Gods Sorely Tested Child

By Marion Tymms

Though the name of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was little known during her lifetime, she is now recognised, more than 160 years after her death, as a significant German poet. Her work is linguistically challenging and her imagery taxing, but a study of it can prove richly rewarding. This book aims to open up this opportunity to English-speaking readers.

Conscious that it would be both difficult and inappropriate to attempt to separate Droste-Hülshoff's work from the woman, her life and the religious climate in which she lived, Marion Tymms, a scholar of German literature for more than half a century, has written God's sorely-tested child to offer new insight into the author's life and work, focusing on her poetic cycle Das Geistliche Jahr (The Spiritual Year) and presenting a complete translation of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: memoirsbooks
• Release date: Apr 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781909020610

Book preview

​Introduction

As revolution raged in Europe in the spring of 1848, a woman languished in her room in Meersburg high above Lake Constance. On May 24 that year, after many years of failing health, she died. She was just 50.

The name of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was little known even during her lifetime, not least because much of her work was published anonymously, or under a disguised name, and circulated, if at all outside her family, in very restricted literary circles. Over 160 years after her death she is recognized as a significant German poet, but her work is still valued only to a limited extent by a German-speaking public and, in England and America, barely at all.

One can find many explanations for her relative obscurity, and certainly one of these must be the linguistic difficulties she presents. Even in German, her syntax, vocabulary and idiom are sometimes problematic, and there have been few concerted attempts to render her work into English. Beneath the challenging language lie other difficulties. The lyric poetry which is arguably her finest achievement lacks the expected quality of melody, although she shows herself extraordinarily alert to sounds and brilliant at evoking them. This is what Clemens Heselhaus, an eminent Droste-Hülshoff scholar, must mean when he speaks of the ‘reassuring and lucid power of the word’ in her writings (1943, p.34). Her abundant imagery is often extremely taxing. Above all, the content makes demands which, for all her undeniable emotion, reflect a deep intellect verging on the cerebral.

It is hard – and probably not at all desirable – to attempt to separate the work of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff from the woman and the life she led. In her case, we are fortunate in having abundant correspondence both from her and to her to afford a picture of her life and an insight into its complexities. This despite the fact that many of her letters were destroyed after her death by a devoted sister anxious to protect her privacy. What emerges, nevertheless, is the very clear impression of an inner turmoil raging in a woman who contrived – or to some extent was forced by her personal circumstances – to remain untouched by the turmoil in the world outside.

The one exception to the prevailing unfamiliarity with her work is the powerful Novelle, Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s Beech), which has been translated into English many times, lends itself to close study and analysis and serves well as a prescribed text for students of German literature. There would be an argument for taking it as a starting-point for the closer investigation of Droste-Hülshoff, but the present study has a specific aim and the author intends to pursue a different course in the attempt to reveal the nature and impact of Droste-Hulshoff’s poetic work, and in particular the place within it of the cycle Das Geistliche Jahr (‘The Spiritual Year’). A second, and in fact more important, aim is to present the bulk of her religious poems, centrally those of Das Geistliche Jahr in English translation.

All translations from German are my own.

​Chapter One

Three poems from the final years: ‘Die ächzende Kreatur’, ‘Gethsemane’ and ‘Das verlorene Paradies’

Strange though it may seem to begin the examination of a lifetime’s work with its closing phases, there is some justification in the case of Droste-Hülshoff for looking to her last poems for the key to the place of her religious poetry within her œuvre. The poem ‘Die ächzende Kreatur’ is usually believed to be her last ‘real’ poem, although during her final months, which were marked by increasing frailty and declining health, she continued to write far less substantial ‘occasional’ poems in response to family events. However, this startling and lucid statement is effectively viewed side by side with two other poems, with all three expressing her religious thought and the preoccupation with spiritual matters which had dominated a lifetime’s creativity. They may be seen as a crescendo, the culmination of much deliberation and sometimes anguished thought. It is not too much to see them, taken together, as setting the seal on the thinking which had spanned the three decades of her adult life and expressed itself in many contrasting ways – and sometimes with marked inconsistency – in the cycle of poems known as Das Geistliche Jahr. To begin with the earliest poems of that cycle and attempt to trace the thinking towards the last entries would seem to be the more logical procedure, yet it gives more weight to the progression of her spiritual life and to her development as a poet to seek the key to both in these three products of her concluding years.

