Welch, Liliane: On the Way to Marburg. In: Ahornblätter. Marburger
Beiträge zur Kanada-Forschung. 11. Marburg 1998.(Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek
Marburg ; 84)
http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sum/84/sum84-3.html
Liliane Welch
On the Way to Marburg
“We hastened through the entire world of Antiquity for fifteen years,
one evening each week, in reading sessions at Bultmann’s house“, “No lecture,
no poetry reading, no play or concert could happen unless it was a place
of meeting and of common experience,“ Hans-Georg Gadamer writes about Marburg
in the 1920s. A mood of spiritual revolution and discussion orgies inflamed
that town.
Paul Natorp, a man of wonderful silences, lecturing by candle light when
the electricity was interrupted. Martin Heidegger, dressed once in skiing
attire and reprimanded by his colleagues: “Thus you go to lecture!“ --
regularly beginning his seminars at seven o’clock in the morning (while
his colleague Nicolai Hartmann retained the students they both shared in
his classes until eleven o’clock the evening before). The art historian
Richard Hamann forever aspiring to unsettle the bourgeois habits of his
fellow citizens. The scholar Ernst Robert Curtius travelling by train to
Giessen for a decent meal in ist railroad station. Saint Elisabeth and
Count Philipp founding a hospice and a university.
Figures from another world. Predecessors on a search. What were these pilgrims
ultimately seeking in these Lahn hills, in this city with the first German
gothic church, the first protestant university in Europe?
“The Marburg of the twenties was not yet the mass university of today,
and in that small town, contact among those belonging together established
itself easily.“ So continues Gadamer, perhaps inducing some of us to believe
that places of the past are paradise. I’m interested in the gulf that opens
between that time and our life. The texture of the difference grabs me.
I long to dialogue with unseen wayfarers, to hear their abrupt song of
incandescent visions as they speak about things we’ve never seen but only
imagined.
Why keep company with predecessors who have thought and written about our
own destinations? Why stand in the splendid auditorium of the Philipps
University or before the golden shrine of Elisabeth church? Do these walls
of religious iconography and classical mythology still speak? Do their
words need me as audience? Or have I only come to give two poetry readings
at the celebration for Canada Day on June 27, 1997? And how will my writing
be affected by the polyvocality, simultaneity and multiplicity of this
cultural landscape? What strategies will I need to enfold this Old World?
Will the English language match its flavours, inherit the ideas that have
informed our understanding of ourselves?
As I bed down for a first night at the guest house in the Botanical Gardens,
Marburg takes me into its confidence as it did when I attempted to thaw
the past earlier that afternoon. In the narrow streets the glided and ribbed
facades opened before me like a prayer book. Before dropping to sleep,
the voices of other travellers shine like ice lakes in the dark. Rilke’s
Requiem which journeys restlessly between the spiritual and quotidian:
“For there is an ancient enmity / Between our daily life and the great
work.“ Emily Dickinson’s verses which straddle those two worlds and make
a solitary music of wholeness from their undiscovered and forgotten states
of being: “-- I know -- / I don’t like Paradise -- / Because it’s Sunday
-- all the time -- / And Recess -- never comes.“ Half awake, both voices
carry me down an unknown river. Perhaps dream will ferry me to the spendid
mirrors that surround the ventures, the epiphanic revelations of these
poets.
When I was a young graduate student at Penn State University, the light
of several Marburg wanderers blown to the New World, altered my life. Still
today their writings shine abidingly into my days, offering a glimpse of
a better life within the Republic of Letters. I often idled away April
afternoons on the broad front steps of the University library. Once, a
philosophy professor ambled by and told me to read Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis, Leo Spitzer’s Stylistic Studies, Ernst Robert Curtius’
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. I ran down to Mrs. Bell’s
bookstore to buy the books, sank into their pages and discussed my findings
with the philosopher the following afternoons. Whole hours Auerbach accompanied
me through European literature, helping me look at Odysseus’ scar, Pantagruel’s
mouth, Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse. The casual movement and errands of
literary heroes and heroines ambulated into my own life, while I watched
students stroll up the mall as the spring sun was gathering under the huge
elms that needed constant doctoring to survive, and I looked at the sqirrels
leaping through the branches like Hindu dancers, and my image of French
servants grew slowly in the hills of ennui on the Normandy plains. No hotdog
stands, no rock bands yet, no noise. Alone, sitting there by myself on
the steps, I was baptized and immersed into great literary works by three
German critics.
