When Wilhelm Müller wrote the poems of the "Winter Journey" in 1822/23, hiking had long since ceased to be limited to the journeyman's journey, but had become a mental and spiritual appropriation of the landscape.

The old rolling mill has been visibly preserved by the carpenters to this day.

The wanderings of the journeymen found expression early on in the textually and musically simple form of the folk song.

Only the poets of the Romantic period made the song the carrier of sophisticated symbolism, and the composers changed the simply repetitive stanzas in the art song to richly varied forms.

The idea of ​​aimlessness was part of the new romantic concept of hiking.

Calm was replaced by a longing for calm.

The fragment took the place of the whole, as in life as in art.

The incompleteness that the half cross-rhymes of Müller's three-line quatrains show reflects in truth something broken that was once complete: the long verse that fell in two halves, which as such had once formed a correct rhyme.

In Romanticism, the incomplete was considered more important than the whole: the ruin in the painting, the fragment in poetry.

The broken little ring was chosen early on as a symbol for everything fragile and broken, also in love.

The hiker's path "brought" him to a graveyard.

It was not the wanderer who sought the field on which he found himself as the goal of his contemplation, he was brought there.

The mirroring of the images of the inn and cemetery quotes old ideas of dying and contemplation, preserved in popular belief, which Müller's verses inextricably intertwine.

The threefold repetition of the u-sound (“The tired hikers invite / Into the cool tavern”) feigns a refreshing coolness, which in reality is as cool as a grave.

But even this is denied to the hiker of the “Winter Journey” at the end.

The second stanza transposes existential experiences into symbols and expressly names this symbolism (“You green wreaths / could well be the signs”).

The two following stanzas tear the wanderer out of the delusion of the misinterpreted signs.

This 'disappointment' robs him of the opportunity for contemplation that he had hoped for, "mortally injured."

The longing for rest

They have never met: the Dessau-born poet of the song cycle of the "Winter Journey" and her composer.

Franz Schubert set the first twelve poems of the cycle to music in February 1827. When he was working on setting the other poems to music in October 1827, which he only saw later, Müller had just died.

Müller has linked the songs together in a subtle order.

Despite individual changes throughout the cycle, the “Wirtshaus” is always preceded by the poem “Der Wegweiser”, which ends with a 'signpost' that the wanderer sees 'uncrazed', but with the path to death only in a nowhere lighted up by no faith and no hope points: “I see a wise man standing / Undeterred before my eyes;

/ I have to go down a road, / which no one has gone back before.”

The poems of the "Winter Journey" are rooted in a stirring experience in which Müller was involved in Brussels in 1814.

There he was stationed as a young lieutenant in the fight against Napoleon's troops.

The unfortunate love affair with a 'beautiful enemy', from whom the name Therese has survived in the sources, led to Müller's dishonorable expulsion from the army after discovery.

Worse events, possibly the death sentence before the court martial, had been prevented – probably at the father's request – by a shrewd superior.

On November 18, 1814, in the freezing cold, Müller set out on foot on his 'winter journey', which took him back to Dessau.

There is some evidence that the name Therese should be written as Thérèse, if not anagrammatically as Esther.

So the same Jewish girl would have been mentioned here, whose stupendous cycle "Johannes und Esther" is commemorated by Müller.

There it says in the poem "Christmas Night" about the woman who is excluded from all festive joy: "But in the quiet house / No bright festive light is burning / And in her black weekdress / She sits there and is not happy."

Müller's last novella, "Debora", which was only published posthumously in 1829, is once again about the love for a Jewess, this time one who was secretly baptized and who lives with her father in the Roman ghetto.

Young Arturo has scarcely caught a glimpse of her one day from afar when all his night fantasies revolve around just one thought: “Man loves only once, as he is only born once and dies only once, and when we awaken to a new existence up there , then our first and only love will also be transfigured with us to a heavenly nature.” The Jewish father murders the daughter, who has betrayed her faith.

The lonely Arturo converted to Catholicism and entered the monastery of Santa Maria di Palazzolo in the Alban Hills.

According to the report that Adelheid Müller left to her friend Gustav Schwab for an obituary, Wilhelm Müller, who was driven by disturbing hectic activity to the end of his life, was granted the privilege of being able to on the night of September 30, 1827, after going to bed early, dying peacefully of a heart attack.

This is exactly how the poet had let the wanderer die in his last novella “Debora”: “weak to the point of sinking, mortally badly injured”.