Fear. The conversation of the dancers

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal 1910 on a photograph by Nicola Perscheid .

Fear. The conversation of the dancers (also called Furcht. Ein Dialog ) is the title of a dialogue by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal , published in the Neue Rundschau in 1907 . The first book was published in 1911 in Grete Wiesenthal's Scenes by Hugo von Hofmannsthal .

Two hetaerae talk about dance and what it means for their lives. Different evaluations and self-images collide in a way that goes beyond the personal and touches on social issues. While Laidion dreams of a completely forgotten dance as the highest expression of fearlessness and creativity, Hymnis is satisfied with its classic , contemporary form and is unable to understand the dreams of her conversation partner.

In the dialogue, the atmosphere of which goes back to Lukian's talks with the hetairians , Hofmannsthal also used motifs from Kleist's essay On Marionette Theater .

content

A hetaera dances for a symposium; Interior of a red-figure drinking bowl by the Brygos painter , around 480 BC Chr.

A sailor and suitor has just told Laidion about a distant island with strange dance rituals when Hymnis enters her room. Laidion asks the seaman to stay and continue with his portrayal, but unwillingly he leaves the two of them and returns to his ship.

Hymnis tells her about the appearance of two dancers. They would have moved nicely; her pantomimes , however, were invented by poets who would not tell people anything new and who would throw sand in the eyes. In her description, some classic motifs from Greek portrayals come to light, such as the transformation of a nymph into a tree or the petrification at the sight of Medusa . For Laidion, still completely absorbed in the story of the sailor, the world of dance is stale and worthless. She tells how she danced for many men and felt harassed by them and the noise. She wishes to go far away to escape her world: “... Everything hacks into my face like greedy bird's beaks and I would rather die than lie with them and drink and listen to their screams. I wish I were as far away as a bird can fly. "

The hymn, firmly rooted in this world, cannot understand Laidion's enthusiasm for the distant country: “What do you get from the foreign countries? You don't want to go there. What do you do among the colored barbarians? ”Ladion doubts that Hymnis is happy when dancing, since she cannot forget herself and get rid of her fear. Hymn contradicts. She is happy about her dance and the enthusiastic reactions of the audience who throw her wreaths. When she's dancing, don't be afraid. For Laidion, however, Hymnis' wishes are an expression of fear . While they try unsuccessfully to escape from themselves with their dance, those distant, happy islanders lose their fear and have no shame when they dance "in the open air under the sacred trees". In this longed-for world with its tall trees inhabited by gods, whose blue-black shade is like something living that can be touched like a fruit, people perform a wild fertility dance once a year and in the end, blessed by the gods, give themselves the Youths.

As a young girl, full of fear and guilt, she often longed for herself. "[...] what would it be [...] that makes us dance if not fear? It holds up the threads that are fastened in the middle of our bodies and tears us this way and that and makes our limbs fly. ” Hope , too, is a mask of this special form of fear that a happy person does not have. Hope leaves you "lying hollow and leaching your soul out of your body."

Once again she paints the life of the dancing girls as a counter-image and lets herself fall into an ecstatic vision in which she herself begins to dance slowly at first, then more and more wildly, and in doing so she is absorbed in the dreamed-of community of the others and all “under one's eyes at the same time of the gods "dance, while the shadows loosen from the trees and sink into the crowd of dancers. In the end she slides back on her bed and her eyes are filled with an unbearable tension of inner happiness. Arrived in reality, protected by hymn with a red blanket, she complains of the ardent pain of knowing about this island but not having it, an island where people are happy without the sting of hope.

Origin and background

Hetaeric talks

Young courtesan and a young man making love on a Attic - red-figure oinochoe of the Shuvalov Painter and S-potter to 430 v. Chr., Berlin Collection of Antiquities

Hofmannsthal wrote the dialogue in the summer of 1907. During this time, which was accompanied by reflections on the conditions of artistic creation, the letters of the returnee and the first notes of the unfinished Andreas novel were written . Hofmannsthal characterized it as a phase of an intense creative state, an "almost excruciating pleasure both to write and to note down future things - one of those sudden, but very beautiful times that come every few years."

In a letter to Harry Graf Kessler , he described this fictional conversation as “the little Greek play for the hetaerae.” It appears in a prominent place in many publication plans, and in 1909 he considered “the creative ... as an essay in the first place of the prose writings III to put, next to the dialogue fear . "

Hofmannsthal was guided by the talks with the satirist Lukian ; However, the ancient model is neither formally nor content-wise and can only be recognized by two elements: the entrance scene, in which the sailor is in a room with the two dancers, and the flirting manner with the hymn about money and jewelry, the Status and the jealousies of the suitor speaks. This superficial chat functions as a means of contrast in order to make Laidion's profound, even culturally critical position even more prominent.

In Hymnis' naive questions, Hofmannsthal parodies the attitude of the Wilhelminian citizen: Hymnis asks whether people hop on one foot and cover themselves with the rags of their ears. Laidion, on the other hand, answers as if from the depths of poetry: “They are golden in color and their mouth is as strong as a predator's mouth. Your hips are strong and slim at the same time. "

Dance and the aesthetics of creativity

For Hofmannsthal, the dance is an expression of an intensely heightened attitude towards life, faunish and burlesque, as in the second act of Rosenkavalier , in which the uncouth ox on Lerchenau begins to dance to the sound of the waltz, in Arabella as a sign of still carefree youth, finally in Elektra as ecstasy and madness. In the chamber opera Ariadne auf Naxos , Hofmannsthal lets the god appear in the form of Bacchus , who since Nietzsche has been the epitome of time-lost, ecstatic, lively preservation of existence.

Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn
Nijinsky as the wind god Vayou in Marius Petipa's ballet Der Talisman , around 1910

As a Dionysian intoxicating state and overcoming gravity, it is part of Hofmannsthal's world of thought, who had also immersed himself in Zarathustra . In the dance song of the second part, Zarathustra asks and encourages the girls who hesitate to continue dancing because of him. How should he, who is not a “spoilsport with an evil eye”, be hostile to “divine dancing”? So he raises himself to a “dance and mockery song” on the “spirit of heaviness”.

Hofmannsthal defined the aesthetics of creativity as a “demonic force” and “magical invincibility”, driving energies in which the female art of movement and body control played a central role. In addition to an essay on the legendary Eleonora Duse, he also wanted to include an essay on the dancer Ruth St. Denis in the anthology , whose dance he understood as the perfect representation of an impersonal mythical ritual .

For a long time Hofmannsthal dealt with questions of the art of acting, dance and pantomime, which was reflected in numerous articles. So he wrote the short essay Eleonora Duse. A Viennese theater week after the actress made a guest appearance in Vienna from February 20 to 27, 1892 and Hofmannsthal had seen her in the roles of fedora and lady of the camellias and later wrote other texts about her, as well as about the “The incomparable dancers” Ruth St Denis , with whom he was on friendly terms, or the dancer Nijinsky , whom he described as “the greatest genius of facial expressions that is known on today's stage”.

Hofmannsthal designed a psychoanalytic model, as it were , a figure with which the burden of the occidental educational tradition is thrown off in order to allow the forgotten original knowledge to rise up as what is actually creative. In the self-forgotten dance as a view of the foreign, the completely different can be opened up, a world that lies beyond the sphere of education and transcends it.

interpretation

For Gabriele Brandstetter , two pairs of myths related to each other form the background of the conversation and are connected by the principle of the distancing gaze, which hits the body from the outside and impresses on it the characteristics of civilization, self-control and the threat of punishment. This view becomes evident in four myths that echo in the dialogue: In Narcissus and Medusa, Argus and the Fall of Man , which, figuratively, was portrayed suggestively in Kleist's multi-layered essay on puppet theater, the theme of balance lost through fearful reflection .

In the fictional conversation , Hymnis embodies the principle of classical art with her dance, her speech and her self-image as a hetaera, while Laidion sees this character as self-alienation and wants to free herself from the constraints of the cultural order through her imagination. Hymnis remains in an affirmative position towards its culture and values, while Laidion develops in a process of critical self-knowledge and introspection, distances itself from everything and overcomes cultural barriers in a visionary dream of the other, “barbaric” dance.

Sexuality is a determining driving force both in the classical form represented by Hymnis and in the unleashed dance presented by Laidion. While the pantomimic dance of the heterosexuals is erotic and was conceived with the dull gaze of the male audience in mind, the dance that Laidion fantasizes about and into which she finally lets herself fall shows the sexual body as part of a supra-individual fertility or initiation ritual . No stylized, refined, seductive dance, but a “primitive”, unspoilt expression of undisguised sexuality. For Gabriele Brandstetter, dance appears as a vision of pure presence, a state of the body that is identical to itself, even if only for the fulfilled moment that later drives the pain of knowledge all the more deeply. In the mystical vision, the phantasmatic and ecstatic body experience , the dancer overcomes the inhibiting boundary between dream and reality and transforms the foreign into her own.

Text output

  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Collected works in ten individual volumes. Volume 7, Stories, Fictional Conversations, and Letters. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 359622165X

Secondary literature

  • Gabriele Brandstetter: The Dream of Another Dance , Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Fear”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Paths of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, pp. 41–61, ISBN 978 -3-534-19032-4

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Furcht, Ein Dialog , Collected Works in ten individual volumes, Stories, Invented Conversations and Letters Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 574
  2. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Furcht, Ein Dialog , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 7, Stories, Invented Conversations and Letters Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 576
  3. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Furcht, Ein Dialog , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 7, Stories, Invented Conversations and Letters Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 579
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Gabriele Brandstetter , The Dream of Another Dance , Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Fear”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Paths of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, p. 41
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Gabriele Brandstetter, Der Traum vom Another Tanz , Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Furcht”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Paths of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, p. 42
  6. ↑ a b c Gabriele Brandstetter, The Dream of Another Dance , Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Fear”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Ways of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, p. 45
  7. ↑ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Furcht, Ein Dialog , Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 7, Stories, Invented Conversations and Letters, Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 575
  8. ↑ Peter Christoph Kern, On the world of thoughts of the late Hofmannsthal, Hofmannsthal's position in the history of ideas, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1969, p. 107
  9. ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part II, Das Tanzlied, Critical Study Edition, Vol. 4, Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, dtv, Munich 1988, p. 139
  10. ↑ Gabriele Brandstetter, The Dream of Another Dance , Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Furcht”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Paths of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, p. 43
  11. ↑ Quoted from: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Collected Works in Ten Individual Volumes, Volume 8, Speeches and Essays, Bibliography, Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 666
  12. ↑ Gabriele Brandstetter, The Dream of Another Dance, Hofmannsthal's Aesthetics of Creativity in Dialogue “Fear”, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, New Paths of Research, Ed. Elsbeth Dangel-Pelloquin, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2007, pp. 57-58