Love letter
A love letter is a piece of writing that is addressed to a person to express love or affection for that person .
The love letter expresses much more than a mundane message. In it, the pain in the face of not being together, not being able to be together or the difficulty of articulating love differently becomes clear. Much more difficult, however, is the attempt to confess one's love, but to be caught in the fear that with every formulation this endeavor will be destroyed. In addition, there is the fear that love will not be returned.
history
Love letters already appear in the literature with Ovid . But they only became more widespread with the Romantic era , to which the acceleration of the postal service , the greater spread of literacy and, above all, the emergence of novels all contributed.
As early as the late Middle Ages, love letters (usually in rhyming verses ) enjoyed great popularity. They have come down to us in various collective manuscripts , where they are inserted between texts of various kinds. In very rare cases, it is authentic correspondence, but rather literature , such as the love letter written in 1500 poem about a poet Gozold at one letter to the loved one at the love-sickness is involved suffering woman. Such love letters associated with minne complaints are assigned by some researchers to the genre of minneeds , with which they have much in common.
Despite their important cultural significance, love letters are usually addressed to only one person and often only understandable to that person. At most, they become known to more than one person through indiscretion or through publication by prominent personalities who have usually consented to publication or have already died. However, there are also love letters that are written by ghostwriters and in a certain way represent a subtle fraud, as they only feign skills (a literary example of this is e.g. Cyrano de Bergerac ).
In the 18th century, love letters were considered good form, they were standardized and there were templates for them.
Modern forms of love letters are SMS , chats and e-mails in which even in the WWW freely available templates are used. Also love letter agencies and digital love letter generators offer their services to formulate for strangers love prose. All these means led to the fact that writing love letters got a new impetus; however, the development of foreign formulations endangers the individual “honest” access to this form of publication or this genre .
Research into German studies has so far concentrated on love letters from writers; There are projects at the TU Braunschweig and the University of Zurich which are now also examining letters from people in public life and, in a broader context, love letters and other written love messages from the 20th century.
example
Paul Celan wrote to his lover Ilana Shmueli on February 9, 1970 :
- Your letter, the news of your inner conflict - what can I say? I want to take away all pain from you, including all physical pain.
- My hands go over you - to you.
Gerit Losse wrote on October 16, 1989 to her friend, the NVA construction soldier Sebastian Kranich :
- Come here, it is not important that there is nothing in this letter that changes the world - is total nonsense, our love is something that the world - at least a little - can slide more smoothly, huh ?!
See also
literature
- Schulz-Grobert, Jürgen: German love letters in late medieval manuscripts. Investigations into the transmission of an anonymous small form of the pair poetry . Tubingen 1993.
- Veronika Beci (ed.): In a sea of flames of love glitters. Love letters from the world of music . Benziger , Düsseldorf 2002, ISBN 3-545-20238-0 .
- Ute Jung-Kaiser (Hrsg.), Matthias Kruse (Hrsg.): Intime Textkörper. The love letter in the arts . Peter Lang Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-03910-427-6 .
- Bernhard Lübbers , love letters of the early 15th century from the environment of Johann von Egloffstein ?. In: Markus Frankl, Martina Hartmann (eds.): Herbipolis. Studies on the city and monastery of Würzburg in the late Middle Ages and early modern times (publications from the Medieval and Early Modern Age College 1) Würzburg 2015, pp. 255–272. ( ISBN 978-3-8260-5805-9 )
- Wyss, Eva Lia: Love letters from children, adolescents and adults. A type of text in a lifelong change . In: Annelies Häcki Buhofer (Ed.): Language acquisition and age. Colloquium on the occasion of Harald Burger's 60th birthday . Basel 2003 (= Basler Studies on German Language and Literature ), pp. 71–86.
- Wyss, Eva Lia (Ed.): Inscribed with passion. Swiss love letters . Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 2006. ISBN 3-312-00339-3 .
- Karina Kellermann, Jörg Paulus, Renate Stauf : love speech, love letter . In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Darmstadt: WBG 1992ff., Volume 10 (2011), pp. 574-585.
Web links
- Comprehensive literature list on the topic (PDF, 36 kB) for a research seminar at Saarland University , summer 2001
- Love letters from famous and historical people
- Love letter collection
Individual evidence
- ^ Ingeborg Glier : Gozold. In: Burghart Wachinger et al. (Hrsg.): The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon . 2nd, completely revised edition, ISBN 3-11-022248-5 , Volume 3: Gert van der Schüren - Hildegard von Bingen. Berlin / New York 1981, Col. 204.
- ↑ In Christianity, the Bible is sometimes understood as a love letter to all of humanity.
- ↑ Annette C. Anton: Authenticity as fiction. Letter culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated February 7, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 9, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Paul Celan: Ilana Shmueli. Correspondence. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004.
- ↑ Sebastian Kranich: First listen to Christ, then to the comrades. Building soldiers letters: Merseburg, Wolfen, Welzow 1988/89 . Halle: Projekt-Verlag 188, 2006, p. 414.
