No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The marked loneliness of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's literary career and position must impress even a casual observer. Not that she lacked affinities with the literature of her time. It is easy to point out Romantic elements in her: her cult of the past, particularly the legends and ancient customs of her homeland; her predilection for “die Nacht-seite der Natur”, the weird, the supernatural; her occasional irony; her conviction that “Sehnsucht” is the true source of poetic inspiration. It is easy, on the other hand, to point out in her work the emergent Realism which was to succeed Romanticism (though there is more of it already present in Romanticism than is generally recognized). In conscious opposition to “einer gewissen romantischen Schule”, Annette insisted “dass ich nur im Naturgetreuen, durch Poésie veredelt, etwas leisten kann”, thus defining herself as a Poetic Realist in the very heyday of Young Germany.
1 See her letter of October 10 (?), 1842, to Levin Schücking: “Es ist doch sonderbar, dafi zum Dichten eigentlich schlechtes Wetter gehört—ein neuer Beweis,.dafi nur die Sehnsucht poetisch ist und nicht der Besitz” (Briefe von A. v. Droste-Hülshoff und Levin Schücking, ed. Muschler, 3. Aufl. [Leipzig: Grunow, 1928], p. 113). This echoes A. W. Schlegel's differentiation of Classical and Romantic poetry in the first of his Vienna lectures of 1808: “die Poésie der Alten war die des Besitzes, die unsrige ist die der Sehnsucht”, etc. Annette's own Heidebilder, written in Meersburg in longing recollection of distant scenes, are an apt verification of this view.
2 Letter of December 15, 1838, to Schlüter; Die Briefe der Dichterin Annette von Drosle-Hülshoff, ed. Cardauns (Munster: Aschendorff, 1909), p. 177, m. Hereafter, unless otherwise noted, letters are cited from this edition as Bfe., t., iii., and b., referring respectively to top, middle and bottom of the page. The newest collection of Annette's Briefe, ed. Kem-minghausen (Jena: Diederichs, 1944), 2 v., has not been accessible to me.
3 Nachlese. Ungedruckte Verse und Briefe der Droste, etc., ed. Kemminghausen (Bochum: Kamp, 1934), p. 41 f.
4 Cf. Ada M. Klett's illuminating essay comparing Annette and Emily Dickinson, in M.f.d.U., xxxvii (1945), 37 ff. A number of affinities could also be pointed out between Annette and Emily Bronte, her exact contemporary.
5 Letter of June 4,1835; Bfe., pp. 79–80.
6 Quoted by Kreiten, Anna Elisabeth Freiin von Droste-Hülshof (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1887), p. 457.
7 Letter of October 31, 1844; Bfe. v. A. v. D.-H. u. L. S., ed. Muschler, p. 292.
8 A remark recorded by Schlüter in 1835; cf. Hùffer, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff und ihre Werke, 3. Ausg. ed. Cardauns (Gotha: Perthes, 1911), p. 178.
9 For this and other similarities to Otto Ludwig, see my article “Otto Ludwig and the Process of Poetic Creation”, in PMLA, LX (1945), 860 ff. There is a similarity even in the physical affliction of these two poets.
10 See her letter to Sprickmann, February 8,1819; Bfe., pp. 18, m.; 19, t.
11 Letter of February 8, 1819; Bfe., p. 19, t.
12 Letter of December 20,1814; Bfe., p. 4, m.
13 Letter of June 4,1835; Bfe., p. 80, m.
14 Letter of May 4,1842; Bfe., ed. Muschler, p. 50.
15 Letter of February 4, 1847; quoted by Hùffer, op. cit., p. 318 f.; also in A. v. D. H., Samtliche Werke, ed. Schwering (Berlin, etc. : Bong, n.d.), vi, 92.
16 Letter of June 4,1835; Bfe., p. 80, b.
17 A. v. D. - ., Samtliche Werke, im Verein mit Bertha Badt und Kurt Pinthus herausg. v. Karl Schulte Kemminghausen (Mûnchen: Millier, 1925, 1930), four vols., of which vol. 1 and vol. 2 have each two parts. In my text, I add references to vol. and p. of this edition only for the prose, and the longer verse, works.
