诗人  (1797年1月12日～1848年5月24日)

 沼泽中的男孩 Der Knabe im Moor

安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫（Annette von Droste-Hülshoff，1797年1月12日－1848年5月24日），德国女作家，德国最伟大的女诗人之一。她最为脍炙人口的作品是宗教组诗《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，1851年）和中篇小说《犹太人的榉树》（Die Judenbuche，1842年）。

生平

安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫出生在明斯特附近的徽尔斯霍夫庄园，是一个信奉天主教的贵族家庭，家教严谨，性格内向。由于早产的原因童年时候体弱多病，1812年至1819年由德国作家安东·马蒂亚斯·施普里克曼（Anton Matthias Sprickmann，1749年9月7日—1833年11月22日）教授担任她的家庭教师。

安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫从小就开始写作，但一直没有发表作品，直到她40岁。即便她的健康状况每况愈下，都从来没有考虑过想要通过写作来维持生计，她始终非常严肃地对待文学创作。她早年的写作主要受到她的堂兄、科隆大主教克莱门斯·奥古斯特·冯·德罗斯特-菲舍林（Clemens August von Droste-Vischering，1773年1月21日—1845年10月19日）的影响，他极端地支持教皇权力。安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫受到了很好的文学教育，远远超过了当时妇女的一般水平。

虽然性格内向而且家教严谨，几乎过着与世隔绝的生活，但安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫还是一直通过信件与同时代的许多杰出人才有着很好的联系，其中包括格林兄弟。1825年，她沿着莱茵河出游科隆、伯恩和科布伦茨，她在伯恩结识了有“莱茵女伯爵”之称的西比勒·默滕斯-沙夫豪森（Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen，1797年1月29日—1857年10月22日），她们组成了一个女作家的朋友圈子，包括德国女作家约翰娜·朔彭豪尔（哲学家亚瑟·叔本华的母亲）和女儿阿黛勒·朔彭豪尔（Adele Schopenhauer，1797年7月12日—1849年8月25日）、歌德的儿媳奥蒂莉厄·冯·歌德（Ottilie von Goethe，1796年10月31日—1872年10月26日），她们经常在伯恩聚会。安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫还在伯恩认识了德国浪漫主义的创始人之一、文学历史学家、翻译家、作家、印度学家和哲学家奥古斯特·威廉·冯·施勒格尔（August Wilhelm von Schlegel，1767年9月8日—1845年5月12日）。

博登湖之旅对于安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫的文学创作至关重要，她先是造访了她的妹妹燕妮，燕妮的丈夫是研究中世纪文学的德国作家约瑟夫·冯·拉斯贝格（Joseph von Laßberg，1770年4月10日—1855年3月15日）。1841年起她主要就居住在博登湖边的迈尔斯堡。她先前结识的德国作家莱文·许京（Levin Schücking，1814年9月6日—1883年8月31日）经由她介绍在迈尔斯堡当上了图书管理员，在他的灵感触动之下，安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫在迈尔斯堡创作了她的大部分诗作。

1848年5月24日，安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫在博登湖边的迈尔斯堡因肺炎逝世，葬于迈尔斯堡的墓地。

 

评价

92年发行的20马克面值纸币的正面

根据《大英百科全书》的记载，安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫是最有天赋的德国女诗人。她的韵文强健而有力，虽然说不上是刺耳但是经常不合调子，人们在诗中读不出一点多愁善感或一丝甜蜜。她最擅长的是抒情诗，她能够很好地把她家乡西威斯特法伦草原的风景融入到曲调中。她的叙事诗以《Das Hospiz auf dem Grossen St. Bernard》（1838年）和《Die Schlacht im Loener Bruch》（1838年）为代表是德国叙事诗的代表作品。她是一个严肃的罗马天主教徒，她经过20多年的时间创作了她最重要的作品宗教组诗《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，1851年），描绘了人们在启蒙思想和宗教信仰之间的矛盾心理，作品受到了极大的欢迎和好评。

1989年发行的第四套也是最后一套德国马克中，20马克面值纸币（1992年发行）的正面是安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫，背景为她后期常住的迈尔斯堡，纸币的背面是钢笔和榉树，象征她的作品《犹太人的榉树》。

德国1961年至1965年发行一套16枚系列邮票“重要的德国人”（Bedeutende Deutsche），1961年发行了其中的安内特·冯·德罗斯特-徽尔斯霍夫纪念邮票，面值1马克。

 

