Swabian poetry school

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The Swabian School of Poets was a relatively loose association of poets that had formed 1805-1808 at the University of Tübingen around Justinus Kerner and Ludwig Uhland .

Karl Heinrich Gotthilf von Köstlin , Eduard Mörike , Gustav Schwab , Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and Wilhelm Hauff are also counted among them . In terms of persons, there are overlaps with the Serach poets' circle , which also included Nikolaus Lenau , Count Alexander von Württemberg and Hermann Kurz , but which only came together later.

This group, which was not so uniform, achieved literary fame through Heinrich Heine's attacks on them in his Schwabenspiegel . In order to be able to polemicize better, he added Karl Mayer , who later also belonged to the Serach group of poets.

Program

Justinus Kerner wrote a poem of the same name in 1839.

The Swabian school of poetry

Where should I direct my foot, I, a strange wanderer,
So that I can find your school of poets, good Swabians?
Stranger Wanderer! Oh, I would like to say this to you:
Go through these light mats into the dark forest area,
Where the fir tree stands, the tall one that once ships through the sea as a mast;
Where from branch to branch swing an army of joyful birds singing;
Where the deer sees with clear eyes out of the dark thicket
And the stag, the slender one, sits over rocks of granite;
Then step out of the darkness of the forest, where
mountains full of vines greet you in the golden ray of sunshine , Neckar's blue in the deep valley;
Where a golden sea of ​​ears of corn billows and undulates through the plains,
Over there in the blue air the cheering of the lark resounds;
Where the vintner, where the reaper sings a song through the mountains and fields:
there is a Swabian poet school, and their master is called - nature!

Literary feud with Heinrich Heine

In 1833 Heine's treatise on the history of modern, beautiful literature in Germany was published , and in 1836 an expanded edition under the title The romantic school .

At the suggestion of the poet Adelbert von Chamisso , a title portrait of Heinrich Heine was to be included for the Musenalmanach 1837 . Gustav Schwab then announced that he would withdraw his contribution to the edition. Other poets of the school like the Bavarian King Ludwig I did the same. Heine learned of the reaction of his fellow poets in a letter in 1836. The shabby behavior contributed to the fact that Joseph von Eichendorff , who had his poems published there in the past, delivered thirteen new poems for printing.

In 1837 Heine's About the Informer was printed. In 1838 Gustav Pfizer published the essay Heine's writings and tendency in the first issue of the German quarterly journal .

In his Schwabenspiegel , published in 1838, Heine assumes the members are provincial and narrow-minded, which has already led to the expulsion of all their greats in Swabia, namely Friedrich Schiller , Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , but also David Friedrich Strauss . He does approve of Gustav Schwab's talent in composing ballads, but a comparison with Schiller is forbidden. Karl Mayer alias Carolus Magnus is presented as the ideal of the Swabian school of poetry. Justinus Kerner , to whom he admits some merits, he mocks like the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau , without, in turn, withholding his reputation. Wolfgang Menzel is presented as a lying and tearful contemporary. Gustav Pfizer , whose prose and poetry are worthless, receives the greatest attention alongside Menzel . Heine does not accept Pfizer's translations either. For that he would like to take on the role of the hangman at the Old Bailey and execute Pfizer. For Ludwig Uhland he uses the picture of the Spanish knight Cid , who despite all injuries was tied to his horse to lead the troops against the enemy. Like the knight once upon a time, Uhland was sent out against the opponents of the Swabian school of poets despite his productivity dwindling.

In his verse epic Atta Troll , published in 1843/44, he again attacked numerous representatives of the school in the 22nd chapter. The bear Atta Troll comes to the hut of the witch Uraka. There he finds a fat pug who is in a hopeless situation. The pug would have liked to stay with Karl Mayer , the Blümelein and Metzelsuppe and misses the cooking of noodles in Stuttgart. On the advice of Christoph Friedrich Karl von Kölle and equipped with a letter of recommendation from Justinus Kerner , he came to the hut. The dog thinks a lot of his virtue, belongs to the Schwaben school of poetry and is not a frivolous Goethean. The muse of the school is morality and she wears the “thickest leather underpants”. Other poets may have spirit, imagination, or passion, but not virtue. After he rejected the witch, she turned him into a pug. He could be redeemed if a virgin could read Gustav Pfizer's poems without closing her eyes. Atta Troll regrets that he is not a virgin, but it is precisely the latter that is impossible for him to fulfill, so that the poet Ludwig Uhland has to remain a dog until the last day .

