Age (Hölderlin)

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Age is a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin . It is part of a cycle of nine poems, which Hölderlin described in his letter as Nachtgesänge .

Title page of the Night Chants in Wilmans' paperback .

Origin and tradition

Hölderlin probably wrote the age at the end of 1803 or beginning of 1804. No handwriting is known. The first text witness is the printing of the Nachtgesänge in paperback for 1805. Dedicated to love and friendship by the Frankfurt publisher Friedrich Wilmans . In the paperback , however, the poems are not night songs , but simply “poems. Overwritten by Ms. Hölderlin ”. Age is the eighth of nine, between half of life and Der Winkel von Hahrdt . The next time it was printed like all Nachtgesänge in the “Sämmlichen Werken” which Christoph Theodor Schwab (1821–1883) published in 1846, in the second volume in a section “Poems from the time of madness”, then again in the Propylaea - Edition by Norbert von Hellingrath , Friedrich Seebaß (1887–1963) and Ludwig von Pigenot (1891–1976).

text

The following text is taken from the historical-critical Stuttgart edition by Friedrich Beissner , Adolf Beck and Ute Oelmann (* 1949). It deviates from the paperback because Beissner tried to reconstruct Hölderlin's presumed original spelling. Because Holderlin, for example, never wrote “tz”, Beissner printed verse 10 “Now but siz 'ich” instead of like the paperback “Now but sit I”. The more recent "reading editions" by Jochen Schmidt and Michael Knaupp again offer slightly different versions, which Wolfram Groddeck commented acutely.

Age in Wilmans' paperback .

000000 Age

0000 your cities of the Euphrates!
0000You streets of Palmyra!
0000You columnar forests in the plain of the desert!
0000What are you?
05 You have the crowns, Because you have crossed the borders of the Othmenden, From heavenly the smoke vapor And taken away the fire; 10 But now I am sitting under clouds ( each of which has its own rest) under well-established oaks, on the heath of the deer, and strange appearances and died to me. 15 The soulful spirits 00
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0000
0000
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00
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  • From Forster: The ruins.

  • Title copper

  • Call

Suggestion

The co-editor of the Propylaea edition, Ludwig von Pigenot, discovered Hölderlin's possible suggestion for his poem in Georg Forster's translation of the work of the French rationalist Constantin François Volney Les Ruines Ou Méditations Sur Les Révolutions Des Empires . The translation “is accompanied by a copper that impressively depicts the ruins of Palmyra: in the foreground sits on a hill under a palm tree, a traveler who looks thoughtfully over the ruins at his feet. The introductory pages, in which the impression of these 'splendid upright columns' is portrayed and the downfall of the once so rich neighboring site <sic!> On the Upper Euphrates is described, almost make it certain that this book inspired Holderlin to write his poem . Volney is an enlightenment philosopher who, in his very learned presentations, rejects the myths of the gods of the ancients as pernicious delusions and pays homage only to the genius of reason. It is conceivable that the 'I' in v. 10 of Holderlin's poem means less the subjective I of the poet than (in the manner of Hegel) the I of the zeitgeist, which Holderlin wanted to display very openly in Volney's statements. " Pigenot's excitation hypothesis is accepted in research. However, the title copper shows a fantasy view of Palmyra .

interpretation

Apart from the comments on the complete editions, Age of Life has been interpreted by Esther Schär, Wolfgang Binder , Wolfram Groddeck , Hans Maier , Hans Gerhard Steimer and Michael Gehrmann.

It is like Half of Life and Der Winkel von Hahrdt and, in contrast to the first six poems of the Nachtgesänge , which are odes, are written in a free rhythm . The first verse is metrically identical to the last. In terms of content, it is divided into two parts of nine and six verses. In the first nine verses, the lyrical self recalls the ancient Orient, in the remaining six verses it makes itself aware of its occidental, “Hesperian” presence. According to Hölderlin's historical perspective, two “ages” of humanity are compared.