作品

诗集（1838年）

《犹太人的榉树》（Die Judenbuche，1842年），中篇小说，从心理角度研究一个谋杀了犹太人的村民，主角的命运被描述为是由社会环境决定的，这在德国文学中是首创。作品所反映了18世纪威斯特伐利亚山区的农村生活，犹如一幅风俗画，是德国文学中艺术性较高的小说之一。

诗集（1844年）

《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，发表于逝世后的1851年，作于1818年至1820年和1839年至1840年），严肃的宗教组诗，反映了她精神生活的纷乱和怀疑。

《最后的恩赐》（Letzte Gaben，发表于逝世后的1860年）

Baroness Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolphine Wilhelmine Louise Maria von Droste zu Hülshoff, known as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (German: [aˈnɛtə fɔn ˈdʁɔstəˈhʏlshɔf] (About this soundlisten); 10 or 12 January 1797 – 24 May 1848), was a 19th-century German writer and composer. She was one of the most important German poets and author of the novella Die Judenbuche.

In an article for the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Francis Joste wrote, "The fame of the poetess rests chiefly on her lyric poems, her pastorales, and her ballads. In the poetic representation of nature, few can equal her. The poetical works of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff are imperishable. What makes them so is their originality, the proof that they are the works of a genius. It is this too that gained for their author the well-earned title of "Germany's greatest poetess.'"

Biography

Early years

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was born at the castle of Burg Hülshoff (now a part of Havixbeck) in the Prince-Bishopric of Münster. Her family, the Barons Droste zu Hülshoff belongs to the oldest Catholic aristocracy of Westphalia. Her father Clemens August von Droste zu Hülshoff (1760–1826) was a learned man who was interested in ancient history and languages, ornithology, botany, music and the supernatural. Her mother Therese Luise (1772–1853) came from another aristocratic Westphalian family, the Barons von Haxthausen. Annette was the second of four children: she had an elder sister Maria Anna (nicknamed "Jenny", 1795-1859) and two younger brothers, Werner Konstantin (1798–1867) and Ferdinand (1800–1829). Annette was born one month prematurely and only saved by the intervention of a nurse. She suffered from problems with her health throughout her life, including headaches and eye troubles.

Droste was educated by private tutors in ancient languages, French, natural history, mathematics and music (she inherited considerable musical talent from her father). She began to write as a child; 50 poems written between 1804 and 1814 have been preserved. Droste's maternal grandfather Werner Adolf von Haxthausen had remarried after the death of his first wife (Annette's grandmother) in 1772 and built himself a new castle, Schloss Bökerhof, in the village of Bökendorf, Paderborn. Here his sons from his second marriage, Werner and August, had formed an intellectual circle. They were in contact with such celebrated cultural figures as the Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, Friedrich Schlegel, Adele and Johanna Schopenhauer. Droste visited the castle frequently and made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Grimm. She and her sister contributed folk tales from Westphalia to the Grimms' famous collection of fairy stories. However, neither Grimm nor her step-uncles gave any encouragement to the young girl's literary ambitions. The only literary figure to recognise Droste's precocious talent was Anton Matthias Sprickmann (1749–1833), whom she first met in 1812. Sprickmann was the founder of the theatre in Münster and had known important 18th-century poets such as Matthias Claudius and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Droste trusted Sprickmann's judgement and showed him many of her early works, including the unfinished tragedy Berta oder die Alpen ("Berta, or The Alps", 1813). Other examples of her juvenilia are the tale in verse Walter (1818) and a novel Ledwina (begun in 1819 but never completed).

In 1819–1820, Annette spent a year with the Haxthausens at Schloss Bökerhof, interrupted only by a stay at the nearby spa town of Bad Driburg, where she hoped to find a cure for her health problems. Here she became romantically involved with Heinrich Straube (1794–1847), a Lutheran law student with literary interests, who was a friend of her step-uncle August von Haxthausen. What happened next is unclear, but it appears that the Haxthausen family, led by Annette's step-aunt Anna (who was in fact four years her junior), disapproved of the relationship because Straube was a commoner and devised a scheme to put an end to it. While Straube was away pursuing his legal studies at the University of Göttingen, they persuaded August von Arnswaldt, a Lutheran aristocrat with literary ambitions, to pretend to pay court to Annette. At first flattered by von Arnswaldt's attentions, Annette gave some indications she was in love with him, before telling him she really loved Heinrich Straube. By this time it was too late, as von Arnswaldt had all the evidence he needed. He traveled to Göttingen and gave Straube proof of Annette's behaviour. The two men wrote a joint letter (which has not been preserved), breaking off all contact with her. She never saw either man again. A few years later, August von Arnswaldt married a widowed Anna von Haxthausen, the ringleader of the intrigue. Straube became a lawyer in Kassel and married in 1824. When he died in 1847, a lock of Annette's hair was found among his possessions. The ensuing scandal was a catastrophe for Annette and severely damaged both her reputation and her marriage prospects. Shocked by the role that her Haxthausen relatives had played, Annette refused to visit Schloss Bökerhof for the next 18 years.

