Idylls from Messina
The Idylls of Messina are a collection of poems of eight Idylls of the philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche . They were published for the first time in 1882 and appeared in a revised version in 1887 as an appendix to his work The Happy Science .
Content and publication history
In May 1882 Nietzsche published eight poems under the title Idyllen aus Messina , which were composed during a three-week stay in Sicily . The collection contains the following titles:
- Prince outlawed
- The little brig, called "the angel"
- Song of the goatherd
- the little witch
- The nightly secret
- "Pia caritatevole, amorosissima"
- Albatross bird
- Vogel judgment
The Idylls from Messina are Nietzsche's only self-published collection of poetry, if one disregards his poetic attempts, which he began when he was ten and mentioned in his autobiography From my life as a thirteen year old. In terms of time, the idylls stand between his dawn and the happy science . For a long time they were regarded as a mere intermezzo between these two works and have neither thematic continuity nor internal coherence. However, they are structured as a cycle of poems and correspond to the style of folk songs in terms of form and rhyme scheme . Nietzsche himself emphasized the cyclical nature of the poems in a letter to his publisher:
“My conditions are
1) that they are printed all 8 at once,
2) and start a number, the next if possible -
3) that they are printed with delicate and elegant letters, not those of the prose essays. "
Ernst Schmeitzner from Chemnitz , the publisher of the idylls from Messina , published the international monthly and was one of the first to sign the anti-Semite petition around 1881 . Whether the International Monthly was already anti-Semitic when Nietzsche's Idylls were published , or whether it only became anti-Semitic at a later date, is the subject of an ongoing debate. Later there was a lawsuit in which Nietzsche sued Schmeitzner in order to partially reclaim the loan he had been granted. In 1887, in the second edition of his Gaya scienza , Nietzsche published a specially written preface and an appendix entitled Songs of Prince Vogelfrei , in which some of the idylls from Messina were incorporated.
These idylls are still considered to be one of Nietzsche's most enigmatic texts.
Individual evidence
- ^ Hermann Josef Schmidt : The Idylls from Messina, commented by Sebastian Kaufmann. P. 2
- ↑ KSA III / 1, p. 193. Online
- ^ Malcom B. Brown Friedrich Nietzsche and his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner: A representation of their relationship.
- ↑ Luca Crescenzi: Nietzsche's idylls from Messina. The folk song as a form of philosophizing Online summary
literature
- Hermann Josef Schmidt : The idylls from Messina, commented by Sebastian Kaufmann, in the context of the development of Nietzsche's poetry - a subversive agent of his moral-critical philosophy? In: Historical and critical commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche's works, Vol. 3/1. On-line
- Malcolm B. Brown: Friedrich Nietzsche and his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner: A representation of their relationship. Archive for the history of the book industry, Frankfurt a. M. 1987. ISBN 978-3-765713-89-7 .
