immanuel Kant , who had a bad influence on German poetry and turned religion into abstract morality and "virtue-stoicism".

Subjects such as the distant, enchanted castles in the heights, the beautiful gardens , wide valleys and again and again "rustling forests " seem to contradict the world of the emerging industrial age . While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , who was extremely critical of Romanticism, turned to the natural sciences and opened up to the new technical developments (they were discussed in the second part of Faust with the “good little man” who “behaved” in the vial ) , Eichendorff closed himself and looked dreamily back to the "good old days". His attitude towards life was not fed from the new world, which Goethe affirmed, but from a past reality.

Helmut Koopmann believes he can see another background in the recurring formulas: Eichendorff tried to portray the threatened present as timeless in order to revive the old times and to re-establish the sunken world. One reason for this may have been his lost childhood and experiences of strangeness, which prompted him to secure time against decay with his poetry. The world changed while time stood still in his poetry. As out of date he was alienated from the present, as he described it in his poem Reversal and spoke of the outcast, fleeting and inept guest of the world. For him, the essence of poetry, as described in the history of poetic literature , is the lyrical representation of the eternal, which only the poet can reveal with the right word, a magic word that awakens the world from its dream state. Lyrical language frees the “sleeping song” that is hidden in the twilight state, as indicated in the dowsing rod (“a song sleeps in all things”). The divining rod becomes a metaphor for poetry par excellence. The poet who knows how to lead it has the power to awaken the eternally mysterious.

For Hartwig Schultz , Eichendorff indirectly addressed the romantic philosophy of history with his Mondnacht . The song, sleeping in all things, was heard a long time ago, but has fallen silent since the Reformation and Enlightenment. Now Schelling and Novalis, "Schlegel and Tieck, have started their day's work", which will allow access to the origins again.

memory

Much of his poetry, the images of which already appeared historically endangered and “questionable” after revolutionary upheavals, is essentially poetry of memories. Homesickness and memory are the musical elements of his formula language, which accompany the motives of painful separation and happy rediscovery. Often the magic song sounds from the past, which is evoked in the poem in order to remember love and the familiar surroundings in a pleasant feeling of security. The attempt to aesthetically regain what was lost in reality is just as obvious as the perceived separation of man from nature . The family goods lost in reality are part of the biographical background from which this language comes.

The gaze goes back to childhood , touches the lost homeland and landscape , the earlier sociability that was lost in time. In that the remembering looking sharpens the awareness of the past and pushes back the present, Eichendorff cannot avoid certain valuations. It is not a question of overcoming the past, but of singing about it. It is mostly the better, the life already lived is more intense in the poetic visualization than the present existence. In this way, the poems capture the reflection of what has been lost forever, which becomes all the more powerful the deeper it is sunk into the sea of ​​time.

Development and Influences

Eichendorff monument in Ratibor

Eichendorff's youth poetry is based on Gottfried August Bürger's ballad tone . Even later he was a valued occasional poet who wrote verses for literary and sociable societies or song tables. A number of poems come from his time at the Matthias Gymnasium in Breslau. As a student in Heidelberg, he wrote verses that were published in the Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst in 1808 or - after revision - included in his collection of poems published in 1837. The artistic poem When Awakening is due to enthusiasm for Madame Hahmann . In a note, the young Eichendorff pointed out the special mood that caused him to write the lines to the ten-year-old lady, wife of a Ratibor justitiar, in 1807. There are words "that suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, open a flower land in my heart ..."

Otto von Loeben

The influence of Otto von Loebens , who had gathered a circle of romantics around him, was important for Eichendorff because he was able to exchange ideas with him intensively and was encouraged by him. Loeben supported connections with other poets and in 1808 presented Ludwig Tieck some verses of Eichendorff, which were to be brought out in an almanac.

Another Eichendorff source was the poetry that Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim put together under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn during this time . They were edited art songs that were believed to be real folk songs. Eichendorff took up her tone of voice. The ballads, romances and connected him with sources that were of divine origin for him and seemed removed from fashionable developments.

