Adam Oehlenschläger: In Dänemark berühmt, in Deutschland vergessen by Christian Gellinek, and: Dänemarks und Deutschlands Kultursolidarität über Grenzen by Christian Gellinek (review)

As a graduate student of Germanistics, the reviewer had four Danish moments. First, Rilke enticed him into reading J.P. Jacobsen. Second, he got into hot water during a dismal course on the German Novelle by wondering if Theodor Storm, from Husum, could not have chosen to write in Danish—the teacher was a Teutophone from Schleswig-Holstein. Third, he upset his venerated Doktorvater, the conductor of an excellent Klopstock seminar, by asking if the bard of Der Messias (and the infinitely more palatable Oden) had bothered to master the tongue of Holberg and Johannes Ewald during his “eleven to fifteen years” (Professor Gellinek’s estimate), out-and-about in Copenhagen, cosseted by Fredrik V. Fourth, the ignorant youth was further inspired to sample the riches of Danish letters by Rilke’s enthusiasm for Leonora Christina Ulfeldt’s Jammersminde.

In his one volume, Gellinek doughtily reminds his (German) audience of a giant once looming very large south of the border. Until his twenty-first year, Adam Oehlenschläger (hereafter AOe) wrote not a syllable of German, but then became, for a time, a star in the larger tongue—his collected Werke came out twice (1829 (1839). Gellinek compares—no easy task—the text of his posthumous Erindringer, 1–4 (1850–1851) with Meine Lebenserinnerungen (1850) in chapter 1. Chapter 2 tells about AOe’s frequent German travels and his German popularity, thanks to the translations, mostly by his own hand, of his creative works. The long chapter 3 gives the contents, using the German texts, of AOe’s some twenty-four plays, from Aladdin (1805) on—a handy guide for those who do not want to read them in the one language or the other. (How often Georg Brandes, in the AOe essay of Danske Personligheder, quotes AOe in German!) AOe’s Corregio (1811) was included as late as 1998 in the catalogue of the Reclam series, to be found in every respectable German bookstore. Most American Ibsenites know AOe from Ballested’s “Snart er alle sunde lukket” (Soon all the sounds are closed) in Frun fra havet, a quote from Hakon jarl hin rige (1807); not many, one fears, have pentrated farther into AOe’s dramatic production.

Gellinek’s finale, chapter 4, “Olympische Höhe,” after ascending the heights of the Danish Golden Age with a couple of AOe’s non-literary contemporaries, the physicist Ørsted and the sculptor Thorvaldsen, marches on to Weimar. One king paid a courtesy call on another, and “as an anomaly, because of his foreign extraction and ‘Danish’ manner of speaking [German], [AOe] was permitted to address Goethe with ‘du,’ a grammatical intimacy Schiller never achieved.” A large bibliography in Danish, English, and German, will nourish the seeker after still more Ochlensehlägerian knowledge. But it does not include Sven H. Rossel’s pages (187–91) in his standard work (by various hands), A History of Danish Literature (1991): “an uneven and somehow stunted production ... undoubtedly [AOe] was at his best only for a ten-year period.”

Gellinek gets around to the lyricist AOe in his other volume, dwelling on “Guldhornene” (1803, The Golden Horns), the big and often anthologized piece (“Da klinger i Muld / Det gamle Guld,” “There resounds in the mold, / The ancient gold), inspired by the North’s heroic past, and by the story of the discovery and the melting-down, by a crooked goldsmith, of the Horns of Gallehus. On a less exalted plane, Gellinek cites AOe’s send-up, “Vergleichung” (Comparison), of Heinrich Voss, Ludwig Tieck, Goethe, and Jean Paul Richter: “Der Erste liebt die reine Form, / Der Zweite bleibt im Stoff enorm, / Der Dritte einet schön die Zwei, / Der Vierte fühlt für alle drei” (The first one loves...