For after the end of the world

The Kickelhahn near to Ilmenau, from here

What book would you take with you to the desert island? If one is not extremely practical – “The Encyclopedia of Tourists and Survivors!” – then he or she immediately thinks of a Big Book. The Bible. The Odyssey. Laozi. Tolstoy. Hafez. The poems of Attila József. Something one perhaps does not read every day, but which would stay as a canon and a memento from the lost civilization.

Different people can have different Big Books. Contemporary literature, however, often proposes a new candidate. Not even a book, just a poem. A poem by Goethe, the Wanderer’s Nightsong.

In Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (2006) it is the representative of German Classicism, Alexander von Humboldt to penetrate, by sailing upstream the Amazonas, into a world of which we do not know whether it symbolizes the pre- or post-civilization state of humanity, but it certainly lacks any traces of civilization. His four oarsmen Carlos, Gabriel, Mario and Julio – who most probably stand for the idols of Kehlmann, the four great authors of Southern American magic reality – keep treating each other with obscure, bloody and magic stories that contradict every rule of European logic. When Humboldt is also invited to say something, he tells the Wanderer’s Nightsong in a prosaic translation. The awkwardness of the translation indicates well the incompatibility of the two worlds and shows how few can be transmitted from the Winckelmannian “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”, but it also highlights that the text even in this form preserves something from its emblematic nature referring to another, more spacious and sublime world.

Mario asked Humboldt to tell a story, he too.
He does not know any stories, said Humboldt and he straightened his hat which had been turned by the monkey. And he does not even like storytelling. But he can tell the most beautiful German poem in a free Spanish translation. Above the hilltops there is silence, between the trees no wind is felt, birds are silent, too, and you will die soon, don’t worry.
Everyone looked at him.
Ready, said Humboldt.
Pardon, asked Bonpland.
Humboldt reached for the sextant.
Excuse, said Julio. It is not possible that this is everything.
Of course it is no bloody story with wars and transformations, said Humbold with irritation. It has no magic, nobody is changed into a plant, nobody can fly and they do not eat each other.

Tatyana Tolstaya’s anti-utopia Кысь (The Slynx/Kys, 1986) is a survey of humanity living in quasi-paleolithic conditions after the nuclear war, but in fact it is an allegory of the morally and culturally eroded Soviet society. In this world there are no books, and there exist only as many written texts as Fedor Kuzmich, the tyrant of the village hands over to his scribes as his own works for copying and for distributing among the commoners:

А списывает Бенедикт то, что Федор Кузьмич, слава ему, сочинил: сказки, или поучения, а то стихи. Уж такие у Федора Кузьмича, слава ему, стихи ладные выходят, чтоиной раз рука задрожит, глаза затуманятся и будто весь враз ослабеешь и поплывешь куда-то, а не то словно как ком в горле встанет и сглотнуть не можешь… Вот намедни Бенедикт перебелял: Горные вершины Спят во тьме ночной; Тихие долины Полны свежей мглой; Не пылит дорога, Не дрожат листы… Подожди немного, Отдохнешь и ты.

And Benedikt copies out what Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, wrote: tales, teachings or poems. And the poems of Fedor Kuzmich, glory to him, are so beautiful that sometimes the hand trembles and the eyes are clouded and one feels as if all his body were weakened and were swimming somewhere or as if there were a lump in his throat and could not swallow… The other day Benedikt copied out this: Up there all summits are still. In all the tree-tops you will feel but the dew. The birds in the forest stopped talking. Soon, done with walking, you shall rest, too.

A look from the Kickelhahn. Drawing of Goethe, 1776. The archive pictures are from the Goethezeitportal.

What qualifies this poem so much for featuring as a Denkmal of European high culture in a world deprived of civilization?

The distilled simplicity of the poem, cunningly counterpointed by the asymmetries in the rhythm and rhyme structure, plays a great role in it for sure. As if it were an utmostly refined flower of European poetry. It is no coincidence that everyone tries to translate it (here you are a synoptic table of some of the Hungarian translations of the last fifty years), and nevertheless nobody could produce a translation that would be regarded as perfect.

But it is also sure that our Bildung, the way how this poem is presented to us in the course of our studies as a symbol of our culture, has its part in it as well. I remember how in the early eighties, in an intellectual environment very similar to that of Tolstaya our old-school teacher of literature taught to us this poem and  we recited it in German, in the language of the destroyed middle-class culture and as a bequest of this culture, while no more than two boys in the class understood anything in this language.

Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.

The fact that this poem took on this importance already in the period of Goethe and it has survived like this in the European tradition is due to no small extent to Goethe himself who attributed this same importance to his own poem.

