Friedrich Schmidt von Werneuchen

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Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmidt (Schmidt von Werneuchen), around 1810, Gleimhaus Halberstadt

Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmidt (born March 23, 1764 in Fahrland ; † April 26, 1838 in Werneuchen ), known as Schmidt von Werneuchen , was a Protestant clergyman in Prussia and the author of naive rural poems, which earned him recognition from a locally limited readership, in addition to benevolent attention, criticism and ridicule from well-known writers of his time.

Life dates

Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmidt was born on March 25, 1764 in the village of Fahrland - today a district of Potsdam . His father was a Protestant pastor, as was his grandfather and great-grandfather. The father died when Friedrich was nine years old, the mother moved with her five children to nearby Döberitz in Havelland . At the age of ten, Schmidt came to the Schindler orphanage in Berlin; In the strictly managed private institution, the pupils wore gray uniform clothing, and their daily program began at five o'clock in the morning. From 1781 to 1783 Schmidt attended the Berlin Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster on a scholarship , studied theology in Halle an der Saale from 1783 to 1786 and then got a - badly paid - job as a field preacher , i.e. a military chaplain , at the Berlin Invalidenhaus , a nursing and care center Supply facility for war-disabled Prussian soldiers .

In 1790 he married his fiancée Henriette Brendel, the main character in many of his poems. In 1795 he was appointed to a pastor's position in Werneuchen , a small town in the Barnim district , around 30 km east of Berlin; Schmidt found this change to be a relief. During the time of his engagement and the first few years of his marriage, the best of his poetic works were created. Henriette died in 1809, at the age of only 39. In 1811 the widower married 35-year-old Marie Friederike Vogel, who survived him. Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmidt lived in Werneuchen for 43 years and died there at the age of 74. His grave is in the immediate vicinity of the church, on the cast iron cross it says: "FWA Schmidt, Preacher zu Werneuchen-Freudenberg, bearer of the Red Eagle Order, 4th class [...]"

The poems

Daniel Chodowiecky: Illustration to poems by Schmidt von Werneuchen

Schmidt's verses are songs of praise for the beauties of country life and they reveal his discomfort with life in the cities. They are called “Brandenburg poems”, but they actually only deal with small parts of the Mark Brandenburg , namely with the area of ​​his childhood, the Havelland, and with the Barnim, where he worked as a pastor. The objects of his descriptions are simple, everyday objects and observations. In the poem To the Village of Fahrland , Schmidt remembers his place of birth:

Oh, I still know you as if I left you yesterday
I know the hanging parsonage with its weathered thatched roof,
Know the beams of the gable, where the rain has long since left the lime
Washed loose, nailed the door with big nails,
Know the little garden in front with the pointed stake, and the arbor
Nailed diagonally with slats, and all around with the seeds of the thick ones
Scattered around the neighbour's elm tree, which the chickens greedily pecked.
[...]

Such a restriction to the simple and normal was viewed by many as unpoetic. In a review of the Jenaer “ Allgemeine Literaturzeitung ”, the anonymous author rated it as an unsuitable approach for true poetry, “when you find groups of sand as pleasant as fertile floodplains, just as much like to hear toads shouting than nightingales sing, and prefer to look at a puddle of ducks than the Rhine Falls” .

Individual poems by Schmidt appeared in magazines and almanacs from 1787 , including in the "New Berlin Museum of the Almanac ", of which he was editor together with Ernst Christoph Bindemann . A first anthology, the Calendar of the Muses and Graces for the year 1796 , summarized 92 of these early works and was published by Haude and Spener in Berlin. The lavishly furnished, small-format volume contained engravings by Daniel Chodowiecki and Johann Gottfried Schadow as well as sheet music by the Prussian court composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt . In a preliminary report , Schmidt described his poetic program:

“I would never have dared to have these few sheets, the contents of which have already been mentioned in some periodicals, printed, if I did not believe they were delivering something that cheap" [ie: unprejudiced] "people called new to be deserved. The reader understands me correctly. Diction , verse, choice of images, etc. in these poems do not make the slightest claim to novelty, but most of the objects that I have tried to work on poetically do; and these are: simple, artless natural scenes. Unencrypted, wild rural, common nature is my goddess [...] far from wanting to compete with any of our poets, I believe [...] I can truthfully claim that even worthy poets seldom copy nature has been. [...] FWA Schmidt. Field preacher of the Royal. Invalidenhauses near Berlin and appointed preacher to Werneuchen. "

Reactions

Goethe

Schmidt's poems were noticeably widespread only for a short period around 1800, mainly in the Berlin area. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Theodor Fontane played a key role in ensuring that his name and his work survived . Goethe's long and often printed satirical poem Muses und Graces in der Mark refers in the title to the Calendar of Muses and Graces from 1796 and contains the typical stanza:

Oh how happy I am, my darling / That you are so natural;
Our girls, our boys / will play on the dung in future!
And on our promenades / only shows the inclination strong,
Dear girl, let's wade through this curd.

The parody appeared in Friedrich Schiller's Musenalmanach for the year 1797 in September 1796. In it, Schiller and Goethe critically dealt with the literary products of their time in verse based on the model of the Xenien (guest gifts) by the Roman poet Martial . Schmidt von Werneuchen was affected several times. Like other contemporary reviewers, Goethe not only criticized the quality of Schmidt's rhymes, but also the lack of great thoughts and passions. But he did not overlook its advantages. A note in maxims and reflections from his estate reads: “Schmidt von Werneuchen is the true character of naturalness. Everyone made fun of him, and rightly so; and yet one could not have made fun of him if he did not have real merit as a poet, which we have to honor in him. "

Fountain

Theodor Fontane described the cozy, poetic clergyman in his first novel Before the Storm (1878) and in the walks through the Mark Brandenburg (Vol. 4, Spreeland. 1882). Before the storm , chapter 15 describes an evening party in a rectory in the Brandenburg region; those present exchange controversial views on Schmidt and his verses close to the ground, as well as the comparatively sublime, romantic poetry of Ludwig Tieck . In the hikes , a few short biographical notes are followed by small messages that Fontane had received on site or in writing, also from one of Schmidt's sons: About the pastor's joy in gardening; the lively exchange with friends and colleagues in the area and other visitors who offered him spiritual nourishment and stimulation; the aversion to the "affected people from the big city, who showed up at him out of curiosity or out of sentimentality, in order to rave about the 'great advantages of country life' afterwards", and about the cheerful serenity with which he responded to attacks responded against its seals.

