Category: German Literature

Nature and Politics in Joseph von Eichendorff’s Life of a Good-for-nothing

This is not a book for our times. Joseph von Eichendorff’s From the Life of a Good-for-nothing / Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts is a novella that is positively soaked in the Romanticism of its day. But while that might make for exciting poetry elsewhere, it doesn’t make the story nearly as interesting as one might hope. While other writers of German Romanticism, such as Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann used their Romantic milieu to create gripping and horrific tales that made use of magic and monsters, Eichendorff’s decision to – on the contrary – use Romanticism’s tropes to tell an ultimately happy and positive story means that the whole thing just becomes drearily cheery and predictable.

An etching of Eichendorff
Joseph von Eichendorff. He wrote, as did many of the German Romantics, a combination of both poetry and prose. From the Life of a Good-for-nothing contains a great many poems interspersed among its pages.

That’s not to say that From the Life of a Good-for-nothing isn’t without its positive aspects. But for me at least they weren’t enough to make me finish reading with a sense that I’d really enjoyed the work.

Plot

The plot of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing is not complex. Our narrator, an Austrian, is kicked out of his father’s house and decides to find his own happiness in the wide world, taking with him his violin. He finds work in a castle, first as a gardener and then as a collector of customs duties, and there he falls in love with one of the women who live within its walls. Events force him out of the castle and onto the road again, and he decides to visit Italy. On the way he meets various other people, from painters to chambermaids, with whom he sings and dances. He also spends a lot of time wandering through nature, in true Romantic style, falling asleep in bushes and dreaming of being a bird. Once in Rome he meets his beloved again, and chases her back to Austria, where they marry.

Music, Nature, and Poetry in From the Life of a Good-for-nothing

I read From the Life of a Good-for-nothing in the original German. Normally, I try to avoid the originals of these novellas like the plague, but I enjoyed Eichendorff’s work more than I expected to. His writing is rather clear. More importantly, From the Life of a Good-for-nothing contains a lot of poetry, which is never fun to read in translation (including below). I’m not going to pretend that the poetry was fantastic, because unfortunately it is infected by the same sickly cheeriness as the rest of the book, but there were a lot of nice ditties, like this one, from the beginning:

If God decides on joy for man,
He sends him into the wide world
And there He shows him all His wonders,
In crag and river, wood and field.

Those lives which lie enclosed at home
Are not refreshed by morning dew;
They only know of children's cradles,
Of worries, burdens, toil and sweat.

Among the hills the river springs,
The larks are whizzing high from joy,
Why shouldn't I be singing with them,
With all my throat and all my chest?

I let the dear lord God be praised:
His rivers, larks, and woods and fields,
And earth and heaven are so great,
And He gives blessings to me too.

The poem really contains within itself the essence of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing. Here nature is seen as the greatest thing that humankind possesses. And real happiness is to live within that nature. Singing and playing music always seem the happiest moments of the narrative, especially because as the novella progresses the narrator finds himself ever more often in the company of people who are willing to join in with him in the playing. Music is a universal language, in contrast to the various other languages encountered by the narrator – French, Latin, and Italian – which he doesn’t speak. He is left isolated and sad when he is unable to speak with and understand people, but using the power of music he is able to overcome language barriers. There is one moment near the end where he joins in a Latin song because the music is accessible to him.

A painting showing a castle which is falling apart and overgrown
Heidelburg Castle by Carl Blechen. Castles were beloved by the Romantics for their history and imaginative potential. The narrator of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing spends lots of time in castles as he travels.

Nature’s great. The narrator spends lots of time wandering around hills and forests and falling asleep in trees. He also regularly expresses a wish to be a bird. This is Romanticism, but it’s not always particularly interesting. It may be that I didn’t understand all of the fine details of the descriptions of forests, but I feel like I understood enough to follow the general idea. The problem with all of this is that the book is hopelessly cliched to modern readers, and far too happy. Don’t get me wrong, I try to be positive in my own life, but the whole worldview of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing is so terribly optimistic it makes me squirm. All you need is the power of music and your own two feet and you can travel the world, make money, and marry the girl of your dreams. It sounds silly.