Eichendorff's actual role model was Goethe , which may be surprising in view of the differences. While the idol was constantly changing and developing stylistically, Eichendorff's poetry appears limited. It is often objected that Eichendorff perfected the style he found early on, but did not develop it further and overcome it. If one looks at the recurring images and themes, which are sometimes presented in folk simplicity, the accusation that they did not develop as a poet seems understandable at first sight.

The objection is put into perspective when the other level of his poetry - like the poetry as a whole - is brought into play: the memory, after all, the recurring formulas refer to mnemosyne , which was also often sung about , the desire to call the old into consciousness, to be saved from the flow of oblivion, the all-leveling stream of arbitrariness of postmodernism . The pictures also pervade the narrative work, in which there are numerous poems. The first, independent volume of poetry from 1837 brought together independent works such as those that were woven into the epic work of the stories and novels - such as the good-for-nothing or Hunch and Present . If one examines these verses in certain contexts of meaning, different shades of meaning can be demonstrated in them. In addition, the recurring formulas cannot be viewed in isolation from Eichendorff's political-religious background; they can be interpreted as the lyrical expression of a believer who, with his second novel, was looking for the meaning of a poetic and religious life and who was critical of the freedom of the press . The liberals' demands for freedom would contradict the longed-for romantic freedom, which could only be found in the golden age to be discovered.

Central motifs and their processing

A few central motifs of his poetry can be named, including the night and the forest , longing and eros, home , strangers , loneliness and farewell. These recurring elements, however, are not clearly defined and open up to different, sometimes contradicting poetic interpretations, which gives the lyric its tension and removes it from triviality. The poetically perceived contradictions of the present can thus become sensual in different ways.

night

Two men contemplating the moon, painting by Caspar David Friedrich

The night is for him no longer - as still in the early Romantics Novalis , which he estimated - the dream world that for the very life and a special, in-depth life is ( Hymns to the Night ), but the time melancholy knowledge of the loss, that makes you lonely, but also allows for moments of deeper feelings of love, as in Secret Love , a work in which the night is "beautiful" and "secret". An ambivalent interpretation can thus also be shown in this central motif of Romanticism.

In what is probably Eichendorff's most famous poem, Mondnacht , the hour of reconciliation unfolds and recalls the romantic unity of all beings. It is a fulfilling moment of balancing heaven and earth; the boundaries between this world and the hereafter are overcome without creating a (false) mystical unity, as the word "as" and the conjunctives suggest: As "had" the sky kissed the earth quietly, as "flew" the soul home. So awareness remains conflict as present as the desire of the poet to lift the opposites imploringly. A deeper look at the moonlit night with the sky kissing the earth and the soul bird that flies home also shows a mythological background with pagan tradition. While the image of the heavens can be found in old creation myths , the “blossom shimmer” reveals the annual belief in the resurrection of spring and the hope of overcoming death.

Another interpretation of the night as a medium of horror and the uncanny is shown in the poem Twilight with all the contradictions and fears of the disturbed consciousness, the mood images and the pathological fear of losing the loved one, even if it comes to the end of the work a strangely lively, religiously based invitation to look confidently into the future.

lonliness

The constant review not only sharpens the mind for what has been abandoned long ago, but also turns his verses into loneliness poetry. It is not several people who remember, but a lonely self that has fallen out of a better time like a young bird from its nest. So the memories do not come during the day, but at night in melancholy loneliness.

German forest

Forest during the twilight, painting by Julius von Klever

The German forest appears - beyond its simple symbolic function - as a speaking landscape and wide projection surface. It is a place of memory, transfiguration and the mystical search for unity, in whose dark depths and "forest loneliness" erotic temptations can also arise. As a lyrical element, like the rustling trees, it appears again and again as the numinous “completely different” in the almost frozen regularity of magical formulas .

Eichendorff also ascribes different meanings to this motif. The forest can initially be viewed as an idealized, unspoilt counter-world to the city , the model of civilization, a free space in which people want to free themselves from the constraints of society. On the other hand, it is the origin of the mythical, in which pan and forest spirits are up to mischief, will- o'-the-wisps and other seductive beings. With its shadows and darkness, the uncanny and unknown that lurks in it and gives birth to fear, it transforms itself into the area of ​​horror and the embarrassingly repressed erotic urges. In his romance Forest Talk, for example, the seductive sorceress Lorelei plays a special role, which Clemens Brentano (and later Heinrich Heine ) introduces in his ballad Lore Lay .

