In the fog (poem)
In the fog is a poem by Hermann Hesse from 1905.
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The poem begins with the following well-known verses:
Strange to go for a walk in the fog!
Every bush and stone is lonely,
no tree sees the other,
everyone is alone.
In this poem, the lyrical self describes its thoughts of a lonely fog wandering.
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The poem, which Hesse wrote in 1905, only appeared three years later in the volume of poems Unterwegs . The poem consists of four stanzas with four lines of verse each and a cross rhyme abab. The similarity of the opening stanza with the last stanza is striking.
The mood is already determined by the first verse (“ Strange to wander in the fog! ”), Which is repeated at the beginning of the last stanza for confirmation. This statement is reinforced by an exclamation mark. The fourth stanza summarizes the meaning: " Life is loneliness ".
In his interpretation of this poem, the Germanist Walter Hinck admits the strong impact it had on him in his younger years:
It was basically just the opening verse, which, like certain melodies, was evoked by associations. When I later read the poem as a whole again, several times and with full concentration, some critical alarm bells also sounded.
In the poem, a person who has become wise communicates his knowledge to the world in the form of a sentence: " Life is loneliness ". You have to keep in mind that Hesse was less than 30 years old when this poem was published.
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The poem was set to music over a hundred times, including a. by Georg Wolfsohn (1913), Karl Klingler (~ 1917), Egon Kornauth (1920), August Reuß (1924), Joseph Haas (1925), Martin Schlensog (1934), Walther Aeschbacher (1935), Casimir von Pászthory (1936) , Felix Wolfes (1941), Karl Heinz Taubert (1942), Victor Fenigstein (1944), Ernst Widmer (1944/46), Hans Kracke (1947), Hugo Herrmann (1949), Othmar Schoeck (1952), Otto Jochum (~ 1953), Ernst Meyerolbersleben (1953), Alfred Stier (~ 1954), Fritz Ihlau (1957), Géza Frid (1960), Hans-Georg Burghardt (1962), Karl Etti (1972), Gottfried von Eine (1974), Ernst Ludwig Leitner (1975), Gerd Watkinson (1975), Fried Walter (1977), Bertold Hummel (1978), Herbert Nobis (1984), Uwe Strübing (1989), Kurt Bikkembergs (1992) and Krzysztof Penderecki (2005/08) and by the following bands : Pur (on their first album from 1983 Opus1 ), Leichenwetter (2005 on the album last words ), Die Toten Hosen (2009 on the single Drowning and 2012 on the anniversary album Die Geister die wir rufen ) and Peter Heppner (2018 on his remix album TanzZwang ).
literature
- Walter Hinck: Stations of German Poetry. From Luther to the present day - 100 poems with interpretations . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-525-20810-3
Individual evidence
- ^ Walter Hinck: stations of German poetry