Image of life
A life picture is a person's biography , usually in a relatively short version or illustration.
Theater, music, literature
In the 19th century, a biographical variant of the theater melodram was called Lebensbild (also "character image", "time image"). The actor and playwright Friedrich Kaiser claimed the invention of this genre for himself. The rural milieu descriptions by Ludwig Anzengruber ( The fourth commandment , 1878) are a further development.
Franz von Suppè composed musical pictures of life, including the life of Mozart (1854). The term image of life was also used for collections of songs and dances. Around 1900, the Berlin publishing house Rehtwisch offered a picture of the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I in "German songs".
The image of life appeared most frequently, however, in biographical literature : a concise, self-contained representation should bring something past or distant to life for the reader or viewer. Back then, the facts were mostly dressed in a flowery, enthusiastic style.
Most images of life seem to have in common that they are not images at all, but were written in language or music and only form an image in the mind of the actors, musicians, readers and listeners. So they should pose a challenge to the imagination . In this sense, the composer Adolf Bernhard Marx declared that “recorded psychologically developed moods become true images of life and characters”.
Living pictures , which illustrated stations in the life of celebrities, local color, social conditions or professional activities, were sometimes also called life picture.
Family history
While scientific and printed biographies mostly only record historically significant people, genealogists or local historians also write life pictures for whole simple, average people. In addition to the basic data contained in the ancestral list , pictures of life (also suitable as an attachment to the ancestral list) provide a comprehensive description of all archival documented important events and living conditions of a person, whereby the aim of the work is the complete recording of all sources about this person, their family and their economic and social circumstances are. In this way, the authors of life pictures make a contribution to everyday history and home history, a story from below .
The language of life images should be short and concise, not lyrical and free from commonplace. Images of life are based on verifiable facts and are therefore not a form of aesthetic literature. Apart from personal use, the texts can be handed over to the responsible regional and academic libraries and the Central Office for German Personal and Family History in Leipzig .
Individual evidence
- ^ Adolph Bernhard Marx: The music of the nineteenth century and their care , Leipzig 1855, p. 78