Reception at Adorno's

Theodor W. Adorno (1964)

In Eichendorff, Theodor W. Adorno , the most important exponent of critical theory and the Frankfurt School , chose another poet alongside Stefan George and Rudolf Borchardt who is located in conservatism .

For him, Eichendorff was “not a poet from home, but rather homesickness in the sense of Novalis, whom he knew he was close to.” In his essay On Eichendorff's memory , he points to the affirmative tone of voice that has escaped the dark and speaks of a “ Decision to be cheerful ”, which manifests itself with a strange paradoxical violence at the end of the work. His self-renunciation separates him from poets of objective intuition and "sensual dense experience" such as Goethe and Eduard Mörike .

In Adorno's view, Eichendorff's adherence to the pre-bourgeois and traditional enabled a critical look at bourgeois conditions. When Eichendorff distanced himself from liberalism, his poetry acquired its utopian dimension for him . In order to prevent the poet from being taken over by “cultural conservatives” and Catholics, dialectical reading against the grain is required . First, however, one has to admit that "the tone of the affirmative, its glorification of existence par excellence" is not defended in order to withdraw other levels of his poetry from the idyllic reading. Adorno points to the attempt to use Eichendorff as a “key witness of positive religiosity” and in a “country-team spirit, a kind of tribal poetics of Nadler's style ”. Such efforts resulted in “resettling him, as it were,” in the patriotic sense, which would be incompatible with his “restorative (n) universalism”.

It is the "opposite of stubborn apology" to save him from friends and opponents. However, there is an element of his poetry that "was handed over to the men's choir ... not immune to its fate" and "brought it about many times". The “tone of the affirmative, the glorification of existence”, which led to certain reading books, cannot be denied either. For Adorno, however, some of his verses sound "like quotations the first time, memorized from God's reading book."

If one concentrates on the function of language, conservatism turns into modernity. The denial of the sovereign, especially about one's own soul, is progressive. His poetry can be carried confidently "by the flow of language and without fear of sinking into it."

In this way, language becomes second nature, which does not deal with the things of the world in a regulative or instrumental way , but rather wants to fill the "reified world" with life and animate it and in this way shows the way out of the dialectic of the Enlightenment .

Capture

That Eichendorff's verses resist the pompous educational attitude is evident from the fact that, despite numerous settings, they have not entered the German treasury. As Adorno pointed out, his poetry defied the tendency of certain circles of interpretation to gloss over the fractures of reality and to glorify the past.

However, it was inevitable that numerous poems were ideologically appropriated and misused for didactic purposes because of their frequent homeland reference during the National Socialist era , a fate that Eichendorff shares with other poets such as Detlev von Liliencron and Theodor Storm .

The beauty of the German landscapes he sung about contributed to this, as did the theme of loyalty , which he took up in a catchy and simple way in the song of the broken ring in a cool ground . These verses met the National Socialist ideal of education . They were detached from their biographical-existential background and instrumentalized in order to promote certain character traits within the blood-and-soil ideology . In order to deprive the work of its individual character, in which the devastating effects of the breach of loyalty on the destroyed, deathly longing ego play a role, it was placed in a propagandistic context in which only the reading desired by the National Socialists seemed possible. To this end, they were combined with banal, glorifying texts by Heinrich Anacker , in which loyalty referred to Adolf Hitler .

Settings

Robert Schumann, drawing by Adolph Menzel

While the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin - despite some outstanding works by Johannes Brahms , in the 20th century also by Carl Orff , Benjamin Britten , Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm - is basically difficult to "deepen" musically because of its high religious and philosophical demands , yes, it already appears as dark linguistic music ("abstractly flowing" as in Hegel), the poems of Eichendorff with their apparent naivety and popular accessibility act like templates or invitations that the composer only needs to follow somehow to create his own "magic song" to discover.

Many of his poems have been set to music in very different scoring and instrumentation and have thus been spread. Numerous (often put on cheerful) settings of poems such as the Frohen Wandersmann ("Whom God wants to show real favor ..."), farewell ("O valleys far, o heights") by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy or the song ("In a cool reason" ) increased Eichendorff's popularity as early as the 19th century and led to the verses being incorporated into German songs as folk songs.

