Friedrich Rückert – Kindertodtenlieder

Friedrich Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder is a collection of 563 poems he wrote in the first half of 1834 following the deaths of his two youngest children from scarlet fever. Since its first edition in 1872, the work has been mangled and misunderstood. Many mistakenly assume, for example, that the five poems set to music by Gustav Mahler in 1904 comprise the entire collection. This article is an attempt to restore the reputation of Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder as one of the very greatest products of nineteenth-century German poetry.

The Rückert family

A comprehensive biography of Friedrich Rückert has yet to be written – a sign of the neglect that this important German literary figure suffers to this day. We are not going to attempt one here, either – the briefest sketch will have to do. Here is a summary of the basic biographical facts about the Rückert family that we need to get us to our subject, the Kindertodtenlieder.

Johann Michael Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) was born on 16 May 1788 in Schweinfurt, now in northern Bavaria. On 26 December 1821 in Coburg he married Luise Wiethhaus-Fischer (1797-1857). Five sons were born in quick succession: Heinrich (1823-1875), Karl (1824-1899), August (1826-1880), Leo (1827-1904) and Ernst (1829-1834). They then had one daughter, Luise Therese Emilie (1830-1833). A sixth son, Karl Julius was born on 6 January 1832, but died three days later.

At the time the Kindertodtenlieder were written, Friedrich Rückert had made a name for himself as a poet, a patriot and an outstanding orientalist scholar. He was teaching at the University of Erlangen and the family were living in Erlangen (now the Südliche Stadtmauerstraße 28).

Starting at Christmas in 1833, all the children became ill with Scharlach, scarlet fever. The older ones survived but Luise died on 31 December (three and a half years old), Ernst on 16 January 1834 (five years and twelve days old).

For completeness we should mention that, after the disaster of their double loss, the Rückerts went on to produce three more children: Marie (1835-1920), Fritz (1837-1868) and Anna (1839-1919).

A diary of bereavement

Distraught at the loss of his two youngest children, the already productive Rückert, of whom it has been said that he almost 'thought in verse', went into poetic overdrive: in the five or six months immediately following the deaths of Luise and Ernst he wrote 563 poems, an average of approximately three per day.

The creative process behind the Kindertodtenlieder is more that of a diary, journal or – in modern parlance – a live blog than a collection or even a cycle of poems.

Further evidence of Rückert's affinity for this approach is the fact that, starting roughly with his retirement in 1848, his poetic works – thousands of poems – were committed to a Liedertagebuch, a 'Poetic Journal' – a blog in other words. That's how Rückert worked: he was thinking in verse and recording those thoughts on a daily basis.

Rückert's 'bereavement blog' is quite remarkable in many ways. One of them is that it is completely 'raw' – at the end of the composition process around the end of June 1834 the manuscript left Rückert's hands and he never revised a line of it. Given the fluency of this poetry we really can believe that he 'thought in verse'. He decided at some point shortly thereafter that the work as a whole would never be published. We might see this as the equivalent of the modern need to put a bad experience behind you.

One further remarkable feature is that the poetry of the Kindertodtenlieder is quite astonishingly honest and immediate. Whilst displaying immense artistry in his versification, Rückert's day-to-day feelings during that terrible time were not artificially modulated. They are quite direct and the lack of any revision or editing process ensured that they stayed that way. In his openness about his own private feelings and emotions Rückert achieves a universal interpretation of grief and bereavement: the modern reader can relate to Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder without the slightest difficulty.

For reasons we shall discuss later, Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder have been neglected and misunderstood. So, this January 2019, 185 years after the events that led to them, let's take a fresh look at Rückert's great work. Native speakers of German may find some of these poems to be the most wonderful things they have read; English speakers will have to put up with the clunky literalism of our translations and try and remember that they are not reading an instruction manual for a washing machine.

Light and darkness on Christmas Eve

The first hint of the catastrophe that was to befall the Rückerts came on Christmas Eve, 1833.

In Germany at that time, Christmas, quite in keeping with the religious idea at its centre, was a festival for the family and particularly for children. With six children in the house, the Rückerts had their hands full at Christmas.

In the German tradition the exchange of presents took place in the afternoon or evening of Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree was lit with candles and decorated with biscuits and chocolates. Luise had tried 'to fulfil all the [children's] wishes' for presents and particularly 'those of the two youngest', Luise, then three and a half and Ernst, nearly five. [KTL 549]

In the Kindertodtenlieder, Friedrich describes the theatricality of the moment on Christmas Eve when the Christmas tree was revealed and the children received their presents.

'There was much happiness', Luise noted, 'but not as loud as usual'. But when Christmas Day came, there was nothing left of Christmas happiness:

That the miserable illness of scarlet fever blighted all six children just at the time of the Christmas celebration of the family was a dismal irony.

After the first intimations of the onset of the disease on Christmas Eve, by Boxing Day there was no longer any doubt that illness had struck them. The youngest, Luise, the only daughter among five boys, was the first to succumb. The doctor was called that evening to her.

Luise, the special one

As the youngest sibling and the only daughter, Luise had a special place in her father's heart. Friedrich Rückert grew up with four sisters: Sabine Sophie, one year older, (1791-1848) and three short-lived younger sisters Anna Magdalena (1793-1795), Ernestine Helene (1795-97) and Susanna Barbara (1797-1801). The family lived in a house in Oberlauringen, a small town about 20 km from Schweinfurt.

German speakers will enjoy the characteristically Rückert-style structural formalities of this poem. The Lebens Braus, 'life's turmoil' refers to the period from 1802, when Rückert ended his time at the village school in Oberlauringen and went to the Gymnasium Gustavianum in Schweinfurt, where he spent three successful years. The sister he carried out into the garden was Susanna Barbara (1797-1801).

In Rückert's own family, little Luise was taken under the wings of her older brothers, just as her father had taken his little sisters under his wings. We can imagine that, having experienced as a child the loss of his own infant sisters, the loss of yet another infant girl would be an especially hard blow for Friedrich:

The same German speakers who enjoyed the poetic playfulness in the previous poem will here have encountered a fascinating augmentation of Rückert's structural skills. The polyglot Rückert's brain seems to have been hard-wired to play games with language that would cost us plodders a week of pencil chewing to achieve – if we ever could.

The five boys took brotherly care of this small doll in their midst. In the light of Rückert's anecdote of his own attachment to his little sister, Susanna Barbara, there can be no doubt that the chivalry of his own sons to their little sister made Rückert very happy and proud. Luise herself seems to have coped with all these brothers intuitively well:

In Luise's case, the scarlet fever took a hold on her that could not be released. Her condition became worse with each day. Soon it became obvious that her death was approaching. Rückert pleaded for her to live just one more day, even in her suffering:

Her dying, even though expected, was a shock for which no parent could prepare. As her breathing became more and more difficult she was overcome by mortal fear and her final agony began. She died at two-thirty in the morning on 31 December, less than six days after the first major symptoms had appeared on Christmas Day. Her mother, father and the five brothers were stunned:

Luise was buried at nine o'clock on 3 January, in her favourite white dress. A myrtle garland was put on her forehead and numerous flowers laid on her body. Her mother adds: 'Two wonderful red hyacinths, which the children and I had planted with great pleasure had just come into bloom. I placed them on her breast and she lay there as though the bride of an angel.' [KTL 552]

Rückert summarised bitterly that terrible festive season in his household using the calendar of religious feast days:

Last things: guilt and regret

Her death released a wave of grief and guilt out of which Rückert's poetic mind created some of his greatest and most moving poems.

Hindsight modulated through grief led to immense regret, not just for what he now held to be the commission of misguided actions but for the omissions which he could now never make good.

Some of the poems in the Kindertodtenlieder are written from the viewpoint of the mother. They were not written by her, however. Although we know next to nothing about the process of the creation of the poems in the collection, it is easy to imagine that the mother's utterances to her husband on her loss could well form the material out of which Rückert forged some of his poems:

Guilt, regret but especially loss, the latter manifested in memories that seem to arise from a now distant world:

The order of things

Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder are not merely lamentations of loss. In effect he was writing a poetic diary with three poems a day on average, each of which reflected some momentary meditation on his loss, some of which were thoughtful pieces on the wider implications of a child's death. We have no right to expect measured consistency between these moments.

In the following poem, for example, there are thoughts on the father-daughter relationship as it would have developed had Luise lived.