Fontane mentioned Schmidt's above-average productivity as a poet. He said that the poet had done too much of a good thing. He divided his entire production into three main groups: sonnets , ballads and descriptions of nature of all kinds. He judged the first two categories with devastating judgment: Schmidt had "no idea of ​​either one or the other". As evidence, he cited the first stanza of the haunted ballad Graf Königsmark and his administrator and noted that the ballad has even "much worse" stanzas:

Count Königsmark had somewhere / In Saxony on the Saale
A good where he gladly fled / The courtly cabal .
The economy there takes care of a loyal / understanding and pious Meier .
[...]

In the descriptions of nature, on the other hand, Fontane discovered not only trivial and involuntarily comical verses, but also many artistically sensitive works. As an example of the outstanding portrayal of an autumn landscape mood, he chose the stanza:

The autumn wind rushed through fields and bush / The rain washed the leaves of the blackthorn /
The swallows fled from there,
The storks moved far across the sea / Then the land became desolate and empty /
And the sad days began.

Fontane ended the chapter with the following sentences: “All his poetry, small and large, successful and unsuccessful, agrees on one point that it breathes love for home everywhere and wants to awaken this love. And therefore cheers to old Schmidt von Werneuchen! "

More reactions

Memorial plaque on the rectory in Werneuchen.

In the German dictionary (DWB) of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm , begun in 1838, Schmidt is quoted several times. Examples of his poems can be found in Theodor Storm's house book from German poets, and a text fragment that goes back to Schmidt has been included by Georg Büchmann as a phrase in his collection of Winged Words : "Be happy like a stint ". The politically influential Berlin composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter visited Schmidt in 1821 on his way through Werneuchen and reported to Goethe about his unchanged enthusiasm for nature: "This goes well with his round, stately figure with a kind of cabbage head, the eyes and mouth seem to be incised" .

The writer and philosopher August Wilhelm Schlegel ridiculed Schmidt and his poems. Ludwig Tieck thought that Schmidt could only be called a poet if he stopped “finding everything so jumbled together”. He had to admit that he didn't quite understand Schmidt's unusual “enumerations”: “But we can call the one poet who enumerates all objects one after the other, describes pleasant and unpleasant things, in eternal contradiction with our feelings, which almost every human being if his heart is warmed up in any way, overlooks or at least quickly disappears from his imagination, who it unexpectedly comes before his eyes? ”On the other hand, the poet Christoph Martin Wieland saw in Schmidt a special natural talent, which should also be judged by special standards: "If blackbirds and warblers sing sweetly in their way, why should I be annoyed that they are not nightingales".

Works

Schmidt as sole author:

  • Count Wolf von Hohen-Krähen. A ballad from the feud times . Meyer, Berlin 1789.
  • Calendar of the Muses and Graces for 1796 . Haude and Spener 1795.
  • Poems . (First volume) Haude and Spener 1797.
  • Poems . (Second volume) Oehmigke jun. 1798
  • Romantic rural poems . Oehmigke jun., Berlin 1798.
  • Latest poems. Dedicated to the mourning of loved ones . Berlin and Leipzig 1815. (3/6)

Schmidt as co-author:

  • New Berlin muse almanac . Berlin 1793–1797.
  • Almanac of romantic rural paintings . Berlin 1798.
  • Almanac for admirers of nature, friendship and love . Berlin 1801.
  • Almanac of the Muses and Graces . Berlin 1802.

literature

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Schmidt von Werneuchen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günter de Bruyn: As poetry good. Fates from Berlin's art epoch 1786 to 1807. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-17488-1 , p. 249.
  2. ↑ A. Hanke: Schmidt von Werneuchen  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Der Sprengel. No. 35 (2007), p. 8.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.pfarrsprengel-fahrland.de  
  3. ↑ Günter de Bruyn (2009), pp. 250-253.
  4. ^ Schmidt von Werneuchen. In: Theodor Fontane: Before the storm. Chapter fifteen.
  5. ↑ Werneuchen. Schmidt von Werneuchen. In: Theodor Fontane: Walks through the Mark Brandenburg. P. 4.
  6. ↑ Werneuchen. Schmidt von Werneuchen. In: Theodor Fontane: Walks through the Mark Brandenburg. P. 6.
  7. ↑ Werneuchen. Schmidt von Werneuchen. In: Theodor Fontane: Walks through the Mark Brandenburg. Pp. 7-8.
  8. ↑ Werneuchen. Schmidt von Werneuchen. In: Theodor Fontane: Walks through the Mark Brandenburg. P. 9.
  9. ↑ Günter de Bruyn (2009), p. 248.
  10. ↑ Günter de Bruyn (2009), p. 249.
  11. ↑ Ludwig Tieck, Critical Writings. The latest muse almanacs and diaries 1796–1798. Leipzig 1848, p. 84
  12. ↑ Günter de Bruyn (2009), p. 250.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt von Werneuchen, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt, Friedrich Wilhelm August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pastor and poet
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1764
PLACE OF BIRTH Fahrland
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1838
Place of death Werneuchen