If you include all vowel genres, you get over 5000 settings from the last two thirds of the 19th century alone. Among them are the songs by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the cycle by Robert Schumann and the six sacred songs for mixed choir as well as single songs (such as the secret love, which is impressive with its Wagnerian harmonies ) by Hugo Wolf . That Eichendorff was able to stimulate a composer again in the 20th century is shown by the last of the four last songs by Richard Strauss , the swan song for the late Romanticism . When his gaze fell on the poem Im Abendrot (“We are through hardship and joy / Gone hand in hand”) in 1946 , he suddenly felt addressed and reminded of his love for his wife. This setting, along with the three other songs based on Hermann Hesse, is one of the most important works of the “outdated” music of the Romantic period , which after the Second World War seemed “impossible” .

Illustrations

literature

  • Theodor W. Adorno : In memory of Eichendorff. In: Collected writings edited by Rolf Tiedemann . Volume 11: Notes on Literature. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-29311-7 .
  • Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literature Knowledge , III. Interpretations, Gedichte, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-015221-6 , pp. 116-143
  • Edith Kempf, The lyrical work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff, in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, pp. 67–70
  • Sven Kramer : Eichendorff, poetry and society. In: Adorno Handbook. Life - work - effect. Ed., Richard Klein,: Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02254-7 , pp. 203-204.
  • Gert Sautermeister, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, introduction. Ed. Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 978-3-15-017528-6 , pp. 7-15
  • Daniela Schirmer, Using the Example of Eichendorff: On the Didactics of an Author of Romanticism in the Third Reich, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004
  • Günther Schiwy , Eichendorff, The Poet in His Time, Eighth Chapter, Heidelberg Romanticism, Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-54963-2 , pp. 209–249

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 68
  2. ^ Herbert A. and Elisabeth Frenzel , Dates of German Poetry, Volume 1, From the Beginnings to Young Germany, dtv, Munich 1982, p. 300
  3. ↑ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 118
  4. ↑ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 119
  5. ^ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 120
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 120
  7. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 68
  8. ^ Helmut Koopmann, Ewige Fremde, eternal return, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Edited by Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 48
  9. ↑ Quoted from Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff, Literaturwissen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, p. 117
  10. ↑ Günther Schiwy, Eichendorff, The Poet in His Time, Eighth Chapter, Heidelberg Romanticism, Beck, Munich 2007, p. 23
  11. ↑ Günther Schiwy, Eichendorff, The Poet in His Time, Eighth Chapter, Heidelberg Romanticism, Beck, Munich 2007, p. 236
  12. ↑ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 117
  13. ↑ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Interpretationen, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 118
  14. ↑ Helmut Bernsmeier, Joseph von Eichendorff , Literaturwissen, Autor und Werk, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, p. 36
  15. ^ Helmut Koopmann, Ewige Fremde, eternal return, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Edited by Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 49
  16. ^ Gert Sautermeister, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, introduction. Edited by Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 8
  17. ↑ Eckart Klessemann, Irdischer Spiegel, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 302
  18. ↑ Sven Kramer, Poetry and Society . In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 203
  19. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, To the memory of Eichendorff, in: Collected writings Volume 11, p. 73
  20. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, To the memory of Eichendorff, in: Collected writings Volume 11, p. 72
  21. ↑ Sven Kramer, Poetry and Society . In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 203
  22. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno, On Eichendorff's Memory, Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11. P. 70.
  23. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno, On Eichendorff's Memory, Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11. P. 72.
  24. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno, On Eichendorff's Memory, Notes on Literature, Collected Writings, Volume 11. P. 78.
  25. ↑ Sven Kramer, Poetry and Society . In: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.): Adorno manual. Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 204
  26. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 68
  27. ↑ On this: Daniela Schirmer, On the example of Eichendorff: On the didactics of an author of Romanticism in the Third Reich, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 123 ff.
  28. ↑ Daniela Schirmer, Using the example of Eichendorff: On the didactics of an author of the Romantic era in the Third Reich, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004 pp. 166–167.
  29. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, On the Metakritik der Epnistheorie, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume 5. S. 354
  30. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 70