Rückert's grief is not selfish. His wife was deeply affected and collapsed after the death of little Luise. She took to her bed for some time afterwards.

The following poem opens with a charming, though now in grief painful anecdote, which is developed into a pointed conclusion concerning his wife's importance to little Luise.

The joke in the fourth stanza needs some explanation. Friedrich Rückert was a tall man in an age of small men, over two metres (six foot six) tall, so Luise's term for him, 'Little Father', was in that context quite ironic, particularly when the little doll of a child was shouting it while tickling her giant of a father.

Ernst: hanging on to the very bitter end

On 1 January 1834, the day after little Luise had died, her brother Ernst took to his bed.

Ernst's suffering would last fourteen days. During that time there were even occasions when he was thought to have died, but then suddenly recovered. For Rückert, losing his beloved daughter Luise had been torture enough, but the dying of his youngest son was a torture magnified and extended.

Ernst hung on, moving in and out of life. The resulting delay merely offered his doctors more time to torment him with their cures – even though they had for some time considered him to be a hopeless case. He had been bled three times on his arms. The wounds from that now began to ulcerate. Like Luise, blistering plasters had been applied to his neck and the itching of the resulting blisters now tormented him: the blisters were scratched, wept and bled. Cold flannels were applied that made him shiver until his teeth literally chattered.

As a final medical insult, mercury ointment was rubbed onto his head, which he disliked greatly, but, his mother tells us, 'he was obedient to the voices of his father and me until his death, and let it happen.' [KTL 555]

Rückert, who during his daughter's death throes had wished for just one more day of life for her, was so affected by Ernst's sufferings that he now prayed for a rapid end to his son's misery:

Ernst and Luise

After Luise's death, Rückert had written of his difficulty in believing that she had really gone. Now, with Ernst dead, he had two losses to deny. He did so in a very characteristic piece of Rückert versification:

This poem illustrates one of the problems of Rückert's poetry and of the Kindertodtenlieder in particular: conspicuous artifice sometimes distracts from their content. The too-clever-by-half versification suggests only emotional insincerity or superficiality.

In this particular poem, Rückert is seeing how many words of the form —flich he can stack up in the poem. The words become odder and odder – reiflich / unbegreiflich / bezweifl' ich / unbegreiflich / handgreiflich / unabstreiflich / umschweiflich / unauschleiflich – and culminate in the absurd word unauschleiflich [a notch in metal that is] 'incapable of being ground out'.

Rückert was clearly not insincere about the death of his children, but occasionally the crossword-puzzler and word-trickster in him cannot be suppressed. It may very well be, though, that Rückert's self-inflicted confrontation with versification trickery was part of the therapy for him. It was, after all, his métier and took his mind off things.

We should also remember that Rückert never went back and edited the Kindertotenlieder, so that in this poem we confront the raw skill of Rückert's language talent without editorial mediation.

The inseparables

The bereaved person takes comfort wherever it is to be found. Rückert took cold comfort that both Luise and Ernst had died, almost as a pair. In the poem above, Geh! du kannst ja doch nicht bleiben he addressed them finally as Ihr zwei unzertrennlichen!, 'you two inseparables!' They were a pair in death just as they had been in life.

Rückert developed the theme in a poem titled [Die] Inseparables, a German word derived from French, Italian and Latin used at the time for lovebirds, the small African parrots.

INSEPARABLES.
Unzertrennliches, ach vom Tod getrenntes,
Zartverschwistertes, durch Geburt und Neigung,
Für einander geschaffnes Vogelpärchen!
O du Brüderchen, an der Schwester hangend,
O du Schwesterchen, nicht vom Bruder lassend!
In dem sonnigen Käfich, eurem Stübchen,
Auf dem Stängelchen, eurem Stuhle, sitzend,
Immer nebeneinander, aneinander.
Saß das Brüderchen auf der rechten Seite,
Und das Schwesterchen links, so ließ sein Köpfchen
Links das Brüderchen hangen, und sein Köpfchen
Rechts das Schwesterchen, also daß die beiden
Köpfchen leise sich ohne Druck berührten.

Inseparables, ah, separated by death, tender siblings, through birth and inclination, a pair of birds made for each other! Oh you, brother, clinging to the sister, Oh you, sister, not leaving his side! In the sunny cage of your room, sitting on the perches, your chairs, always together, side-by-side. If the brother sat on the right-hand side and the sister the left, the brother tilted his head to the left and the sister tilted her head to the right until the two heads lightly touched each other.

Saß das Brüderchen aber auf der linken,
Und das Schwesterchen auf der rechten Seite,
Denn sie pflegten in diesem Stück zu wechseln,
War das Hängen der Köpfchen auch gewechselt,
Daß sie gegeneinander wieder neigten.
So war euere Neigung gegenseitig,
So war euere Liebe wechselwirkend,
Ohne Wechsel als den der äußern Stellung.

If, however, the brother sat on the left-hand side and the sister on the right, for they used to change like this, then the tilt of the heads also changed, so that they inclined to each other again. So your inclination was mutual, so your love reciprocal, without change other than the external position.

Was ihr aßet, das aßet ihr zusammen,
Und ihr tränket zusammen, was ihr tränket;
Was ihr spieltet und scherztet, sangt und spränget,
Was ihr lebtet, das lebtet ihr zusammen.
Und so seid ihr zusammen auch gestorben.
Als das Schwesterchen mit zerdrückter Brust lag,
Eingedrückt von des Geiers ehrnen Krallen,
Jenes Geiers, vor dem den Lebensvogel
Kein Goldkäfich der Liebe kann beschützen;

Whatever you ate, you ate together, and you drank together whatever you drank; what you played and joked at, sang and jumped, what you lived, you lived together. And so you died together. When the sister lay with a crushed breast, squashed by the vulture's iron claws, that vulture from which no gilded cage of love can protect the bird;

Ließ das Brüderchen auch das Köpfchen hangen,
Nicht zur linken und nicht zur rechten Seite,
Sondern grad' auf die Brust, und hobs nicht wieder.
Und nun laßt uns zusammen sie begraben,
Unter Thränen, am Fuß des Lebensbaumes,
Wo wir klagen um sie im dunkeln Schatten.
[KTL 204f]

the brother also hung his head, not to the left and not to the right side, but rather down on his chest, never to raise it again. And now let us bury them together, under tears, at the foot of the tree of life where we lament them in dark shadows.

The theme of the companionship in death as in life of Luise and Ernst, the two 'lovebirds', is one that inspired Rückert to a number of poems in the Kindertodtenlieder:

Ernst and Luise were so inseparable that they were given the nickname in the family of 'knife' and 'fork', because they always belonged together and remained next to each other. From its content, the following seems to have been written after Luise's death and during Ernst's illness.

The loss of Ernst may appear not to play as big a role in the Kindertodtenlieder as that of little Luise, but that is partly due to the role of the little sister in Rückert's upbringing and partly to the great shock of the first childhood death. Most importantly, after the death of Luise, Ernst is now frequently mourned as one of a pair, not individually.

Medical torture

It was bad enough for parents to have to watch their children suffering, but having to watch the suffering caused by medical treatments intended to cure them was a terrible ordeal. There was a joke that lasted for centuries, that the sick needed to be really healthy before they called a doctor.

Friedrich Rückert was appalled at the medical torture he had to witness with both Luise and Ernst, treatments that resulted in nothing but more suffering:

In her mother's account we learn that Luise resisted at first, clenching her teeth, so that her parents had to force her mouth open to administer the bitter medicine and to spray it into her throat. Blistering plasters (containing irritants such as cantharidin or mustard powder) were applied around her neck. All, of course, to no avail – mere torture of a dying child. [KTL 551]

Ultimately it was the Rückerts, not the doctors, who had to force their children to drink the useless, bitter potions:

Rückert had to stand by and watch leeches suck his children's blood, a sight that haunted him:

In the six days of her illness Luise had leeches applied to her chest once, on Sunday 29 December, barely a day before she died.

Her brother Ernst's suffering lasted longer, nearly sixteen days, and so the doctors had more time to work their repulsive magic on him. He was leeched on his arms on three separate occasions. Towards the end the leech bites ulcerated, becoming black, infected, itchy and painful – yet more misery for the boy in what would be the last days and hours of his life.

Dark spirits of the earth

Rückert's powers of observation and his analytical mind strove to reconcile healing with the vicious substances that were supposed to bring it about.

