Explain to me love

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Tell me, Liebe is a poem by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann that was first published in 1956. It can beattributed to love poetry after 1945 and articulates the pain about "the incompatibility of the spiritual character with the animal and vegetative character of love."

Speaking situation

The lyrical ego is an essential element of the speech situation (verses 21, 30, 31, 36). It is unclear whether it is a woman or a man.

The other person who is addressed as you cannot be determined with absolute certainty:

  • In the imperatives (verses 10, 24, 30 and 36), as can be seen from the apostrophe love , there can be an “ allegorical personification of love”, ie the feeling of love .
  • Likewise, the pronoun can also refer to "a woman who [the lyric I] calls love ". In the first stanza, however , the lyrical you bears the features of a man: it lifts its hat in greeting (verse 1).
  • Elsewhere (verses 8 and 9) it seems plausible, based on the content, that the lyrical I speaks to itself with the pronoun you , so that the I and you can “think together”. It could also be a "desperate self-talk".

Christa Wolf summarized this “grammar of multiple simultaneous references”, which “cannot be thought logically”, as follows: “You are me, I am him, it cannot be explained.”

Structure and style

Text layer

The poem consists of 38 verses . These are grouped into nine stanzas of different lengths . The three single-line stanzas II, V and VII consist of exclamations, with the title of the poem being repeated in II and V with an exclamation mark at the end.

There is no continuous meter . A masculine end rhyme can be found in verses 21 and 23 ( ... I also felt , ... distant strawberry bush ), a likewise masculine inner rhyme in verse 5 ( ... in the country ... overhand ). The line style largely determines the poem. The enjambement that connects verses 36 and 37 is a stylistic device that reproduces the salamander's walk through fire.

Sentence level

While the natural beings appear as subjects (for example, "the dove puts the collar up", verse 12), this is not the case with the human thought being in the first verses: For example, in verse 1 the lyrical you does not lift the hat, but the hat himself. In verse 7/8 (“you raise your face blind from flakes / you laugh and cry and perish on yourself”) the person appears for the first time as a subject: with his confusion “he is completely identical”.

Word level

Verses 1 to 4 begin anaphorically with the personal pronoun dein . The abstract term love is addressed directly in this text, i.e. personified ( explain to me, love!, Verse 10).

Subject

The first stanza implies "communication and impossibility of communication". While manifestations of the extinct love of a person are formulated here (“your heart has something else to do”, verse 3), love in the animal kingdom is idealized in the third and fourth stanzas, “in images that support one another, drive one another higher and surpass one another descriptive of nature ”. In the sixth stanza, too, nature appears as peaceful. In verse 29, which closes this passage, even inanimate nature is depicted as soulful (“One stone knows how to soften another!”). At the end of the third stanza, the lyrical self wishes it could participate in this world ("if only I had its meaning ...", verse 21). From verse 30 onwards, it contrasts this feeling of unity with its reality, a world of lack in which there are only "thoughts", no beings and no feelings.

The lyrical ego asks love several times for an explanation of phenomena that it cannot interpret itself (verses 10, 24 and 30), but withdraws this request shortly before the end of the poem (verse 36). Immediately afterwards it shows a possibility how the painful situation can be overcome: It highlights the insensitivity of the salamander , who can survive in the fire without pain (verses 36-38). In doing so, the lyrical ego indicates that immunity to feelings can prevent suffering, and it shows that such beings also exist in nature. However, there is no indication that the lyrical ego wants to go this way; rather, the poem ends at this point. This could be taken as an indication that the lyrical ego "does not want to pay this as a price for inviolability: to be insensitive." "The incompatibility of the spiritual character with the animal and vegetative character of love is painfully felt."

The role of the thinker

In verses 31 through 34 the existence of the lyric self is described as that of a thinking person who excludes love (verses 32/33). Christa Wolf thought the following interpretation of the verses was possible: The lyrical I should only deal with the thoughts of the beloved; this is the other “spirit” who counts on the lyric self (verse 35). Because of this encounter, which takes place exclusively in thought, the lyrical I can “know nothing love and do nothing love” (verse 33), so it misses the beloved or even oneself as a whole person because of the reduction to the level of thought. “The brotherhood, naturalness, innocence that he thought away from himself, they are now missing.” The poem expresses intellectual isolation.

Language criticism

The "old, worn, used language" no longer does justice to the description of love. In the area of ​​tension between feeling and reflection, it is about “the poet's ability to express herself in a natural love language.” Love is “experienced as a different language”, as a language that “goes beyond the mere communicative value”. The new language is a prerequisite for a new world.

Position of the poem in the work

The poem was first published in July 1956 in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and appeared in the same year in the poet's second collection of poems, Invocation of the Great Bear . Here it is the sixth poem in the second of the three parts, in which there is also advertising .

reception

Christa Wolf dealt with the poem in the course of the preparatory work for her story Kassandra and published her reflections as part of her fourth Frankfurt Poetics Lecture in 1982. Ingeborg Bachmann was the first teacher of these poetics lectures in 1959/1960. The poem portrays unequivocal thinking, insensitive to feelings, as a possibility of existence, but not as the path of the lyrical ego; to that extent it is "an example of the most precise indeterminacy, the clearest ambiguity."

Text output

  • First published in Die Zeit , Hamburg, Volume 11, No. 29, July 19, 1956, p. 7.
  • The Invocation of the Great Bear , 1956 and 1968

Secondary literature

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ a b Edgar Neis, structure and subject matter of classical and modern poetry . Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag Paderborn, 1986, ISBN 3-506-76101-3 , p. 98.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Christa Wolf, from: Christa Wolf: Kassandra. Four lectures. A story, Luchterhand Literaturverlag Darmstadt and Neuwied, 3rd edition, May 1983, ISBN 3-472-61456-0 , SS 128.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Manfred Jurgensen: Ingeborg Bachmann: The new language. Bern, 1981, p. 35, quoted from: Edgar Neis, Structure and Themes of Classical and Modern Poetry . Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag Paderborn, 1986, ISBN 3-506-76101-3 , p. 97.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Christa Wolf, from: Christa Wolf: Kassandra. Four lectures. A story, Luchterhand Literaturverlag Darmstadt and Neuwied, 3rd edition, May 1983, ISBN 3-472-61456-0 , SS 129.
  5. ↑ In Ingeborg Bachmann's estate, a copy of the fourth edition of Invocation of the Great Bear from 1962 was found in which a line was drawn between verses 35 and 36 (in the source: the first and second lines of the last verse ) and in the margin by Ingeborg Bachmann it was noted by hand: separate . This entry is signed "Ingeborg Bachmann 5-11-64". (Information taken from: Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, Clemens Münster: Ingeborg Bachmann. Works. Volume 1: Poems, radio plays, libretti, translations. Piper Verlag Munich and Zurich, 2nd edition, 1982, ISBN 3-492-02774- 1 , p. 650.) The explanations here follow the order from 1956.
  6. ↑ a b c Jörg Hienger: Explain to me, love. In: Jörg Hienger, Rudolf Knauf (Hrsg.): German poems from Andreas Gryphius to Ingeborg Bachmann. An anthology with interpretations. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Göttingen, 1969, p. 208.
  7. ↑ a b c Edgar Neis, structure and subject matter of classical and modern poetry . Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag Paderborn, 1986, ISBN 3-506-76101-3 , p. 97.
  8. ↑ Ingeborg Bachmann: Tell me, love! In: zeit.de . July 19, 1956, accessed December 11, 2016 .