Hiking motif

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The hiking motif is a literary and artistic motif of Romanticism , a European art and style epoch between 1795 and 1848. In the performing arts and novels , the romantic wanderer often vacillates between wanderlust and homesickness , and the wanderer often becomes familiar with the Christian Middle Ages in various ways confronted and nature untouched by civilization becomes a fairytale world. Hiking is also justified with a critical stance towards social conventions.

Motifs are, for example, the blue flower , mythical creatures such as fairies and ghosts , as well as wanderlust and longing .

More hiking motifs

The search

Here the cosmopolitan attitude of individual characters on the educational journey is underlined. It also appears in connection with stations of the journey through life and thus depictions of self-realization , the search for experience and maturation.

Adventure

Often it is used in conjunction with the motif of adventure . Inner restlessness and the search for divine order (after the people were disappointed in the political system of the French Revolution) often appear in connection with the Wanderer. With the exception of the knightly heroes, the religious seekers and the strollers, who gain an overview of the whole of existence along the way, hikers are usually inspired by the spirit of contradiction to conventional life at home. They carry the traits of the pure idealists and the gates , the adventurer and the thinker, the longing scamp and the world revolutionary innovator.

meaning

The motif contains a polar structure: on the one hand it stands for a positively perceived desire for freedom, on the other hand it serves as a warning of the dangers of restless wandering in the distance. The motif is also inextricably linked to individual figures such as Ahasver , Cain and Odysseus .

Examples

  1. Often the migration is forced and the wanderer wanders about homeless and searching. So z. B. King Lear (Shakespeare) has come across a foreign country and seeks shelter in vain. The exposure calls for a reorientation of the hiker and corresponds to an "expulsion from paradise". The hike becomes a test that steers and purifies people.
  2. In Romanticism, the representation of wandering is much more emotionally related.

Longing for the unknown makes the hiker pull into the distance. "He leaves purposeful notions of his homeland behind, gets involved in a variety of adventures, looks at the beauty of nature and finally sees the whole of existence as a continued wandering " (cf. also The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien )

In the novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderings by Ludwig Tieck one has an important document of the motive within the German early romanticism. The wandering motif also becomes clear in the songs of a traveling journeyman (4-part song cycle by Gustav Mahler ), in which a journeyman goes on a journey and leaves an unfulfilled love in his homeland behind. In addition, Joseph von Eichendorff's From the Life of a Good-for-All is an important work from the Romantic period in which the hiking motif occupies a central position.

literature

  • Wolfgang Albrecht, Hans-Joachim Kertscher (ed.): Wanderzwang - Wanderlust. Forms of spatial and social experience between the Enlightenment and early industrialization. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-484-81011-4 .
  • Heinrich Bosse, Harald Neumeyer: "Winter blooms beautifully there". Son of the Muses and Wanderlied around 1800. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1995, ISBN 978-3-7930-9116-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. Daemmrich, Ingrid; Daemmrich, Horst (Hrsg.): Topics and motifs in literature. A manual. 2. revised, ext. Edition. Metzler, Tuebingen.