Shortly after the death of little Luise, he finds himself at the intersection of the spiritual, the purity of his 'angel' now in Heaven, and the corruption of the earthbound and subterranean matter, the 'earth spirits' which had been used on her.

Goethe's Heinrich Faust and his mentor Mephistopheles were the models for the medical practitioners who conjure with these materials. They had made him a co-conspirator in the despoilment of his own child:

The doctors of the time really were mere practitioners of the black arts, meddling ineffectually with compounds known by their alchemical signatures and measured out and applied in forms that would not be out of place in a conjurer's book of spells. We note in passing that the modern fans of homeopathy still talk of the 'signatures' of substances left in their waters.

Among the many guilt feelings that come with grief is the feeling that all this medical torture was completely unnecessary. Even among the great marvels of modern medicine, many patients and carers still have to confront the decision whether or not medical intervention is necessary. It is ironic that despite Friedrich Rückert's distaste for the medical profession, his second son Karl (1824-1899) would go on to become doctor.

Brutal Nature

Rückert was overcome by helplessness and grief at his loss, at having to watch two small children die. The religious – and Rückert was a convinced Christian – are forced to absolve the maker of the earth and seas by blaming Nature for her barbarity:

Abzuschaffen geschärfte Todesarten,
Abzustellen den Graus der Folterkammern,
War wol unseren aufgeklärten Zeiten
Vorbehalten zu einem Ruhm. Doch leider
Daß unschuldige Menschenleben gleichwol,
Von Krankheiten gespannt auf Folterbetten,
Schwerem langsamem Tod entgegenschmachten!
Ach wenn menschlicher auch die Menschen wurden,
Unsre Mutter Natur, sie ist bei ihrer
Alten heiligen Barbarei geblieben.
[KTL 114]

The abolition of the death penalty, the end of the horror of the torture chamber, were held to be the great fame of our enlightened times. But it is sad that innocent human lives just the same are stretched out on torture beds and face the mortification of a difficult slow death! Oh, even though humans have become more humane, our Mother Nature has kept to her ancient sacred barbarity.

This perceptive remark of Rückert's reveals the state of cultural and intellectual progress in the West at that time. He was of course aware of the progress made during the Enlightenment (roughly 1650-1800), that age of reason which began to break the shackles of bigotry and superstition. But he could not yet see the results of the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1550-1900), which would bring so many benefits to mankind.

In 1834, when the Kindertodtenlieder were being written, the fundamentals of scientific chemistry were only just being laid. John Dalton (1766-1844), the founder of the atomic theory of matter was still alive, and chemistry was finally moving out of the manipulation of earthbound substances, of alchemical 'signatures' and 'affinities'.

Progress in medical science would follow, but too late to help the Rückert children. The treatments they had to suffer would have been familiar to any doctor in the two or even three preceding centuries. Once it started, however, progress was fast: it would be only another century or so before antibiotics were discovered and manufactured and a few pills could have prevented the deaths of Luise and Ernst and the sufferings of the other Rückert children.

Your newborn author was only prevented from being an early adopter of penicillin by his parents' keeping his older brother, then mottled with scarlet fever, well away from him for several weeks. In the family tradition, this banning of the elder son is the explanation of a lifelong sibling rivalry between him and the little upstart. With penicillin having barely entered into general use your author reflects on the deep wisdom of keeping this germ-laden, festering oaf away from him.

Rückert was by no means the only one at that time having bleak thoughts on the brutality of the natural order and the seeming indifference of the Almighty to suffering– can we speak of a Zeitgeist?

Alfred Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam had died in 1833, the year before Rückert's children, and Tennysons's grief at his loss would lead to the questionings of In Memoriam, with its famous line 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' [Canto 56]. Tennyson, like Rückert, separated God from the Nature he was presumed to have created, allowing them both to give the blame to Nature for its 'holy barbarity'.

The physical reality of death

Rückert had no illusions about the bodily corruption of death and faced that fact square on. When he saw the body of Luise arrayed with flowers in her coffin he did not shun that awful reality:

There is a limit to how much of the awful physical reality of death the normal person – let alone the grief-stricken – can be expected to take. Rückert experienced his share of that:

Rückert, father and poet, recorded a terrible moment that took place immediately after Luise's death. It became one of his greatest poems:

Even the exceptionally mild winter of that year prompted thoughts of the physical reality and the finality of the grave for his dead children:

Let's not deny Rückert, a poet capable of recording such stark sights, his occasional elevation into hope for his children's place in heaven. He had, according to his wife, 'a religious sense' and 'a great love': [KTL 7f]

Despite his rationalist conviction that the children he has lost are not in any sense present in their graves in the churchyard, combined with his faith in their place in heaven, it was not easy for Rückert to separate himself from the physical remains of the dead and from whatever spiriti loci seemed to remain:

At other times the pain of loss forced the rationalist mind to seek refuge in comforting poetic conceits. Such inconsistency is the chief reason we have chosen the live-blogging metaphor to describe the creation process of the Kindertodtenlieder. Rückert – thankfully – did not revise his work. It was left in an almost stream of consciousness state.

In the following poem, for example, Rückert elevates the graves that hold the decomposing bodies of his children to the status of their protectors. The winter had been mild, but the spring of 1834 was cold and windy. A day of bad weather led Rückert to a dark reflection of helplessness and hope.

Mahler fans will have recognised this as the text of the fifth and last of his settings of the Kindertodtenlieder.

The artefacts of loss

After the deaths of Luise and Ernst, Rückert's life is filled with physical reminders of what once was, as well as with the presences of the departed and the shadows of their former existence. For the bereaved, everything becomes a reminder of loss. The Kindertodtenlieder contain numerous examples of this universal phenomenon of grief.

The abandoned Christmas tree

Here, for example, Rückert notes the desolate state of the Christmas tree, left over when Christmas was so brutally interrupted by illness and death.

The empty beds

Among the worst of the physical reminders were the children's empty beds. In a wondrously clever poem, Rückert moves the two children from their earthbound empty beds into their aerial afterlife:

We are in the presence of a world-class linguist and philologist who taught himself forty or so languages with scholarly precision. Modern readers need a bit of help in untangling Rückert's clever and for him quite characteristic wordplay.

The genesis of the conceit at the heart of this poem appears in stanza no. 55 of his series of three line poems Dreizeilen-Hundert, which also form part of the Kindertodtenlieder. German prosody knows the form under the name Ritornell.

There Rückert wrote: Blüh', Amorellchen! / Im Bettchen schläft ein goldnes Amorettchen, Hat ein Goldammerchen zum Schlafgesellchen., 'Flower little cherry! / In the bed sleeps a little golden Cupid, with a yellowhammer for company'. The amorelle (or amarelle) in the diminutive form Amorellchen refers to one of the many varieties of the sour cherry, Prunus cerasus. [KTL 284]

In the present poem (now separated from the other in this edition by a hundred pages) he develops and expands that imagery.

The first stanza shows us the empty beds left behind by the dead children. There is a clever paradox between the Ruhestättchen, the place of quiet, where now 'nothing stirs'.

In the second stanza we are told that the empty beds used to be occupied by the two Amorettchen, little Cupids, who have slipped the chains that bound them to the family. In a general context ausgeschlüpft would mean hatched, but in this specific context it should be read as 'emerged' [from their resting places] to slip their loose chains.

In the final stanza, Rückert transforms the image of the two empty beds in the house into two empty pupae cases (Puppen) hanging on the garden fence. The two 'little sylphs' flying away 'over the fence' can be taken literally to be moths (the etymology for this is complex and not altogether clear) or spirits of the air.

The greater allegory, in the context of their deaths, is the flight 'over the fence' as the transition between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

We now realise why Rückert used the rather odd word ausgeschlupft to describe the escape of the two little Cupids in the preceding stanza: it prefigured their hatching as moths or spirits from their pupae and thus their departure – their slipping free – from their beds.

The poet takes his reader into a world of metaphors and metamorphoses – transitions from inside to outside, hatching into a new, more beautiful forms and existence, souls escaping from earthbound matter and flying over the fence that separates the earthly from the heavenly.