The ancient Orient is invoked three times at the beginning, just as Georg Forster's book begins with a “call”. The "cities of the Euphrates" (verse 1) remain unnamed; maybe Holderlin was thinking of Babylon , the Babel of the Bible. Palmyra, in the Bible and in today's Arabic Tadmor or Tadmur, all meaning "palm city", is not on the Euphrates , but halfway between the river and the Mediterranean. The "pillared forests in the plain of the desert" (verse 3) are the colonnades of Palmyra in the middle of the Syrian desert . In his translation of Volney, Forster writes of "a multitude of countless splendid upright columns which, like the avenues in front of our animal gardens, stretched out in symmetrical rows as far as the eye can see." The "comparison of the 'pillars' with 'avenues' condenses with Hölderlin to the metaphor of the 'pillared forests'".

But Hölderlin does not evoke the splendor of antiquity, but its ruins. Palmyra was destroyed by the Romans at the end of the 3rd century AD after its prime under Queen Zenobia . According to Holderlin's view of history, the cities on the Euphrates, Palmyra and Palmyra's pillars bloomed like Greece, which is left out and "yet <...> unnamed", in a time when people with their culture and the pantheistic God-nature were more loving Harmony, holy festivity lived. This time has passed, and so thoroughly that the poet does not ask “Where?” As he usually does, for example in The Archipelagus (verse 62) “Say, where is Athens?”. Searching and longing are asked. “What are you?” (Verse 4) sounds more serious, more fundamental, a question about the nature of the ruins, the meaning of history. Similarly helpless, in Patmos (verse 151) and Mnemosyne (first version, verse 35), in view of the end of an era of happiness , Holderlin asks : "What is this?"

Then the tense changes from present tense to perfect tense . In “a boldly built period” the poet founded the downfall of the ancient world. In everyday prose the sentence would read: "The smoke and (verse 8) the fire (9) of heavenly ones (8) took away your crowns (5) (9) because you crossed the borders of the Othmenden (5 , 6). ”Hölderlin writes in a“ hard coincidence ”that shaped his poems from these years. People have exceeded the limits set for them. The skip "Die Bound / Der Othmenden" makes the crossing of boundaries sensually perceptible. The hubris of the people because of who the celestial, the "crowns" (verse 5), perhaps the capitals , taken away the pillar of fire. As with the cities on the Euphrates, Holderlin may have thought of Babylon and of the Tower of Babel . The "smoke vapor" is also a reminiscence of the Bible. According to Luther's translation, the word appears in Joel 3.3  LUT - “And I will give miraculous signs in heaven and on earth: blood, fire and smoke” - and as a quote from Joel in the Acts of the Apostles ( Acts 2.19  LUT ). Hölderlin reinterprets the destruction by the Romans into a world fire, an ekpyrosis , the "dissolution of existence in ('divine') fire, which in Stoic cosmology takes place at the end of a world period".

“But now I'm sitting”: With the return to the present tense and the first appearance of the “I”, the turn to the second “age” takes place, the world period of the poet's presence. He seems to be sitting in an idyll, in innocent nature without history, under clouds, under oaks, on the deer heather, in a northern landscape. In this way, Hölderlin quotes, clearly to contemporaries, the well-known Ossian poem by James Macpherson , in the Ossian under an oak, clouds, the "heath of the deer", in the original "Heath of the deer", as well as the spirits of the deceased figure prominently. In the idyll, however, the ego feels lonely, in need. Perhaps the clouds are reminiscent of the “smoke vapor”, the “well-established oaks” of the “columnar forests”. In his imagination he sees cities, alleys, columned forests, but “the soulful spirits” appear to him - “hard coincidence” makes the statement pathetic - “strange”, rightly, because it lives in a different “age”. In the historical night of distance from the gods, Holderlin knows himself in this “night song” as in The Archipelagus, verse 241: “But woe! it walks in night, it dwells like in orcus, / without divine our race. "