In 1844 the poem Der Tannhäuser appeared again in Heine's New Poems under Miscellaneous . It was published in the third volume of its salons in the same year as the Romantic School . In it the legendary knight Tannhäuser returns to the Venusberg and tells his love the following from Swabia:

In Swabia I visited the poet school, very
dear creatures and droplets!
They sat there on little poop
stools with cones on their heads.

In his poem Der Scheidende from the estate, Heine reflects on his condition in the mattress tomb to the philistines.

The smallest living Philistine
Zu Stukkert am Neckar, he is much happier
than I, the Pelide, the dead hero,
the shadow prince in the underworld.

effect

The conflict between a progressive literature, which reflects and shapes the political and social discourse of its time, and a conservative poetry, which stages a landscape that is hardly changeable as a social counter-program, became formative for the subsequent controversies in German literature. While the protests of the early naturalist authors were initially directed against the implementation of capitalist marketing strategies, bourgeois taste tendencies and morality, after the founding crisis, conservative forces once again focused on the imagination of quiet, mostly fairytale, mystical and sometimes pagan landscapes for the purpose of transcending social conflicts. After 1918 the conflict intensified in the dispute between völkisch-nationally minded authors and mostly left-wing bourgeois authors. Heine's predecessor was recognized by both progressive and conservative revolutionary forces.

literature

  • Gerhard Storz : Swabian Romanticism. Poets and poetry circles in old Württemberg . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, etc., 1967.
  • Armin Gebhardt: Swabian group of poets. Uhland, Kerner, Schwab, Hauff, Mörike . Tectum, Marburg 2004, ISBN 3-8288-8687-6 .
  • Suevica. Contributions to Swabian literary and intellectual history . Edited by Reinhard Breymayer . Series: Stuttgart works on German studies . Academic publisher Hans-Dieter Heinz, Stuttgart. - ISSN  0179-2482 . [Journal devoted to the Swabian school of poetry.]
  • Barbara Potthast (ed.): Provincial width. Württemberg culture around Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner and Gustav Schwab . With the assistance of Stefan Knödler. University Press Winter, Heidelberg, 2014.
    • P. (7) - 12: Barbara Potthast: Introduction.
    • Pp. (13) - 34: Hans-Otto Binder : Württemberg's way into modernity.
    • P. (35) - 48: Ilonka Zimmer: The 'Swabian Poet Circle' as a literary-historical construction.
    • P. (49) - 60: Helmut Schanze : Space versus time. To the habitus of the romantics of the 'Swabian School'.
    • P. (61) - 72: Günter Oesterle: Attempts to assert in the province. The romantic all-rounder Justinus Kerner. An essay.
    • P. (73) - 93: Monika Schmitz-Emans : The seer von Weinsberg and his world of images: Justinus Kerner.
    • Pp. (95) - 119: Helmuth Mojem: Provincial Romanticism? Justinus Kerner and Heinrich Heine, Evening Ship Type and Homecoming II .
    • S. (121) - 140: Stefan Knödler: Poetry and Philology between Classicism and Romanticism. Ludwig Uhland and his teacher Karl Philipp Conz.
    • S. (141) - 160: Fritz Peter Knapp: Uhland's study on the old French heroic epic .
    • S. (161) - 182: Hartmut Fröschle : Aspects of the history of the impact of Ludwig Uhland as a poet, scientist and politician: results, problems, desiderata.
    • S. (183) - 202: Markus Malo: Schwabenspiegel. Karl Mayer as the representative of Old Württemberg.
    • S. (203) - 220: Barbara Potthast: Schwabs Schiller.
    • S. (221) - 238: Bettina Gruber: The 'Project Prevorst' as a (Swabian) contribution to the epistemology of European romanticism.
    • P. (239) - 256: Annette Bühler-Dietrich: [(Karl) Heinrich (Gotthilf von)] Köstlin and psychiatry in Württemberg.
    • S. (257) - 278: Wolf Eiermann: The garden monuments of the Bettenburg forest in Franconia and their relation to the Stuttgart poet circle (1789-1817).
    • P. (279) - 307: Ulrich Gaier : Memorial sites in Swabian poetry.
  • Link to this journal: Suevica .