2023-04-28 08:40:00
His cocaine was called freedom
Cover of an old Atta Troll issue
What: pa/akg-images
Suddenly there are bears everywhere. In the cinema, on the sheep pasture, on drugs and unfortunately also on the heels of joggers. High time to remember the most famous bear in German literature. What Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll had to do with a “Mohrenfürsten” and a magical pug.
DThis bear doesn’t get high on cocaine, but on liberty, equality, and fraternity. He doesn’t kill joggers, but allows himself to be forced to dance for a while for money. And when he finally pulls away from his bear handler, he doesn’t shed sheep’s blood, it only drives him straight back to his children.
Atta Troll in Heinrich Heine’s epic verse of the same name is a very German bear. He can’t dance, does gymnastics like Jahn and his star student Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, whose name is mentioned literally, and rejects water and soap as a non-German Gallic refinement, just like the two gymnasts – at least that’s what Heinrich Heine claims. Atta Troll, written in 1841 and first published in 1843, is a key epic. Also because and not only because it is about the hunt for a bear that disturbs people, it fits well into this week.
“Atta Troll” bears the subtitle “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and thus identifies itself as Heine’s forerunner to the much better-known work “Deutschland. A winterstory”. When the nights get warm, the bears crawl out of their dens. They have to put on new fat, and woe to the people or sheep who get in their way. However, the probability of something like this happening in Germany in the mid-19th century was lower than it is today. The last bear in the Thuringian Forest was shot in the 18th century. Heine had to move his epic to the border area between Spain and France, even if the animal was a symbol of German conditions.
In the Pyrenees, the poet can have fairy-tale characters appear that would no longer be imaginable in Germany, disenchanted by the railways, early industrialization and the pre-revolutionary battle of opinions. The narrator goes bear hunting with Laskara, the mute son of the witch Uraka. While the witch casts the magic ball, he talks to a pug, who turns out to be an enchanted Swabian poet who wanted to defend his virtue against the witch’s encroachments.
Even if Heine protests against putting a message behind his “Atta Troll”, he gets involved in the literary-political debates of his time: in addition to the Swabians, his colleague Freiligrath is also mocked for his poem “Der Mohrenfürst”. Heine feels closer to romanticism than these poetic opponents, although its living representatives have long since become reactionary and catholic. Heine once again evokes the irony, the formal richness and the erotic liberality, which were also elements of Romanticism: “I wrote … in the whimsical dreamy manner of that Romantic school, where I spent the most pleasant years of my youth and finally beat the schoolmaster.” What he learned there shows Heine with the four-legged, non-rhyming trochaea in which the epic dances along. They prove his virtuosity and yet seem to float lightly.
#Heinrich #Heines #Atta #Troll #Mohrenfürsten #magical #pug