Requiem (cycle of poems)

“Requiem”, partial preprint in “ Simplicissimus ” of February 10, 1913. Illustration: Richard Kaiser (1868–1941).

The cycle of poems Requiem is a mourning suit by Bruno Frank over the death of his beloved friend Emma Ley.

Bruno Frank's “artistically mature and most beautiful poem”, which consists of 29 punches in 14 individual poems, was published in 1912 and 1913 as a preprint in “ Simplicissimus ” and in 1913 as a book by the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich.

content

The lament for the dead , which Bruno Frank “celebrates” in the strict classic punch form, is a memorial of memory, love and mourning. “The lyrical self communicates with the dead, laments her loss and tries to design a life without her. The lack of hope for future unification in the hereafter is characteristic of the utter desolation of the plaintiff. Death is no redemption because it seals the final separation of the lovers. "

The table outlines the content of the 14 individual poems that make up the “Requiem”.

poem	punch	content
1	1	Appearance of the girlfriend The "departed" appears to the mourner at night.
2	2-3	Dialogue with death The lover saw the "dark one" wave to his girlfriend, but he did not believe the threat. Now that she is dead, he would like to follow her if he could believe in life after death, but "it is better to be burning with waking pain than to rest by your side and not know it."
3	4-5	The torments of the night At night, when the darkness “looks at me with hollowed eyes”, his heart tries to “bewitch” “hopefully”, “as if such a pain should not root senselessly”, as if “the dull storm of erring feelings could ... itself form into the only shape! ”But he must recognize:“ No thing that rises and falls without effect. But one heart is less than all. "
4th	6-7	You cannot donate any more consolation Once the friend gave consolation, even if trivial matters only tormented him, “Today I need consolation from your hands. And today you cannot donate it. "
5	8-9	I will never see you again Never again will he look at her eyes, "the light, brown hair", never again feel her "young breath": "Oh, all joy is frozen for me, your laugh, oh, your laugh is lost!"
6th	10-12	Why just why? He thinks back to his beloved friend, a free, unbound being, she was "so strong and exquisite": "You seemed immortal to me". He asks her: “Is the figure of the highest love mourning?” His “sore heart”, it hangs on her “open mouth”, “and weeps for a reason”.
7th	13-14	Even my songs will soon fade away He will never breath her name again: "I don't speak it anymore, but I want to sing it". Alone, he knows that his songs will soon fade away too.
8th	15th	Appearance of the girlfriend With every new day he sees the "dawning phenomenon, barely outlined". "The day is young", but "every step will lead me into nowhere."
9	16-18	You will never be my mirror again Time moves on inexorably. The lonely “now lacks the mildness of tender judgment” as a mirror of himself. “Value and dignity”, which he strived for, “are now ghosts that my heart does not know”. And the question remains forever: "Have you really left me all alone?"
10	19-20	Life never returns A hawk descends, "it is now alive, it occurred to me, and has a today". Can a world “that so scatters, gives and steals life” not give the beloved a second life?
11	21-22	Death is unjust The loss of the loved one plunges the survivor into poverty and loneliness, but he is still alive! The beloved, however, has lost everything: “It is not right. I shouldn't live anymore. "
12	23-25	Inner contemplation His life has so far flowed as an "eternal stream in a circle". He was “enough for himself” and now he sees “a world of hardship and death”. No consolation is to him "the empty duration that floods in the dark."
13	26-27	The memory is gone His voice, which called the "lovely name", has almost fallen silent, the much-kissed letters pale, your silk scarf no longer shines with life: "What else do I have, what can still be stolen from me?"
14th	28-29	light on the horizon And yet, in spite of “corpse silence”, life is stirring all around, and all silence screams: “You are alone, and this is your earth!” A lonely shepherd dog, whom he caresses, jumps up and barks, and: “But it was me as if I had seen light. "

shape

The “Requiem” cycle consists of 14 individual poems, each with one to three stanzas, which are designed as punches . The eight iambic lines of verse in a punch consist of five accents and end alternately on an additional subdivision or on the fifth accentuation. Example (punch 1):

You allowed to now, lovers ste, free it you be away s,

You From ge different ne 'm det Sit te not .