Droste's earliest poems are derivative and conventional but in 1820 her work began to show marked originality when she embarked on a cycle of religious poems, Das geistliche Jahr ("The Spiritual Year"). Droste intended to write one poem for each Sunday and Feast Day of the church year and the cycle was meant to please her devout grandmother, but when Droste had completed 25 poems, she realised they were too personal and showed too many traces of spiritual doubt, so she shelved the work until 1839 when a friend persuaded her to complete the series. Even then she did not publish the poems and they were only offered to the public posthumously in 1851.

When her father died in 1826 she moved with her mother and sister to a small country house near Hülshoff called Rüschhaus. Here she led a constricted, monotonous existence, broken only by a few trips to the Rhine and Bonn. She composed poetry, but not prolifically. In 1834 her sister Jenny married Joseph von Laßberg, a specialist in medieval German poetry. The following summer, Annette and her mother travelled to Laßberg's castle Eppishausen in the Swiss Alps. She was inspired by the scenery and on friendly terms with Laßberg, but neither he nor his friends appreciated modern literature and Droste's hopes that they might help her to publish her work came to nothing.

Droste now entrusted the publication of her first book to two friends, Christoph Bernhard Schlüter and Wilhelm Junkmann. They had little experience of the literary world and chose the local Münster publisher Aschendorff. Droste would have preferred a non-regional publisher rather than a Westphalian one as Westphalia had a reputation as a cultural backwater and few people bought books there. The collection appeared in 1838 in a print-run of 500 copies, of which only 74 were sold. It contained three long narrative poems (Das Hospiz auf dem großem Saint-Bernard, Das Vermächtnis des Arztes and Die Schlacht in Loener Bruch) and a handful of lyrics. Although they were issued under the name "Annette Elisabeth von D.H.", her family did not approve. Droste found the failure of her book "humiliating." 

Literary success

The year 1840 marked a turning point in her career, however. In 1838, Droste had begun to frequent a literary salon in Münster, presided over by Elise Rüdiger, the "Hecken-Schriftstellergesellschaft." One of its members was the young poet Levin Schücking. Schücking had published an admiring review of Droste's collection and sought her help in writing his own book, Das malerische und romantische Westfalen ("Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia", 1840). The two soon formed a close friendship and Droste wrote a number of ballads for inclusion in the book, among them "Das Fräulein von Rodenschild" and "Der Tod des Erzbischofs Engelbert von Köln". Schücking encouraged her renewed literary creativity. In the winter of 1840—1841 she wrote her famous novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew's Beech, published 1842), based on an incident which had occurred near Bökerhof in the late 18th century. The following autumn and winter, Droste and Schücking stayed at her brother-in-law's castle at Meersburg on Lake Constance, where Schücking had been given the task of cataloguing Laßberg's book collection. Here Schücking told her that her talent lay in lyric poetry, which relied on rare moments of inspiration. Droste disagreed: she had no problem composing poetry in her head but had difficulty writing it down and the failure of her first book had not encouraged her to make the effort. Now she had a sympathetic reader in Schücking, she began to write in earnest, producing about fifty poems between October 1841 and April 1842. They include poems dedicated to Schücking, often on the theme of ageing (e.g. "Kein Wort", "O frage nicht"), and poems of self-analysis such as "Das Spiegelbild" ("The Image in the Mirror") and "Die Taxuswand" ("The Yew Hedge"), which looks back to her unhappy love affair with Straube. Other lyrics are the nature poems collected in the cycle "Heidebilder" ("Heath Pictures"), including such famous pieces as "Die Krähen" ("The Crows"), "Der Hünenstein", "Die Mergelgrube" ("The Marl Pit") and "Der Knabe im Moor" ("The Boy on the Moor"). These often have an element of supernatural terror.

In April 1842, Schücking left Meersburg to take up a job as a tutor in an aristocratic family. Droste returned to Rüschhaus the same summer. The pair would never be so close again. Droste's literary productivity declined, but she did compose a few more poems, including the supernatural story "Spiritus familiaris." In September 1844, the prestigious publisher Cotta issued a large collection of her poems from the 1840s. This time Droste enjoyed great success and the book received admiring reviews from many important intellectual figures. Clara Schumann asked her to write an opera libretto for her husband Robert (the project never came to fruition). In time, Droste was acknowledged as the greatest female German author of the 19th century.

