Ludwig Tieck

Johann Ludwig Tieck (May 31st 1773 with Berlin - April 28th 1853 in Berlin) is a German poet , Traducteur, editor, critical Romancier and , initiator of the first Romantisme.

Presentation

Friend of childhood of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck is about of the same age as the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis or Friedrich Hölderlin. Around 1850, having survived all the large romantic ones, it remains alone on a scene whose decoration completely changed, and on which one sees riding only poor new actors. The year of its death, it has been more than one half-century that Novalis is not any more, forty-two years that Heinrich von Kleist, that it liked and supported, committed suicide, thirty-one years that Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, which held it for a Master, left this world, fifty years that Hölderlin became insane and forty years that he died in the Zimmer carpenter. These some reference marks can help a little to include/understand how Tieck, polygraph virtuoso, died at the eighty years age, cover of honors, ended up incarnating, almost with him all alone, this romantic school which it had, with some others, founded and of which it had been found, after 1832, after the death of Gœthe, the last representative of scale.

But if its work still deserves to be published and read, it is probably not under the terms of its character the hugoesque and protean, but rather because of the few durable mice, endowed with capacity, intact, to cause same frights, the same anguishes, whose mountain was confined. Taken separately, certain tales of Tieck, writings at different times, represent such treasures well: Eckbert Fair the (1797), Runenberg (1802) and Love and Magie (1811). All in these accounts appears necessary and exact. It is not by their only literary qualities, nor by their only music, or their decoration more suggested than described, than these stories reach us so deeply. By telling them, Tieck approached what one can name “the umbilical point of the tale”, this mental place where the close friend and the universal one meet. It knew like no one other to evoke the obscure share of the life, the dark zone where come to join the fear, the threatening madness, and the childhood which one remembers initially like a enigma. Thus, at the dawn of the romanticism, Ludwig Tieck evoked what one will call the Unconscious one later one century. He spoke about the confusion of the spirit and the body, of the persistence of what one believed forgotten, of the power of the desire conceived like only engine of creation and even of the faith. In 1919, Freud saw in the Man with sand of E.T.A. Hoffmann, of which the climate of worrying strangeness had much with the influence of Tieck, an anticipation of discovered psychoanalysis: what would it have says very strange memories of childhood that Bertha ( Eckbert Fair the ) evokes one evening, at the request of her husband, in front of the enigmatic friend, and of this brutal “return of the repressed” (Strohmian) which makes it sick to die?

Tieck was thus the large initiator of the literary and inventive rewriting of the old tales. Admittedly, before him, Goethe had written its famous Märchen ( History of Fleur de Lys ), and had invited the author of tales to be let carry by a wandering imagination and a direction of the enigma, to have in any account the elements impossible to interpret: admittedly Novalis had outlined the romantic theory of the Märchen and had given some to an idea with the tale of the Fleur Bleue in Henri d' Ofterdingen . But it is Tieck which contributed to create the environment of the romantic and fantastic tale, and showed with the writers of its time and the generations to come the richnesses from this literary kind. All in aquarellées volutes that would cut, clearly, with the dark lines, the writings of Ludwig Tieck impregnated all the German Romanticism. But around a point of impact of its most beautiful tales, the concentric waves of the dream, childhood, fear and madness widened to us. Speed and slowness of unforgettable images, dyed pastel and black ink.

the Voyage in Blue (Fahrt ins Blaue) was translated by Robert Valençay (see Romantic German of Armel Guerne, Desclée de Brouwer, 1956 and 1963, rééd. Phébus, 2004).

See too

German Literature
Romanticism

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