Frankfurt anthology: DH Lawrence: "Tourists"

Ironically, the lifelong displaced and restless.

The constant traveler.

Born in England, he was constantly on tour, first in Germany and Italy, later in Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Ceylon, Mexico, again in Italy, and finally in southern France, where he died in Bandol on March 2, 1930 at the age of forty-five.

He had always had death in front of him for a long time. So he found himself in constant flight from enemy Hein, who was mercilessly on the heels of the lung patient. And just as all tourists are periodic refugees in their unfulfilled hearts (“Where you are not, there is happiness”, sings Schubert's Wanderer), he was the periodless tourist

. At home only in foreign lands. And now, of all people, the warning under the catchphrase “Tourists”: “There is nothing to look at any more, / everything has been seen to death.” A two-line line from the “Pansies” collection (“... Pensées, anglicé pansies; a handful of thougths ", as he himself put it) by the poet and novelist and world, society, love and marriage improver DH Lawrence, some of which he published himself in 1929, some as" More Pansies "and" Last Poems ”were published in 1932 from the estate.

Lawrence's “handful of thougths”, as brief and undisguised as they appear, take the long detour via the aphoristic punch line art of the Pensées tradition à la française, celebrated by the Pascal, Voltaire, Renard, Valéry et al .

- and set up a brightly painted sign at the end of the traditional route, so to speak, which indicates a language knight leap: "Pansies".

So the pensées fly as pansies over the sleeve language channel.

On the wings of morality of unconditional attachment.

Who is exclusively in search of the hour of the only true sensation.

This applies to looks at the beautiful as well as, for example, the even more beautiful of marriages.

Final travel warning!

In his most famous and most scandalous novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (in three versions, the last published in 1928 as a private print in Florence), which has provocatively occupied both guardians and courts for decades, Lawrence celebrates the adultery of Connie Chatterley with the gamekeeper Mellor, described in detail in Sexibus eternal, basically fundamentally Catholic marriage, which for Lawrence "only comes into question as a phallic" one. Which is why Mr. Chatterley, who was shot to death in the war to become a wheelchair-banned eunuch, is out of the game from the start. Connie and Mellors are both all over the world. In which they are completely absorbed and in which they perceive any contact with the external world of society as a nuisance. And that was and is the real scandal. And in his perhaps most beautiful story, "The man,who loved islands ”(1927), the island man is the“ only egg ”that can fit on an island. And he searches for the real island, completely isolated from the rest of the world, until he can only feel the "breath of the snow in his back". Resistant individuality in the smallest of social spaces and at the same time merging into the larger natural whole: Lawrence - actually the red-green contemporary poet for the older sixty-eighters as well as for the newer ecoistsLawrence - actually the red-green contemporary poet for the older sixty-eight as well as for the newer ecoistsLawrence - actually the red-green contemporary poet for the older sixty-eight as well as for the newer ecoists

So his travel warning comes at the right time. Those who love the beauties from afar stay away from them - so as not to get infected with the virus of staring to death, the massing of looks. In front of the Grand Canal like in the Louvre. “I was photographed to death”, the aged Marlene Dietrich complained to her portraitist Maximilian Schell in a beautiful film portrait, who did not force her into the picture in a chevalesque way. And anyone who has seen how masses of Japanese tourists photograph each other, how they photograph the Mona Lisa, understands such looks-at-the-picture throwers as image destroyers. In any case, the much toured poet Lawrence, according to his widow Frieda, née von Richthofen, was sitting when he wrote “Lady Chatterley's Lover” in the Tuscan mountains, “so quiet,that the lizards ran over him and the birds hopped close to him ”. Part of a whole. Not its Beglotzer.