At midnight (Goethe)
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At midnight is the title of a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that was written on February 13, 1818 and first printed in 1821 in the Neue Liedersammlung by Carl Friedrich Zelter . Goethe called it his “song of life” and has always valued it very highly since “its unforeseen creation at midnight”.
With its venomous anacoluthic syntax and personal confessional character, it marks the transition to the old work and can be viewed as a condensed résumé due to the autobiographical references.
Form and content
The poem consists of three five-part, iambic and cross- rhyming stanzas that illuminate childhood , adulthood and old age and at the end of which the eponymous refrain “At midnight” is repeated like an echo. They are:
At midnight I went,
little, little boy, that churchyard
, to the pastor's father's house; Star on the star
They all shone too beautifully;
At midnight.
If I then had to go further into the vastness of life
to the dearest, because she was moving,
stars and northern shine over me in conflict,
I going, coming, sucked in bliss;
At midnight.
Until then, at last, the full moon's
brightness. As clearly and distinctly penetrated me into the darkness,
Even the thought willingly, sensibly, quickly
wrapped itself around the past as well as the future;
At midnight.
Origin and background
In the annals of 1818, Goethe described how the song came into being from a “wondrous state in sublime moonlight”. He judged it “the better and more valuable” than “could not say where it came from and where it was going.” On January 14, 1827, he told Eckermann that the song was still “a living part” for him and was alive in it.
As Goethe put it in Poetry and Truth , the "feeling of past and present in one" was a frequently formative feeling for him. Linking the time levels, he at the same time alienated the autobiographical background - his father Johann Caspar Goethe was not a pastor, and his parents' house was not near a churchyard - in order to be able to concentrate more clearly on the child's emotional experience.
Six years after its publication, Eduard Mörike wrote a poem of the same name , which is one of his best-known works and, according to Heinz Politzer , can be read as an answer to Goethe, in which the title corresponds to the refrain that has been repeated three times. Mörike also uses the refrain of “days gone by” to connect the present with the past. If Goethe's work was shaped by a fatherly perspective, Mörike opposed it to a motherly one .
The poem shows some peculiarities that characterize Goethe's age style. This includes the doubling of adjectives (" Klein, kleine Knabe"), closely related to the tendency towards neologisms , in which an adjective is often not declined, as well as unusual word orders and grammatically non-closed sentence constructions.
interpretation
Benno von Wiese sees three stages of development in the stanzas, which Goethe presents in the form of a shortened curriculum vitae. The melancholy mirrored “trauma and happiness of childhood” in the first stanza is followed by the openly autobiographical depiction of the love life of the man in the second and finally the retrospective and the maturity of old age in the third stanza. For him, the phrase “Gestirn und Nordschein over me in dispute” refers to the tense relationship between southern Italy on the one hand and northern Weimar on the other. This complex of problems is connected with the linguistically hard coincidence “had to, had to, because she drew”, from which Goethe's difficult relationship with Charlotte von Stein can be read, which he left behind in cool Germany when he set out for Italy in 1786 .
The chorus-like formula "At midnight" at the end of each stanza reflects the individual episodes from the depths of advanced age, which evokes the previous stages of life in memories. The three phases of life stand independently and with their own magic, but are at the same time connected to one another via the three stanzas, in that the lyrically represented life seems to culminate in the first line of the last stanza, in which everything is illuminated in the bright, night-penetrating moonlight . As is typical of Goethe's age style, the past appears lively: the child's feeling of strangeness in the churchyard and his longing for the stars, as well as the man's love that dates back many years.
Even Erich Trunz sees the biographical background and the development movement of the poem. For him, the word “last” in the third stanza indicates the age reference. In the light of the full moon , Goethe looks back calmly and connects the past with the present. If the world was still strange and unrecognized for the child and marked by painful feelings of love for the man, now the spirit determines what is happening, which has risen against the weakening body, awakens the past and wonders whether there can be an increase . This development corresponds to the increasing brightness from the still dark childhood to the glowing moonshine of old age. The life itself is, however, not completely illuminated, but remains enigmatic. For Trunz, this can be seen in the sentence structure, in that the conditional clause of the second stanza is not clearly brought to an end and the temporal clause of the last stanza remains open without a primary main clause, which leaves the further development indefinite. The secret of life remains untouched.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from Erich Trunz , at midnight . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Notes, Goethe's Works, Hamburg Edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 746
- ^ Mathias Mayer: The lyrical late work. 1818 - 1832. In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 439
- ^ So Benno von Wiese , curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 399
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, At midnight . In: Goethe's works, poems and epics I, Hamburg edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, pp. 372–373.
- ↑ Quoted from Erich Trunz, at midnight . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Notes, Goethe's Works, Hamburg Edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 746
- ↑ Quoted from Erich Trunz, at midnight . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Notes, Goethe's Works, Hamburg Edition, Volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 746
- ↑ Quoted from: Benno von Wiese, curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 399
- ^ Benno von Wiese, curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 398
- ↑ Heinz Politzer , Mother Night , in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsche, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 209
- ^ Mathias Mayer: The lyrical late work. 1818 - 1832. In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 449
- ^ So Benno von Wiese, curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 399
- ^ Benno von Wiese, curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 399
- ↑ Erich Trunz, At midnight . In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poems and epics I, notes, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 747