Heidelberg (Holderlin)
Heidelberg is an ode by Friedrich Hölderlin . It is one of his most famous poems and at the same time one of the most famous poems about the city of Heidelberg . Eduard Mörike , who visited the sick Hölderlin in the Tübingen Hölderlin Tower several times, called it "the most beautiful Hölderlinische poem" in 1847, Adolf Beck in 1947 called it "one of the purest and noblest structures of German poetry", the North American literary scholar Cyrus Hamlin (1936-2011) in 1970 “A perfect example of Hölderlin's mature odes”.
Origin and tradition
According to the unanimous opinion of researchers, the poem is based on at least two visits by Hölderlin to Heidelberg. The eighteen-year-old told his mother in Nürtingen about his first visit, on June 3, 1788, on his first trip beyond home, after returning to the Protestant monastery school in Maulbronn : “We had a dead straight road for three hours from Schwezingen to Heidelberg - and on both sides old, oak-like mulberry trees. We arrived in Heidelberg around noon. I liked the city extremely well. The location is as beautiful as you can ever imagine. Steep, wooded mountains rise up on both sides and on the back of the city, and on top of them stands the old, venerable castle. <...> The new bridge there is also strange. ”For the second time, Hölderlin almost certainly passed through Heidelberg seven years later, in June 1795, when he had fled the University of Jena for reasons that were not entirely clear - probably among other things because of the feeling of overwhelming superiority of Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte . The ode "fuses both memories". The sick old Holderlin said that he had been to Heidelberg twice; however, further visits that might have prompted the writing are not excluded.
- "Heidelberg" in the magazine "Aglaia"
The first ten stanzas draft was probably made in 1798. Its first eight stanzas are in a manuscript in the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg , the last two in a manuscript in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart. Another manuscript from the Württemberg State Library ("Homburg.H, 21-22") contains the eight-stanza version, based on the poem Empedocles and followed by the poems Die Götter and Der Nekar . These four poems were published in the magazine Aglaia in 1801 . Yearbook for women printed on 1801 . The relationship between the print and "Homburg.H, 21-22" is not certain. One hypothesis is that Hölderlin wrote the poems from the Aglaia print once again, perhaps for a hoped-for complete edition of his works. The versions in "Homburg.H, 21-22" and Aglaia are essentially the same. In the fourth and seventh stanzas, however, Hölderlin made changes in "Homburg.H, 21-22".
In this article, if not otherwise stated, Hölderlin is quoted from the historical-critical Stuttgart edition published by Friedrich Beissner , Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann (* 1949) . Heidelberg is identical to the Aglaia version there, including the punctuation, but with the exception of the presumed spelling "Brüke - gieng - Reizende - hieng - Schiksaalskundige" ( Aglaia -print "Brücke - went - reitzende - hung - Fateful") for Hölderlin's not preserved print copy ). The ten-verse design by Heidelberg is taken from the historical-critical Frankfurt edition published by Dietrich Sattler .
Text and interpretation
- "Heidelberg" in "Homburg.H, 21-22"
Empedocles and the beginning of Heidelberg
End of Heidelberg and The Gods
Emil Staiger , Adolf Beck, Cyrus Hamlin, Gerhard Buhr, Jochen Schmidt and Ulla Hahn gave interpretations of the poem .
Heidelberg is one of the rare works by Hölderlin in which he does not go to ancient Greece, not to the distant past or future, but to a native landscape. The ode conveys a true-to-life picture of Heidelberg from the point of view of what was then, as he wrote his mother, new, now known as the Old Bridge . The ode celebrates the city through its three geographical elements: river, bridge and castle. More than that, however, it is a reminder and thanksgiving poem, a reminder of and thanks for a “magic” that was once given to him “As sent by gods” (verse 9) and for which he now wants to give a gift in return. At that time he was given a "picture of nature as a symbol of being, harmoniously structured in opposites," in which he was allowed to "feel secure and the tensions of his existence lifted, the rhythm of his soul reflected". The asclepiadic meter of the ode, a structure of high artificiality, seems to contradict the desire to give an “artless song” (verse 2). But for Holderlin, the Greek art form was close to nature and facilitated the return to nature symbolized in the poem.
| Aglaia setting | draft |
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I have loved you for a long time, I would like to call you mother for pleasure , and give you an artless song, you, the most beautiful country of the country towns, as much as I saw. 5 As the bird of the forest flies over the peaks, Swings over the river where it shines past you, Light and strong the bridge that sounds from cars and people.