‘Die ächzende Kreatur’ (‘Groaning Creation’) arose as the product of communication she had had with her dear friend, the philosopher Professor Christoph Bernhard Schlüter, who was a literary critic and writer himself. It was he who had urged her, possibly in the face of considerable resistance on her part, to persist with the work on Das Geistliche Jahr, many years after she had set it aside, and he who saw to it that it was published three years after her death, according to her wish that it appear only posthumously. As with that cycle, however, it is evident that his promptings were taken up in a very different way by his independent-minded friend. When he referred her to the passage in Romans 8,22 which speaks of the anguish of all creation, he may have hoped that she would read beyond those lines, to the hopeful expression of the ultimate freedom to be attained through God, the release which will come after agony, the harvest that awaits us.

St Paul’s assurance of the love of God, on which this great chapter ends, may have comforted her at other times. However, at this point of her life, with illness and physical weakness reminding her constantly of the approach of death, and on a day damp and chill, her emphasis is on suffering; her own, but also that of all the little creatures on whom she focuses. Her view of the fate of living things leads to this startling statement of original sin and the acceptance of guilt as man’s legacy. She apparently sent the poem to Schlüter towards the end of August 1846, and one may well imagine that, not for the first time, he may have been surprised and disconcerted by the direction she had taken in this poem, which she calls ‘his’ in a letter dated August 1846.

If he had hoped to comfort her, she appears, as so often, to reject comfort in favour of a stark and unembellished view of man’s place in the universe. This poet of the ‘ever-open wounds’ – the phrase which she herself uses in her poem ‘Abschied von der Jugend’ (‘Farewell to Youth’, 1841) and which seems appropriate to describe her own deeply vulnerable personality – did not readily adopt an easy path, even though so much of what she says makes it clear that she knows that such a path is there for the choosing. The love of God, like the beauty of nature, underlies her poetry, but something in her complex personality made her question its unambiguous relevance to her.

One is left, then, with the uncomfortable sense of a devout and deeply contemplative woman wrestling with the contradictions which have characterised her writings throughout her life, and not finding the solace one might have wished for her. If one looks at the whole œuvre, however, one recognizes that this was probably never going to be possible, and that resolution had always eluded her and would always do so. Schlüter, writing after her death, admitted that she remained a puzzle to him and that that was not least because religion never seemed to bring her freedom or to make her inwardly happy. Though he modified this last phrase with the word ‘completely’ when he came to reconsider his assessment late in his own life, one would probably have to agree that her religious poems, and particularly Das Geistliche Jahr, confirm this impression.

Thus ‘Die ächzende Kreatur’ may well be her last word on a subject central to Christian thought, the whole question of suffering and guilt, of the place of man in God’s creation, and his relationship with all living creatures. The ‘Kreatur’ of the title – though Droste-Hülshoff herself identified the poem by the first line which evokes so vividly the specific setting of its origin – echoes Luther’s translation, and may be understood both as mankind, Man as the creation of God or, more generally, the entire cosmos. Here English can convey the duality of the German by rendering it either as ‘creature’ or ‘creation’, and those who have translated the poem have done both. Here the abstract noun is preferred because it seems to place the whole poem in a broader context, with the solitary figure of the human-being, the speaker who is ‘the sorely tested child of God’, at the very heart of it, yet profoundly aware of her place within the whole.