The Context and Politics of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing

From the Life of a Good-for-nothing was finished by Eichendorff in 1823, and any deeper look at the novella will struggle to avoid the political dimensions that lurk beneath the surface of the work. But first, the context. The German lands, Britain, Austria, and Russia in 1815 had ultimately emerged victorious in the conflict with Napoleon. However, the ideas of the French Revolution were not to be stopped as easily as its political and military leaders were. To combat these ideas, of progress and of freedom, the Austrian foreign minister and later also Chancellor, Klemens Metternich, organised a system of alliances with Russia and Prussia to isolate France and liberalism and also keep such ideas repressed within their own borders by means of increased censorship.

From the Life of a Good-for-nothing, for all its apparent innocence, is not free from the influence of its times, and is ultimately a rather conservative book – just as Romanticism more broadly in some ways was. The novella begins in a world of hard work – a world where even the snow drips “industriously” (emsig), under the shadow of the narrator’s father’s mill. Although the mill is not a modern invention, its inclusion nonetheless reflects the Romantics’ concerns about the destruction of nature for economic reasons. The narrator, instead of continuing to try to conquer nature, goes out and wanders. He finds his joy singing among the trees – a harmony, where the mill otherwise indicated disharmony. His job as a gardener is also implicitly contrasted with that of the millworker. As a gardener he is responsible for ensuring nature’s growth and development, rather than its control and destruction.

The narrator’s reward for his rejection of the stodgy, sedentary life, is the girl of his dreams and a house and wonderful wedding trip. He manages to “earn” more by not trying to “earn” anything within the growing industrial framework of value, and he does all this while being happier than the average worker. Further evidence for the rejection of modernity comes in the portrayal of Rome, where the narrator dreams of nature and doesn’t enjoy the company of the people he meets.

The ending of the novella is not only conservative for its attitude towards hard work. It’s also important to pay attention to class here. The poet’s beloved, who for the majority of From the Life of a Good-for-nothing is referred to as the “Countess”, turns out not to be a noblewoman at all. At the very last moment of the story she declares herself a foundling – thus making her marriage to the narrator suitable from a social perspective. The conservatism of the novella lies, therefore, not simply in a Romantic rejection of early industrialisation and urbanisation, but also in a subtle refusal to allow anything that would go against the existing class structures and propriety. Go into nature if you so wish, but know your place. In light of Marx and the development of radical politics later on in the 19th century this message is dangerously naïve.

Conclusion

Look, don’t get me wrong, From the Life of a Good-for-nothing is a fun and innocent book. It comes from a simpler, kinder time than our own. To come at it with a modern and critical sensibility is to destine yourself for disappointment and frustration. Its escapism is too unreal and impractical to offer any solutions for our own cynical lives, and its ultimate message of idleness being the source of wealth is not particularly inspiring either. If idleness had engendered a mental wealth, but not a physical one, then the book’s message would be both more relevant to our own days, where many are attempting to extract themselves from the rat race. To say we can make money by doing nothing, unless we’re rentiers already, is a stupid lie, and one that distracts from the value of the escapism the book otherwise proposes. At least the poetry’s good.

For more German poetry, have a look at my thoughts on a few pieces of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work here. For more interesting examples of German novellas, see Storm’s Aquis Submersus and Meyer’s Marriage of the Monk.

Have you read From the Life of a Good-for-nothing? Am I wrong to dislike it? Have I completely misunderstood the whole thing? Why not leave a comment!

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm
Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle
A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Poetry of Crisis

Introduction: Hofmannsthal, the enfant terrible of Vienna

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is perhaps the greatest claimant to the title of the German enfant terrible, placing him alongside Mikhail Lermontov in Russia and, most famously of all, Arthur Rimbaud in France in the German canon. Like those two poets Hofmannsthal displayed precocious talents at a young age – in his case he frequented a literary salon from the age of about fifteen with his father accompanying him since he was too young to go alone. And like Rimbaud, Hofmannsthal also ceased writing poetry suddenly to concentrate on other parts of his life. The reason usually identified by the critics is that he lost his belief in language as a tool to convey thought and the reality he saw around him. This crisis is memorably expressed in his fictional “Lord Chandos Letter” to Francis Bacon, in which the former man (a surrogate for Hofmannsthal) explains how language has failed him.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal shown in a photograph
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). Don’t let his dates fool you – he wrote almost all of his poetry before the turn of the century, before settling down into gloom and reactionary politics.