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I have loved you for a long time, I would like to call you mother for pleasure and give you an artless song, you of the country towns, the most beautiful of the country, as far as I know! 5 It is true that your Nekar also embraces the hidden town, where the forest raised me to be more open minded, Where with the strolls of May Day Apollo first animates me. But more mature and already more proud, the river flatters you 10 Your meadows, and the busier waves play. Even the more serious ships trust each other. As the bird of the forest over the waving Oak Summit oscillates about the power itself to you 15 light and strong the Brüke, the roars of cars and people.
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Hölderlin was born in Lauffen am Neckar . He spent childhood and youth in Nürtingen and Tübingen. In the two stanzas deleted from the original draft, it becomes clear that Heidelberg represents all these Neckar cities to him, where “Apollo first animates him” (draft verse 8). By redeeming it, it takes back its subjectivity in favor of the objectivity of the city. Buhr thinks that in the “You” of the poem, the maternal city deity, the “Mother Athene” - so called in The Archipelagus - is addressed in addition to the city . Their figure was erected in 1790 on the bridge, which was completed in 1788. Heidelberg is the “fatherland city / most beautiful country”. In the words separated by the dispatch but connected by the enjambement , according to Buhr, there is the contradiction and at the same time connectedness of town and country, culture and nature, spirit of the fatherland and natural beauty, “the area of the father and the places of the mother to be found in it “Expressed.
From the trinity of the Heidelberg landmark bridge - river - castle, the "truly wonderful" second ( Aglaia ) stanza of the bridge applies. Their arc is compared to the line of a bird's flight. “Never has a bridge been built more perfectly than in these lines. The bridge, the words, the image of the flight of birds: one harmony. Movement is not asserted, it is. ”“ The bridge thus represents a merging of solid form and dynamic movement. This is underlined by the rhythm and syntax of Holderlin's language. ”The asclepiadic verses reflect the ups and downs of stressed and unstressed syllables the ups and downs of bird flight. "In this way, Holderlin's language imitates the state that the bridge embodies in its swinging over and ringing."
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As sent by the gods, magic once captivates' |
As sent by the gods, gave me a charm fixed I went idle and silent about the Brüke An exiled wanderer 20 The fleeing people and books. Oh since the current rushing tentatively out into the country Sad Glad as the heart when it themselves too good to go down Loving In the tides of time throwing up, 25 sources you had him, the fugitives had Holde given shade; your shores looked after him faithfully and her lovely image trembled from the waves.
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With the third ( Aglaia ) stanza, the poem changes into the past tense, which it retains until the last word “rest”. “As if sent by gods, a spell once bound me on the bridge as I passed” (verses 9-10). The draft says under what circumstances the “magic” happened to Holderlin. He was a displaced person "who fled from people and books" (draft verse 20). The research relates the verses to Hölderlin's “Escape” from Jena in June 1795. He loved Heidelberg “for a long time” (verse 1), now the “magic” of healing has become his. “In any case, this phrase does not apply so well to any other time.” The Aglaia version leaves it at “since I passed by”; again Holderlin takes back his subjectivity.
The “magic” captivates the lyrical self when looking from the bridge to the west, into the “charming distance”, graceful but also seductive. As the river pulls into the plain to pour into the Rhine, so the heart longs to “go down lovingly” in the “floods of time” (verses 15-16). It is “the romantic tendency to give oneself, to flow in the - as Holderlin says - torrent of time”. The poet immerses the picture in the most tender mood tones. “How incomparable this downfall has become here <...> language, in the sentence which, as the only one, extends over two whole stanzas, which in the first stanza, as the magic is just beginning to work, holds its breath and itself in the divine delight, in the first two verses of the second, in artful hypotax , summarizes the entire wealth of the enchanted soul, in order then to pour out what has been collected <...> in the rhythmic cadence of the stanza, as if after a last hesitation. “This content, according to Staiger, is adequate to the Asclepius stanza, because the streaming feeling can be regulated into its rigidity. In the poem Empedocles at the same time , Holderlin clad the “empedoclean longing” in the image of falling “into the flames of Aetna”.
