Born: Munich, Germany; May 6, 1871
Died: Untermais, near Meran, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Merano, Italy); March 31, 1914
PRINCIPAL POETRY
In Phanta’s Schloss, 1895
Auf vielen Wegen, 1897
Horatius travestitus, 1897
Ich und die Welt, 1897
Ein Sommer, 1900
Und aber ründet sich ein Kranz, 1902
Galgenlieder, 1905 (The Gallows Songs, 1963)
Melancholie: Neue Gedichte, 1906
Einkehr, 1910
Palmström, 1910
Ich und Du: Sonette, Ritornelle, Lieder, 1911
Wir fanden einen Pfad, 1914
Palma Kunkel, 1916
Der Gingganz, 1918
Stufen, 1918
Epigramme und Sprüche, 1919
Klein Irmchen, 1921
Mensch Wanderer: Gedichte aus den Jahren 1887-1914, 1927
The Moonsheep, 1953
The Daynight Lamp, and Other Poems, 1973
Gesammelte Werke in einem Band, 1974
Lullabies, Lyrics, and Gallows Songs, 1995
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Christian Morgenstern (MAWR-guhn-shtehrn) was an active translator of Scandinavian literature. Among his translations are August Strindberg’s Inferno in 1898; a large number of plays and poems for the German edition of Henrik Ibsen’s work; and Knut Hamsun’s Aftenrøde (1898) in 1904 as Abendröte, and his Livets spil (1896) in 1910 as Spiel des Lebens. Morgenstern also translated the works of Frederick the Great. There are two editions of his letters, Ein Leben in Briefen (1952) and Alles um des Menschen willen (1962). Otherwise, Morgenstern is known chiefly for his poems.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Christian Morgenstern began to write serious and humorous verse while still in school. By 1894, he was contributing to various magazines, and in the following years, he began to travel extensively. In 1903, he became a reader for publisher Bruno Cassirer and edited Das Theater. The serious side of his nature was stimulated by the lectures of Rudolf Steiner, and in 1909, he became a member of the Anthroposophical Society. The German Schiller Society made him the recipient of an honorary stipend in 1912, and in November, 1913, he was honored at a Morgenstern festival in Stuttgart.
BIOGRAPHY
Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern was born just as the Franco-Prussian War ended, and he died shortly before the outbreak of World War I. His life span covers a long interval of peace in the history of modern Germany. The lack of external political problems may have been responsible in part for his attention to that which ailed the country from within, particularly the crass materialism he perceived and the callousness of the upper class with regard to the plight of the worker.
Morgenstern was the only child of Carl Ernst Morgenstern, a landscape painter, and his wife, Charlotte, née Schertel. Both parents came from artists’ families. Because of the frequent changes of residence necessitated by his father’s profession, Morgenstern’s education was erratic. He changed schools frequently and sometimes received private tutoring. After the death of his mother in 1881 of tuberculosis—a disease from which he also suffered, requiring frequent sanatorium visits—he was sent to his uncle’s family in Hamburg. This arrangement proved to be unsuitable, and when his father married again, Morgenstern was sent to a boarding school in Landshut. The strict, oppressive environment there, which included corporal punishment, was unbearable for him, and his bitter complaints to his father resulted in his removal from the school after two years. In March, 1884, he joined his parents in Breslau and attended a local Gymnasium for four years. Although Morgenstern’s schooling was not a positive experience, he began to write poetry and became acquainted with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and medieval German mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. Shortly before entering a military academy in 1889, he met Friedrich Kayssler, who became an actor and Morgenstern’s best and lifelong friend. It quickly became obvious that Morgenstern was not suited for the military life; in 1890, he entered the Gymnasium in Sorau, and after his graduation in 1892, he became a student of economics and political science at the University of Breslau. The following two years brought some personal upheavals that culminated in his estrangement from his father. In the summer of 1893, his tubercular condition became more severe, requiring an extensive period of rest. He began reading Friedrich Nietzsche, to whose mother he sent his first book of poetry. Meanwhile, his father had divorced his second wife, remarried, and refused to finance his son’s further schooling. In the spring of 1894, Morgenstern left for Berlin.
