Villa (prose)
Villa is the title of an essay on landscape history by Rudolf Borchardt . The first edition of 1908, commissioned Alfred Walter Heymels as a private edition appeared in 1907 was a two-part publication in the Frankfurter Zeitung ahead.
Taking the example of the Italian villa as a starting point, Borchardt deals with questions of cultural and architectural history, deals with socio-political backgrounds and postulates fundamental differences between the Romanesque and Nordic feeling for nature.
For Borchardt the Italian villa is a testimony to tradition and forms an aesthetic unit with the landscape from which it historically emerged .
content
At the beginning, Borchardt deals with problems of tourism in a critical and sharp manner and distinguishes a real Italy from that of most travelers.
Italy has become one of the most unknown countries in Europe since the railways "opened it up for traffic." Today's traveler includes "a conspiracy of railway administrations [...] hoteliers, foreign industries, foreign cities, tourist guides, Baedeker at the top, from every contact." the realities. ”The vacationer was forced to return quickly by the time-limited tickets, could not deepen his impressions and was far removed from Goethe's experiences . This leads to prejudices and clichés.
The average traveler knows the villa itself “only from a confused distance, as a torn mass picture” that is only half seen through a railway window and quickly lost. The tourist, “this poor modern type of traveler to Italy”, cannot find all the beautiful details, such as the overgrown gardens, which are inaccessible or difficult to reach. Few would have seen Artimino's Villa Medici , "uphill for hours from the empty Signa, this stone dream of royal mountain solitude" or the Villa of Marlia with its "melancholy of wild flowers."
Borchardt separates the villa from the country house north of the Alps . It is "not a coincidental house on a hand's breadth of land, [...] but a historically developed transition completed on the spot" from a castle of a dynast to a mighty "court house of his grandchildren", an "institution of overall Italian existence."
With the environment it forms a unit that goes beyond land-swarming sensitivity. For Borchardt, it is not just the visual integration into the structure of the landscape, the perfect relationship to hills and neighboring hills, small villages, groups of trees and individual tops, vineyards and the Mount of Olives that would convey a pleasant and cohesive image to the artist's eye from a distance. Since no “human intention could have created this necessity for the beautiful”, the villa is historically connected to its landscape and only therefore aesthetic .
By embodying a continuity of millennia, it belongs to the center of the history of the estate . So it is a living symbol of influence and wealth, "real through and through, something connected with money and power" and is able to peacefully stylize the connection with economy and rule to the outside world. It was on this basis that the Latin soul developed the term, which includes the contrast between town and country and which has been immortalized by the poets.
Borchardt differentiates between German and Italian perceptions of nature. It remains “southern religion to sanctify the conquered and useful nature”, be it “Nordic, to give up on the arrogant, wild, traceless, self-sufficient.” What is sacred to the southern, scares the Nordic.
The German feeling is that of an individual placed on freedom and longing , who streams “into the folk tale and folk song so loudly and powerfully” “like the compressed heart of a Goethean stanza.” The Italian feeling is “like all archaic feelings in the popular breadth and latent bound ... deeply interwoven with the world feeling of the Lord, province of a culture in which only the haves and those assimilated to them participate.
While the German villa for Borchardt is more of the "construction expression of the rentier" and "something petty bourgeois clings to the gentleman in the country", its Italian counterpart presupposes "the gentleman and again and again the gentleman."
In the further course, Borchardt praised the relationship between the Contadini, the permanent tenant farmers, and the actual masters through the institution of the partial lease , which is ultimately based on a hidden interrelation of unspoken obligations, whereby "despite the appearance of an aristocratic regime a democratic community" is realized. For this reason, socialism , which is otherwise so tempting for the “little man” in Italy, has no basis in the Tuscan Campagna. The spokesmen of the class struggle would only get through where "rootless workers hundreds of new factory centers [...] are allowed to overrule and represent the indigenous population in parliament in the pursuit of stupid majority principles", while the Tuscan peasant is not receptive to the agitation of the "foreign screaming candidates".
