GSNA conference: Romantic tendencies in art

The conference is over. I am heading back to NYC in a few hours. I'll try to do a wrap-up of the conference in the days ahead, but I'd like to highlight a couple of presentations, because they allow me to add lovely pictures to the post.

Catriona McLeod's subject was the illustrations of German Märchen in the early 19th century. Only slowly were the Grimm brothers open to including illustrations with their tales. They were, after all, scholars, but they became convinced that they were losing a lucrative publishing opportunity, not to mention that the English had already begun publishing translations of fairy tales with their own illustrations. The brothers kept the business in the family, commissioning Ludwig Emil Grimm. The paternal Grimms monitored Ludwig Emil's drawings, which led to Christianizing the reception of the tales. For instance, in an illustration of "Red Riding Hood" (Rotkäpchen), a Bible appears on the table in the room where Grandmother lies in bed. Another instance can be observed in the lovely illustration above of the tale about the boy who is turned into a fawn. The sister and the deadly river are of course part of the original tale, but not the angel who watches over the pair. I learned a new phrase in Catriona's talk: "discursive interventions," i.e., which describes the function of frontispieces.

Spring Landscape in Rosenthal near Leipzig by C.G. Carus, 1814

Beate Allert organized a session on painting and visual aesthetics focused on Goethe, Carl Gustav Carus, and Ludwig Tieck.  Carus (1789-1869) has been described by Peter Berglar as the "geniale Polyhistor und Polypragmatiker," who was also a medical doctor and psychologist, a "Naturwissenschaftler" and philosopher, painter, aesthetician, and writer, with over 200 writings to his name. (See the Goethe-Handbuch entry on Carus by Anton Philipp Knittel.) Their shared interest in the natural world and in art led to a correspondence between Carus and Goethe in 1818. Goethe had been enthusiastic about a book by Carus on animal anatomy, and the correspondence continued for a decade, during which time Carus sent many of his paintings to Goethe. The letters suddenly stopped three years before Goethe's death. Why is uncertain. Goethe drafted a letter to Carus in late 1831, but it was not sent.

Beate suggested some differences between the two men that may have played a role. Carus had worked on the front during the Napoleonic wars, an experience that left him with many psychic wounds, but that also led to his profound interest in "das unbewusste Seelenleben," a subject about which Goethe was very cautious and that explains much about his aversion to aspects of Romanticism. Carus seems to have been "purposive" in his life, both in medicine, in which he sought to help others, and in art, the practice of which served a therapeutic function for him. Goethe was antipathetic to art serving as therapy or, indeed, for any other purpose.

Contemporary German poets

When I was in Pittsburgh Klaus Post gave me a neat collection of contemporary German poetry, Lyrik von Jetzt zwei (the "two" in the title indicating a second installment of an earlier edition of the work of young poets) . Here is a poem I particularly liked, "Geweihe," by Nora Bossong.

Das Spiel ist abgebrochen. Wie sollen wir

jetzt noch an Märchen glauben? Die Äste

splittern nachts nicht mehr, kein Wild,

das durch die Wälder zieht und das Gewitter

löst sich in Fliegenschwärmen auf. Gleichwohl,

es bleibt dabei: Das Jucken unter unsern Füßen

ist kein Tannenrest, kein Nesselblatt, wir folgen noch

dem Dreierschritt, den sieben Bergen und auch

dem Rehkitz Brüderchen und seiner Liebsten.

Erzähl mir die Geweihe an der Wand, erzähl mir

Nadel in die Fliegen. Im rechten Moment

vergaßen wir zu stolpern.

Schneewittchen schläft.

Let me do a loose translation. The title refers to the antlers of deer, though in this case I think she means the kind you see hanging with hunting trophies, as in the vintage photo below.

The game is over [lit. broken off]. How are we still supposed to believe in fairy tales? The branches no longer crack at night, no deer moves through the woods, and the storm dissolves in swarms of flies.

Nevertheless, there remains: the scratching under our feet is not a bit of pine, not a nettle; we still follow the Three Tasks, the Seven Mountains, and Little Brother and his darling. Tell me the story of the  antlers on the wall, tell me the needles in the flies. We forgot to stumble at the right time. Snow White sleeps.

Nora Bossong is writing about the loss of magic in the world. Thus, the fairy tale imagery, the Three Tasks, for instance, referring to the three-stage rhythm of the tale, the hero with three tasks, the princess who dances three times, and so on. The Seven Mountains is where Snow White lived with the dwarves. And Little Brother (in German "Rehkitz Brüderchen) is from the tale of "Brother and Sister," about a brother and sister who escape from a wicked stepmother into a forest, only to have the boy transformed into a deer after drinking from a spring that she has bewitched.

I also recommend Nora Bossong's novel Gegend, a rather mysterious family story, which was highly praised on its appearance in 2006. The younger writers in Germany -- Bossong is twenty-six -- are returning to earlier literary traditions for inspiration, unlike many of the German poets of my generation (the so-called "68"ers), for whom social relevance often came first.

Picture credit: Ookami Dou.