Newly independent, Morgenstern was briefly employed at the National Gallery. He then began to contribute to a number of different journals, among them the Neue Deutsche Rundschau and Der Kunstwart. For the latter magazine, he wrote theater reviews. This activity brought him in contact with Max Reinhardt, the famous theatrical producer, who became one of Morgenstern’s friends. In 1895, his first volume of poetry, In Phanta’s Schloss, was published. Morgenstern characterized it as humorous and fantastic, but it contains lyrics with mythological and mystical elements engulfed in pathos. Even as a sixteen-year-old, he had written a poem on reincarnation, and during the winter of 1896-1897, he had several dreams that he transformed into a cycle of lyric poems. They became part of Auf vielen Wegen. Between 1897 and 1903, Morgenstern translated a large number of plays and poems by Ibsen, whom he met in 1898 on a journey to Oslo. Morgenstern always had a sense of urgency about his work—a conviction that his time was limited. He traveled extensively to Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, and within Germany, always writing, always battling his deteriorating health. While vacationing in Dreikirchen in the Tirol, he met and became engaged to Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern in 1908; they were married in 1910.
At this point in his life, Morgenstern was seriously ill and had to spend considerable time in hospitals and sanatoriums. After learning of the spiritualist and occultist research being done by Rudolf Steiner, the couple attended his lecture in January, 1909, on Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Carnegie. Steiner had written studies on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Nietzsche as well as on mysticism in Christianity. After having outlined his philosophy in Philosophie der Freiheit (1894; Philosophy of Freedom, 1964) and in his Theosophie (1904; Theosophy, 1954), he published a work in 1909 outlining his method of attaining a knowledge of the occult. Morgenstern became a member of his Anthroposophical Society in May, 1909, and attended Steiner’s lectures in Oslo, Budapest, Kassel, and Munich. During the last years of his life, Morgenstern’s longing for communication with a world beyond that of his present existence took shape in a number of poems of a meditative nature. Two weeks before his death, he determined that the last collection of his lyrics was to be called Wir fanden einen Pfad (we found a path). Morgenstern died on March 31, 1914.
ANALYSIS
Christian Morgenstern himself considered his serious lyrics paramount in his poetic oeuvre, although he is best known for his humorous poems. He has been compared to contemporaries such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he shared a sense of poetic mission and a certain melodiousness of verse. Morgenstern’s poetry is considerably less complicated both linguistically and metaphorically than Rilke’s, although it expresses emotion sincerely. Only a few of his serious poems have been translated into English, and German audiences were more receptive to his grotesque humor than to the expressions of his religious convictions or metaphysical thought. Although Morgenstern considered his light and provocative verse to be Beiwerke (minor efforts), it is in this area that he anticipated trends that were later exploited more extensively in Dadaism and concrete poetry. He experimented with visually and acoustically innovative techniques, presented a satirical view of a philistine society in his verse, and playfully created new and sometimes nonsensical word constellations that appear to mock both the advocates of a poésie pure and the efforts of those who, thirty years after his death, attempted a reconstruction of his poetry with ciphers and absolute metaphors. Satire, religious fervor, humor, and mysticism found in Morgenstern an expressive spirit.
THE GALLOWS SONGS
Morgenstern’s frivolous verse is the foundation of his fame, notwithstanding his protestations. His most popular collection was The Gallows Songs, which ran through fourteen editions in his lifetime and by 1937 had sold 290,000 copies. Critics persisted in reading hidden meanings into these witty lyrics, so that he felt compelled to render mock explanations in Über die Galgenlieder (1921; about the gallows songs). The first group of these whimsical lyrics were composed when Morgenstern was in his twenties. On the occasion of an outing with some friends, they arrived at a place referred to as Gallows Hill. Being in a bantering mood, they founded the Club of the Gallows Gang, Morgenstern contributing some frivolous poems that another of the group later set to music. These poems obviously attest Morgenstern’s lighter side, and no attempt should be made to imbue them with a depth that they do not have and that was not intended, yet it will not detract from the reader’s pleasure if the spirit of innovation and the subtle humor that pervade them are pointed out.
Morgenstern’s raw material is the sound, the structure, the form, and the idiomatic usage of the German language. The nineteenth century saw an abundance of grammarians and linguists who attempted to regulate and explain linguistic phenomena and to limit expression to precisely defined and carefully governed modes of communication. Morgenstern perceived this approach to be hopelessly dull, “middle-class safe,” and philistine. A degree of arbitrariness is an essential element of language, and he proceeded to point this out by confusing the complacent and satirizing the pedants. He accomplished this on the semantic, grammatical, and formal levels in his poems. In “Gruselett” (“Scariboo”), he created what has come to be known as a nonsense poem:
The Winglewangle phlutters
through widowadowood,
the crimson Fingoor splutters
and scary screaks the Scrood.
