In court

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In court is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , written in 1776.

History of origin

The young Goethe wrote this literary defense speech by an unmarried mother in 1776, which declares all conventions of the society in which she lives to be null and void. The ballad was published for the first time in 1815 after it had previously only been included in a handwritten collection of poems for Frau von Stein .

At this point in time, Goethe was not yet the secret legation councilor of Duke Carl August . In this role he later had to work as a consultant and appraiser, such as For example, in the case of the child murderer Anna Catharina Höhns (1783), in which Goethe and his colleagues spoke out in favor of the death penalty:

"Since the result of my most insidiously submitted essay agrees completely with both of the thorough votes I have given, I can all the less doubt that I will support them in all parts and declare that, even in my opinion, it might be more advisable to keep the death penalty."

content

I won't tell you who I got it from, the
child in my womb.
“Ugh!” She spits: “the whore there!”
I'm an honest woman.

Who I dared to be with, I won't tell you.
My darling is dear and good, he
wears a gold
chain on his neck, he wears a straw hat.

Should mockery and scorn be borne,
I alone bear the scorn.
I know him well, he knows me well,
and God knows about it too.

Pastor and bailiff you,
please, leave me alone!
It is my child, it remains my child;
You don't give me anything.

shape

The poem, in the tone of a popular ballad , has four stanzas of four lines each. The first and third lines of each stanza have no rhyme , while the second and fourth lines rhyme contrast throughout. The meter is not uniform, but the syllable stress alternates between iambic (see verses 2, 3, 4, 6 etc.) and dactylic meter (see verses 1, 5, 9 etc.).

The Woman in Society of 1770

Late feudalism prevailed in Germany at this time . In comparison to France and England, industrialization came a little later. A large part of the rural population belonged to the uneducated lower class. Many unmarried young women followed the growing need of the growing bourgeoisie for servants and moved to the cities. For many, this meant a major change.

At the same time, bourgeois values ​​began to assert themselves in other social classes: “As a specific bourgeois value, the model of premarital abstinence with the entire complex of bourgeois norms and behavior diffused into other social groups. The ecclesiastical moral regulations enforced by the absolutist state reinforced this process. ”Unmarried young men from the bourgeoisie mostly only married within their own class, which, however, did not exclude sexual intercourse with women from the servant class.

Married men probably also took advantage of the variety and, since they were already bound, they too were de facto irrelevant in the event of pregnancy. So the single mother was on her own.

This is not to say that illegitimate children were only born by maids at the time, and the social status of the lyrical self is also unknown in Goethe's ballad . But the situation in such a case turned out to be particularly difficult for the reasons mentioned.

interpretation

Much remains open in Goethe's poem. It remains unknown who will accuse the expectant mother. It can be assumed that these are secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries who ask the mother to be left alone. Out of wedlock she is pregnant (v. 2), but she deliberately does not go into her secret affair any further. The child's father can just as easily be a peasant with a straw hat or a person from higher social classes with a “golden chain”. The speaker stands by her child and wants to keep it (v. 15 f.).

literature

  • Anja Bachmann: “Who I got it from, I won't tell you”: Goethe's “In court” against the conventions of his time . GRIN Verlag GmbH, Munich 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Anja Bachmann: “From whom I got it, I won't tell you”: Goethe's “In front of the court” against the conventions of his time . GRIN Verlag GmbH, Munich 2005
  2. quoted from: Christoph Braendle, Sunday supplement of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from 5./6. December 1998