德國 德意志邦聯  (1797年元月12日～1848年五月24日)

 沼澤中的男孩 Der Knabe im Moor

安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫（Annette von Droste-Hülshoff，1797年1月12日－1848年5月24日），德國女作傢，德國最偉大的女詩人之一。她最為膾炙人口的作品是宗教組詩《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，1851年）和中篇小說《猶太人的櫸樹》（Die Judenbuche，1842年）。

生平

安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫出生在明斯特附近的徽爾斯霍夫莊園，是一個信奉天主教的貴族家庭，傢教嚴謹，性格內嚮。由於早産的原因童年時候體弱多病，1812年至1819年由德國作傢安東·馬蒂亞斯·施普裏剋曼（Anton Matthias Sprickmann，1749年9月7日—1833年11月22日）教授擔任她的家庭教師。

安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫從小就開始寫作，但一直沒有發表作品，直到她40歲。即便她的健康狀況每況愈下，都從來沒有考慮過想要通過寫作來維持生計，她始終非常嚴肅地對待文學創作。她早年的寫作主要受到她的堂兄、科隆大主教剋萊門斯·奧古斯特·馮·德羅斯特-菲捨林（Clemens August von Droste-Vischering，1773年1月21日—1845年10月19日）的影響，他極端地支持教皇權力。安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫受到了很好的文學教育，遠遠超過了當時婦女的一般水平。

雖然性格內嚮而且傢教嚴謹，幾乎過着與世隔絶的生活，但安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫還是一直通過信件與同時代的許多傑出人才有着很好的聯繫，其中包括格林兄弟。1825年，她沿着萊茵河出遊科隆、伯恩和科布倫茨，她在伯恩結識了有“萊茵女伯爵”之稱的西比勒·默滕斯-沙夫豪森（Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen，1797年1月29日—1857年10月22日），她們組成了一個女作傢的朋友圈子，包括德國女作傢約翰娜·朔彭豪爾（哲學家亞瑟·叔本華的母親）和女兒阿黛勒·朔彭豪爾（Adele Schopenhauer，1797年7月12日—1849年8月25日）、歌德的兒媳奧蒂莉厄·馮·歌德（Ottilie von Goethe，1796年10月31日—1872年10月26日），她們經常在伯恩聚會。安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫還在伯恩認識了德國浪漫主義的創始人之一、文學歷史學家、翻譯傢、作傢、印度學家和哲學家奧古斯特·威廉·馮·施勒格爾（August Wilhelm von Schlegel，1767年9月8日—1845年5月12日）。

博登湖之旅對於安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫的文學創作至關重要，她先是造訪了她的妹妹燕妮，燕妮的丈夫是研究中世紀文學的德國作傢約瑟夫·馮·拉斯貝格（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邊的邁爾斯堡。她先前結識的德國作傢萊文·許京（Levin Schücking，1814年9月6日—1883年8月31日）經由她介紹在邁爾斯堡當上了圖書管理員，在他的靈感觸動之下，安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫在邁爾斯堡創作了她的大部分詩作。

1848年5月24日，安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫在博登湖邊的邁爾斯堡因肺炎逝世，葬於邁爾斯堡的墓地。

 

評價

92年發行的20馬剋面值紙幣的正面

根據《大英百科全書》的記載，安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫是最有天賦的德國女詩人。她的韻文強健而有力，雖然說不上是刺耳但是經常不合調子，人們在詩中讀不出一點多愁善感或一絲甜蜜。她最擅長的是抒情詩，她能夠很好地把她家乡西威斯特法倫草原的風景融入到麯調中。她的敘事詩以《Das Hospiz auf dem Grossen St. Bernard》（1838年）和《Die Schlacht im Loener Bruch》（1838年）為代表是德國敘事詩的代表作品。她是一個嚴肅的羅馬天主教徒，她經過20多年的時間創作了她最重要的作品宗教組詩《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，1851年），描繪了人們在啓蒙思想和宗教信仰之間的矛盾心理，作品受到了極大的歡迎和好評。

1989年發行的第四套也是最後一套德國馬剋中，20馬剋面值紙幣（1992年發行）的正面是安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫，背景為她後期常住的邁爾斯堡，紙幣的背面是鋼筆和櫸樹，象徵她的作品《猶太人的櫸樹》。

德國1961年至1965年發行一套16枚係列郵票“重要的德國人”（Bedeutende Deutsche），1961年發行了其中的安內特·馮·德羅斯特-徽爾斯霍夫紀念郵票，面值1馬剋。

 

作品

詩集（1838年）

《猶太人的櫸樹》（Die Judenbuche，1842年），中篇小說，從心理角度研究一個謀殺了猶太人的村民，主角的命運被描述為是由社會環境决定的，這在德國文學中是首創。作品所反映了18世紀威斯特伐利亞山區的農村生活，猶如一幅風俗畫，是德國文學中藝術性較高的小說之一。

詩集（1844年）

《宗教的一年》（Das geistliche Jahr，發表於逝世後的1851年，作於1818年至1820年和1839年至1840年），嚴肅的宗教組詩，反映了她精神生活的紛亂和懷疑。

《最後的恩賜》（Letzte Gaben，發表於逝世後的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