The phrase in brackets relating to the clouds "(each of which has its own peace)" is grammatically incomprehensible. Of several conjectures , Friedrich Beissner's is the most plausible, “whose” is corrupted for “in”, the brackets “(in / each one has a rest)” is right. This gives the "meaning: everything past is saved in the clouds, it rests there hidden, and the thought of the person sitting under the clouds creates the shapes of the canceled past in melancholy holy memory". According to Esther Schär, “each” means the cities and temples and the people who created them. All of this has "a rest" inherent in it, in the clouds, the world-historical rest of the time when the gods are far from God. Perhaps the text in Wilmans' paperback is just about the right one; “With the help of a little linguistic violence” the poet wanted to refer to the “clouds”, namely the tradition that says “to us today about the ancient times, about the early gods and the enthusiastic people”.

For Binder, age is a poem of grief. The complaint is "unmistakable and all the more shocking as it does not name the pain, but only lets it be heard in that 'you' and then locks it up in the sober conclusion 'strange and died'." Schär believes that taken away by the gods means at the same time "Lifted by them". The destruction by fire and smoke vapor is not only a punishment, but also a "visitation" in the literal sense. "Because mortals are at rest with the heavenly ones, that's why they are called the 'blessed ones' at the end of the poem." So the poem does not lack "a very slight pious confidence". Groddeck would like to accept the enigmatic in the poem. It eludes an unambiguous interpretation, realizes the question of the meaning of tradition - "What are you?" - to the limit of answerability. The reader would "make no sense of the poem", but he could "make the fragile and perhaps already broken text structure his own as a special medium of philosophical-poetic meditation".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Theodor Schwab (Ed.): Friedrich Hölderlin's all works. JG Cotta'scher Verlag , Stuttgart / Tübingen 1846.
  2. ↑ Wolfram Groddeck: Hölderlin: New (and old) reading texts. In: Text - Critique. 1, 1995, pp. 61-76.
  3. ↑ Georg Forster: The ruins. From the French by Herr von Volney with a preface by Georg Forster. Vieweg Verlag , Leipzig 1798. Retrieved January 31, 2014.
  4. ↑ P. 8–9 of the section "The Ruins" of Forster's book.
  5. ↑ by Pigenot 1949.
  6. ↑ The word is derived from the Hesperides of Greek mythology, who guarded a tree with golden apples in their garden in the far west. By this, Holderlin meant, for example, in Bread and Wine, verse 150 - “Look! It is us, it is us, the fruit of Hesperia! ”- the non-Greek western world, especially Germany. Stuttgart edition Volume 2, 2, pp. 619–620. Esther Schär uses the word six times in her interpretation of age .
  7. ↑ Steimer 2002/2003, p. 194.
  8. ↑ Groddeck 1996, p. 154.
  9. ↑ Binder 1970, p. 354.
  10. ↑ Groddeck 1996, p. 159.
  11. ↑ Norbert von Hellingrath coined the term "hard coincidence", from ἁρμονία αὐστηρά. The style is characterized by the hardness of the joints between the linguistic elements, more irrational and less tied than in conventional prose. In the sentence structure there is anacoluthe , words placed without a predicate , soon sprawling periods that begin two or three times and then suddenly break off, always full of sudden changes in the construction. Friedrich Norbert von Hellingrath: Pindar transmissions from Hölderlin. Prolegomena to a first edition. Breitkopf & Härtel , Leipzig 1910.
  12. ↑ Schmidt 1992, p. 840.
  13. ↑ Steimer 2002/2003, p. 228: "Hölderlin read <...> his Ossian <..> as a document of that early stage of development in Hesperian culture, in which it emerges from the natural context and takes shape."
  14. ↑ Stuttgart edition, Volume 2, 2, p. 661.
  15. ↑ Schär 1962–1963, p. 506.
  16. ↑ Schär 1962–1963, pp. 506–507. Groddeck and Gehrmann also want to keep the paperback version. According to Gehrmann 2009, p. 115 it should point to the Babylonian confusion of languages.
  17. ↑ Binder 1970, p. 356.
  18. ↑ Schär 1962–1963, p. 507.
  19. ↑ Groddeck p. 164.