The city exists towards the longing for the unbound - "And always / for the unbound there is a longing". She gives the current sources and cool shadows and looks after it. The correlation is best expressed in the verb "tremble". “In the trembling of the lovely image on the waves, the fixed order of the city is blurred.” Nonetheless, the mirror image remains in place, denotes a duration in alternation, a “staying in life”.
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But heavy in the valley the gigantic, fate-informed castle hung down to the bottom, torn by the weather; But the eternal sun poured 25 Your tapered light over the aging giant screen, and about turning green living ivy; friendly forests rushed down over the castle. Bushes bloomed down to where in the clear valley, 30 Leaned against the hill, or on the bank, Your cheerful streets rest under fragrant gardens. |
Familiar with the Schick Hall saw the gigantic |
With the sixth stanza, Heidelberg's third landmark enters the poem. “But the gigantic castle, with knowledge of its fate, hung heavily in the valley, / Torn by the weather” (verses 21-23). The comma after “reason” (verse 21) in the Aglaia print and accordingly in the Stuttgart edition is omitted by other editors; it does not "hang the <...> castle down to the ground", but the castle is "down to the ground / torn by the weather", as the draft text confirms. The Heidelberg Castle was in 1689 under the command of French General Ezéchiel de Mélac been blown up and hit by lightning after reconstruction 1764th "Heavy and dark vowels determine the sound, until in the third verse with the short and sharp e- and i-sound followed by a hard double consonant, a garish dissonance concludes the sentence." "The 'fortune-aware castle': a memento mori , which does not destroy the harmony, but rather acts like a black brushstroke that a painter uses to make his colors really shine. ”Its past makes the castle“ knowledgeable about fate ”,“ admonishing ”(draft verse 30) of time and History, “a symbol not of the existence that flows away in time, but of the self-preservation conscious, defiantly asserting existence - which is precisely because of this exposure to the blows of time.” “Youthful stream and gigantic castle: two images, two signs of the loving, longing Surrender and courageous endurance. "
For only three verses, the ruin threatens the “lovely image” trembling on the waves (verse 20). “Not even a full stanza is given to the cruel. With the last line, 'But the eternal sun poured out', the healing powers of nature already begin. "The" eternal sun "means the physical sun as well as the mythical one, the" Father Helios "of the poem Since I was a boy ... . Under their light ivy spun around the shattered castle, also mythical like in Patmos , where it is “the stuff of immortal life” and in bread and wine , where it wreaths Dionysus . “The series of ideas seems to be 'eternal - rejuvenating - aging' soothingly harmonious, almost like a simple geometric figure, an equilateral triangle.” The sun shines down, the woods rush down over the castle, and the movement doesn't stop there, “ it communicates with everything and, as it were, falls gradually from the infinite height of the sky <...> over the mountains into the 'cheerful valley' to find blissful calm here in the 'happy alleys' of the city ”. The movement is maintained down to the last detail. Emil Staiger saw the essence of the poem in her, in the link between one and the other “through the most tender love affair”. Like The Archipelagus, Heidelberg is a perfect picture of Hölderlin's ideal of a loving unity of the divine and the human, nature and culture.
“The reader feels the line of life itself, the arc between birth and death.” Hölderlin's Heidelberg grasps the transience of personal experience and the lasting beauty of the city. The ode reconciles the forces of life and nature with the rigid forms of art and culture. According to Buhr, it is a myth of the maternal city deity Athena. By trying to correspond to the essence of the maternal deity, it must itself become a holy place of rest, asylum in the sense of the line from My Property "Be you, singing, my friendly asylum!"
literature
- Johanne Autenrieth and Alfred Kelletat: Catalog of the Hölderlin manuscripts. Publications of the Hölderlin archive 3. Kohlhammer Verlag , Stuttgart 1961.
- Adolf Beck: Heidelberg - attempt at an interpretation. In: Friedrich Beissner, Paul Kluckhohn (eds.): Hölderlin yearbook, year 1947, pp. 47–61.
- Adolf Beck and Paul Raabe : Hölderlin. A chronicle in text and pictures. Insel Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1970.
