HAUS FÜR POESIE

Nikolaus Lenau (born 1802 in Tschadat/Csatád in the Banat region—today Lenauheim, Romania; died 1850 in Vienna) was the last of the late Romantics, even though both Ludwig Tieck and Joseph von Eichendorff outlived him by a few years.

His poems are creations still animated by the old breath of the folk song—deceptively simple, often singable, always marked by a clear tendency toward resignation: “Welkes Laub und welkes Hoffen,” an eternal “Herbstgefühl” that rhymes “verderben” with “sterben.” Each poem traverses the decaying spaces over which death spreads its nets. Lenau represented the romantic rearguard under the banner of Universalpoesie in an age of Restoration and the dawning Biedermeier. He was the wild one among the tamed, a self-mythologizing figure closer to Byron than to Eichendorff—and thus became a key witness for Max Stirner’s later anarchism.

His own life was to become a work of art; in his so-called Zettel, he documented his mental and physical decline. And yet, the staging of the poetry he lived—indeed, suffered through—was entirely artificial, an attitude that became second nature to him. Nowhere was he truly at home—or perhaps most at home in the Viennese cafés and taverns, later in the Swabian salons, and still later in the taverns and ale houses of the New World. A life in transit: between two cities, between two women, and finally—already halfway into madness—between several mental institutions. A prototype of the self-destructive man who would have countless successors in the twentieth century.

This evening will explore the question of what the lyrical work of this man can still mean to us today.

A joint event of Haus für Poesie and Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa in Potsdam and the Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde in Tübingen

Readings & discussion with:
Olivia Spiridon, Georg Aescht