In another poem – at a lower level of etymological complexity although still with a characteristically Rückert-like complex scheme of rhyme and repetition – Rückert notes the light that has both literally and metaphorically gone out of his life. This appears to be one of the poems which Rückert wrote from the point of view of the mother:

The night-light

The children's book

Those who have suffered bereavement will not need to be reminded of the fact that everyday life continues after the loss, leading often to bitter ironies. After the death of Luise and Ernst, a children's book, of all things, arrives for them:

The book was Fünfzig Fabeln für Kinder, which had been first published in 1833 and was, thus, 'hot off the press'.

The author of the fables, Johann Wilhelm Hey (1789-1854), a vicar and school inspector in Thuringia, remained anonymous in the first edition, merely the name of the illustrator, the Hamburg artist, Otto Speckter (1807-1871), was on the title page. Hence Rückert's sole attribution to the illustrator 'Spekter'[sic].

The book and its sequel remained a bestseller throughout the 19th century and even into the early 20th century. A digitalisation of a facsimile edition from 1920 is available on Wikisource, a good digitalisation of an 1852 edition is in the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Rückert, despite being a classical philologist, orientalist and astounding polyglot, was a German patriot and a great champion of the German language. Thus, thinking of the school education that his remaining children were undergoing, with Hey's attractive book of fables in front of him, he takes a dig at the fables of Phaedrus (20BC?-50AD?) that were used in the schools of the time to teach Latin, leaving them 'no time to study German'.

Every modern parent can relate to Rückert's agonized imagining of a reading session much as it had been before, but this time shared with the ghosts of his dead children. In the phantasmagoric session, when the dead children appear to him in the 'silence of the night', he can show them the pictures and read them the rhymes aloud. He would judge their opinions from their eyes and the movements of their heads.

Rückert gives us a memory of one of his readings or recitations to Luise and Ernst:

Here Rückert recalls reciting Goethe's ballad Der König in Thule to Luise and Ernst. The ballad, although it also has an existence as a standalone poem, found its final resting place in Goethe's Faust I [lines 2759–2782], where it is a song sung by Gretchen whilst she is getting ready for bed. Franz Schubert set the song to music in 1816 (D 367).

Both on its own and in the context of Faust, the ballad is a rich source of symbolism and interpretation, too rich for us to discuss here. Over time, the story of the ballad was picked up by other writers and became a fixed point in the German literary canon.

In the ballad, the King of Thule is given a golden goblet by his dying lover, his Buhle. He made good use of the goblet at every meal, emptying it with tears in his eyes for his dead love. When his turn came round to die, he disposed of all his riches among his heirs but kept the goblet for himself. At his death he drank from the goblet one last time then hurled it into the sea.

Rückert not only references Goethe's ballad directly in the last stanza of his poem, his intensive and unusual use of der Buhle for Ernst and die Nebenbuhlerin for Luise is also a clear allusion. The modern usage of der/die Buhle and particularly der Nebenbuhler/die Nebenbuhlerin is rather unpleasant, but Rückert's usage is the older meaning that Goethe would also intend – a 'lover'. In this case, therefore, a male lover and his female rival for their father's affections.

Now his adoring children have gone into the army of shadows, the king's crown – in other poems he referred to his children as his crown – has been lost into the sea, but he is left to fill the goblet with his tears.

Notches in the doorposts

The dead depart and leave behind not just the memories of them that remain with the living but the physical artefacts of their former existence. Here, for example, Rückert meditates on the height marks that had been cut into the doorposts every half year to follow the growth of the two children.

Children's clothes

More physical reminders of what once had been are the clothes of the two children. Since Luise and Ernst were the youngest in the family, their clothes and shoes will not be passed down but preserved as they are.

It is possible that these two poems are also among those written in the persona of the mother:

Staat is a now obsolete term for what might be called in English the children's 'Sunday best'. As already noted, the Rückerts produced another three surviving children – were these clothes ever handed down? Who knows?

Shadows and shades

The family house, once noisy with six children, has now gone quiet and is filled with shadows.

Even when the surviving children arise from their sickbeds, they, too, move around the empty house like shades:

A pair of extremely moving poems describe the emptiness left by the loss of Luise.

In the first of these, Luise's place has been taken by shadow. Reality and imagination are mixed skilfully: the shadow is not her ghost, but the absence of light left by her own absence:

This pair of poems was made famous as one of the five Kindertodtenlieder that were set to music by Gustav Mahler between 1901 and 1904. For some reason, Mahler reversed the order of the poems, which means that his setting begins with poem no. 2.

The Rückert family house is full of the shadowy presences of the two children who have passed on:

Following the sheep

In former springtimes, Luise and Ernst could not be restrained from joining the shepherd taking the sheep out early in the morning and bringing them back in the evening. Now they are both dead, this ritual is one more painful memory for their father:

There will be tasteful readers who are repelled by what they take to be Rückert's descent into what seems to be at first glance merely maudlin kitsch. There are two things to be said about this.

The first thing we need to realise is that Rückert's imagery of the rosy clouds is a clever allusion via the word Wolkenlämmern, 'cloud lambs' to the German word Schäf­chen­wol­ken, 'little sheep clouds', the high, cirrocumulus clouds that look like fluffy sheep. As high clouds in clear weather they catch the setting sun and glow rose and gold in the sky. Rückert has cleverly linked this real phenomenon with the sheep Luise and Ernst loved so much.

He is not the first poet nor will he be the last to imagine the souls of his children now in heaven – itself an ancient synonym for sky. It is noticeable that Rückert chooses not to use the word Himmel, 'sky' or 'heaven' directly – the allusion to Wolkenlämmern is sufficient.

The second point is one that we have mentioned on a number of occasions already: that there is no overarching thematic structure or concept behind the Kindertodtenlieder. They were written, often several on one day, as a form of grief management. They were, in effect, composed in the mood of the moment by an accomplished, talented and highly educated poet. As such they were a poetic diary, not a structured poem cycle. In modern terminology, as we have already noted, we would call them a blog.

Some days Rückert woke up feeling depressed, some days hopeful, some days melancholic, some days religiously moved, some days… well, who knows? – probably some combination of all of these. The man who could not stop writing poetry was moved to literary creation by whatever struck him at the time. If it was Schäf­chen­wol­ken at sunset, so be it. The memory of his children's excitement at accompanying the shepherd, his dog and his sheep came to him, too – and this is the poem we get.

The two doves

Our understanding of Rückert as a poetic diarist or blogger is reinforced when he recounts noteworthy events that occur in the household. The following poem brings us a remarkable coincidence of finding two doves, initially intended for the cooking pot, perched on the empty beds of his deceased 'lovebirds', Ernst and Luise:

Picking the blossom

In our hard-bitten and cynical modern age writing about flowers and blossom is a highly suspect activity – it is fair to say that those who do it will never achieve literary standing. Rückert, like his almost exact contemporary John Clare (1793-1864), had no such inhibitions. Clare wrote of nature as he found it, as did Rückert, whose collection of 137 three line Ritornelle in the Kindertodtenlieder is structured mostly around flowers.

Two related poems are built around the image of the blossom of spring. It was only in May 1834 that Rückert and his wife began to recover their equilibrium after the deaths of the two children in the winter. The first of the pair of poems is a traditional appeal to the human not to pluck the bud but to allow it to blossom and enjoy its brief existence.

The second of the pair of poems deals with what we would now call delayed gratification: the flower that is plucked will never bear fruit. We saw this idea as it appeared in Johann Gottfried Herder's 1771 poem Die Blüthe a forerunner Goethe's Heidenröslein. Sixty-odd years before Rückert, the clergyman Herder was warning wild young men of exactly this problem. Rückert's version is considerably more nuanced:

These two poems are kept together in the 'thematic' collection that Heinrich Rückert produced from his father's manuscripts. But as so often in the present collection of the Kindertodtenlieder we find related poems ripped completely out of context.

In this case, 230 pages after the pair of poems about collecting blossom, comes the resolution of the blossom picking problem: if all the blossom were left to fruit the tree would break under its weight. Nature is bounteous and from all the blossoms it produces, God chooses those which should ripen to fruit, just as, allegorically, God chooses the childhood blossoms that will never ripen.

Der Baum ertrüge selbst nicht die Beschwerden,
Wenn alle Blüten sollten Früchte werden.
Allein warum läßt Gott mehr Blüten treiben,
Als an den Zweigen sollen Früchte bleiben?

The tree itself could not bear the weight when all the blossom turned to fruit. Why did God allow more blossom to grow than there should be fruit on the boughs?

