Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing

Eichendorff Joseph Von

Description

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the girl of his dreams - is one of the best-known classics of German literature. Deeply imbued with the style and sentiment of German Romanticism, and philosophical and poetic in its approach to nature and existence, "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing" is at once an exhilarating romp and an exemplary distillation of nineteenth-century thought.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714547619
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
Joseph von Eichendorff
Translated by Ronald Taylor


ALMA CLASSICS


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Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing first published in German in 1826
First published in this translation by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1966
Translation © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1966
This edition first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Limited) in 2008
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2015
Cover image: The castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria © 123RF / haveseen
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-451-1
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Contents
Introduction
Chronology
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
Notes



Introduction
F ew are the works that have claimed such artless and unwavering affection in their native country as Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing). And equally few are the writers that have been so readily and so completely identified with the fortunes of a single work as its author. To be sure, he wrote other stories, as well as dramas, verse epics and literary essays, and his lyric poetry is among the sincerest and most touching in the whole of German literature. Yet none of his other extended works has ever been taken by the German people to their hearts, while some of his best-known, most charming lyrics are in fact to be found set like jewels in the lyrical narrative of the Taugenichts. Posterity, indeed, has not judged wrongly, for the tale that the Good-for-nothing tells is a fragment of the spiritual autobiography of his creator, a presentation of the values with which the Romantics of the nineteenth century sought, in their diverse ways, to infuse their lives and their art.
The real life of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff was very different. Born into a well-to-do family on an estate near Ratibor (now Raciborz, in Poland), he studied law, first in Halle, then in Heidelberg, where he came under the lasting influence of the German folk-song movement led by Clemens Brentano and Achim von arnim. Here, under the editorship of these two men, there appeared in 1805 and 1808 the three volumes of Des Knaben Wunderhorn , the most famous of German folk-song collections, and Eichendorff shared in the undertaking. To the years that immediately followed his stay in Heidelberg belong the first of his two novels and many of his finest lyrics.
At the end of his university studies Eichendorff joined the Austrian, and later the Prussian, forces in the Napoleonic campaigns, but saw no fighting. He returned to his native Silesia as a government official in 1816, subsequently serving the Prussian state in Danzig, Königsberg and finally Berlin, where, as a highly esteemed administrator, he lived out the last thirteen years of his professional career. In 1853 he retired to the Silesian town of Neisse, where he died four years later, little more than thirty miles from the home in which he had been born.
The reasons for the popularity of Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts are not far to seek. Its lyrical charm; its directness, its accessibility, its closeness to nature, its cheerful optimism – these are some of its more obvious endearing qualities. Of deeper and broader significance, however, are those characteristics which merge under the shadow of two vague, but none the less real, collective concepts which dominate the literature of nineteenth-century Germany: the concept of Romanticism, and the concept of German cultural nationalism.
However elusive a comprehensive definition of the term “Romantic” may be, no one would question its applicability to this story, or deny the peculiarly German character of the “Romanticism”. Its praise of the joys of nature; its illumination of an ideal life governed by the power of love and the flight of fancy; its portrayal of a world in which goodness and happiness are one; the utter unrealism and anti-utilitarianism of its philosophy; its enthronement of Art as the God-given mediator between the ephemeral “facts” of material existence and the eternal realities of the spirit; its anti-intellectualism and its faith in the heuristic power of dreams: such are the “Romantic” values, clothed in an idyllic, and sometimes embarrassingly banal, whimsicality of style, which the story of Eichendorff’s anti-hero transmits.
In the context of nineteenth-century Germany these qualities could not but assume the role of national characteristics. Love of nature became praise of the Fatherland; the supremacy of the spirit called for a Utopian vision of national character and historical destiny; and the release of spiritual energy was to reveal in unconditional terms, through the intercession of the holy trinity of Nature, Love and Art, the true personality of the German people, the cultural ethos of Deutschtum. In his aimless and often ill-starred wanderings, his naive, improbable exploits in the name of his love for a woman whom he takes for a countess, and his unfailing recourse to poetry and song in his moods of ecstasy, the Good-for-nothing leads – if so active a term can be used – his life in response to the dictates of this trinity.
“He is of the people,” wrote Thomas Mann. “He breathes the purity of the fairy tale and the folk song… a blithe and happy symbol, touching in his modesty, of a true humanity, a cultured, Romantic humanity – in short, as I say, the humanity of Germany herself.”
Above all, above the life of this gay, sunny creature, to whom every day is a Sunday and every moment a time for rejoicing, there presides a benevolent deity, a deity concerned that the blissful serenity of the Good-for-nothing shall become the lot of all mankind, and desirous of being worshipped in this image. It is the direct, uncomplicated faith of “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world”. And embodied in this very directness – for the Good-for-nothing himself, for Eichendorff, and for the Germany of the nineteenth century – lie both its claim to universal validity and its power of ultimate persuasion.
R.T.
The text used for this translation is that in Eichendorff. Werke und Schriften. Neue Gesamtausgabe , ed. G. Baumann and S. Grosse (Stuttgart, 1957–8), Vol. II.


Chronology
1788 Born at Schloss Lobowitz, Silesia on 10th March.
1805–13 Studied law at Halle, Heidelberg, Berlin and Vienna.
1813 Service with the Austrian army, later with the Prussians.
1814 Marriage to Luise von Larisch.
1815 Ahnung und Gegenwart (novel).
1816–44 Public service in the Prussian administration in Breslau,
Danzig, Königsberg, and finally Berlin.
1826 Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts and Das Marmorbild
(short stories, published in a single volume).
1837 Das Schloss Dürande (short story). In the same year his col-
lected poems also appeared.
1846–53 Translations of dramas by Calderón de la Barca.
1847 Über die ethische und religiöse Bedeutung der neueren
romantischen Poesie in Deutschland (literary criticism written from the moral standpoint of a devout Catholic).
1853 Residence at Neisse, in Silesia.
1857 Death there on 26th November, at the age of sixty-nine.


Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing


1
T he splashing and clattering of my father’s millwheel was again in full swing, the snow on the roof was melting fast, and the twittering sparrows fluttered to and fro as I sat in the doorway and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, revelling in the warm sunshine.
At that moment my father came out. Since the crack of dawn he had been stomping around irritably in the mill, and now, his nightcap perched crookedly on his head, he shouted at me:
“You good-for-nothing! Here you are, basking in the sun again, stretching your limbs until they ache and leaving me to do all the work by myself. I don’t see why I should keep you here any longer. Spring is just round the corner, so out you go into the world and earn your own living for a change!”
“So I’m a good-for-nothing, eh?” I retorted. “All right, then. I’ll go off and seek my fortune.”
The idea was indeed very much to my liking. In autumn and winter time the yellowhammer used to sing a lament outside our window: “Farmer, please hire me! Farmer, please hire me!” But a short time ago I had seen him sitting proudly on top of the tree, singing his merry springtime song: “Farmer, keep your work!” – and this had given me the idea of making for the open road.
So I went into the house and took down my fiddle – on which I was no mean performer, I may say. My father gave me a few coppers for the journey, and I set out down the long road that ran through the village. I smiled to myself as I saw all my old friends and companions leaving for work, going out to dig and plough as they had done yesterday, the day before yesterday and all the days before that, while I was free to roam the world.
With an air of pride and contentment I called out “Farewell!” to the poor folk around me, but none of them paid much heed. I felt as though every day would be like a Sunday. And when I finally got into the open country, I took out my beloved fiddle and played and sang as I