18 See her letters to Schücking in Musc Mer's edition, pp. 224, 230 ff., 258 ff., 267.
19 See, of various instances, Bfe., ed. MuscMer, p. 314.
20 Letter of July 19,1838; Bfe., p. 170, m.
21 Personally, Annette's family were a great comfort and support to her; for her poetic calling they represented a major handicap (others being her sex, “Stand”, and religion). A passage in a letter to Schluter gives us a picture of the forty-year-old poet at the beck and call of her mother: “In Ruschhaus habe ich Tag für Tag die Besuche empfangen, Be-richte der Dienstboten angehort und mich meiner Mutter sehr wiederholtem Anrufen persönlich gestellt. In der Tat, ich war dessen so gewohnt, daß ich nicht muckste, in der Hàlfte eines Verses abzubrechen, was mich manchen guten Gedanken oder manchen eben gefundenen Reim gekostet hat.” (Letter of November 3, 1836; Bfe., p. 86 f.)
22 Letter of March 23, 1837; Bfe., p. 114 f.
23 Letter of February 11,1838; Bfe., p. 164, m.
24 Letter of July 20,1841; Bfe., p. 391, m.
25 It should be noted that Annette, dubious of her own gift in this direction, undertook Perdu only with reluctance (see her letter of April 26-28, 1840, to Schluter; Bfe., pp. 217–219), and never allowed it to be printed.
26 “Und dann war ihr Auge trotz einer beispiellosen Schárfe fur ganz nahe Gerücktes von einer ebenso grofien Blodsichtigkeit fur das Entferntere—sie hat die Welt stets nur durch einen Schleier gesehen und verschwimmende Umrisseder Dinge”—A. Freiin v. D. -Hs. Gesammelte Werkein 3 Bdn., 2. Aufl. (Stuttgart: Cotta, [1898]), 1,42.
27 R. M. Meyer, Deutsche Charaktere (Berlin: Hofmann, 1897), pp. 138 ff.
28 In the poem Christi Himmelfahrt (in the Geistliches Jahr), line 12, she even transfers the green hedgerows of Westphalia to Palestine. Annette was a forerunner of “Heimatkunst” even more than of Impressionism. Her characters, as well as her settings, are Westphalian.
29 Letter to Schluter from Eppishausen, Switzerland, October 22, 1836; Bfe., p. 85, m.
30 Letter.of June 20,1844; Bfe., ed. Muschler, p. 276.
31 Letter to Schlüter, November 9,1836; in Samtl. Wke., ed. Schwering, vi, 35.
32 As a matter of fact, high-flying birds (eagles, vultures, kites, gulls, larks) are a not infrequent motif in Annette's poetry.
33 Annette's cherishing of small things can be taken as connecting her with the “Andacht zum Kleinen” of Romanticism no less than with the “Sammeln und Hegen” of the “Bieder-meier.” She was an avid collector, not only of coins, minerals, and petrefacts, but of many other things; cf. Bfe., p. 70, t.
34 For a broad-daylight picture of a herd, equally “true to life”, see her poem Die Jagd.
35 Thus, for example, Die Decke über mir, gesunken, schief, An der so blafi geharmt das Mondlicht schlief, Wie eine Witwe an des Gatten Grabe (Der Hünenstein) might be termed Wertherian-Romantic, while Er liegt so still im Morgenlicht, So friedlich wie ein fromm Gewissen (Der Weiher) is lyric-Klopstockian, the comparison having an emotional, and not a concrete, “value.”
36 Her memory, too, seems to have been of a pictorial type; see her letter of February 18, 1819, to Sprickmann, Bfe., p. 19, b.
37 Apparently some things came to her full-fledged in dreams. To Junkmann she writes, August 4, 1837, of a “Stoff… zu einem Gedicht, von mehreren Gesàngen, den ich ganz vollstandig gelràumt, durch aile Gesänge, die ich zu lesen glaubte” (Bfe., 123, t.). The strange Vermachtnis des Arztes might well have originated in a dream, though possible literary antecedents have been pointed out (cf. Samtl. Wke., ed. Kemminghausen, iii, 298 f.).