Um voller uns den Hoffnungskranz zu schmücken,
Und daß die Lenzluft könne Blüten pflücken,
Ohn' irgend sich an einer zu vergreifen,
Die uns, von Gott bestimmt, zur Frucht soll reifen.
[KTL 482]

In order for us to decorate the wreath of hope and so that the spring breeze can pluck blossom without touching any of those which, decreed by God, should ripen to fruit for us.

Faith and hope

'Faith, hope and love' wrote St Paul in the thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The chapter in its entirety – in its magnificent brevity – constitutes one of the cornerstones of Christian faith, whatever the flavour, founded as it is on the doctrine of faith, hope and love. Rückert was a believing Christian, a Protestant, whose religious faith and hope supported him during and after the tragedy of the loss of Luise and Ernst.

The reader who doesn't believe in an afterlife, or who considers it beyond human comprehension, or in whom faith and hope have been replaced by cold reason alone, may find Rückert's faith and hope to be hard going. But it was what it was, and in times of observing their two youngest children sicken and die, what hard-hearted cynic would take away the parents' faith in their continuing life after death and their hope for a reunion.

Faith and hope – but not the simple sort such as that mocked by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) in his short story Un cœur simple (1877), in which Felicité, the servant girl, elevates Loulou, the stuffed parrot, to the status of the Holy Ghost.

Unlike Felicité, Rückert possessed extraordinary intellectual powers and, in particular, an extensive knowledge of other religions. But in the end, in those moments of the deepest despair which he endured in 1834, the foundation which sustained him was the rock of Christian faith and hope.

After Ernst's death, for example, he comforts himself in a triumph of hope over reason by imagining his son now freed from the troublesome path of the earthbound boy and, now taught by angels, spared the schoolmaster's Bakel, his cane:

There is the faith, too, that one day Rückert will be reunited with his two children:

We repeat: Rückert's collection of Kindertodtenlieder is neither a religious tract nor a calmly structured cycle of homogeneous insights – it is best viewed as a diary or a blog in which each day brings what it will.

Job and the consolations of faith

On occasions he accepts with humility and subjugation the divine will expressed in that anthem of the bereaved, Job 1:21: 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord':

On other occasions this unthinking consolation does not come easily. The loss of his children is a loss which cannot be transformed by Panglossian sophistry into a gain for which he must now somehow be grateful:

We are not surprised to find that the religious questions raised in the Kindertodtenlieder are closely aligned with those of that great Judeo-Christian analysis of suffering, the Book of Job. Rückert, like Job, never blames God directly for his misfortunes, but the meek acceptance of suffering was a heavy burden for both Job and Rückert.

Rückert, like Job, even had his comforters – who it appears were as useless as Job's comforters had been. When their comforting words come, they are not the right ones at all:

Ultimately, only Rückert can be his comforter, but his pain is so great that consolation appears to be impermissible. This is a common feeling among the grieving, that a diminution of grief is considered by the grief-stricken to be a kind of impious betrayal of the dead person – in other words, piety demands the maintenance of grief. Rückert expresses this psychological observation with a poem of characteristic linguistic fireworks:

On occasion there are brighter days, though, when, through the application of simple faith and hope, the prospect of a reunion beckons, not just with the dead Luise and Ernst but with the whole family.

Rückert's vision of that reunion is a difficult one for the literal-minded rationalist to accept – if only for the problem of ageing in heaven: infants and children will never be adults; the old will never be rejuvenated. How far back, too, will the reunion of the entire Rückert clan go? But we cannot begrudge him the comfort of imagining his family, about whom he cared so much, at some point in the future being made whole once more, 'purged of all defects'. This poem is concerned with the loss of little Luise – Ernst seems not to have died yet:

Ultimately, Rückert's Christian cornerstones – faith, hope and love – stood firm during the crisis. The shared trajectory between the Kindertodtenlieder and the Book of Job also reaches a shared conclusion. On Easter Monday, 1 April 1834, for the first time following that terrible quarter-year, Luise Rückert attended a church service:

On the second day of Easter I went for the first time again to church. Everything that had happened in the last quarter-year lay heavy on my heart during the singing of the hymn, so much so that I thought that my powerful weeping would drive me from the church. But the sermon was a real resurrection sermon and my earnest prayer during my attack of weeping, that God would put the right words of consolation for me in the mouth of the preacher was answered. The text was from Job; words that have comforted me often since then: 'For I know that my redeemer liveth' and he will wake me up out of the earth, etc.

Am 2ten Ostertag gieng ich zum erstenmal wieder in die Kirche. Was alles in diesem ¼jährigen Zwischenraum sich begab, fiel mir beym Singen des Liedes recht aufs Herz, so daß ich meinte das heftige Weinen werde mich aus der Kirche treiben. Aber die Predigt war eine rechte Auferstehungspredigt, und mein heißes Gebet, bey den heftigen Thränen vorher, daß Gott dem Prediger doch das rechte Trostwort für mich, heute in den Mund legen möge, hat er erfüllt. Der Text war aus Hiob; die Worte die mich schon seither oft getröstet haben: 'Ich weiß daß mein Erlöser lebt und er wird mich hernach aus der Erde auferwecken' etc.
[KTL 556]

The 'right words of comfort' came from the Book of Job, 19:25, 'For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth', in the King James Version; the Luther Bible of 1545 says much the same. Luise's version is not quite what Job said, but this is not a Bible class and her general understanding of the passage is not too far out, though slightly more optimistic.

As Rückert's grief ebbed and his mood began to lift, he was able to take a longer term view of the loss of his two children and the place of that loss in the greater whole. Addressed to Ernst, for example, he can now write:

In an uplifting stanza addressed to himself, the faith and hope that was his crutch during the dark days of his bereavement are now replaced by an uplifiting religious positivism.

The destruction of reality

Bereavement and grief tear apart the socially constructed reality in which the subject lives. Everyday situations, events and behaviour that were once a massively present normality become suddenly quite alien – that is, as though they came from a different world. Everyday life is so sanitised and full of normalised routine that bereavement, when it strikes, makes this normality seem extraordinary in the all-consuming context of grief.

In our modern times the bereaved only has to turn on the radio or the television, open up a newspaper or visit a website to experience the shock of the everyday world carrying on with its sanitised ways as if nothing had happened.

The Rückerts, with the death of two small children in such a short space of time, must have felt this detachment from the world of the everyday very strongly. There is an abrupt jar as the tectonic plates of the reality of the everyday and the reality of death – the most abnormal normality of all – slide apart, a shock that manifests itself in the subjective as well as in the social sphere. As Rückert's diary of bereavement, the Kindertodtenlieder contain many examples of this jarring of reality.

Subjective reality

At a personal level, the bereaved struggles to maintain the sane normality of everyday life. Time is ultimately here the great healer, but for those who lose this struggle, madness awaits.

Here, in a poem written after the death of Luise, Rückert gives us an example of a painful attempt to participate in everyday life, 'just as before', after the massive reality shift resulting from her death has rendered everyday reality quite alien:

Throughout this poem runs a characteristically Rückert-like modulation of the theme of full and empty – leer / leeren / Voll / leerer / Voll / voll / Flut – one that is difficult to render properly in translation.

Rückert describes the situation in which he finds himself in terms with which today's bereaved persons and today's bereavement counsellors could identify perfectly:

The world of his poetry now appears as a dream world, separate from the massive reality of the children's deaths. His public poetry inspired by his family life is now only yet another source of bitterness for him:

Rückert, in 'live-blogging' the stages of his grief in his poetry gives us many examples of the shocking fission of everyday reality caused by grief. The poem that Mahler set to music as the first of his five settings is an example of the contradictions of subjective and objective reality when these two are torn apart. The poem is a meditation on light. The sun continues to rise, despite the death of a child in the night. Rückert distinguishes between the personal and the public realities:

The easy and bald positivism of the religious conclusion of the 'light of the world' is puzzling in the context of the Kindertodtenlieder as a whole.

The poem seems to consist of two separate halves with two completely separate moods: the first two stanzas are tragic and insightful, the second two oddly hortatory. The glue that binds the two halves is the wordplay on light and darkness that penetrates them both. Mahler's choice of this piece for not just one of the five pieces in his settings but the very first of those pieces is baffling – just as baffling as the music of the setting itself. The composer's dreary tone for the first part is continued into the bright religious conclusion of the second part.