According to the established rhyme scheme [abababcc]in a stanza a triple cross rhyme ababab is followed by a final pair rhyme cc. Example (punch 1):

You can now, dearest, move more freely,	a
You departed are not bound by custom.	b
You step out of my door at night	a
With a little light in the starlight	b
In the light wind I see your hair moving	a
Your face stirs in the glow and smile ...	b
Escaped figure. Extinguished candle.	c
I enter my house in blackness of death.	c

Bruno Frank forced himself to pour his sad thoughts into the solid form of the punch. Submission to the strict discipline that its rigid structure requires saved him from indulging in his grief unrestrainedly. Even Thomas Mann saw the close relationship between form and content: "It is here a soreness of the simple thought, a pervasive desolation of feeling, by the calm, lucidity and regularity of the form in which it saves itself, in which it holds itself , not distant, but rather brought almost unheard of close. "

Emergence

Alice Oberfoell

In March 1909, the twenty-two-year-old Bruno Frank, “after many an affair”, “entered into a permanent relationship” with Alice “Lisa” Oberfoell (1886–1911), who was almost the same age. He moved in with her and tried to bring order into his life. In early summer Lisa survived a serious illness. The following year, Bruno Frank took Lisa on a trip to Italy and the spa town of Bad Schandau in Saxon Switzerland to cure his rheumatism . The relationship broke up after a year and a half, and Lisa went to Berlin to study there. In mid-1911 Bruno Frank informed a friend that Lisa had died and "although she had not treated him well in the end and they had not seen each other for a long time, he had not stopped loving her".

Emma Ley

Forest Sanatorium Davos-Platz 1912.

In the second half of 1911, Bruno Frank fell in love with Emma Ley (1887–1912), an American girl with lung disease of the same age. She was the youngest daughter of parents of German origin and was with her widowed mother Martha Ley nee. Hallenstein on a trip to Europe.

In December 1911, Bruno Frank rushed to Davos, where his girlfriend had to undergo a life-threatening operation. Thomas Mann's wife Katia also left for a spa stay in Davos on March 10, 1912. She lived in Professor Jessen's forest sanatorium in Davos-Platz, where Emma Ley was also staying.

The exact sequence of Emma Ley's last weeks of life is unclear. After Günther Schwarberg , Bruno Frank, a friend of the family, came to Katia Mann every day “to cry, just like a little boy”. His girlfriend died at the age of twenty-four on April 18, 1912. The desperate Bruno Frank stayed (after Schwarberg) in Davos “until Thomas Mann came. On June 8, 1912, he was on the guest list of the Hotel Montana for the last time. Then he traveled to Paris and wrote the book of his mourning there. ”Bruno Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner writes:“ It is said that he was in Davos one more time when Katia Mann arrived there in March 1912 to cure her apex catarrh ”; on April 26, 1912, he had already been in Paris for four weeks.

Emma Ley's death not only found literary expression in Bruno Frank's “Requiem”. Thomas Mann, who was familiar with the circumstances of Emma Ley's death through his wife Katia and Bruno Frank, remembered her in a marginal note in his novel “ The Magic Mountain ”. His protagonist Hans Castorp moves into "that room no. 34 of the» Berghof «sanatorium, in which» the day before yesterday «an American woman died, as his cousin Joachim Ziemßen tells him".

Coping with grief

“The death of a second beloved woman within a year had darkened the world for him,” writes Bruno Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner. His grief for the two deceased friends was reflected in poems that appeared in his third collection of poems, “The Shadows of Things” in the early summer of 1912: “Ambulance”, “No Consolation”, “The Dress Book” and “The Hammer Blow”. They describe Bruno Frank's desperate helplessness in the bed of the sick, his desolation after their death, the painful memory of the beloved friend and the horrific farewell in the face of the grave. Bruno Frank's mourning found the strongest echo in the “melancholy lament for the dead” of the poetry cycle “Requiem”, which bore the dedication “Emma Ley in memory”.

Going to press

Advertisement for Bruno Frank's “Requiem” in Simplicissimus of December 15, 1913.

Before the cycle, which was completed between April and September 1912, went to press, excerpts were published in " Simplicissimus " in 1912 and 1913 (see # preprints ):

• September 9, 1912: "The Apparition" (Stanze 1). With a drawing by Alphons Woelfle (1884–1851).
• February 10, 1913: "Requiem I" (Stanze 13-14), "Requiem II" (Stanze 8-9), "Requiem III" (Stanze 28-29). With a drawing by Richard Kaiser (1868–1941) (see cover picture).
• September 15, 1913: “Before evening” (Stanze 4-5).
• September 29, 1913: "Einkehr" (Stanze 24-26).

