German Literature by Nicholas Boyle

Author:Nicholas Boyle [Boyle, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199206599
Published: 2008-04-18T04:00:57+00:00

ature er 9. The Poor Poet (1839) by Carl Spitzweg (1808–85), a painter of humorous scenes of middle-class life. This would-be ‘Romantic’

outsider, scanning his hexameters to the scheme scratched on the wall German Lit

beside him, betrays his bourgeois character by his nightcap character of the writing of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797 – 1848). As a member of an established Westphalian noble family she would seem socially to belong to the ancien régime as much as Mörike. But she no more fi tted the 18th-century model of the writer than he, though for different reasons: she was a Catholic, and a woman, the fi rst great woman poet of modern German literature. Unlike Mörike, who seems to receive passively the mystery of experience, she fi ghts to gain control of memory, pain, and guilt, but cannot be sure of victory. For her the ancient days may conceal an unnameable menace. Familiar images take on a quite new connotation: the distant sound of a horn in the valley recalls the lost courage of youth; the shadowy mountains before moonrise seem a sinister circle of judges. Some of the most famous motifs in poems of Goethe and Schiller – Prometheus, 90

the lake, the cup of life cast into the waves – are reinterpreted in one of her last poems as symbols of moral nemesis. In an extraordinary – no doubt unconscious – parallel to Blake, precisely based on botanical fact, she then asks if she has to be destroyed in order that her poetry should preserve this corrective to the tradition she has inherited, as the thistle fl ower is consumed by the larva of the gall-fl y, which reputedly has medicinal properties:

Flüstern oft hör’ich dein Würmlein klein,

Das dir heilend im Schoß mag weilen,

Ach, soll ich denn die Rose sein,

The age of mat

Die zernagte, um andre zu heilen?

erialism (1832–1914)

[I often hear the whispering of that little worm of yours, that perhaps lingers healing in your womb. Alas, am I then to be the rose, gnawed apart to heal others?]

Romantic motifs – the doppelgänger, hints of devilry, a tree associated with both crime and retribution – run through Droste-Hülshoff ’s best-known prose narrative, The Jew’s Beech ( Die Judenbuche, 1842, not her own title). But they point not to some other level of existence but to the moral meaning of a story in which four, partly unexplained, violent deaths are shown to originate in the neglect of basic principles of humility, honesty, charity, and Catholic religious practice. The Jewish community, though treated with brutal contempt by their Christian neighbours, appear as the guardians of the moral law fundamental to Christianity but they remain mysterious and hardly knowable. Even the identity of the principal character is fractured and indeterminate. The centre of Droste’s life, as of Mörike’s, lies outside any world that she can depict with the literary resources she has inherited, dependent as 91

they ultimately are on a post-Lutheran theology that equates personal identity with an omnipotent state to which she owed no allegiance.

The

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