An important example of the fracturing of subjective reality comes from a poem describing an incident in Ernst's long-drawn-out illness.

For Christmas Ernst had received a puppet theatre with cut-out cardboard figures of rustic folk at a rural wedding. The memory of that present would come to haunt his father, particularly the memory of his son listlessly attempting to play with it, as though it were a duty to be fulfilled:

In the bitter new reality of the sickroom, after Luise's death and with Ernst's death looming nearer every day, the happy world of Christmas, the happy rustical wedding scene was something that belonged to another world, another reality, altogether.

Rückert's feelings and experiences, recorded with unremitting honesty during five months of poetic live blogging, offer an insight into the processes of grief and recovery that has no literary parallel that I know of.

Social reality

The detachment of the subjective reality of the bereaved from the realities of the everyday world is bad enough, but on top of that come the fractures with the world of external social reality. In the Kindertodtenlieder, these fractures manifest themselves in two distinct ways, which Rückert records with analytical precision: social isolation and social disconnection.

Social isolation

Because of the illness in the Rückert family, friends and acquaintances avoid them as much as they can. We saw this happening during Schubert's last illness, when only a few hardy souls came to visit him.

When emotional disaster strikes, people who in normal times can easily do without others find themselves isolated and alone:

In her memoir, Luise Rückert gives us an example of this need for other people. Ernst's suffering and long drawn out struggle for survival was a difficult test for his father. At the worst moments, thinking Ernst already dead, he would go outside and search out other people with whom he could share the shock of his own premature grief:

At one point Ernst was so weak that we, especially his father, thought that he would be dead any moment. Oh, and once more I had to listen to that sound, that heart-rending farewell to the world – then Rückert ran out, outside the house, and told the friends that he met that his son was dead. But not yet, the suffering would last a further eight days!

Auf einmal wurde er [Ernst] so schwach, daß wir, besonders der Vater meinte, er werde sogleich dahin seyn. O und noch einmal mußte ich den Ton, den herzzerreißenden des Lebewohls für diese Welt hören – dann lief Rückert weg, hinaus ins Freye, und seinen ihn begegnenden Freunden sagte er, der Knabe sey todt. Aber noch nicht, noch sollte das Leiden 8 Tage dauern! [KTL 554f]

Even when a welcome letter from a friend arrived, it only served to reinforce his sense of isolation.

Social disconnection

The Rückerts' social isolation was made much worse by the fact that the illness fell upon the children at Christmas and the New Year. Whilst others were celebrating, the Rückerts were nursing their children, the ill and the dying:

In previous years Rückert and his family would have participated in the rituals of the winter season: Christmas, New Year and Fastnacht, 'Carnival'. In the grief of loss, these celebrations have now become a form of mockery – they are aspects of another, everyday social reality which is now incomprehensibly alien to the new reality of sickness, suffering and dying.

Rückert cannot now understand how he could ever have taken part in such celebrations – a characteristic example of the dislocation of social reality caused by bereavement:

On New Year's Day groups of locals would go from door to door, playing trumpets, fiddles, drums and whatever else came to hand. As with today's carol singers, some reward was expected. Fireworks were a luxury few could afford at the time, so the tradition was to fire guns into the air. In Erlangen the church bells were being rung, too. At exactly this festive moment, the body of little Luise is lying in the house, not yet dead a day.

Normal life at times such as New Year does not observe the pieties of death:

Luise was buried at 9 o'clock on 3 January 1834. The burial would have been followed by the traditional Leichenschmaus, 'wake'. The tradition has its justification for the extended families of the elderly who have died, but for a three-and-a-half year old girl the ceremony was just too much for Rückert.

The ancient traditions of the wake offended Rückert deeply. The thought of the oven-warm almond cakes baked for Luise's wake being proffered as a treat to the dying Ernst was too much to bear.

Once again, we are confronted with a textbook example of the fractured interface between the grief of the father and the wider social reality in which he lives. He characterises the wake for Luise as being the most horrible experience of that terrible time:

The Rückerts had not only to get through the wildness of the New Year observances but survive the närrische Zeit, the 'crazy time' of the Carnival period that began (in many places) on 6 January, Dreikönigstag, 'Three Kings' Day / Epiphany'. The Carnival period ended on Fastnachtsdienstag, 'Shrove Tuesday', the day before Ash Wednesday, which fell on 12 February that year and which began the Lenten season of fasting and abstention.

The scission of social reality caused by bereavement causes both parties, the bereaved and the non-bereaved, to fear and avoid contact. The non-bereaved have to cope with the difficult duty of expressing sincere condolences in the midst of their everyday normality; the bereaved have to find words that express their grief in some socially acceptable form. Rückert faced this latter problem. Once again, we are astonished at the psychological honesty of the Kindertodtenlieder, as Rückert expresses his fears of one encounter:

Rückert's retreat from the society around him is so marked that he even wants to avoid a burial in the cemetery at Erlangen. The two youngest children had little social connection outside the family and in that sense did not belong there.

Nur wer gelebt in einer Volksgemeine,
Sollt' in derselben werden auch begraben;
So möchten sie ihr Fest zusammen haben,
Im Mondschein nun, wie sonst im Sonnenscheine.

Only those who live in a community should be buried in that community, too. In that way they all have their special occasions together, in moonlight now as otherwise in sunlight.

Euch aber, dich, mein Töchterlein, das kleine,
Und dich, o meinen nicht viel großem Knaben,
Statt daß sie hier euch euer Plätzchen gaben,
Bestattet wünscht' ich euch im stillen Haine.

You, though, my daughter, the little one, and you, my not much bigger boy, rather than make your places here I should like to have you buried in a quiet woodland grove.

Ihr wart noch unter Leute nicht gekommen,
Und müßt hier unter lauter Fremd' euch mischen;
Wie werdet ihr von ihnen aufgenommen?

You did not yet mix with people, and you would have to mix with all those strangers; how will you be received by them?

Hier ruht kein Ahn, mit Muth euch zu erfrischen,
Und euer Vater hat erst nachzukommen;
So nehm' euch Gott in seine Hut inzwischen!

[KTL 140]

No ancestors rest here, to refresh your courage, and your father is yet to come; so may God take you under his wing until then!

Rückert emerged from his grief a changed man. The personal and social tectonic plates have been shifted by grief. He returned to the social everyday reality with a deeper understanding of that reality – 'the cover had lifted'. He documents the change precisely:

Rejoining the world

The Kindertodtenlieder are not just a record of a descent into the darkness of grief but an account of the ascent back to the light. Rückert blogged in verse on the way down and blogged in verse on the way up, too.

Time, the great healer, played its part, as did – eventually – the weather. After the unseasonable warmth of January and February 1834, March was exceptionally cold and windy, but eventually Nature's course reasserted itself and April finally gave way to a clement May, the month when Nature finally re-awoke, as did Rückert's mood.

The dark night of depression had lasted nearly four months, but even then, there were days when courage and optimism returned to our poet:

Still, nur still! die bösen Stunden gehen auch;
Lange standst du, kannst noch länger stehen auch.
Und wenn dichs zu Boden drückt, erliegest du;
So das Unerträgliche besiegest du.
[KTL 401]

Still, be still! the evil moments go away too; You have stood a long time and can stand longer too. And if it presses you to the ground, you will succumb; so you will vanquish the unbearable.

On a number of occasions in the Kindertodtenlieder Rückert wrote of the obligations he had towards the remaining family. He wrote some interesting and perceptive poems on the new dynamics of the family after the loss of its youngest members. For example, he noticed that the four remaining sons had started to behave more childishly as though trying to replace the two youngest siblings. [KTL 374/375]

We leave these matters all undiscussed, mentioning only an elevating spring lesson he draws from the return of the swallow:

The lifting of the cloud of grief permits the return of a new positive attitude. Observing the spring flowers coming to life he feels gratitude for what he has had:

Earlier we mentioned the impermissibility of comfort felt by people who are grieving. The splendour of Nature and the lesson of spring brush aside that inhibition – 'Life hopes afresh, and forgets what it lost':

And at last, after Time, comes that other great healer, Sleep:

What a marvel the Kindertodtenlieder are! The collection has epic dimensions and speaks to the human condition in ways unlike any other poem collection I know. So why, with all these qualities, is it almost forgotten?