I am no Hofmannsthal expert, but I have read through his small poetic corpus a few times and want to share two aspects of his poetry that make him an interesting poet to me. Though the crisis that ultimately turns him away from poetry appears to be a linguistic one, I think there are more tensions lying under the surface of his perfectly tuned poesy than just ones of language. As ever, unmarked translations are mine.

Language Dies with a Whimper

By the time Hofmannsthal in 1902 actually penned his imaginary letter complaining of his inability to write it was long since he had written anything substantial. In my copy of his poems there are collected those poems he did not see worth publishing in his 1922 Gedichte. Some of these aren’t very good, but interestingly enough as 1895/6 – the apogee of his talents – passed he began to write several little couplets, which are scarcely poems at all. Instead, they seem a halfway point between the faith in language expressed poems like “A Dream of Great Magic” and the collapse of that faith expressed in the “Lord Chandos Letter”. At only two lines long, they seem positively Beckettian in attitude – the attempt to salvage some kind of meaning from the gigantic void that language’s failure has left. Some of them are, though bitter, thought-provoking and beautiful. Hopefully my translations are too!

Names

“Visp’s the name of a frothing brook; another name is Goethe. 
There came the name from the thing; but here the bearer created its clang.”

This poem is written by a poet who is very aware of words and their effects; but not only that these effects exist but how they have the capacity to be created and remade by a sufficiently talented person, like a Goethe.

Words

“There are some words that hit like hammers. But others
You swallow like hooks and swim on and do not yet know it.”

I love this one. It captures one of those inarticulable feelings you get when you read something truly superb. You know that the best works and their words will stay with you, but Hofmannsthal puts his finger on an image for how they do it. “Words”, here, is more specifically phrases, but I think that’s clear enough from the context and of little importance anyway. That title sounds better to my ear than “phrases” would.

The Art of the Storyteller

“Do you wish to depict the murder? Well show me the hound in the yard: /
Now show me at the same time in the eye of the dog the shadows of the killing.”

I think in this one the scepticism about language’s ability to reflect reality is clearly manifest. It was even clearer when I accidentally misread “murder” for “world” in the German because I wasn’t being careful. Nonetheless, Hofmannsthal is challenging our ability to depict the world in any meaningful way. Meaning here is removed by the successive impulse to get into smaller and smaller parts of reality – first the dog, then his eye, and then the shadows of the killing itself. It becomes too much, too detailed. We’re overloaded with information we cannot possibly manage to represent, and so representation itself becomes suspect. While the modernist fiction writers tried to go further and further into the subconscious, Hofmannsthal is expressing a feeling of futility in such an idea. It will never not fail at showing everything we are. This is the poem of one who will shortly give up on poetry.

Hofmannsthal’s Poetical (and Political) Guilt and Doubt

Late in life Hofmannsthal, the Austrian aristocrat, became a great reactionary. The loss the empire over which he and his fellow Viennese had ruled through military failure in the First World War was too much to bear for a soul like his, one already inclined by birth towards that which is conservative and noble in temperament. But we ought to give him his due – he was young once. And in his poems, there is more a tension between an artistic temperament that seeks to live creating art-for-art’s-sake, channelling a certain strand of Nietzsche, and an awareness of the responsibilities that he has for his people as a result of his position in society. A sense of his duty as a human being fighting against his sense of his duty as an artist. I think it is this tension that produces one of his most well-known poems, “Manche Freilich…”/”Some, of course…”:

Some, of course…

Some, of course, will have to die below,
Where the heavy rudders of the ship are striving;
Others live at the helm above,
And know the birds’ flights and the stars’ lands.

Some have to lie down with heavy limbs
Among the roots of tortured lives;
Others find they've seats arranged
Up by the Sibyls and the queens,
And there they sit as if at home,
With easy bodies and easy hands.

