Lebensalter und Literatur

Abstract

is strange how blind we are for the reality of old age as long as we are not really Although elderly people are among us, they are taken for members of a strange native tribe. When I was twenty my long-term plans did not reach further than to my fiftieth birthday.Therefore I can say I am living in a time without plan. Literature contains possibilities to deal with every phase of life. Poets can deal with every phase of life at the same time; even with the phases they have not yet lived through and maybe never will. Literature can be an anchor, especially at old age, because it can eliminate the inevitable now that could otherwise weigh someone down. But literature does not save everybody! Goethe needed literature to master his immense feelings. In contrast to him for Robert Walser and Arthur Rimbaud writing meant ripping open old wounds. The latter two therefore chose early to be silent. On the other hand Theodor Fontane did not start writing before he was sixty, pulling himself cheerfully out of the morass of growing older. Analysing himself helped Goethe to stay curious and vivacious. In contrast Rimbaud aimed at turning radically dull. He could not stand repeating old frights. Robert Walser was urged by his doctors to write, but for him writing was a symptom of his illness if not the illness itself. He was conscious of this link very early, even when he was being celebrated in Berlin. At that time he wrote: Maybe I will never spread out my branches and twigs, one day I will be a fragrance, I will be a blossom, I will smell sweet a little bit for my own pleasure and then my head will be drooping ... my arms and legs will go limp in a strange way, mind, pride and character, everything will break and fade away and I will be dead, not really dead, but in some way dead, and then I will live and die for maybe sixty And that is what really happened! There are artists who really died very young like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Georg Buchner. Who can imagine what kind of work they would have produced if they had not died so young? It is not true that they were like comets predestined to glow and die fast. There are artists who create important works both when they are young and when they are old. Goethe would also be immortal if he had only been creative in his early years. There are just a few books a young man could not write. Goethe did know the pain of an old man who is not supposed to kiss a seventeen-year-old girl. Just for this reason he could write the Marienbader Elegien. Literature can be an anchor but sometimes it is only a mast to raise.