Friedrich Rückert

Biographical sketch

The biographer squints down like a scientist on the Brownian motion of the subject's life and slices it up into neat periods between collisions, each characterised by some defining quality. Let's do this quickly and sketchily for Friedrich Rückert.

A map always helps:

Rückert was born on 16 May 1788 and died, 77 years old, of colon cancer, on 31 January 1866. He had reached a good age for his time. Rückert's parents were solid middle class stock, his father was a lawyer. They were not nobility, not rich, but not poor either, and could afford the education that Friedrich received.

The Schubert fans on this website might care to contrast Friedrich Rückert's easy access to education, travel and employment with the narrowness of Schubert's perspectives as a young man with no material support beyond what came from his own ceaseless labour.

Whereas Schubert's immense productivity overwhelmed the slow processes of the music publishers of Vienna, Rückert's immense productivity found ready takers in the expanding market for magazines and almanacs.

Money – wonderful stuff!

Friedrich's intellectual gifts revealed themselves in his school days and flowered during the university studies in the five-year period between 1805 and 1810, principally at the University of Würzburg – a period he completed with great academic success.

As far as we know, Rückert's first poetic efforts appeared around 1808, when he was twenty – poetic scribbling would accompany him from then on throughout the rest of his life.

Despite this great educational promise, instead of following a path of academic drudgery for the rest of his life, the 23 year-old Rückert did what fiery young men often do: in 1811 he embarked on a period of turbulent Brownian motion that would last seven years.

There were many meetings, friendships and influences that buffeted the young Rückert during this period – far too many to detail here. One deserves mention, though: his German patriotism. For readers unfamiliar with that period in the history of continental Europe, the basis of that German patriotism probably requires some explanation.

The period between about 1810 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Befreiungskriege, the 'Wars of Liberation', was a time when many German patriots, Rückert among them, longed for the re-emergence of the German nation. The neutered fragments of Germany with its many princelings that remained after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had been humiliated by the French upstart Napoleon. Local political exigencies always trumped any feeling of broader German solidarity.

Sometime between the summer of 1809 and the autumn of 1810 – that is, in his early twenties – the patriot Rückert wrote a poem which bound him firmly to the cause of a re-united Germany, Der Mittelpunkt, 'The Middle Point':

After Napoleon had finally been defeated, the Congress in 1815 brought restoration of the old dispensation; the resentments and aspiration of Germans came to nought and young Germans like Rückert had protested in vain. The problem would rumble along until Bismark solved it in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The tall, imposing figure of Rückert affected a Teutonic look – long hair, moustache and long, flowing coat – that would not have been out of place fighting alongside Hermann, the nemesis of Varus' three legions in the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald (around September 9 AD).

In 1815, his wild appearance almost caused him to be ejected from Stuttgart, then within the Kingdom of Swabia, one of those insecure Westphalian fragments always on the lookout for real or imagined troublemakers.

Two years later, the aesthetes of the German poets' colony in Rome, which Rückert visited in 1817, found the 'old German' appearance of the 29 year-old quite unsettling – almost as though he had turned up wearing an MGGA hat (Make Germany Great Again).

Those who think of Rückert as an academic drudge or simply a poet of flowery-bowery kitsch should not forget what a stormy, revolutionary, patriot's heart beat within him. Rückert would not live to see the unification of Germany, which took place in 1871, five years after his death, following yet another French provocation.

In 1818 the period of turbulence came to an end for the now 30 year-old Rückert. The interest in oriental languages that would come to define his later academic career and much of his later poetry began. In 1819 the turbulent Odysseus returned to his parents' house in Ebern, (now in northern Bavaria). Two years later, on a stay in nearby Coburg, he met his Penelope, Luise Wiethhaus-Fischer. They married in December of 1821.

For the next five years Rückert followed twin paths as a poet and orientalist, culminating in his appointment in 1826 as a full professor at the University of Erlangen. During that time he supplemented his income with the earnings from the sale of his poetic works, not just as books but in many of the magazines and almanacs which had a rapidly expanding readership, particularly female, during a time of rapidly increasing popular literacy. He and Luise founded a substantial family.

This period brings us to 1834, the moment of the catastrophe documented in the Kindertodtenlieder. Rückert was then 46 and went on to follow a substantial academic career until 1848, when he retired at 60 from his post at the University of Berlin to a house in Neuses, near Coburg – back his roots, if you like – where he remained until his death nearly 20 years later.

The poetic scribbling that had started in 1808 never ceased during the sixty or so years that followed. During his long retirement he wrote several thousand poems in his Liedertagebuch, his 'Poetic Journal', hardly any of which he published. In this respect, his poetry strikes us as a kind of 'poetic thinking aloud', not really intended for others to read. From the middle of 1826 until the end of his life, Rückert's academic and poetic reputation grew. He was a frequent recipient of honours.

Reception and obscurity

Rückert's clever mastery of German and so many forms of versification cannot be denied. He was a German patriot not just in the subjects of many of his poems but above all in his championship of German as a medium of poetry.

This language patriotism may surprise those who have read of his mastery of so many complex foreign tongues, but it is an undeniable fact that Rückert was at least writing German poetry in German – as opposed, for example to those great 'German' authors Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, the Weimar Viergestirn, 'Four Stars', and many of their predecessors with great names who were effectively writing Greek and Latin poetry in German. Today's Germanists will flutter their fans in horror at the sacrilegious thought that Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) wasted most of his considerable talent writing declamatory Pindaric Greek in declamatory German.

In Rückert's lifetime his Germanic German poetry was frequently misunderstood by contemporary authors. His easier and accessible pieces appeared in magazines and almanacs that were intended for a largely female readership, good reason for literary types to look down their noses at them. Even Rückert's playful internal rhymes could amuse and be appreciated by a non-specialist reader, one who did not care to count out the feet of hexameters, identify classic models – is this an ode or an elegy and if so, what kind of one? – and untangle classical allusions.

Paradoxically, the fiendishly clever poems that he also wrote were dismissed as simply being too clever by half. His work is full of paradoxes, but nevertheless, he was published, widely read and his works sold – yet another reason for the literary panjandrums to view him with distaste.

But after the sufferings of the economic 'pauperism' of the 1830s and the failed, bloody uprisings of 1848, the German Romantic vision of happy rustics cavorting in bucolic surroundings – think of the rural wedding scene which Ernst received as a Christmas present – suddenly had nothing more to say. It jarred with reality, much as it had done for the sick Ernst.

Hard, heavily political realism took over. For the new wave of German writers, Rückert had had his day, though there were still plenty of readers who continued to enjoy his lighter literary touch. It is one of the many, many Rückert paradoxes that Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder, the poetic diary of the awful reality of the loss of his children, was never published until after his death and even then in a completely mangled form.

Rückert was his own worst poetic enemy. During his life a backlog of thousands of unpublished poems built up, so that at his death his literary executors and the literary world were confronted with a mountain of manuscripts from a poet whose time had largely passed. Even if this mountain were to be published, what would be the point? Who would now buy it or read it?

In Schweinfurt in 1963 the Rückert-Gesellschaft, the 'Rückert Society' was founded and since that time has been plugging through the publication of Rückert's literary estate. We could argue that the society's noble efforts are pointless and have in the meantime been overtaken by the digital age: the society continues to churn out unaffordable short-run publications as though the internet had never happened.

Amongst other Rückert productions, so far they have managed to produce ten volumes of the Liedertagebuch, the latest one in 2015 covering the year 1855. Only eleven years more to go! At one every three of four years!

We have to wonder who, apart from academic libraries, will pay anything between 50 and 100 Euros for each of these works.

Rückert's manuscripts have disappeared into various archives, principally the Goethe-Schiller-Archive in Marburg and the Stadtarchiv Schweinfurt. The process is sad and the equivalent of a second interment of poor Rückert: the worthy ones have exhumed Rückert's manuscripts, are transcribing them slowly and then burying both of them again out of sight of the general public.

The publication history of the Kindertodtenlieder illustrates perfectly how the good intentions and well-meaning actions of Rückert's modern admirers have in fact contributed to the continuing neglect of his work and his descent into obscurity.

Burying the Kindertodtenlieder

Rückert finished the Kindertodtenlieder in July of 1834. The stack of manuscript pages (of varying size but most quite small) was given to his wife Luise sometime around June 1834. Rückert never touched them again after that. It was Luise who asked that the work should never be published. She sent the manuscript bundle to various friends and it circulated from hand to hand until after Rückert's death.