It was not until December 1913 that the cycle appeared as a bibliophile print in “a one-time edition” of two hundred numbered copies by the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich. The luxurious equipment of the plant was advertised in the “ Simplicissimus ” on December 15, 1913 (see illustration).

Thomas Mann , who was on friendly terms with the young author, praised the successful match of content and appearance:

“With the publication of the» Requiem «by Bruno Frank, the Langen'sche Verlag tries for the first time in the field of bibliophile printing - very happy, it seems to me, especially since it applies care and splendor to an object worthy of such effort and its human-serious, almost private character is excellently suited for such an exclusive form of publication. "

Naturally, the expensive first edition, which was limited to 200 copies, did not reach a large readership. One can therefore assume that Bruno Frank's mourning cycle only became more widely known with the publication of the two volumes of poetry from 1916 and 1919 and the selection volume from 1937, all three of which contained the “Requiem”.

reception

Bruno Frank's lyrical work is almost completely forgotten. From 1905 to 1919 he brought out seven volumes of poetry with about 300 poems, most of which received benevolent attention. By his self-confession, rather old-fashioned in his ethical and literary taste, he stood out clearly from the progressive poetry of his time. This may be one reason why it did not find lasting resonance. However, his cycle “Requiem” occupies a special position in Bruno Frank's lyrical work. Contemporary critics praised the "deep emotion" and the " living beauty" of his mourning suit.

The first review of the “Requiem” was a “courtesy service” that Thomas Mann did to his young fellow writer. He had first approached the older, esteemed and famous writer in 1910, and over time a friendship developed between the two, which lasted until Bruno Frank's death in 1945. Thomas Mann's review was supposed to appear in the December issue of the magazine “ Der Zwiebelfisch ” at the same time as an advertisement in “ Simplicissimus ” (see #Printing ), but to Bruno Frank's annoyance, it could only be included in the magazine in March 1914. Thomas Mann judged the work of his young friend:

“The book is dedicated to the memory of a beloved dead and contains poems, punches, nobly bound complaints, coming from deep emotion and at times gripping the reader with the utmost immediacy, like real, own pain. In truth, I hardly remember feeling the lyrically conveyed life and death suffering in my throat as I did when reading these stanzas - and that infallible when I read it again and again. "

The philosopher Martin Havenstein (1871–1945) found in 1914, a few months after the publication of the “Requiem”:

“... the left alone, who by nature tends to melancholy, is now shadowed by the darkest melancholy. According to his brooding disposition, the pain is expressed in reflections as it loosens. The night flowers of knowledge grow for him on the grave of love, and he plucks them and artfully winds them together to form a wreath of painfully scented, dark, magnificent stamps. "

In an overview of contemporary “Munich authors” in 1917, the writer Richard Rieß (1890–1931) also discussed Bruno Frank's volume of poems “Requiem. Poems "from 1916:

“Bruno Frank pleased us with a lyrical book of great artistic importance, whose» Requiem «was published by Erich Reiss in Berlin. As a poet, Frank also shows the culture of feeling and linguistic expression that distinguish him as a novelist. His stanzas, especially the stanzas of the Requiem, are of classical beauty, they achieve the purity of Platen's verse structures, but are warmer and more intimate in their emotional content. "

The theater critic Julius Bab described the “Requiem” in the “ Schaubühne ” in 1918 as Bruno Frank's “artistically most mature and most beautiful poem”:

“The noble language of this lament grew out of the culture of old Goethe, for example from the blemishly clear sounds of pain in the Marienbad elegy; Even in the last shock, Frank's spirit, which was never titanically rebellious, did not forge any new weapons here either: but it does mean something that the giant's armor can wear with such decency. "

In contrast to Bruno Frank, the critic and poet Oskar Loerke was a representative of the progressive literary currents of his time. In the “ Neue Rundschau ” in 1918 he reprimanded Bruno Frank's persistence in tradition: “He wrote the war of 1914 as if he were living in 1814”, but remarked:

"But where, as in the» Requiem «, an inner violence turns into words and stanzas, a tormenting woe turns into living beauty."

expenditure

Requiem. Poems , 1916.

First edition

• Requiem. Munich: Langen , 1913.

Other issues

• Requiem. Poems. Berlin: Reiss , 1916, pages 7–24. - Reprint of the “Requiem” and 25 mostly new poems.
• The wine press. Selected poems. Munich: Musarion, 1919, pages 123-138.
• For many years. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag , 1937, pages 392-399.