- Gerhard Buhr: To Hölderlin's Ode Heidelberg. In: Klaus Manger, Gerhard vom Hofe: Heidelberg in the poetic moment. RV Decker's Verlag, G. Schenck, Heidelberg 1987. ISBN 3-7685-4186-X , pp. 83-116.
- Ulla Hahn: Between birth and death. Frankfurt anthology . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 7, 1995.
- Cyrus Hamlin: Hölderlin's “Heidelberg” as a poetic myth. In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society 14, pp. 437–455.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Homburg Folioheft - Homburg.F. Digitized version of the Württemberg State Library, Stuttgart. Retrieved January 4, 2014.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Complete Works. Big Stuttgart edition . Edited by Friedrich Beissner, Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1943 to 1985.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Complete Works . Historical-critical edition in 20 volumes and 3 supplements. Edited by Dietrich Sattler. Frankfurt edition. Stroemfeld / Roter Stern publishing house , Frankfurt am Main and Basel 1975–2008.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: All works and letters. Edited by Michael Knaupp. Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich 1992 to 1993.
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems. Edited by Jochen Schmidt. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 3-618-60810-1 .
- Emil Staiger: Heidelberg . In: German language masterpieces from the nineteenth century. 2nd Edition. Atlantis-Verlag , Zurich 1948, pp. 13–24.
References and comments
- ↑ Colored etching by Friedrich Rottmann .
- ↑ He sent a “copy of the most beautiful poem from Holderlin” to his friend Wilhelm Hartlaub (1804–1885). Letter from 26./27. March 1847. In: Eduard Mörike - Works and Letters Volume 15. Edited by Hubert Arbogast and others. Klett-Cotta Verlag , Stuttgart 2000. ISBN 3-608-33150-6 , p. 143.
- ↑ Beck 1948, p. 48.
- ↑ Hamlin 1970, p. 437.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 6, 1, p. 35.
- ↑ Beck and Raabe 1970, p. 42.
- ↑ Frankfurt edition, Volume 5, p. 459.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 2, p. 408.
- ↑ The manuscript - it is the one that Mörike copied for Hartlaub - was stolen in 1981 and found again in 1991: Timeline of Heidelberg history from 1965. Retrieved on May 11, 2014.
- ↑ Frankfurt edition, Volume 5, p. 459.
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↑ The modified fourth stanza reads:
But far from the place where he was born Oh! the dark the lust that drives the demigod, loving to drown yours, down the river.
The modified seventh verse begins:
Your rejuvenating light over the grayish giant picture,
both based on “Constituted Text IV” in the Frankfurt edition, Volume 5, p. 468.
- ↑ Beck 1947, p. 54, also cited by Hamlin 1970, p. 438.
- ↑ Buhr 1987, p. 87.
- ↑ Based on the Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, pp. 14–15 with the aforementioned adaptations to Hölderlin's assumed orthography.
- ↑ “Constituted Text 1 C / D ”; Frankfurt edition, Volume 5, pp. 464–465.
- ↑ Buhr 1987, p. 86.
- ↑ Beck 1947, p. 51.
- ^ Hahn 1995.
- ↑ Hamlin 1970, pp. 442-443.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 408.
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 672.
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 671. The "raging time" comes from Der Archipelagus verse 293.
- ↑ Staiger 1948, p. 19.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition Volume 1, 1, p. 240.
- ^ Mnemosyne , third version, Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 197.
- ↑ Hamlin 1970, p. 445. “To stay in life” from Der Frieden , Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 7.
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 672.
- ↑ Beck 1947, p. 57.
- ^ Hahn 1995.
- ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 671.
- ↑ Beck 1947, p. 58.
- ↑ Staiger 1948, p. 21.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition Volume 1, 1, p. 266.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 166.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 1, p. 94.
- ↑ Beck 1947, p. 59.
- ↑ Staiger 1948. Staiger quotes: “and fall from Kalauria / Silver streams” and “When the holy moonlight comes in from Asia's mountains / Comes”; Stuttgart edition Volume 2, 1, pp. 103-104.
- ^ Hahn 1995.
- ↑ Hamlin 1970, p. 451.
- ↑ Stuttgart edition Volume 1, 1, p. 307.