Staging Shi'ites in Silesia: Andreas Gryphius's Catharina von Georgien

In meiner ersten Blut'/ ach! unter grimmen Schmertzen Besturtzt durchs scharffe Schwerdt' und ungeheuren Brand Durch iibster Freunde Tod und Elend/ als das Land In dem ich auffging fil'/ als toller Feinde Schertzen/ Als Laster-Zungen Spot mir rasend drang zu Hertzen/ Schrieb ich dis was du sihst mit noch zu zarter Hand Zwar Kindern/ als ein Kind/ doch reiner Andacht Pfand/ Tritt Leser nicht zu hart auf f Blumen Erstes Mertzen/ Hier donnert/ ich bekenn/ mein rauher Abbas nicht/ Nicht Leo/ der die Seel' auff dem Atar ausbricht/ Der Martrer Helden-Muth ist anders wo zu lesen: Ihr die ihr nichts mit Lust als frembde Fehler zehlt Bemuht euch ferner nicht: Ich sag' es was mir fehlt Das meine Kindheit nicht gelehrt doch fromm gewesen. - Andreas Gryphius, "Uber seine Sonn- und Feyertags Sonnette" (1657) In this sonnet about sonnets, the lyric voice returns in retrospect to his Sonnets for Sun- and Holidays. Although poet Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) was only twenty-three when this collection of one hundred sonnets first appeared in 1639, it was in fact the young poet's secono published gathering of sonnets. Already two years earlier, the Lissaer Sonetten had established the Silesian prodigy as a singular voice. His gifts were immediately recognized by his contemporaries across the German-speaking world. Poems first included in the Lissaer Sonnetten, such as the famous "Threnen des Vaterlandes" ("Tears of My Homeland"), declaimed the trauma of war. The collection forged forms that poured the poet's shocked witness onto the page, flooding it with the various horrors of the Thirty Years War, rendered in images whose emotional intensity remains compelling today.1 In the decades following both collections' initial publication, Gryphius repeatedly reworked many of their poems, an activity itself commemorated by the sonnet cited here as epigraph. This later poem first appeared in print when Johann Lischken in Breslau produced the 1657 edition of Gryphius's complete sonnets.2 In its return to lines written years earlier, this sonnet attributes them to a "child" and to a "hand still too tender. " Produced by a young hand, the verses remain untrained and unfinished, not yet shaped by a craft mastered in time, and in response to those critics who faulted the purity of Gryphius's rhymes. Although unschooled in the rules for rhyme as they had evolved in the years after Martin Opitz's 1624 seminal handbook for German poetry, the Sonnets for Sun- and Holidays instead document "the pure devotion" of "children," "Zwar Kindern/ als ein Kind/ doch reiner Andacht Pfand." And so the older poet asks those who "delight in nothing more than others' mistakes" to tread lightly on his "first blooms." These early buds fade, he believes, when compared to the thunderous voice which the older poet lent his dramatic characters, "Hier donnert/ ich bekenn/ mein rauher Abbas nicht."3 While Gryphius prepared the Sonnets for Sun- and Holidays to be reprinted, his drama Catharina von Georgien too finally made its way into print.4 Though both appeared in 1657 under the name Andreas Gryphius, the sonnet suggests they were produced by two very different poets. If the Sonnets for Sun- and Holidays stand under the sign of tender childhood, Gryphius's Abbas figures the poet's maturity. His savage thunder drowns out the gentle voice of the poet's youth. The sonnet on sonnets' final tercet takes aim at Gryphius's critics, "Ihr die ihr nichts mit Lust als frembde Fehler zehlt."5 It concludes with the clever twist of an accomplished sonnet, "Bemuht euch ferner nicht: Ich sag' es was mir fehlt/ Das meine Kindheit nicht gelehrt doch fromm gewesen."6 He readily concedes his fledgling verses' lack of rhetorical technique and erudite subject matter. But their piety trumps any lack of erudition. These oppositions, established by the relatively late sonnet "Uber seine Sonn- und Feyertags Sonnette," offer a path through the tangle of religious geopolitics staged in Gryphius's Persian Trauerspiel. …