There my critical path was set. I still have the paperback of Mimesis
with its red and blue underlinings. In those readings, my desire to
write, the irresistible force found its impetus. The itinerant Marburg
scholars set in motion a course of literary inquiry, seedbed for the poetic
travels to come.
It was also at Penn State University that I heard the vitality of Martin
Heidegger’s thought: his Being and Time, written in Marburg, with
its treks through the quotidian, its suns onto our mortality, its migrations
into space and time. Through that momentous book’s stupendous voyages,
the air, rocks, soil, waters of our Western tradition expanded their ice
and fire. The intensity and concentration of Heidegger’s reflections spoke
to the seriousness of a vocation in writing. In need of philosophic instruction
and direction, I was fortunate to encounter that tough and tenacious teacher
to whom everything mattered. His ardent, intense voice opened me onto what
was possible. Still today I can’t teach his essay Words, about the
adventures of poets and thinkers, without a stinging nostalgia: for what
I did then, for the books I read, for who I was then.
I have since admired the thought of other philosophers, especially that
of Hegel, Kant and Nietzsche, all of whom exert an irrestible power and
seduction. But the thinker of princely rank to whom I keep returning and
to whose music my poems keep lying open is Heidgegger, the highest peak
of contemporary philosophy. He made my life bearable when I sought academic
sanctuary. Like any good teacher he persuaded me by his example that writers
are servants to language, that we are always on the way to it as we move
through history and place.
Every place contains many journeys, meditations on self, predecessors and
landscapes. What a difference between the serenity of the pre-war Marburg
and our own speed-crazed lives. On my last day, I try to fathom the in-between.
If Gadamer were at his window, he might see me tracking the brothers Grimm,
walking from the St. Michaels chapel to the castle on the hill to examine
the old roofs below: such expansiveness under my feet, such distances waiting
to be reassembled. I circle the witches’ tower, traverse the park. A refined
crowd strolls here, healthy and dignified. The peregrinations through his
town run upward to the peaks of the spirit and downward at the earth and
our tenuous place within it. I return to my bench in the Botanical Gardens,
the still centre of things, listen to the voices I inhabit.
In silence I wonder why writing enduringly holds sway over my life. Why
this act must be re-invigorated by arrowing in and out of places that bid
me to walk with the slower, solemn pace one sets on a jagged mountain peak
where each step is significant, heightened, dangerous and accountable.
On the bench across from me, two students study a book, pointing out to
one another passages. They too watch over words. The birds are pulsing
in the bushes, a cool breeze blows. Marburg, its intermingling of the physical
and spiritual, asks me to enter into the difference, turns me back to my
whole past: the inherited personal and historical kaleidoscope -- the landscape
and art of my European childhood fused with the context of North America.
I’m yet at another juncture of the voyage that courses backwards and forwards.
On the way to pick up my travel case in the hostel, past the waters of
the artificial lake, it occurs to me that the road I took at Penn State
University may have joined another one that veered out of the shadows in
the late sixties, when Cyril and I started mountain climbing in the Alps.
We hiked up interminable paths from the valley, and were then suddenly
confronted with the enormity of a peak’s head wall, rising so near, so
huge, the sun flashing from its minerals and ice, small clouds evaporating
round the crest. We couldn’t turn back, had to touch those steep rocks.
A man and a woman on that silent mountain, alive to its omnipotent voice,
forging a new route.
Dr Liliane Welch, Mount Allison University, Department of Languages and
Literatures, Sackville, NB, E0A 3C0, Canada
e-mail: lwelch@mta.ca