2024-05-05 13:06:14
Literature Sturm und Drang
Falling in love, spring, feelings of happiness – what Goethe knew about May
Status: 05.05.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Like Goethe and Friederike once did: lovers in the countryside
Quelle: Getty Images/Digital Vision/Janina Steinmetz
In 1771, youth was invented in German literature. Goethe loved Friederike and wrote the most beautiful verses of Sturm und Drang. It was a literary revolution that continues to have an impact today.
Love is a heavenly force that can change the whole world or at least life for the lover. Sometimes just the course of literary history. When the 21-year-old Johann Wolfgang Goethe (then far from being a “von” Goethe) met the pastor’s daughter Friederike Brion in Sesenheim, northeast of Strasbourg, in the fall of 1770, the development of German literature took a different course. It was not the first time that Goethe had fallen in love, but unlike his frustrating years as a student in Leipzig, the feelings now drove him to a poetic breakthrough.
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“How wonderfully / Nature shines for me! / How the sun shines! / How the fields laugh!” are the famous first verses of the “May Song” written the following spring and originally called “May Festival”. In a new folk song-like sound, youthful enthusiasm, experience of nature and the rush of love found their unheard of, jubilant expression.
“Flowers emerge/ From every branch/ And a thousand voices/ From the bushes// And joy and bliss/ from every breast.” The Goethe editor Erich Trunz wrote that here – for the first time in German poetry – “is being young “became a sound.” A lyrical youth revolt.
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Theorists like Herder, whom Goethe also met in Strasbourg, had already mentally prepared this literary youth movement. The “Sturm und Drang” was a time-specific disposition that drew everyday experiences such as amorous spring fever or the enjoyment of nature into its vortex and took the simple words – “happiness”, “lust”, “sun”, “air”, etc. – with it charged to maximum luminosity. “Oh girl, girl,/ How I love you!/ How your eye twinkles,/ How you love me!”
In fact, Goethe’s relationship with Friederike, which was already over in the summer of 1771, was ultimately rather painful, overshadowed by accusations and feelings of guilt, the details of which generations of German scholars have racked their brains over. It is not possible to clarify which experiences exactly underlay the rousing lyrical upswings, no matter how much “Friederikenforschung” speculated. The “fragments of a great confession,” as Goethe wanted his works to be understood in retrospect, could no longer be put together, especially since almost all of the letters between the lovers are lost.
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The Sesenheim idyll that so stimulated the imagination of Goethe’s readers can (almost) only be found in the poems. They first appeared in a magazine in 1775 – by this time Goethe was already the famous author of “Götz” (1773) and “Werther” (1774).
Just like the equally famous “Welcome and Farewell,” the “Mail Song” became a timeless expression of subjective intensity of experience. Everything here depends on an inconspicuous pronoun: “How wonderfully it shines mir nature!” Because of these verses, May will forever be the month of Sturm und Drang and love.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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