By arranging essentially meaningless words according to a familiar syntactical pattern within the sentence and by adding a number of adjectives and verbs that stimulate lexical memory, Morgenstern coerces the reader into believing that he has grasped the sense of what has been said. It must be pointed out here that most of the translations of Morgenstern’s poems have not been literal and have frequently deviated greatly from the original to preserve a semblance of the poet’s intention (the use of puns, untranslatable idioms, grammatical constructions not found in English, and so on).
“THE BANSHEE”
Proper inflection, punctuation, and use of tense also come under attack by Morgenstern, who freely admitted that his teachers had bored and embittered him. His poem “Der Werwolf” (“The Banshee”) reflects the eagerness, gratitude, and eventual disillusionment of the pupil, as well as the futility and uselessness of that which is taught by smug grammarians. When the banshee requests of an entombed teacher, “Inflect me, pray,” the teacher responds:
“The banSHEE, in the subject’s place;
the banHERS, the possessive case.
The banHER, next, is what they call
objective case—and that is all.”
The banshee, delighted at first, then asks how to form the plural of “banshee”:
“While ‘bans’ are frequent,” he advised,
“a ‘she’ cannot be pluralized.”
The banshee, rising clammily,
wailed: “What about my family?”
Then, being not a learned creature,
said humbly “Thanks” and left the teacher.
The teacher’s wisdom is depicted as severely limited and out of touch with reality. His linguistic expertise extends only to abstractions.
“AMONG TENSES” AND “KORF’S CLOCK”
Time, that element which is “money” to the businessperson and is “of the essence” to the philistine, is only relative to Morgenstern. He satirizes the preoccupation of humanity with the temporal in several ways, one of them grammatical. In the poem “Unter Zeiten” (“Among Tenses”), past and future are on equal terms in the present: “Perfect and Past/ drank to a friendship to last./ They toasted the Future tense/ (which makes sense)./ Futureperf and Plu/ nodded too.” The clock, the object that enslaves humanity because it measures every minute and every hour and restlessly reminds us that “time flies” (tempus fugit), is reinvented to improve on the fatal flaw. “Die Korfsche Uhr” (“Korf’s Clock”) not only deprives time of its sovereignty but also recalls those people who, while still existing in the present, seem to live forever in the past:
When it’s two—it’s also ten;
when it’s three—it’s also nine.
You just look at it, and then
time gets never out of line,
……………………….
time itself is nullified.
A counterpart to Korf’s clock, and one with yet greater flexibility and sophistication, is Palmström’s clock (“Palmströms Uhr”): It heeds requests and slows or quickens its pace according to the individual’s wishes. It “will never/ stick to petty rules, however,” and is “a clockwork with a heart.” For those who are incurably enslaved by time and who permit it to upset their equilibrium grievously, Morgenstern suggests a cure: Since time is not a matter of reality but merely of habit, it is useful to read tomorrow’s paper to find out about the resolution of today’s conflicts.
“THE FUNNELS” AND “FISH’S LULLABY”
Morgenstern’s visual verse is a forerunner of concrete poetry. It expresses graphically in the poem what is described linguistically in the choice of words. Max Knight translates the poem “Die Trichter” (“The Funnels”) in the singular:
A funnel ambles through the night.
Within its body, moonbeams white
converge as they
descend upon
its forest
pathway
and
so
on
The funnel in effect becomes its own pathfinder as it streamlines the moonlight through its neck and directs it like a flashlight on the dark path. Although this poem is meant to be humorous, it contains an element of Morgenstern’s own undaunted search for cosmic (divine) direction and communication, which is very evident in his serious poetry. As a final example of Morgenstern’s humorous verse, the visual poem “Fisches Nachtgesang” (“Fish’s Lullaby”), may suffice:
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Fish, as mute creatures, can express lyrical sentiments only wordlessly, by rhythmically opening and closing their mouths. The unverbalized song is formally recorded by Morgenstern as a series of dashes that leave the content to the imagination of the reader.
