“God and the World” by Marie Luise Kaschnitz | EUROtoday

From 1941 till her dying in 1974, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, née Baroness von Holzing-Berstett, lived in Frankfurt’s Westend. In addition to the beloved village of Bollschweil in Baden and the colourful cosmopolitan metropolis of Rome, Frankfurt is the poet’s third geometric location. The block-like residence constructing at Wiesenau 8 with “six front doors, six staircases” and “sixty balconies” was inside strolling distance of the analysis middle of her Austrian husband Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg. He taught classical archeology on the University of Frankfurt from 1940 till his retirement in 1955. Naturally, one may say, her life was oriented alongside his skilled paths.

Even after his dying in 1958, a profound turning level, Kaschnitz held on to the Wiesenau, always in worry that the home could be torn down. In the inventive destructionbecause the economists say, it senses violence: “There is a force majeure of war, we know that well enough, but also a force majeure of peace, it is the force of the future.” This risk to the post-war interval, on each a small and a big scale – “Save the chestnuts, and completely different dangers have long since come into our view” – is the basso continuo of Kaschnitz’s not too long ago printed notes wherein she observes the town of Frankfurt altering underneath the stress of progress. They could not be extra present.

This 12 months, the studying pageant “Frankfurt Reads a Book” presents a discussion board to have a good time the a hundred and twenty fifth birthday of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, the primary lady to obtain the Georg Büchner Prize (1955), with “God and the World – Notes from Wiesenau”. Rainer Weiss compiled the anthology, and Ina Hartwig, head of the Frankfurt cultural division, contributed a sleek foreword. The majority of the 84 brief texts from 1966 and 1967 come from her e book “Days, Days, Years” from 1968 and observe its chronological order. 1 / 4 of the smaller passages interspersed are taken from the amount “Orte” printed by Insel-Verlag in 1973, undated within the authentic, which was her final e book.

The notes have a particular connection to the reader. This may be seen, for instance, in Kaschnitz’s “tourist guide game,” which has been referred to as out a number of occasions, within the border space between actuality and fantasy. It differs from the literary motif of the room journey in that it’s overshadowed by a attainable “last time”. Like an archaeological tour, it’s an expertise of time gone and gone. Her notes about rising previous are simply as sober as they’re delicate.

The double, nearly dialectical motion between inside and outside additionally contains persistent emotions of guilt concerning the Germans’ idly accepted breach of civilization. The attribute of “inner emigration” – Kaschnitz’s husband was exculpated resulting from suspicion of being a follower – appeared inappropriate to her. She did not need to settle for such a label.

As early as 1949 she had printed 4 poems by Paul Celan in Dolf Sternberger’s journal “Die Wandlung” (which she was additionally answerable for). When she and Celan dined collectively after a studying at Fischer Verlag in early 1960, his deep disappointment touched her coronary heart. “If you just look at Paul Celan,” she writes to her daughter, “the bite gets stuck in your throat and you are embarrassed that you are alive.” In the diary’s recording reminiscence, disgrace then turns into a picture, a poiesis: “Celan sad as the only survivor of the gas chambers.”

It would have been good to incorporate such key scenes on this anthology, at the very least to not forego a commentary as a matter of precept – particularly when it’s explicitly meant for college students and the e book is meant to assist “rediscover or rediscover a wonderful author”. The editor is worried with texts, it says considerably strikingly within the afterword, that cope with Frankfurt and with the “political and social upheavals from the mid-1960s onwards and therefore – very personally – with the feelings of a woman who asserted her place in a changing world”.

In truth, again then, shortly earlier than the scholar revolt in 1968, Kaschnitz was a acknowledged author, effectively related and in dialog with many artists and intellectuals. Not least with the Adorno couple, who reside across the nook. Adorno, the critically admired mentor, helped her provide you with the title of her e book “Where I am” (1963) and devoted the essay “Title – Paraphrases on Lessing” to her, which he additionally included in his “Notes on Literature” in 1965. Kaschnitz, in flip, devoted journey poems and the brief story “The Child,” which is reprinted within the Wiesenau quantity, to him.

Very few information are tales. Situations usually tend to be communicated that set off a journey of thought. Essayistic miniatures? Yes too. Many of the brief texts, which final one to 2 pages, play by means of a “what if” situation. Others probe the age of a sixty-five-year-old and “the determination of the condition, the physical and mental state of the abilities that one still has or no longer has.” That sounds melancholic and unusually light-handed on the similar time. “While the body will soon need a stick, the mind feels more and more weightless, not just wanting to dance, but dancing. So they grow apart, the body and the soul, to use that lovely old-fashioned word.” In sleep and goals the separation ends and one “removes oneself with the wings of the sheets, dream steps, from reality, from the day.” Magic phrases about getting previous.

The lovely photograph that Frankfurt makes use of to advertise its studying pageant is sadly inappropriate as the duvet picture of the e book. It would not present Kaschnitz as an authority within the cultural scene of the Sixties, who went from being an aristocratic bookseller with out a highschool diploma to being a PEN and Academy member, being showered with prizes and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Frankfurt in 1968. The portrait of her as a younger lady suggests the bohemian mental instantly after the battle, puffing on a pipe and smiling androgynously on the viewer. That’s what the market needs.

How would the declared non-feminist Kaschnitz have commented on this fraudulent label? Perhaps in the identical approach she discovered society’s perspective in the direction of widowhood: humiliating! She has created nice literature with the small texts within the mode of modesty. Everywhere she tried, Kaschnitz stated in her Büchner Prize speech, “to draw the reader’s attention to what is significant, to the wonderful possibilities and deadly dangers of human beings and to the astonishing fullness of the world.” So let’s learn this e book, and never simply in Frankfurt. We can belief Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s perspective and sincerity.

Marie Luise Kaschnitz: “God and the World”. Records from Wiesenau. Edited by Rainer Weiss, foreword by Ina Hartwig. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2026. 171 pages, hardcover, €22.