Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Practicing Piety: Representations of Women’s Dying in German Funeral Sermons of the Early Modern Period
- 2 “Ich sterbe”: The Construction of the Dying Self in the Advance Preparations for Death of Lutheran Women in Early Modern Germany
- 3 The “New Mythology”: Myth and Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s Literary Work
- 4 The Murderess on Stage: Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804)
- 5 “Ob im Tode mein Ich geboren wird?”: The Representation of the Widow in Hedwig Dohm’s “Werde, die du bist” (1894)
- 6 The Figure of Judith in Works by German Women Writers between 1895 and 1921
- 7 Lola Doesn’t: Cinema, Jouissance, and the Avoidance of Murder and Death
- 8 Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy in Representations of Death
- 9 “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten
- 10 TV Nation: The Representation of Death in Warfare in Works by Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
3 - The “New Mythology”: Myth and Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s Literary Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Practicing Piety: Representations of Women’s Dying in German Funeral Sermons of the Early Modern Period
- 2 “Ich sterbe”: The Construction of the Dying Self in the Advance Preparations for Death of Lutheran Women in Early Modern Germany
- 3 The “New Mythology”: Myth and Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s Literary Work
- 4 The Murderess on Stage: Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804)
- 5 “Ob im Tode mein Ich geboren wird?”: The Representation of the Widow in Hedwig Dohm’s “Werde, die du bist” (1894)
- 6 The Figure of Judith in Works by German Women Writers between 1895 and 1921
- 7 Lola Doesn’t: Cinema, Jouissance, and the Avoidance of Murder and Death
- 8 Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy in Representations of Death
- 9 “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten
- 10 TV Nation: The Representation of Death in Warfare in Works by Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
MYTH AND DEATH ARE AT THE CENTER of the poetic works of Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806). In her last collection, entitled Melete von Jon (Melete by Jon, 1806) — dedicated to the “Muse des sinnigen Daseyns — die auf hohe Lieder sinnt” (the muse of sensuous being, who ponders high songs) — the lead poem deals with the death of Adonis. In the funeral elegy “Adonis Todtenfeyer” (Memorial for Adonis) we read:
Wehe! Dass der Gott auf Erden
Sterblich musst geboren werden!
Alles wandelt und vergehet
Morgen sinkt, was heute stehet;
Was jetzt schön und herrlich steiget
Bald sich hin zum Staube neiget;
Dauer ist nicht zu erwerben,
Wandeln ist unsterblich Sterben.
[Woe that God had to be born as a mortal on earth! Everything changes and perishes, what stands today falls tomorrow; what now rises beautifully and majestically will soon turn to dust; permanence cannot be acquired, living is immortal dying.]
These elegiac lines have a religious quality, reminiscent of baroque lyrics in their evocation of inescapable death, of all living beings turning into dust, of no permanence: “Dauer ist nicht zu erwerben”; yet the conceit “Wandeln ist unsterblich sterben” turns death in oxymoronic fashion into the immortal. In this and many other poems and in her plays, Günderrode uses mythological imagery to represent death. The poet here is mourning Adonis, one of the most complex cult figures in Greek mythology. In Greek religious belief he was an annually renewed, ever-youthful “god of vegetation,” a life-death-rebirth deity whose cult was perpetuated by women: the cult of the dying Adonis was fully developed in the circle of young girls around Sappho on the island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, as a fragment by Sappho reveals. As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite, who had to share him with Persephone, the Goddess of the Underworld; when he went hunting in spite of Aphrodite’s warning, he was killed by a wild boar. As a sign of her mourning Aphrodite then made red flowers spring from his wound. The Adonis story (his birth, love, and death) was a frequently used subject in ancient art and it has often been employed in European literature, art, music, and opera since the Renaissance.
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- Information
- Women and Death 3Women's Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500, pp. 51 - 70Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010
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