A Note on Eckermann, Stieglitz, and Yale

CHRISTA SAMMONS A Note on Eckermann, Stieglitz, and YaIe When Johann Peter Eckermann's wife died in 1834, he was left with a young child, meager resources, and the daunting task of editing Goethe's posthumous papers. The result was near breakdown. Maria Paulowna, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, came to the rescue with 100 taler for a vacation on Helgoland, not far from Eckermann's birthplace, a village on the river Luhe near Hamburg. "Schon der Aufenthalt in Hamburg frischt ihn wieder auf," notes his biographer H.H. Houben. "Sein ganzes Leben nach Goethes Tod," adds Ernst Beutler in his introduction to the Gespräche mit Goethe, "war ja im Grunde Sehnsucht nach dem Lande seiner Kindheit." That longing, so apparent in the autobiographical essay that serves as a preface to the Gespräche, was cruelly frustrated. Eckermann's livelihood depended on a parsimonious annual pension of 300 taler from SaxeWeimar , and Duke Karl Friedrich refused to let him retire with it to his birthplace, the marshlands between Hamburg and Lüneburg. The Gespräche had made Eckermann a minor tourist attraction, and Weimar was in need of such after Goethe's death. It is hardly surprising then that one of Eckermann's best and longest poems should be a hymn to Hamburg and the Elbe. The poem, or rather eight stanzas of it, first appeared in print in the summer of 1830, in number 40 of Chaos, the literary weekly edited by Goethe's daughter-in-law Ottilie. It has the title "Hamburg (Ein Fragment)" and, like many of the contributions in Chaos, is unsigned. The first four stanzas are organized around a comparison between the Elbe and the Rhine: anyone who grew up along the Rhine and (like Eckermann) has been "displaced to the middle lands of Saxony" will surely suffer much homesickness. Should such a person see the Elbe, he will be reminded of the Rhine. At stanza 5, the poem takes a turn and, truer to the spirit of the final version, begins to describe the beauties of the Elbe and the northern coast: the gulls, the wild geese, reeds 304 Christa Sammons and willows, and particularly the storks. Eckermann was an avid watcher and keeper of birds. After the first two volumes of Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe were in print, he began to think about compiling a collection of his own poems. They appeared in 1838, published, not very willingly, by Brockhaus. The volume contains a variety of material love songs, aphorisms, occasional verse with a concluding section of "new" poems, the last of which is the Hamburg poem of 1830, revised and much expanded. The awkward comparison of the Rhine to the Elbe is gone. The poem, now called simply "Die Heimat," begins directly with its theme: "O EIb'! an deinen Ufern aufgewachsen . . . ." It has grown to fifty-one six-line stanzas, a paean to the river, the landscape, the coast, and most particularly to the city of Hamburg with its harbor, its people, its ships and docks, its colorful, noisy, vibrant life, its commercial vigor. Beutler calls "Die Heimat" Eckermann's "schönste dichterische Leistung" and compares it favorably to the best work of another north German poet, Detlev von Liliencron. Whatever Eckermann's limitations may have been, poems like "Die Heimat" show that he possessed considerable literary gifts, the same gifts that imbue the Gespräche with immediacy and grace and that suited their author to be the artistic confidant of Goethe's late years. By one of those happy coincidences that sometimes occur in large libraries , a partial manuscript of "Die Heimat" has been preserved in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which is also home to the William A. Speck Collection, the largest Goethe collection outside Germany. The manuscript, undated but in Eckermann 's hand, represents the poem in an intermediary stage, between the 1830 Chaos fragment and the final version of 1838. The Rhine-comparison is still there, but eight new stanzas, added since the 1830 version, fully establish the subject, mood, and direction of the completed poem. The manuscript fragment ends with a note in Eckermann's...