“EVOLUTION” AND “THE EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD”
A large part of Morgenstern’s work is serious prose, much of it dealing with profound matters, such as the search for truth, and with humanity’s position in the universe and in relation to God. Not only did Morgenstern write deeply religious verse in the Christian tradition, but also he developed poems involving the concepts of pantheism and reincarnation. Although his basic philosophical tenets may not have changed significantly, a change in style, a greater facility and fluency in writing, is evident in a comparison of portions of his early with his late work. This may be perceived in the opening stanzas of two poems dealing with reincarnation, one of which, “Der Achtzehnjährige” (“The Eighteen-Year-Old”), was written in 1889, while the other, “Evolution,” was written shortly before Morgenstern’s death. “The Eighteen-Year-Old” begins:
How often may I already have wandered before
on this earthly sphere of sorrow,
how often may I have changed
the substance, the form of life’s clothing?
The formal aspects of this poem in the German are scrupulously observed: iambic meter with four feet, regular abab rhyme scheme. The first two strophes posit the fundamental question (rhetorically), and the last one answers it with the metaphor of the ever-changing waves of the sea. The finality of the answer is sententious. Despite the use of enjambment, the poem grinds along with the deadening regularity that is one of the pitfalls of iambic meter, and it does so because the metric stress coincides almost perfectly with the syllabic emphasis of the words.
Thus, the prosodic perfection becomes somnolent and detrimental to the poem’s overall effect. The single place (in the second stanza) in which the word “order” is reversed for the sake of the rhyme causes the verse to sound contrived and strange. It may be argued that the monotony of the verse is intentional, thereby underscoring the repetitiousness of life, death, and rebirth inherent in the concept of reincarnation. While such a theory is certainly plausible, other early poems by Morgenstern with different topics show a similar emphasis on the regularity of rhyme and meter and thereby reveal the style to be a sign of poetic immaturity and inexperience.
The difference between “The Eighteen-Year-Old” and the poem “Evolution” is striking. The latter begins:
Barely that that, which once separated itself from Thee,
recognized itself in its special entity,
it immediately longs to return to its element.
The excessive pathos and the sententiousness that characterized the first poem are missing here. The certainty, too, is absent: There are no answers in “Evolution,” only ambiguity, longing, and the realization that this yearning cannot yet find fulfillment. The easy solutions of youth have mellowed into a peaceful submission, a quiet recognition and acceptance of the inevitable unfolding of individual and collective destiny. The formal presentation is also different. Although the poem in its entirety retains a formal meter (iambic pentameter) and a regular rhyme scheme (aba bcb c), there is a natural flow of rhythm akin to that inherent in prose: The monotony of the iambs is broken by the deliberate placement of semantically significant syllables on metrically unstressed ones, and vice versa. The interlocking rhymes facilitate the smooth flow of verse, and the third strophe is not a glib retort but a reduction, a one-line confrontation with an unfathomable phenomenon.
Morgenstern’s serious poetry is not without beauty and merit, although it has been neglected both by the reading public and by the critics. There is a certain dogmatism, a religious and mystical undercurrent inherent in it that limits its appeal and precludes the kind of universal acceptability that, for example, the lyrics of Rainer Maria Rilke possess. Morgenstern’s lighter verse, which exemplifies the cheerful side of his personality, not only requires less empathy from the reader but also stimulates the reader’s intellect without engaging the personal prejudices that he might have. It is an art worthy of pursuit.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
NONFICTION: Ein Leben in Briefen, 1952; Alles um des Menschen willen, 1962.
TRANSLATIONS: Inferno, 1898 (of August Strindberg’s novel); Abendröte, 1904 (of Knut Hamsun’s play Aftenrøde); Spiel des Lebens, 1910 (of Hamsun’s play Livets spil).
MISCELLANEOUS: Über die Galgenlieder, 1921.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauer, Michael. Christian Morgensterns Leben und Werk. Munich: R. Piper, 1941. The standard biography, illustrated. In German.
Forster, Leonard. Poetry of Significant Nonsense. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. A brief treatment of Morgenstern in the context of Dada and nonsense verse.
Hofacker, Erich P. Christian Morgenstern. Boston: Twayne, 1978. A good Englishlanguage introduction to Morgenstern’s life and works.
Knight, Max, trans. Introduction to The Daynight Lamp , and Other Poems, by Christian Morgenstern. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. The translator’s introduction to this slim collection casts light on Morgenstern’s poetics.
Scott, Robert Ian. “Metaphorical Maps of Improbable Fictions: The Semantic Parables of Christian Morgenstern.” Et Cetera 52, no. 3 (Fall, 1995): 276. Scott argues that Morgenstern made absolute faith in words “obviously ridiculous” in demonstrating that the world does not follow human logic. He examines a number of Morgenstern’s poems.
Helene M. Kastinger Riley