Preprints

• The appearance (punch 1). In: Simplicissimus , 17th volume, issue 24, September 9, 1912, page 375.
• Requiem (punch 13-14, 8-9, 28-29). In: Simplicissimus , 17th year, issue 46, February 10, 1913.
• Before evening (Stanze 4-5). In: Simplicissimus , Volume 18, Issue 25, September 15, 1913, Page 403.
• Einkehr (punch 24-26). In: Simplicissimus , Volume 18, Issue 27, September 29, 1913, Page 436.

literature

General

• Julius Bab : Bruno Frank. In: Die Weltbühne , volume 14, first half of 1918, number 18, May 2, pages 412–416.
• Julius Bab : German War Poetry of Today IX. In: Das literäre Echo , 20th year, 1918, issue 8, January 15, 1918, column 450, 459.
• Martin Havenstein: Bruno Frank. Requiem. [Review]. In: Prussian year books , volume 156, April to June 1914, pages 546-547.
• Bruno Frank # Kirchner 2009 , pages 56-58, 84, 88, 351, 386, 389.
• Oskar Loerke : New Poetry. Problematic of the form. In: Die Neue Rundschau , 29th year of the free stage, 1918, Volume 1, pages 268–269. - Review of Bruno Frank # Frank 1912.1 and Bruno Frank # Frank 1916.3 .
• Oskar Loerke ; Hermann Kasack (editor): The book cart: discussions in the Berlin stock exchange courier 1920 - 1928. Heidelberg 1965, pages 16-17.
• Thomas Mann : Bruno Frank's “Requiem”. In: Thomas Mann: Question and Answer. About own works. Tributes and wreaths: About friends, companions and contemporaries. Afterword by Helmut Koopmann. Frankfurt am Main 1984, pages 365-367.
• Kurt Martens : Bruno Frank. In: The German literature of our time in characteristics and samples. Munich 1922, pages 221-222.
• Richard Riess: Munich authors. [Bruno Frank. Requiem]. In: March . Eine Wochenschrift , 11th year, volume 3, 1917, pages 902–904, here 903-904.
• Günther Schwarberg : Once upon a time there was a magic mountain: Thomas Mann in Davos - a search for clues. Göttingen 2001, pages 44-47.

swell

• Bruno Frank. Requiem. [Display]. In: Simplicissimus , Volume 18, Number 38, December 15, 1913, Page 644.
• Thomas Mann ; Thomas Speaker (Editor): Thomas Mann. Letters I, 1889–1913. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pages 538-539, 850.
• The American Historical Society (Editor): Encyclopedia of Massachusetts: Biographical - Genealogical , Volume 10, New York 1916, page 335, online: .

Web links

• Bruno Frank, digital works, poems
• Simplicissimus online .

Footnotes

1. ↑ #Bab 1918 , page 415.
2. ↑ Bruno Frank # Kirchner 2009 , page 570.
3. ↑ #Mann 1984.5 , page 366th
4. ^ Bruno Frank # Kirchner 2009 , pp. 40–50.
5. ↑ #Massachusetts 1916 , #Schwarberg 2001 . - Date of birth according to "Davoser Zeitung" from April 22, 1912, quoted in #Schwarberg 2001 , page 45: August 10, 1887. Year of birth according to #Massachusetts 1916 : 1885.
6. ^ Bruno Frank # Kirchner 2009 , pp. 55–56, #Schwarberg 2001 , pp. 45–46.
7. ↑ Bruno Frank # Kirchner 2009 , pp. 55–56.
8. ↑ Bruno Frank Frank # 1912.1 .
9. ↑ Bruno Frank # Ackerknecht 1956 , pp. 127–128.
10. ↑ # Advertisement 1913 .
11. ↑ #Mann 1984.5 , page 365th
12. ↑ Bruno Frank # Frank 1916.3 , Bruno Frank # Frank 1919.1 , Bruno Frank # Frank 1937.2 .
13. ↑ Bruno Frank # Frank 1930.4 .
14. ↑ Commentary on a letter by Thomas Mann in # Mann-GKFA-21 , page 850.
15. ↑ # Man GKFA-21 , page 538-539, 850th
16. ↑ #Mann 1984.5 , page 365-366. - See also #printing .
17. ↑ #Havenstein 1914 .
18. ↑ # Riess 1917 .
19. ↑ #Bab 1918 , page 415.
20. ↑ #Loerke 1918 .