Groaning Creation

On a day when the wind was damp and the rays of the sun

shrouded in grey, God’s sorely tested child was sitting

in a dejected state close to the little garden room. Her heart

was so weary and her breast felt so constricted, her head

so dull and heavy that even around her mind the pressure

of her blood drew veils of mist.

Wind and birds her only companions in this solitude of her own choosing;

a great sigh from nature, and place and time soon vanished.

It seemed to her as though she were sensing the tide of eternity

rushing past her, and yet must hear each drop of blood and every heart-beat.

She sat and thought, and thought and sat. The throaty cricket

was singing in the grass, and from a far-off field came the faint sound

of a scythe. The timid wall-wasp flew anxiously about her face

until she pulled her dress firmly to one side, and the

little creature’s nest was uncovered.

And a beetle ran across the stonework, terrified and quickly,

as though it were fleeing, and buried its little head, now deep

in the moss, now in the nooks and crannies. A linnet fluttered past,

on the lookout for food, and, at the sound of the bird’s cry,

the insect hid itself with a sharp movement in her sleeve.

Thus it became clear to her that God’s curse lay not only upon

humankind but yearns upwards towards the heavens,

groaning for salvation, with heavy, dull agony, in the frightened worm,

the timid deer, in the parched blade of grass in the meadow,

thirsting with its yellowed leaves, in every single creature.

How with the curse which he brought upon himself in paradise,

the Prince of the Earth destroyed his blessed kingdom

and caused his servants to pay the price; how he forced

death and decay, agony and anger through the pure veins,

and how nothing remained for him but guilt,

and the sharp thorn of conscience.

This sleeps with him and wakes with him on every new day,

tears apart his dreams at night and goes on bleeding during the day.

Ah, heavy pain, never softened by the greatest pleasure

nor the boldest pride, when gently, gently, it gnaws and thuds

and bores its way inside him like maggots in wood.

Who is so pure that he is not aware of an image within the depths

of his soul because of which he must beat his breast and feel himself

afraid and wounded? And who so wicked that there is not

one word remaining which he cannot bear to hear but which forces

the blood up into his face with fiery, fearful, profound shame?

And yet there is a burden which no one feels and each one bears,

almost as dark as sin and nurtured at the same breast. He bears it

like the pressure of a breeze, sensed only by the sick body, as unaware

as the cavern is of the cliff, or the fatally-wounded man of the bier.

That is the guilt at the murder of the beauty of the earth

and its gracefulness, the deep and heavy guilt at the oppressive blight

on the animal kingdom, and at the fury which inspires it

and the deceit which tarnishes it, and at the pain which torments

it and the mould which covers it.

If this is indeed the last poem she wrote, its message is a hard one to bear, for it looks as though, however aware she was of the wonders of the natural world – and so many of her poems leave no doubt of this – her ultimate view is a pessimistic one, of a creation destroyed by the created and condemned by its own fault. She offers no alleviation here of the guilt which is the lot of Man since the ‘Prince of the Earth’, Adam himself, erred.

Yet not many months before this she had written a poem which can be dated to the late summer of 1845, not very long, that is, before her illness overtook her and she declined steadily towards her death. One would like to think that this woman, who had wrestled with matters of her faith throughout her life but for whom faith was an abiding strength, though never unquestioned, found solace in the knowledge of redemption which fills the great ‘Gethsemane’, a poem which speaks, not of condemnation and guilt, but of the ultimate saving power of love. Based on the Gospel accounts of St Mark and St Luke, Droste-Hülshoff’s depiction of the Agony in the Garden movingly anticipates the suffering and death of Christ, with details of her own which give the poem a powerful visual quality and also, most importantly, convey her awareness of the Saviour as a human being, with all the fears and doubts of man, yet raised above them by His confidence in God the Father and in the nature of His mission.

Gethsemane

When Christ was lying on His face in the grove of Gethsemane,

with His eyes closed, the air seemed only to be uttering sighs,

and a stream was murmuring its pain, reflecting the pale full moon.

