New Lübeck dance of death
New Lübeck Dance of Death is the title of a drama by Hans Henny Jahnn that he wrote together with Werner Helwig in 1931 as a festival for the Lübeck Baltic Sea Year. The theme goes back to the Lübeck dance of death . A first performance at the theater with the incidental music created later by Yngve Jan Trede did not take place until 1954.
Emergence
In 1930 Hans Henny Jahnn was commissioned by the Nordic Society to write a festival for the “Baltic Sea Year 1931” in Lübeck. Jahnn was impressed by the dance of death in Lübeck's Marienkirche painted by Bernd Notke around 1463 for the confessional chapel and wrote a new dance of death in Lübeck .
Depressed by the unexpected death of his friend Gottlieb Friedrich Harms, Jahnn was unable to complete the text he had already started and asked his friend Werner Helwig for help. "Entire scene drafts can be proven to go back to him." Influential Lübeck citizens, however, prevented the planned premiere because they found the work too pessimistic and unchristian. The Berlin critic Herbert Ihering stood up for Jahnn and wrote in a letter to the Nordic Society that Lübeck had "missed the opportunity to add a Nordic counterpart to the Salzburger Jedermann every year". The play, which had already been announced in many newspapers as the highlight of the Baltic Sea year, was now forgotten until it was reprinted by Rowohlt in 1954 with a cover photo by Alfred Mahlau together with the music of the Danish composer Yngve Jan Trede April 1954 was premiered at the Cologne theater .
Content, interpretation, reception
The medieval dance of death finds a modern continuation in this piece in front of stage sets in Lübeck's old town. The choirs of the old Lübeck dance of death are provocatively contrasted with choirs from the police or from unemployed people. Conventional individual death, as a representative of modern civilization, is contrasted with the figure of “Feist death”, because “Fate no longer has a person's name, it is called a system.” The fable shows the replacement of generations, a young person leaves his mother and later his lover, who gives birth to his son, who in turn leaves his mother, whereupon she desperately abandons herself to death. The reporter, the wanderer and a poor soul also appear in the play.
Oskar Loerke gave the speech of “Feisten Todes” on the market square as well as two other monologues for “great, never-to-be-reached highlights of contemporary German poetry”. Thomas Freeman notes in his Jahnn biography that it has been shown in reviews and literary criticism that the New Lübeck Dance of Death "contains sections of incomparable poetic power alongside others that have miserably failed."
The premiere took place on November 18, 1951 as a staged reading (with actor Walter Franck, among others ) at the “reading stage” founded by Rolf Italiaander at the Hamburger Kammerspiele . After the first performance in Cologne in 1954, there were occasional other performances (initially in Recklinghausen), often in studio performances, for example in 2004 the multimedia production of the Audio-Visual Center and the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Bielefeld University in the university hall. In 2009 there was a new production with the music of the Swedish organist and composer Hans-Ola Ericsson , with actor Björn Grundies among others . The premiere took place in Herford's Marienkirche .
Quote (beginning of drama)
“ The green seaweed sways in the glass of sea water. When the sea is undiluted, it stands like a tree thanks to the hidden power of the liquid. If it flows miraculously with the force of the tides or swirls sucked in through distant places of the deep, the pale slimy plant goes to the ground like animals that go to sleep with the expectation to digest and experience a new day. It is a parable. Like blooming and miserable withering. And it's a span between waking and sleeping like a dream. "
expenditure
- In: Neue Deutsche Rundschau , S. Fischer, Berlin 1931, pp. 748 to 776
- New version with music by Yngve Jan Trede, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1954
- (Theater edition). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1954
- In: Works and Diaries . Volume 5. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1974
- In: Works. Volume 7. Dramas II. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 978-3-455-03837-8
literature
- Jan Bürger: The stranded whale. The immoderate life of Hans Henny Jahnn. The years 1894–1935 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-351-02552-1 .
- Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . 1st ed., Hoffmann u. Campe, Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-455-08608-X .
- Jürgen Heizmann: man machine death. Tradition and modernity in Hans Henny Jahnn's mystery play New Lübeck Dance of Death . In: L'art macabre 5 . Yearbook of the European Dance of Death Association, Bamberg 2004, ISBN 3-934862-07-1 .
- Werner Helwig: Comments on Hans Henny Jahnn's “New Lübeck Dance of Death” . In: Program for the studio stage performance at the University of Hamburg on January 18, 1963.
- Sandra Hiemer: A “New Lübeck Dance of Death” as a “Dance of Life” . In: Hartmut Feytag u. a .: The dance of death of the Marienkirche in Lübeck and the Nikolaikirche in Reval (Tallinn). Edition, commentary, interpretation, reception . Böhlau, Cologne 1993, ISBN 978-3-412-01793-4 .
- Erik Martin: Werner Helwig and Hans Henny Jahnn . In: Musselhaufen (annual publication) | Musselhaufen. Annual journal for literature , Volume 26A, Viersen 1991, ISSN 0085-3593 .
- Michael Walitschke: Hans Henny Jahnn's New Lübeck Dance of Death . Backgrounds - partial aspects - levels of meaning . Metzler, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-476-45041-4 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jan Bürger: The stranded whale . P. 291
- ^ Paul Th. Hoffmann: Hans Henny Jahnns Lübeck Dance of Death . In: The circle . No. 11/1931
- ^ Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . Hamburg 1986, page 175
- ↑ Werner Helwig: The parable of the disturbed crystal . Mainz 1977. ISBN 3-7758-0925-2 , p. 102
- ^ Thomas Freeman: Hans Henny Jahnn. A biography . Hamburg 1986, page 178
- ↑ Bielefeld University Newspaper . No. 216/2004 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.
- ↑ Beginning of the address of the "Feisten Todes" in the market place. In: New Lübeck Dance of Death . New version with music by Yngve Jan Trede, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1954, page 10>
