Frankfurt anthology: Marie Luise Kaschnitz: "Everything"

The imperative made its way into twentieth-century poetry.

Brecht's admonition "Don't let yourself be seduced!" or Ingeborg Bachmann's "Gehourte Zeit" with the condition "tie up your shoes!" set a tone that Marie Luise Kaschnitz implemented more quietly, but no less seriously.

She probably made plans for a collection of poems "Songs of Human Life" soon after the Second World War and also integrated texts from the 1930s, but it was only much later, in the summer of 1974, that a small selection of ten poems was published.

The full cycle was not published until 1982, eight years after the poet's death.

It also contains the poem "Everything".

In the first three verses, he swears to his counterpart and the reader to refrain from holding back from beauty and love, then from the idea of ​​God.

Three prohibitions are erected, warnings, demands that are addressed to an unspecified group and are not justified.

It is only with the following, thoroughly enigmatic pair of verses, "You got over your death very young / You got over it", that it is made clear that the addressees must have had an essential, an existential experience that is not in any obvious relation to their age.

"Very young" - and yet death behind them: Here an absolutely drastic turning point becomes visible, even if one does not want to assume in the harmless sense that those addressed simply died.

The fact that they have, in a figurative sense, entered another epoch, another world, becomes clear when the present becomes the subject.

The point in time from which the poem speaks is characterized by a “different” death, by a complete reversal of the normality lived.

Midday, as the moment of the shortest shadow, as Nietzsche says, as the time of the brightest light, now conversely bears “the face of the night”, that is, a kind of metaphysical solar eclipse is evoked here.

Instead of going a way forward, "every step shows the gesture of falling," of a fall.

is characterized by a "different" death, by a complete reversal of the lived normality.

Midday, as the moment of the shortest shadow, as Nietzsche says, as the time of the brightest light, now conversely bears “the face of the night”, that is, a kind of metaphysical solar eclipse is evoked here.

Instead of going a way forward, "every step shows the gesture of falling," of a fall.

is characterized by a "different" death, by a complete reversal of the lived normality.

Midday, as the moment of the shortest shadow, as Nietzsche says, as the time of the brightest light, now conversely bears “the face of the night”, that is, a kind of metaphysical solar eclipse is evoked here.

Instead of going a way forward, "every step shows the gesture of falling," of a fall.

Noon bears the face of night

What can thus appear as a kind of dating of the poem, the moment of radical loss, a devastation and darkening of the light at night, turns out to be an ultimately surprising commonality of those addressed as well as the speaking "we": both sides share in an emptiness, where there seems to be no place for beauty, love and God, where light has been lost and the path could lead into the abyss.

And yet the poem then leads to a surprising prospect that is not simply a primitive consolation: The question, which is all too comprehensible after the previous record of the loss of meaning - "What can still happen to us?" - is neither played down nor resolved into a banal catastrophe scenario, but instead with the expected "nothing" vice versa with the one-word verse of the title dramatically pointed.

Even after the loss of the world, its light, of beauty and love and God, in a world of nihilism, which the Sartre reader considered necessary, “everything” can still happen, nothing is over, everything is possible – too in the limited and dim conditions of the "now" when noon is already dark.

The rhyme structure of the little poem also contributes to this: if the first four verses have no rhyme,

Spoken with the title of another volume of poetry: "No magic spell" is offered here, Kaschnitz does not write from an ivory tower, one of her best-known poems is dedicated to "Hiroshima", she is connected to Ingeborg Bachmann or Adorno, Camus and Beckett are among her intensive ones readings.

Her radio plays and stories and the autobiographical prose with the harmless-sounding title Engelsbrücke.

Roman memories” offer fascinatingly clear, philosophically reflected and literary completely independent expeditions.

Marie Luise Kaschnitz is one of the most impressive voices of her time.