Final years

Meanwhile, her relationship with Schücking had cooled. In 1843, Schücking had married Louise von Gall. When the couple had visited Droste in Meersburg for four weeks in May 1844, the two women had not liked each other. Droste published a poem "Lebt wohl" ("Farewell") in the literary journal Morgenblatt, effectively saying goodbye to Schücking. Schücking also used his own literary works to mark his distance from Droste. In 1846, he published two novels. The first, Die Ritterbürtigen, contained a highly critical portrait of the Westphalian aristocracy. This caused Droste embarrassment as Schücking had made use of private information he could only have derived from conversations with her. The second novel, Eine dunkle Tat, included characters resembling himself and Droste. The character of Katharina, based on Droste, is maternal and possessive and treats the hero as a substitute child. As a result of these publications and her dislike of Schücking's radical political views, Droste made a decisive break with him. Nevertheless, after Droste's death, Schücking helped publicise her works, publishing the collection of her final poems, Letzte Gaben, in 1860 and an edition of her collected works in 1878–9. Important poems from her last years include "Mondesaufgang" ("Moonrise"), "Durchwachte Nacht" ("Sleepless Night") and "Im Grase" ("In the Grass").

The profits from her book had helped Droste to buy a small vine-covered villa known as Fürstenhäusle in Meersburg, while she lived in the old castle from 1846 until her death in May 1848, probably from tuberculosis.

Character of her poetry

The critic Margaret Atkinson wrote:

In the history of German poetry she is an isolated and independent figure. She shares with the Romantic writers an awareness of the power of man's imagination and a keen sense of his exposed and precarious position in a world of danger and mystery. But her poetry has none of the vagueness of emotional mood and the sweetness of sound that characterize theirs. Nor did she intend that it should. Indifferent to contemporary taste, she pursued her own ideals in her own way. "Ich mag und will jetzt nicht berühmt werden," she once wrote, "aber nach hundert Jahren möcht' ich gelesen werden." And indeed she was ahead of her time. Her keen sensory perception and her precise recording of phenomena make her appear as a herald of the new realistic literature of the latter part of the century. With her unusual combination of imaginative vision with close accurate observation and depiction of reality, she thus stands at the point of transition between Romanticism and Realism and does not belong wholly to either.

Musical activity

Droste received early instruction in piano and later in singing. In 1821 she was given a composition manual, Einige Erklärungen über den General=Baß, written by her uncle Maximilian-Friedrich von Droste zu Hülshoff (a friend of Joseph Haydn) and announced her intention to learn it by heart. 74 Lieder by Droste survive as well as fragments and sketches of 4 unrealized operas. She did not fulfill Clara Schumann's request for a libretto for her husband, but Robert did set a poem, Das Hirtenfeuer, as Op. 59 no. 5.

Legacy

Asteroid 12240 Droste-Hülshoff, discovered by astronomer Freimut Börngen in 1988, was named in her memory.

Works

• Gedichte (1838)
• Die Judenbuche (novella, 1842)
• Gedichte (Poems, 1844)
• Westfälische Schilderungen ("Westphalian Illustrations", 1845)
• Das geistliche Jahr (The Spiritual Year, cycle of poems, 1851)
• Letzte Gaben ("Last Gifts", poems, 1860)
• Briefe von Annette von Droste-Hülshoff und Levin Schücking (Letters from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Levin Schücking)
• Lieder mit Pianoforte-Begleitung. Componirt von Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (Songs, posthumously edited 1871 by Christoph Bernhard Schlüter)

See also

• Biedermeier
• Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is the main character of Karen Duve's novel Fräulein Nettes kurzer Sommer, Galiani, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86971-138-6.

References

Further reading

• Works by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff at Project Gutenberg
•  Texts on Wikisource:
  • "Annette Elisabeth, Baroness von Hülshoff". Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913.
  • "Droste-Hülshoff, Annette Elizabeth". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
  • "Droste-Hülshoff, Annette Elisabeth". Encyclopædia Britannica. 8 (11th ed.). 1911. p. 591.
• John Guthrie, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: a German poet between romanticism and realism, Berg, 1989, ISBN 978-0-85496-174-0
• Margaret Laura Mare, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, University of Nebraska Press, 1965, OCLC: 460375644