After a description of the architectural details, Borchardt finally talks about the essence of the idyll , the dream of the country. It is a law of the soul of the builder who escapes the "heavy city palace ... with its corridors and chambers, halls and courtyards that know too much" and the "ghastly ghost of Piazza with the faces of lurking friends and smiling enemies" wanted to. Borchardt speaks of the Latin fate of not being able to escape from oneself and of Latin greatness, only wanting to escape to the point where the villa is. One should read Horace to understand the deep relationship with Italy.
Origin and background
The work is related to the poetic and political views of the author, for whom a creative restoration was required in order to vault what he called the “break of the 19th century”, which for him was caused by mechanization and the “belief in development of the Expiry "was caused.
Since 1904 Borchardt lived in Italy, for him the land of unbroken traditions, in which the continuity of millennia could be felt. As a tenant of various villas - among others near Lucca and Pistoia - he led a life there with his family that was dedicated to literary and cultural-political work as well as garden art . The love for Italy and the knowledge of its literature was reflected in the transmissions of the Divine Comedy and the Vita Nova Dante as well as other monographs on landscape history.
With this work, the conservative author once again documents his adherence to traditions and his belief in historical continuity. He told his sister in a letter that he wanted to continue to hold on to traditions "at a time that is constantly trying to create the future out of the ground, out of the misery of the lumpy moment called the present."
The motto “Quocumque ingredimur, in aliquam historiam pedem ponimus”, a free quotation from Cicero's philosophical work De finibus bonorum et malorum , which precedes the essay , refers to the origin of the villa tradition, from where, in Borchardt's opinion, it extends to the present continued.
reception
Hugo von Hofmannsthal , an influential friend of Borchardt's friends, praised the work and wrote how much the reading had impressed him. It is "not the individual, but the gesture in it as well as the possibility of being able to rely on someone in spiritual matters [...]."
Ernst Robert Curtius rated the essay as a “milestone in modern intellectual history”, which raised awareness of the Roman continuity of the “European intellectual form [...]” and paved the way for the “reassessment of Romanism and Virgil”.
Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow recognized an orderly thinking going beyond the treated subject and emphasized the paradigmatic character for the later works of Borchard. Gerhard Schuster noted that the essay was a fragment of a more extensive, long-term work on Italy and, like other landscape studies, was “spoken across to Germany and to Germany”.
literature
Text output
- Rudolf Borchardt: Villa. In: Rudolf Borchardt: Collected works in individual volumes. Prose III. Edited by Marie Luise Borchardt. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3608938087 , pp. 38-70.
Secondary literature
- Andreas Beyer : “Is that the villa?” Rudolf Borchardt in the villa landscape. In: Ernst Osterkamp (ed.): Rudolf Borchardt and his contemporaries (= sources and research on literary and cultural history . Vol. 10 [244]). De Gruyter, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-11-015603-4 , pp. 194-209.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Epilogue. In: Rudolf Borchardt: Collected works in individual volumes. Prose III. Edited by Marie Luise Borchardt. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, p. 525.
- ^ Rudolf Borchardt: Villa. In: Rudolf Borchardt: Collected works in individual volumes. Prose III. Edited by Marie Luise Borchardt. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, p. 40.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 42.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 43.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 46.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 47.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 56.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 60.
- ↑ Borchardt: Prose III. 1996, p. 70.
- ↑ Rudolf Borchardt: Creative restoration . In: Rudolf Borchardt: Collected works in individual volumes. Talk. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1998, p. 230.
- ↑ a b Hartmut Zelinsky : Villa . In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Munich 1989, Vol. 2, p. 926.
- ↑ Andreas Beyer: "Is that the villa?" Rudolf Borchardt in the villa landscape . In: Ernst Osterkamp (Ed.): Rudolf Borchardt and his contemporaries. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1997, p. 196.
- ↑ Quoted from: Andreas Beyer: "Is that the villa?" Rudolf Borchardt in the villa landscape . In: Ernst Osterkamp (Ed.): Rudolf Borchardt and his contemporaries. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1997, p. 196.
- ↑ Quotation and selection from: Andreas Beyer: "Is that the villa?" Rudolf Borchardt in the villa landscape . In: Ernst Osterkamp (Ed.): Rudolf Borchardt and his contemporaries. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1997, p. 195.