Frankfurt anthology: Gottfried Keller: "Buried alive"

It is the opening poem of the cycle "Buried Alive" of fourteen poems, which in the first version even comprised nineteen texts. Gottfried Keller (1819 to 1890) allows someone buried alive to speak through all of his poems, who thinks, remembers, and settles accounts with the living. The motif was in the air in the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe's story “Lebendig Buried” was written in the same year as Keller's cycle: 1844. The fear of being buried alive was widespread, there is a mysterious foreign word for it: taphephobia. The legend goes about the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen that he never went to sleep without placing a piece of paper clearly visible on the bedside table with the warning: "I'm not dead, I'm just sleeping."

Keller finds amazing images and situations that go through the head of the seemingly dead.

In one of the poems he imagines himself lying in a country “where there are hyenas”.

He hopes it would dig one up for him hungry, fight with it, defeat it, then move "in the shroud, like newborn" and "singing home".

And finally to the doctor who made the misdiagnosis of definitive death, who “hit the grave over the ears”.

A bold fiction of poetry that brings the Swiss classic closer to Charles Baudelaire's and the beginning of modern poetry.

Knock from another world

In another poem, Keller lets the pseudo-dead eat the rose that the beloved woman put into his supposedly dead hand: “I even ate the rose that she put in my rigid hand! / That I would eat roses again / I would never have believed in my life! ”James Joyce was fascinated by the poem and translated it into English:“ Now have I fed and eaten up the rose ”. It remained one of his favorite poems for the rest of his life.

The absurd situation is captured in the opening poem. The buried is anything but dead, because he is speaking - to whom? To us? He can no longer exercise any physical activity (“In the dark grave, no rain and no stirring”). In return, fantasy (“let your eagles fly!”) And spirit (the “wood worm in the fir wood” of the coffin) are expressed all the more strongly. He ponders his sinister situation, questions the character of time: “Is that eternity?” He goes through a “wonderful time” that corresponds to a modern, relative, subjective conception of time - the “pure duration” of Henri Bergson.

Here speaks a deeply lonely man, left alone under the earth, separated from the rest of humanity.

The English poet John Donne generously claimed in the seventeenth century that no one is an island.

It is, however, there is nothing more island-like underground than someone buried alive.

In the last two stanzas, the word field of “lie” is sought with persistence, as an adjective (“lying”), as a verb (“lied”), as a subject (“liar”) and as an object (“lie”), semantically varied ("Cheated").

The people are a "lying sex" - probably not alone because they buried him supposedly dead.

The seemingly dead does not hold back with his criticism: The deficient love of truth should generally denote one of the shortcomings of humanity.

The people in the poem do not even appear as particularly mean or evil, they are just inattentive, forgetful, incompetent, and tend to conveniently lie or half-truths. There is no certainty here whether the judgment of truth will one day come, only a fearful hope that “the lie will take revenge on itself”. “Vigilante justice” instead of the verdict of a higher power, instead of the Last Judgment. There is no absolute, transcendent truth, the lie could only kill itself and probably would - also you! - just be an apparently dead person. The liars are more likely to remain “unpunished”.

Influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and with him rejecting the belief in the immortality of the soul, Keller was convinced of the uniqueness of existence, of the impossibility of life after death. The only thing he did not want to completely rule out was the continuation of life in the poem. Then again the seemingly dead still describes himself as a “lie”, he is the incarnated lie, the object of the lie of others, because as someone buried prematurely and prematurely he is in truth not dead at all. But he is not just the lie of others, he does not exclude himself personally from the lie.

In this double play of lies, the poet also means that he is a liar because he stubbornly maintains the fiction of being buried alive through so many verses.

The poem thus also reflects the essence of the lyric: an apparently “dead letter” that can suddenly be resurrected through rereading and rereading.

Poems speak from a supposed hereafter or, according to the grave location, up to us.

We should be careful, listen to the word, to the knock that comes as if from another world, from someone who is only apparently dead.