foudebassan (foudebassan) wrote in gedichte, @ 2008-04-09 21:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | aufklaerung, goethe, sturm und drang |
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832) is something of a giant in German literature. The foreign establishments meant to spread German culture abroad (equivalents of the British council or Alliance Française institutions) are named after him.
He and his younger sister Cornelia were the only surviving children of a wealthy "imperial councelor" (honorific charge that came with an significant annual pension) and a much younger noble girl. He got a well-rounded education and studied law, got the degree, but failed to establish himself in this branch because he was too busy writing. His novel The Sufferings of the Young Werther became a best-seller, young people all around Europe started killing themselves because of it, and one of his fans, the duke of Weimar, offered him a job in his court. Goethe accepted, fell in love with Charlotte von Stein (it lasted for ten years and 1700 letters, but we don't know whether they slept together eventually or not). But he wasn't that fond of the court and "escaped" during one of his vacations, and left to visit Italy. Greece was under Turkish occupation at the time, so he had to stop his travelling in Sicily (he was fluent in Greek and Latin, hence the need to visit those two countries).
When he came back he became one of the duke's ministers, met Christiane Vulpius, a middle-class woman whom he lived with and eventually married, and Schiller, with whom he had what is probably the best-known literary friendship ever. Goethe was not overly fond of Schiller's Rousseauist idealism and Schiller couldn't stand Goethe's stand-offish conservatism, but, like two BNFs that friend each other just to know what the other is up to, they never stopped exchanging letters and discussing things, most of all science (Goethe was an accomplished physicist, botanist and geologue).
Schiller died in 1805 and Christiane in 1816. Goethe went on travelling - he got the Légion d'Honneur from Napoléon himself - and being active on literary, philosophical and scientifical front alike. He fell in love with 16-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow and even asked for her hand in marriage (in vain! he was over 70 by then!). On his deathbed he gestured towards the window and asked for someone to lift the heavy curtains ("mehr Licht!" = "more light") before snuffing it. These last words are widely interpreted as meaning "more reason, more science, more enlightment!" and thus rank in a good place in any anthology of famous last words.
(I do prefer his "Wer fremde Sprache nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen" though.)
Not only was Goethe extremely prolific, he also transcended given genres. He always wanted to become a librettist, and a significant portion of his works (about 1/5) are actually lines for operas. His novels, Werther or the Wilhelm Meister trilogy, definitely belong to the "classics"; so do his theater plays, first of all Faust. His works on human anatomy and light diffragmentation were significant innovations at the time. He is also the only genius I know who wrote for women's magazines: when his Greek-themed plays became hits, ladies wanted to dress like the heroines, and he penned careful articles detailing how exactly the front of a chiton ought to be gathered right under the subjects's breasts. He also loved drawing and painting and did a lot that, despite acknowledging that it wasn't his forte.
And, of course, there is his poetry. There too he carried out significant innovations, giving a lot less importance to form, and opening it up to more popular forms and languages. He wanted poetry to express something - as objectively as possible - not serve some abstract ideal of what a poem should be like.
Today's example is not my personal favourite, but it is one of the two greatest German poems according to French scholars (care to guess what the other one is?). It was made into a lied by Schubert. (ETA: Thank sylvanawood for the link)
I'm pinching the translation from wikipedia. I don't know what the etiquette is in these cases, am I allowed to copy-paste? In doubt, I'd rather just link to it: Der Erlkönig.
Now this poem is cunningly disguised as a folk song. Its theme is not lyrical, there is no love-forsaken first person narrator singing under the stars here. It tells the kind of tale old women like to tell with their own simple words during long winter evenings, complete with fantasy/horror/surreal motives.
If it can be called a ballad for this reason, it is, however, very carefully constructed. The narrative structure is just about perfect, as you can see for yourself: the poem is divided into four voices, an omniscient narrator at the beginning and end (8 lines); the father (6 lines); the child (8 lines) and the mysterious alder king (10 lines). There is an unbalance, the mysterious alder king gets more space than the father, so he wins, and gets both the child and the title of the poem.
Who is this Erlenkönig? The short story is, we don’t know. The king of the elves (Elfenkönig) is a folkloric figure from Denmark usually associated with death that Herder (contemporary poet) used before Goethe. But this one is an alder king, not an elven king.
It is very fashionable to give a psychoanalytical reading to this poem. The first and last strophes are like a “frame of reality” around the dream, the inner mental dialogue that goes on when unchecked by wakeful thought. The father’s voice would be the rational conscience; the alder king, the deep dark and sexually charged subconscious; the child becomes the barrier behind them. When it breaks – when the child dies – psychoanalysis both begins and ends, because all the shrinks around us keep telling us to analyse our deeper feelings but being able to hide complex things within ourselves is what makes us human rather than animals. So we need the first and last strophes, on either side of the poems to shield ourselves from the outbreak.
I am a bit sceptical, since the poem pre-dates Freud by some years.
It could also be understood as an allegory for paedophilia, with the alder king as the (dreamt) incarnation of a everything a child could have to fear, including from his own father. What is that man doing in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with a sick child tight in his arms, in the first place? Children belong with their mothers, and ought to be in their own beds at night, especially if they’re sick. Is that a surreal rendering of what reality couldn’t otherwise be expressed in a poem? The child’s death would then make a parallel to the more traditional death and the maiden theme, when sex equals the annihilation of all that is young and tender and blossoming and virginal. Michel Tournier plays around with that interpretation; there’s a film adaptation byVolker Schlöndorff.
Lastly, this poem was written the year of Goethe’s father died. Some see in it the conflict between the childish desire to know what’s going on (the child realises it is dying and is looking for an explanation that makes sense to its limited consciousness) and the adult knowledge that sometimes, it’s better not to know. The father here is, to a large extent, in denial – for him to take a sick child across the country at night, perhaps in a last-ditch attempt to get him to the doctor’s on time, shows he’s still hoping against all rational expectation. For all his apparent calm, he could well be the irrational one here.
Ten points if you guess what poem there will be on the menu tomorrow...