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Chapter Two: The Pure Fool and the Knight of Faith: Wolfram’s Parzival and the Stages of Existence
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Chapter Two The Pure Fool and the Knight of Faith: Wolfram’s Parzival and the Stages of Existence “How many books have I bought because of an odd inclination and left lying until—.” So wrote Kierkegaard in some undated notes of 1836 (Pap. I A 183/JP 4:4389). According to Hermann Peter Rohde, Kierkegaard “was, by nature, something of a collector in the domain of books. Just as he could be tempted by the windows of the antique shops on his way through town, he also, now and then, bought a book which, strictly speaking, he did not need but to which he just took a fancy.”1 An inveterate bibliophile, he accumulated a considerable number of books from 1830 to his death, most of which he purchased during the first ten of those years. A decade and a half after Kierkegaard died, the philosopher Hans Brøchner, a second cousin and friend of his,2 recalled having been awed as a young man in 1837 by the largeness of Kierkegaard’s library. At that time, in Rohde’s judgment, “it must still have been far from its maximum size” (ASKB xlvii).3 The collection Brøchner saw may have already included the copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Rittergedicht or courtly epic poem Parzival, which appears in the record of books auctioned from the library of the deceased Kierkegaard. His edition was not of Parzival’s original Middle High German version but rather of the modern German translation by San-Marte, published in 1836.4 It is not surprising that Kierkegaard purchased this volume, given his love of books, his passion for German literature, and his fascination with the Middle Ages, a fascination he inherited from, and shared with, the Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel had claimed to “look for and find the Romantic” not only “in Shakespeare, Cervantes”—the subjects of our next two chapters—but also “in Italian poetry, in that age of knights, love, and fairytales in which the thing itself and the word for it originated” (KFSA 2:335/DPLA 101). Accordingly , the Romantics, and the young Kierkegaard after them, construed 87 the Middle Ages as practically synonymous with “the Romantic” (Danish : det Romantiske), viewing Romanticism as having arisen in medieval times. His notebooks reveal him to be “everywhere concerned with the popular literature of the Middle Ages (adventures, sagas, popular books, fables, folk songs, proverbs, etc.).”5 Stimulated largely by the Romantics as part of this medieval preoccupation, a revival of interest in Parzival’s author and theme was already underway in Kierkegaard’s time. Friedrich Schlegel had pronounced Wolfram “the greatest poet Germany has ever had,”6 and Heinrich Heine ranked Parzival among “the most magnificent works of the Middle Ages” (SSchr. 3:365/RSOE 7).7 The renewed popularity of the Parzival tale eventually culminated in the creation of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, which was first performed at Bayreuth in July 1882.8 It is often said that the Christian pretensions of this music drama were what led Nietzsche, the apostle of paganism, to his break with Wagner. However, as Walter Kaufmann contends, Parsifal did not cause that break, but “merely sealed it—and not because it was Christian but because Nietzsche considered it an essentially insincere obeisance” by a composer who was anything but Christian.9 Although Kierkegaard would almost surely have been as revolted as Nietzsche was by Wagner ’s phony Christian pose, we cannot know for sure how someone who died in 1855 would have reacted to an opera whose libretto and score were completed in 1877 and 1882 respectively. Except for a single, passing mention of Wolfram’s Titurel and Parzival, which occurs in a lengthy set of reading notes on Friedrich Diez’s classic study Die Poesie der Troubadours (1826), dated April 22, 1836, in one of Kierkegaard’s notebooks (Pap. I C 89, p. 255/KJN 1:68),10 Parzival is nowhere mentioned in Kierkegaard’s writings, and Wolfram himself is discussed only once, allusively, in some dense, somewhat convoluted notes of December 3 later that same year, which do not indicate whether Kierkegaard had actually read him. Perhaps we might apply to this once-and-neveragain mentioning of Wolfram a hypothesis similar to the one offered by Tony Aagaard Olesen to explain why the young Kierkegaard, in his notes on Diez’s study, mentioned only once in passing (with a sole exception ) each of the many troubadours’ names he catalogued—namely, that he presumably shared...