Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff

Did You Know?

• Theodor W. Adorno stated that 'Unconsciously Eichendorff's unleashed romanticism leads right up to the threshold of modernism'.
• Eichendorff's late religious and political writings were commissioned works, while his poetry represents a highly personal perspective.

Biography

Eichendorff was born in 1788 at Lubowitz Castle in Lubowitz near Ratibor in Upper Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Adolf Freiherr von Eichendorff, was a Prussian officer, and his mother, Karoline née Freiin von Kloche, came from an aristocratic Roman Catholic family. The family sold estates in Deutsch-Krawarn, Kauthen, and Wrbkau and acquired Lubowitz Castle from his mother-in-law; its Rococo reconstruction nearly bankrupted them. Young Joseph was close to his older brother Wilhelm. From 1793 to 1801 they were home-schooled by tutor Bernhard Heinke. Joseph began writing diaries in 1798, recording weather, finances, and early poems, and was already aware of his parents' financial difficulties. In 1801 he noted his father traveling to Breslau to flee creditors. His sister Luise Antonie Nepomucene Johanna was born in 1804. After final exams, both brothers attended lectures at the University of Breslau and the Protestant Maria-Magdalena-Gymnasium. Eichendorff valued theatre more than formal education, recording 126 plays and concerts visited. Together with Wilhelm, he studied law and humanities in Halle an der Saale from 1805 to 1806, a city near Jena, a focal point of the Frühromantik. They frequently attended the theatre of Lauchstädt, where the Weimar court theatrical company performed plays by Goethe.

Growth of a Romanticist

The two writers who most influenced Eichendorff's artistic development were Friedrich Schlegel, who established the term romantisch in German literature, and Joseph Görres. Both movements emphasized the individual, subjective, irrational, imaginative, personal, spontaneous, emotional, visionary, and transcendental over classical precepts, and held the idea of a 'unity of poetry and life'. Eichendorff shared Schlegel's view that the world was a naturally and eternally 'self-forming artwork', and used the metaphor that nature was a great picture book pitched outside by God. Arnim's and Brentano's studies of the Volkslied deeply influenced Eichendorff's poetry and poetology. Their anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of songs about love, soldiers, wandering, and children's songs, was an important source for the Romantic movement.

Eichendorff's poetical style

Eichendorff's poetry includes many metric forms, from simple elegiac couplets and stanzas to sonnets, but his main focus was on poems imitating folk songs. His lyricism was directly influenced by Brentano and Arnim. Following the model of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, he uses simple words with added meaning beyond dictionary definitions, giving his words rich connotative power, imaginative appeal, and sound. Certain expressions and formulas, sometimes criticized as cliché, represent a conscious reduction in favor of emblematics. In Görres' poetology, nature speaks, but the wonderful song sleeping in each thing must be woken by the poet's word; one notable example is the Zauberwort (magic word). His poem Wünschelrute is about finding such a Zauberwort. Besides wandering, the two other main motifs of his poetry are the passing of time (transience) and nostalgia. Time has a metaphysical dimension: each day and night has such a dimension. Morning evokes the impression that all nature was created just in that moment, while evening often acts as a mysterium mortis with the persona pondering transience and death. Nostalgia is described by some critics as a phenomenon of infinity, with various interpretations: one critic notes the Taugenichts feels continually homesick; another distinguishes longing and melancholy within nostalgia; Theodor W. Adorno called Eichendorff a poet of homesickness, not of the homeland; another view sees an unstable equilibrium of homesickness and wanderlust.

Works

Eichendorff's first publication of some poems appeared in Ast's Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst under the pseudonym 'Florens' in 1808. His novel Ahnung und Gegenwart, with a foreword by de la Motte Fouqué, was published in 1815. Das Marmorbild appeared in Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1819. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts was published together with Das Marmorbild in 1826. Other works include the novel Dichter und ihre Gesellen (1834), the story Eine Meerfahrt (written 1836, published posthumously 1864), Das Schloß Dürande (1837), and Die Entführung (1839). He wrote dramas such as Krieg den Philistern! (1823), Meierbeth's Glück und Ende (1827), Ezelin von Romano (1828), Der letzte Held von Marienburg (1830), and Die Freier (1833). His poetry collection Gedichte von Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff appeared in 1837. Later works include the verse story Julian (1853) and the epic poems Robert und Guiscard and Lucius (both 1855). He also produced critical works: Über die ethische und religiöse Bedeutung der neuen romantischen Poesie in Deutschland (1847), Der deutsche Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts in seinem Verhältniss zum Christenthum (1851), and Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands (1857).