That was the hour when the angel was sent down, weeping,

from the throne of God, in his hand the bitter chalice of suffering.

And in front of the Saviour the Cross rose up, and upon it

He saw His own body hanging, torn in pieces, stretched out.

The sinews on His limbs pressed forward in front of Him like ropes.

He saw the nails projecting, and the crown upon His head,

where a drop of blood fell from every thorn, and there came

the muted sound of thunder rumbling, as though in anger.

He heard the sound of dripping and a soft whimper slid,

tormented, desolate, down the upright wooden Cross.

Then did Christ sigh, and sweat poured forth from all His pores.

And the sky darkened, a dead sun floated in the grey sea,

and the anguish of the Head with the crown of thorns

could hardly now be seen, swaying to and fro in the pangs of death.

At the foot of the Cross lay three figures. He could see them

lying there, grey like clouds of mist. He heard the movement

of their heavy breathing. The folds of their garments fluttered gently.

Ah, what love was ever as fervent as His? He knew them;

He had known them well. The human heart within His breast ablaze,

the perspiration surged more strongly.

The corpse of the sun vanished, leaving behind only black smoke,

and sunk within it the Cross and the soft sound of sighing.

A silence, more terrifying than the raging of the storm,

floated through the starless alleys of the firmament.

Not a breath of life any longer in the wide world,

a crater round about, burnt out and empty, and a hollow voice cried

from above My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

Then the pangs of death overtook the Saviour, and Christ wept,

His spirit broken. Then His perspiration turned to blood,

and trembling came forth from the mouth of the suffering One:

Lord, if it is possible, let this hour pass me by.

A flash of lightning streaked through the night.

The Cross was floating in the light, radiant with the symbols

of the martyrdom, and He saw millions of hands stretched out,

clinging fearfully to the stem of the Cross. Ah, hands

great and small from the farthest reaches! And round the crown

there hovered millions of souls as yet unborn, like sparks.

A light haze of smoke crept out of the ground, and from the graves

of the departed came the sound of pleading. Then,

with abundant love, Christ raised Himself to His feet and cried:

Father, Father, not my will but Thine be done!

The moon floated silently in the blueness. A lily stood

before the Saviour in the dewy grass, and out of the calyx

of the lily stepped the angel and gave Him strength.

Droste-Hülshoff draws on the Gospels for the episode itself and uses the familiar words of the Son to the Father. She takes from St Luke the detail of the angel coming, to give strength to Christ (Luke 23, 43), but she adds the image of the lily, symbol of purity and holiness. Most powerful of all the visual effects she creates is that of the hands outstretched, the pleading millions of souls departed and yet to come. In this way she places the Crucifixion firmly in the context of the history of mankind, ensuring that the fact that God made Man through Jesus Christ is seen in His relationship with all men, and the message of the Sacrifice is ultimately not of suffering but of Love. This is a wonderfully positive poem which transcends the agonizing sense of guilt of ‘Die ächzende Kreatur’, with its overwhelming consciousness of the burden laid on all creation since the transgression of Adam. Yet ‘Gethsemane’ does not flinch from the depiction of physical agony, this time of the Saviour as He prepares Himself for the martyrdom ahead, but looks beyond it to the redemption it represents.

Belonging to the same year as ‘Gethsemane’ and classed, like it, as a ‘Legende’, is Droste-Hülshoff’s highly individual treatment of the question of human transgression in ‘Das verlorene Paradies’ (‘Paradise Lost’). In it the concentration is on the figure of Eve and her part in the legacy of original sin.

Paradise Lost

When paradise was still opened up to the first sinless pair

the viper knew no poison, the shrub no thorn,

the lion and the tiger knew no rage, and the fluting

of the nightingales still resounded merrily. Then every evening

Eve fell asleep against a rose-bush, and the radiance of her

innocent red cheeks played tenderly around