It is a major miracle that the manuscripts survived this wandering – however, we must assume that the order of the pages in the bundle was not necessarily preserved.

Having survived that peregrination, around five years after Rückert's death the manuscript bundle came into the hands of Heinrich Rückert (1823-1875), Friedrich's oldest son, who was then a professor of German History in Breslau. He published his father's Kindertodtenlieder in 1872.

That first edition of the Kindertodtenlieder must represent one of the greatest acts of philological barbarism in the history of German literature.

Heinrich took his his father's poems and rearranged them into four 'themes'. The themes are breathtakingly stupid: Lied und Leid, 'Song and Suffering', Krankheit und Tod, 'Sickness and Death', Winter und Frühling, 'Winter and Spring' and Trost und Erhebung, 'comfort and elevation'.

Readers who have plugged at great personal sacrifice through our small selection (about 80 out of 563 – say 14%) of samples from the Kindertodtenlieder will probably understand our bafflement at these ridiculous categories. In creating his categories Heinrich (and possibly the numerous previous readers of the manuscripts) shuffled the poems out of their original chronological order. It seems almost certain that the poems of the manuscripts that left Rückert's hands were in chronological order – how could it be otherwise?

Heinrich didn't number the pages before he shuffled them around. As will be clear to anyone who worked their way through the poems in this article, the chronology of Rückert's experience of his children's deaths is an essential thread on which the poems have to hang. We used the 'live blogging' analogy to describe this. Without that sequence, the poems are largely incomprehensible.

We hope that in this article, by reinstating as best we can some partial form of sequence in the work, we have made the poems comprehensible. We ourselves introduced some categories, but only as a way of coping with a subset of the material. In a full edition this would not be needed.

Interested readers looking for proof of the shambles that is the Kindertodtenlieder should glance at the references on the poems in our selection to the pages on which these poems appear in the critical edition of 2007. The critical edition has kept the poems in the order in which Heinrich first published them.

Thanks to Heinrich et al., poems that are quite clearly related are scattered through the collection, sometimes separated by several hundred pages. Luise and Ernst die many times over in Heinrich's edition. A particularly egregious example is the poem about the Rückert children awaiting the Christmas Eve celebration. The reader encounters this poem, which from its content must appear at or close to the beginning of the collection, only on page 350.

Hans Wollschläger, the principal editor of the 2007 critical edition and, until his death in that year, one of the principal editors working on the Rückert-Gesellschaft's editions, then compounded Heinrich's philological barbarism with philological cowardice in his decision to leave Heinrich's sequence as it was 'in order not to load the text with even more interventions' [KTL 572].

The result is that the Kindertotdtenlieder are now published in a 'critical edition' – with all the authority which that appellation bestows and presumably now in perpetuity – in Heinrich's unreadable order. His blunder is thus perpetuated. As we have shown in our small selection, it would be possible to rearrange the poems in the collection in at least some rough order that would make the collection accessible and comprehensible to 'normal' readers.

In most cases there could be no philological certainty that one particular poem came before or after another particular poem. It is true that risks would be run in doing this – but they would have been risks worth running in the cause of restoring the Kindertodtenlieder to the place they deserve in German literature.

The 1872/2007 sequence is not sacred, it is not Friedrich Rückert's work, but Heinrich Rückert's work. Heinrich, the idiot who wisely remained anonymous in the 1872 publication. The Heinrich/Wollschläger sequence is a barbarism that deserves neither piety, respect nor politeness.

In this benighted 'critical-edition' the shoulder-shrugging resignation continues in the provision of the critical apparatus. This apparatus will be of interest to few readers, but dumping it in 38 page block of tiny type at the end of the book is a sign of resignation. It is a sign that no one really cares – the editors and publishers are just going through the motions.

In accordance with long-standing philological tradition the elements of the apparatus should be on the same page as the relevant text. If they are at the end of the work then there should be at least some attention paid to usability.

The small-print block at the end is extremely tedious to use – because the editors seem to believe that no one is going to use it anyway.

The annotations in the apparatus are very few and far between and generally add nothing to the reader's understanding. Some philological rabbit has spent gruelling hours simply correlating words in autographs with words in printed editions.

Driving a stake through the heart

Just to pile on the misery, in 1993 Hans Wollschläger brought out an edition of the Kindertodtenlieder in Insel Verlag.

The sequencing defects were the same as those of the 2007 critical edition, but at least it was a relatively inexpensive and relatively compact (426 pages on thin stock) paperback that could be slipped into a roomy pocket. Admittedly, Wollschläger's incomprehensible foreword just added dead weight to the book, but you didn't have to read that, just carry it around.

But – one step forward, two steps back – within a few years this book went out of print – presumably in order to remove the competition for the critical edition of 2007 (currently 64 EUR). It is difficult to be sure whether the Rückert-Gesellschaft is really working in Rückert's interest or their own.

Advertisement for the restoration

Come on, you Germanists – you can do better than this! Whatever you may think of him now, Rückert was a major figure of nineteenth century German literature and his monumental Kindertodtenlieder a product of remarkable quality on so many levels. Now that the 2007 editors have done the boring job of manuscript fiddling, it is time for someone to take a stab at reinstating – if only in the most general terms – the chronology that is at the heart of the work: minimally 1-Luise – 2-Ernst – 3-The pair – 4-Recovery.

Once that is done, any half-competent television producer will realise that the script of a sixty-minute TV film has just written itself.

Come on, Reclam, what are you waiting for? Give us an inexpensive, carryable edition of the Kindertodtenlieder just as you gave us an inexpensive anthology of Rückert's work. Add a few footnote comments on difficult passages and the work would be the German train-travellers' carrying-book of choice, just as your Rückert anthology was for this train traveller:

German train carriages would be full of weeping women and moist-eyed millenial men, fearing for their mascara.

Eichendorff: the other Kindertodtenlieder

We appeal once more to the sturdy souls who have plugged through the poems in our selection: what did you think of them?

Some will reply that if Professor Dr So-Und-So thinks Rückert is better left forgotten, who are we to disagree? We suspect, however, that the majority of our readers have the self-confidence to form their own opinions.

Here to help them is a spine stiffener: another set of Kindertodtenlieder, this time by Joseph von Eichendorff, published in 1837. The set is titled Auf meines Kindes Tod and was written in response to the death of his youngest daughter Anna (20.10.1830 - 24.03.1832).

Some poems from the set were published individually in 1834 (that year in which the Rückerts were experiencing their own dark night of the soul). One reviewer thought the cycle was the 'most beautiful thing that Eichendorff ever wrote'.

There are ten poems in Eichendorff's cycle. After this long article on Rückert's Kindertodtenlieder, reproducing them all would be asking too much of the already frayed nerves of our readers – and translating them asking much, too much of your author.

Those who read German are free to read all ten (they are easily available online) and form their own opinion as to the comparative merits of Rückert's and Eichendorff's poems.

For non-German speakers, here is one of Eichendorff's poems translated and lightly commentated, poem number 6, Ich führt dich oft spazieren, 'I often took you out walking'. The basis for our selection? It's short:

Eichendorff's technique in all his poetry is generally to set up list of words of 'nice' things, 'nice' feelings and 'nice' events, held together by an undemanding rhyme scheme.

This poem is no different. The winter is 'solitary', the time of year is 'beautiful', then we have 'spring' (in the poetic word Lenz), then 'larks' (what else?), blue sky (what else?) and weeping. The imagery of the poem is conventional and the final statement that the larks are bringing a greeting from the dead girl is fatuous – without any possibility of rescue through some metaphorical understanding.

No matter how sentimental Rückert's images may occasionally seem, there is always an inner logic to their use. Rückert has much more intellectual depth than Eichendorff.

If you compare Eichendorff's 10 poems with Rückert's 563 poems, or even just the 80 or so we have reproduced here, you will have to admit that Rückert is much the better poet and his Kindertodtenlieder have much more to say to the human condition in general.

However, Eichendorff only wrote 10 poems in his cycle and published them shortly after their composition. Rückert's 563 poems floated around unseen until Heinrich mangled them, by which time no one cared any more. That's the difference.

Sources

All sources are in German, unless otherwise noted. All translations ©FoS.

Update 11.07.2020

An additional poem from the Kindertodtenlieder is discussed and analysed here: Über alle Gräber… .