If we have just said that for the Romantic poet only the poem “writ in water” is really everlasting, then this poem fulfills all the necessary criteria. It does not have a proper title: in the first editions of Goethe it followed the Weimar Wanderer’s Nightsong, written four years earlier, under the title Ein Gleiches (“The same”). And it was writ, if not in water, but on decaying plank, the wooden wall of a hunter’s cabin in the Thuringian Forest, on the Kickelhahn above Ilmenau visited by Goethe almost thirty times during his life. And to make the metaphor complete, the handwriting of Goethe was sawed out of the wall at the end of the 19th century. Since then it has been lost.

The Kickelhahn hunter’s cabin today

Goethe wrote this poem on the cabin’s wall on the night from 6 to 7 September 1780, and in 1813 he renewed it. In 1831, shortly before his death he returned here again only to see it once more. His companion, the forest ranger Johann Christian Mahr described this visit in his diary, published shortly afterwards:

Beim Eintritt in das obere Zimmer sagte er: “Ich habe in früherer Zeit in dieser Stube mit meinem Bedienten im Sommer acht Tage gewohnt und damals einen kleinen Vers hier an die Wand geschrieben. Wohl möchte ich diesen Vers nochmals sehen und wenn der Tag darunter bemerkt ist, an welchem es geschehen, so haben Sie die Güte mir solchen aufzuzeichnen.” Sogleich führte ich ihn an das südliche Fenster der Stube, an welchem links mit Bleistift geschrieben steht:

The Kickelhahn cabin

Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.

Goethe überlas diese wenigen Verse und Thränen flossen über seine Wangen. Ganz langsam zog er sein schneeweißes Taschentuch aus seinem dunkelbraunen Tuchrock, trocknete sich die Thränen und sprach in sanftem, wehmüthigem Ton: “Ja warte nur balde ruhest du auch!”, schwieg eine halbe Minute, sah nochmals durch das Fenster in den düstern Fichtenwald, und wendete sich darauf zu mir, mit den Worten: “Nun wollen wir wieder gehen.”

On entering the upper room he said: “I used to spend here eight days in a summer with my servant and then I wrote a little poem on the wall. I would like to see this poem once more, and if the day on which I wrote it is also noted below, then please be so kind to have a record of it for me.” I immediately led him to the southern window of the room, where this was written with pencil:

Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Es schweigen die Vöglein im Walde;
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

D. 7. September 1783. Goethe.

Goethe read over these few verses and tears flowed down his cheeks. Very slowly he took his snow-white handkerchief from his dark brown cloth coat, he wiped his tears off, and he said in a gentle, mournful tone: “Yes, just wait, soon you will rest, too!” He was silent for half minute, looked through the window at the dark pine forest, and then he turned to me by saying: “Now we can leave.”

A perfectly arranged scene. I would be surprised if it were not yet adapted for the screen. “Since this description of Mahr the poem has been linked to the image of the old man sitting on the Kickelhahn and being absorbed with melancholy and with a presentiment of death in the contemplation of nature turning to night”, writes Wulf Segelbrecht in his monograph about the reception history of the poem. *

Goethe as an old man on the Kickelhahn, with the texts of both Wanderer’s Nightsongs below.
Thüringerwaldverlag Rich. Zieschank, Rudolstadt

Goethe’s cabin and the Kickelhahn look-out tower. Verlag v. W. Zinke, Friedrichroda, 1906

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the sea of fog, c. 1818

Paul Hey, Volksliederkarten: “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”

However, the tradition of this poem as an icon of European culture reaches back not only to Goethe but even much further in time.

The Greek poet Alcman came from Anatolia to Sparta in the seventh century before Christ, during the archaic period of Greek culture. In Sparta he composed choir hymns for the parthenias, the religious associations of young girls. This fragment was left to us from one of his hymns (the English is by Lionel Casson):

Εὕδουσι δʹ ὀρέων κορυφαί τε καὶ φάραγγες πρώονές τε καὶ χαράδραι φῦλά τʹ ἑρπέτʹ ὅσα τρέφει μέλαινα γαῖα θῆρές τʹ ὀρεσκῴοι καὶ γένος μελισσᾶν καὶ κνώδαλʹ ἐν βένθεσσι πορφυρέας ἁλός· εὕδουσι δʹ οἰωνῶν φῦλα τανυπτερύγων.

The mountains sleep, the valleys and peaks the jutting headlands, the tumbling creeks the black earth’s teeming creatures that crawl the beasts of the forests, the swarms of bees the monsters deep in the purple seas the wide-winged birds, asleep, one and all.

The fragments of Alcman were published in one volume in 1773, producing a great effect in contemporary classical philology. Goethe wrote his Wanderer’s Nightsong seven years later. His poem attests the knowledge of Alcman’s hymn. As in a medallion, it sums up the very first description of a European sunset, inheriting its sacrality and universality and transmitting them until the last sunset of European culture and further.


Goethe – Schubert: Wandrers Nachtlied – Wanderer’s Nightsong D.768 (1823). Barbara Hendricks, soprano; Radu Lupu, piano (1986). This song can be found in several versions on YouTube, but I prefer this one because of the fine play of Radu Lupu.

A look from the Kickelhahn