Otto Ludwig

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Otto Ludwig
Signum Otto Ludwig 1 (cropped) .jpg

Otto Ludwig (born February 12, 1813 in Eisfeld , † February 25, 1865 in Dresden ) was a German writer .

Memorial plaque on the house, Leipziger Strasse, in Meißen
Ludwig's grave in the Trinitatisfriedhof in Dresden

Life

Otto Ludwig was born in Eisfeld, Thuringia, and attended elementary school there. In 1825, one year after entering elementary school, his father Ernst Friedrich, city counsel and ducal court advocate of Saxony-Meiningen, died at the age of 46. In 1828 he moved to the Georgianum grammar school in nearby Hildburghausen . In 1829 he left the grammar school and two years later went to the Lyzeum Saalfeld. In the same year his mother, Sophie Christiane, geb. Otto. After a two-year stay in Saalfeld , he returned to Eisfeld in his garden house, where he devoted himself to musical and literary studies. In Eisfeld he performed the operas “Die Geschwister” and “Die Köhlerin” in the local rifle house in 1834 .

In 1839 he began studying music in Leipzig with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy on a scholarship from Duke Bernhard II of Meiningen . In the autumn of 1840 he had to give up his studies due to illness and returned to his place of birth. In the same year he undertook a score study in Meiningen .

In 1842 he left Eisfeld for good "after making suggestive remarks about his 'jobless and breadless life'" and with his novella "The Emancipation of the Servants" received approval for another scholarship in Leipzig . Seven years later, in 1849, he moved to Dresden , after having lived in various cities in Germany for a short time. One year after he moved to Dresden, on March 4, 1850, his most successful drama “Der Erbförster” was premiered at the court theater there. In 1852 he married Emilie Winkler and had three children with her, born in 1852 (Juda), 1854 (Ernst Reinhold Otto) and 1858 (Cordelia). In 1860, Ludwig fell ill with a nervous disorder, to which he finally succumbed on February 25, 1865.

Otto Ludwig coined the term poetic realism , in which he describes a representation of reality between naturalism and idealism , with which the poet allows his world, which he has created, to "leave as much of its breadth and variety as is compatible with the spiritual unity."

Monuments and honors

Bust in the Meininger Theater
Summer house in Eisfeld

A memorial was set up in Otto Ludwig's classicist summer house in the Eisfeld. In front of the house there is also a monument created in 1934 by the sculptor Karl Röhrig , which is decorated with a bust of the young writer. The sculptor Arnold Kramer created a marble bath for the writer, which was ceremoniously unveiled in 1911 on the Bürgerwiese in Dresden.

Another monument, a larger-than-life bronze bust on a marble base created by the Munich sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand , has stood in the Herrenberg Landscape Park in Meiningen since 1892. In the entrance hall of the Meininger Theater there is a bust of Ludwig, created in 1909 by Otto Lessing based on Hildebrand's design.

Streets in Eisfeld, Dresden, Meiningen, Nordhausen and Berlin-Charlottenburg are named after the poet. The state regular school in Eisfeld bears the name Otto Ludwig.

reception

Monument in Eisfeld

The language critic Eduard Engel saw in Ludwig, especially because of the two novellas Die Heiteretei and Aus dem Regen in die Traufe , the most important exponent of a local literature after Gottfried Keller . The psychological novel Between Heaven and Earth , which tells the conflict between the two Cain and Abel brothers, Fritz and Apollonius Nettenmair, dominated by their authoritarian father, about the decent and beautiful Christiane, he rated as a masterpiece: “With its extraordinary, almost agonizing tension, the artistic reflection of reality, the deep drawing of the soul, this novel is unique to our narrative poetry. ” Franz Mehring , who denied Otto Ludwig the ideal of a modern poet, also judged this narrative:“ But since he is always honest with his art said that, despite all the limitations and especially in it, he has succeeded in creating a work that is part of the permanent possession of German literature. ”Another admirer of Otto Ludwig was Alfred Döblin , who admitted that Between Heaven and Earth “ remains the most outstanding Narrative performance ”, which he knows from German literature and relates to Ludwig's application of the inner M onologs drew attention. Many readers - e. B. Paul Heyse (1856) and Julian Schmidt (1857) - criticized the supposedly inconsistent end of the novel with the idealized ascetic relationship between Apollonius and Christiane, who after their long period of suffering up to Fritzens death could actually live the love that he had schemed to prevent, the author defends in his detailed interpretation: “My intention was to depict the typical fate of a person who has too much conscience, this is shown by his drawing, as well as the contrast of his brother, who is supposed to symbolize the typical fate of a person who has too little conscience. Then the contrast, how the too conscientiously applied makes the other worse and worse, the latter makes the other more and more anxious. It is the typical fate of the all-too-conscientious, the born moral hypochondriac [...], because he has the shame of the noises that others drink. "