 But a shadow falls up from that life
 Into the other life above,
 And the easy are bound to the heavy
 Just as they’re bound to earth and air:
 
 I can’t remove forgotten tragedies
 That plagued past peoples from my eyes;
 Nor keep my frightened soul safe from
 The silent fall of far-off stars.
 
 Many fates are woven beside my own
 And through them all a presence plays;
 And my part is more than just this life’s 
 Slightest flame or slender lyre. 

A German version of the poem can be found here

Analysis: a political poem?

I’m not entirely sure what this poem means, but I’ve learned it and had it going around in my head for a few months, so I’ve at the very least been thinking about it. The sticking point, critically speaking, is in the first line: “Some, of course, will have to die below”/”Manche freilich müssen drunten sterben”. It’s hard to know what tone this is written in. It seems at first to indicate a resigned attitude towards equality and social progress and, if not an endorsement of existing hierarchies, then at the very least a suggestion that the hierarchies ought not to be tampered with. But it could be read as anything from complete support to a more insidious, ironic tone. I, at least, can’t read it without hearing irony. The description of the ship is designed to show inequality, without being so political as to start demanding solutions.

A picture of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born at almost the same time as Hofmannsthal, and into even more luxury. But unlike Hofmannsthal, whose “Some, of course” shows hesitation before action, Wittgenstein’s life contains many heroic attempts to connect with his fellow men and women.

Instead, the focus seems to be on the existence of inequality and the need, not for solutions so much as for understanding and a sense of personal responsibility. Hofmannsthal here is trying to feel what anybody in his position as an aristocrat, and indeed anybody in a position of relative wealth, can easily forget to feel – a sense of awareness of, and compassion and responsibility towards those who luck and other circumstances have not left as well-off as they have themselves. It is easy enough, I know from experience, to ignore the plight of others as being almost unreal, to dismiss the homeless as somehow deserving of their fate, and criminals as being exclusively bad people. Of course, there are bad people among the criminals, just as there are dangerous people among the homeless, but that cannot be justification to look away and hide from the obligation to pay attention.

Interconnectedness as solution

Hofmannsthal is keenly aware that he does not need to take any part in society whatsoever, except, if he wants, as an artist. A life of aesthetic and creative pleasure lies open to him in a way that it is for almost nobody else. He can, in the language of the poem, look at the birds and the stars, and sit and feast well into the early morning. But this life becomes, in contemplation of the reality facing him as a conscientious human being, inadequate – “my part is more than just this life’s slightest flame or slender lyre” – the lines reject making that life of luxuriant aestheticism the entirety of his world. Not only do the fruits of that life seem to be unworthy, Hofmannsthal also appears to feel a kind of guilt from it, suggested by “I can’t remove forgotten tragedies / That plagued past peoples from my eyes”.

He begins to see being fully aware of “the presence” / “Dasein” that runs through all things as the goal of his life. With that there comes a view of the world that sees all life as valuable for being a reflection of this central idea of its very existence. It’s not a religious idea per se, so much as the idea of our interconnectedness made clearer. Instead of seeing himself as isolated from other people because of his social status, Hofmannsthal here reworks his understanding of his position to allow himself the ability to feel keenly the value of other people, even as he doesn’t let it become a political statement. He disestablishes the hierarchies of his mind, instead of concerning himself with destroying the hierarchies of the world. In essence, he adds compassion to his conservatism. It is, I think, a somewhat heroic gesture.

Conclusion – Reasons to read Hofmannsthal

Hofmannsthal is a pretty cool poet. What I like the most about his poetry is how little there is of it, and how good what there is is. No matter how productively-minded you may be, there’s enough time to go back and reread things, and think about what they have to say. The German is attractive to the ear, and the topics that he deals with are usually interesting enough. That sounds like a lukewarm recommendation, and perhaps it is, but I think it’s difficult to capture a sense of beauty when you recommend something anyway. His poetry is beautiful and filled with pleasant turns and wondrous images. He is neither a great thinker nor a great soul in his poetry, but for a young man who stopped writing his poems only a year or two older than I am now, it’s amazing what he did achieve. Check him out.

For more German poetry, I’ve translated some pieces by Theodor Storm here.