3 - The “New Mythology”: Myth and Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s Literary Work

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.