Menon's complaints about Diotima

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Friedrich Hölderlin, pastel by Franz Karl Hiemer , 1792

Menon's complaints about Diotima is the title of a great love story by Friedrich Hölderlin , which was published in two parts in Johann Bernhard Vermehrens Musenalmanach for 1802 and 1803 .

In the meter of the elegiac distich , the nine- stanza work revolves around the meaning of suffering in lament and thanks and can be seen as the end of a series of Diotima poems.

In addition to the ode Der Abschied and passages of the lyrical letter novel Hyperion , the elegy is considered the most important lyrical processing of the painful separation from Susette Gontard , whom he idealized as Diotima . With the name “Menon”, which refers to the Platonic dialogue of the same name , Hölderlin shows a clear reference to Plato . He uses elements of Greek mythology and draws on Virgil and Ovid with a few phrases, metaphors and parables .

Emergence

From September 1798 on, Hölderlin's elegiac poetry was dominated by the parting from Susette Gontard. A purely handwritten poem in elegiac distiches, which Hölderlin probably wrote between autumn 1799 and summer 1800, was only given the name Elegy and was the model for the work. Since this first version is in the tradition of the Augustan love elegance , its content dimension as a love poem becomes clear with the simple generic name (elegy).

Hölderlin revised this template and sent the text to Vermehren, who confirmed receipt on May 4, 1801 with the words: “Always crown my work as you crowned it this time!” An exact date of origin of the revised version cannot be given; however, formal and biographical details indicate that the work was completed by the summer of 1800. After the editor in the Musenalmanach for the year 1802 had initially published verses 1-56, he had verses 57-130 follow in 1803.

Content and special features

The nine stanzas of the poem have a triadic structure. At the end of each triad, Holderlin sings of love, which transcendence can transcend. At the beginning of the elegy the lyrical ego wanders through nature and compares itself with a "hit game", which searches for rest and healing there, but is constantly driven and tormented by the pain of loss. With this he takes up a parable that Virgil used in the epic Aeneid , in which the lovesick Dido wanders through “forests and gorges” “like dogs struck by arrows”.

In the second stanza, Holderlin works with the "gods of death" who conquered the sufferer with ideas from the underworld of Greek mythology . The man torn into the "gruesome night" remembers past happiness even in the darkness of Hades , so that he is "blessed ... in the midst of suffering" and can speak of the "light of love" at the beginning of the third stanza, that also seem to the dead. Here the path of memory leads him - according to the triadic composition - over the “paths of the grove ”, the burden of transience disappears, and united with Diotima he feels the relation to the eternal and divine .

background

Friedrich Schiller painting by Anton Graff

Hölderlin's elegies can be understood as answers to Friedrich Schiller , who clearly influenced Hölderlin. With Der Wanderer , Hölderlin reacted to the elegy The Walk and, with bread and wine , addressed questions that Schiller had raised in the powerful and controversial poem The Gods of Greece .

For Wolfram Groddeck, Menon's complaints about Diotima Schiller's genre-poetic definition corresponds to the elegy that he undertook in the extensive treatise On Naive and Sentimental Poetry . Schiller counted the elegy, along with satire and idyll, to the most authoritative forms of the sentimental poet and demanded that “ mourning should only flow from an enthusiasm awakened by the ideal” and that this should give the elegy its “poetic content”. Even if the lament “mourns a loss in reality, it must first transform it into an ideal. [...] The elegiac poet seeks nature, but as an idea and in a perfection in which it never existed, even if he weeps for it as something that has been there and now lost. ”It seems as if Holderlin had Schiller's normative guidelines tries to implement faithfully by describing the search for nature in the first stanza: "Every day I go out and always look for something different ..."

literature

  • Wolfram Groddeck: Menon's complaints about Diotima . In: Hölderlin Handbook. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2011, pp. 322–323, ISBN 3-476-01704-4 (special edition 2011: ISBN 978-3-476-02402-2 )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So Valérie Lawitschka: Liaisons - Imago and reality . In: Hölderlin Handbook. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2011, p. 35
  2. ↑ So Jochen Schmidt , Commentary on the Elegy. In: Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Poems , Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 703
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Wolfram Groddeck: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: Johann Kreuzer (Ed.): Hölderlin-Handbuch. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2011, p. 322
  4. ↑ Jochen Schmidt, commentary. In: Friedrich Hölderlin, Complete Poems , Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 703
  5. ↑ Jochen Schmidt: Commentary on Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: The Complete Poems . Paperback, Volume 4. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt 2005, p. 703
  6. ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: The Complete Poems . Paperback, Volume 4. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt 2005, p. 267
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Jochen Schmidt, commentary. In: Friedrich Hölderlin: Complete poems . Paperback, Volume 4. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt 2005, p. 703
  8. ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: The Complete Poems . Paperback, Volume 4. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt 2005, p. 268
  9. ^ Ulrich Gaier: Friedrich Schiller. In: Hölderlin Handbook. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2011, p. 82
  10. ↑ Wolfram Groddeck: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: Hölderlin Handbook. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2011, p. 323
  11. ↑ Peter-André Alt: About naive and sentimental poetry. In: Schiller, Life - Work - Time, Volume II, Chapter Six, CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 216
  12. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: About naive and sentimental poetry. In: Complete Works , Volume V: Philosophical Writings, Mixed Writings. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 467
  13. ↑ Friedrich Schiller: About naive and sentimental poetry. In: Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works , Volume V: Philosophical Writings, Mixed Writings. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 468
  14. ^ So Wolfram Groddeck: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: Hölderlin Handbook. Life work effect . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2011, p. 323
  15. ↑ Friedrich Hölderlin: Menon's complaints about Diotima. In: The Complete Poems . Deutscher Klassiker Verlag im Taschenbuch, Volume 4, Frankfurt 2005, p. 267