Heimat, Krieg und Exil in Franz Werfels Spätgedicht Eine Prager Ballade
| Title in English | Coming Back Home - To a Foreign Country (Heimkehr in die Fremde) War (1757, 1939-45) Franz Werfel's Poem "A Prague Ballad" |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | COMING BACK HOME – TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY (HEIMKEHR IN DIE FREMDE): FRANZ WERFEL's modest late poem "A Prague Ballad", written when he was in exile, was included in Under Foreign Skies (Unter fremden Himmeln), a book on the literature of exile by Werfel's fellow-countryman F. C. WEISKOPF. In this study we first compare "A Prague Ballad" with Werfel's play Jacobowsky and the Colonel. Werfel's late lyric verse has not received much notice from literary critics and "A Prague Ballad" itself, owing to its seeming simplicity, has been more or less ignored, so that it might seem that so far – for German philology as well as for Czech Studies – the names of the Czech villages that occur in it are all Greek. None are fictitious (as for example Werfel's editor KNUT BECK believes to be the case with one of them), nor do they all relate to Werfel's autobiographic sketches or his lyric-Expressionist beginnings, inspired by MAX BROD (as suggested by KLAUS WEISSENBERGER and HARTMUT BINDER). In fact at that given point in time they are coded messages for exiles with a knowledge of Prague (as pointed out by ANGELO MARIA RIPELLINO and MILAN KUNDERA). In their lyrical brevity these places reveal among other things a crucial segment (a "site of memory") of the "Prague urban text" (JOHANNES URZIDIL – Predella. A Relief of the City) as well as an open and hidden confrontation of the opposition of Prussian (Nazi) vs. Austrian (Czech) against the background of the Battle of Štěrboholy (the Battle of Prague, 1757) and its reflection in literature (for example in GOTTFRIED AUGUST BÜRGER's Lenore, in THEODOR FONTANE and JOHANN WILHELM LUDWIG GLEIM, EGON ERWIN KISCH's Lenore, and in folk literature), but also in the light of the reality of the anti-Hitler wave of exiles in Czechoslovakia and the struggle for national rights. This ballad is thus situated at the point of intersection of both the imaginary and the real Prague and can be regarded as latent late evidence of the Habsburg myth. |
| Related projects: |