According to Armin Gebhardt, the novellas Die Heiteretei , From the rain into the eaves , Between Heaven and Earth stand out from Ludwig's narrative work. He also counts the drama Der Erbförster and the Dramatic Studies to be among the most important works by Ludwig. The columnist Edo Reents , who, like Engel and Mehring, considers Ludwig's lyrical and dramatic work to be insignificant, calls Ludwig the founder of the psychological novel in Germany.

In 1942 Harald Braun filmed the family conflict of Ludwig's story in the film of the same name Between Heaven and Earth , but moved the time and place of the action, incorporated further actions (wartime) and people and ended with a happy ending.

Works

prose

Dramas

Poetry

  • On colorful flower mats , poem
  • You stood in the golden evening light , poem
  • There is a little hut in the Odenwald , poem
  • It winds between hills , poem
  • Yesterday I rested at the source , poem
  • I walk around in dreams , poem
  • I walked in the silence of the night , poem
  • O Lindbaum, you faithful , poem
  • Oh how is it possible then , poem
  • Tell me, so spoke the brittle , poem
  • Blessed by the gods , poem
  • How it rests on your breast , poem
  • Two loved each other and didn't want to tell each other , poem
  • Love , poem
  • The discontented one , poem
  • Notice , poem
  • Spring drunkenness , poem
  • Contrition , poem
  • The boy's song , poem
  • Voices of warning , poem

Essays

  • My method in poetic creation
  • The spectrum of colors and shapes

literature

  • Armin Gebhardt: Otto Ludwig - the poetic realist . Tectum, Marburg 2002. ISBN 3-8288-8427-X
  • Hans-Peter Rüsing: Otto Ludwig's Agnes Bernauer fragments. On the crisis of drama in bourgeois realism . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994. (= historical-critical work on German literature; 16) ISBN 3-631-47278-1 .
  • Felix Bamberg :  Ludwig, Otto . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, pp. 602-612.
  • Friedrich Nemec, Pramod Talgeri:  Ludwig, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , pp. 432-435 ( digitized version ).
  • Erika Eschebach: Mediation through staging. The Otto Ludwig Room in the Dresden City Museum . In: Wolfgang Hesse / Holger Starke (eds.): Those standing in the light. Photographic portraits of Dresden citizens of the 19th century , [Kromsdorf]: Jonas [2019] ISBN 9783894455637 , pp. 251–260.
  • Wolfgang Hesse: mask, stele, gravestone. Monuments to the poet Otto Ludwig . In: Wolfgang Hesse / Holger Starke (eds.): Those standing in the light. Photographic portraits of Dresden citizens of the 19th century , [Kromsdorf]: Jonas [2019] ISBN 9783894455637 , pp. 261–267.

Web links

Wikisource: Otto Ludwig  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Otto Ludwig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Otto Ludwig  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Otto Ludwig: Shakespeare studies. From the estate of the poet, ed. by M. Heydrich. Leipzig 1872, pp. 264-269.
  2. ↑ Eduard Engel: History of German literature: from the beginnings to the present. Leipzig ²1907. Volume 2, p. 951.
  3. ^ Franz Mehring: Otto Ludwig , Die Neue Zeit. February 7, 1913. In: Franz Mehring: Collected writings. Essays on German literature from Hebbel to Schweichel , Berlin 1961, p. 60.
  4. ^ Otto Ludwig's collected writings. Volume 6. Studies, ed. by Adolf Stern. Leipzig 1891, p. 223.
  5. ↑ Cf. Armin Gebhardt: Otto Ludwig. The poetic realist . Tectum, Marburg 2002, p. 9.
  6. ↑ Edo Reents: Otto Ludwig A great narrator who is wrongly forgotten. In: FAZ. February 12, 2013, accessed January 25, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Ludwig, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH Ice field
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1865
Place of death Dresden