Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Sinead Morrissey 'The Lightbox' Philip Terry 'What is Poetry' Ned Denny 'Nine Poems after Verlaine' Sasha Dugdale 'On learning that Russian mothers buy their soldier sons lucky belts inscribed with Psalm 90 to wear into battle' Rod Mengham 'Cold War Hot Air'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 199, Volume 37 Number 5, May - June 2011.

Catchwords 12 Iain Bamforth
Mines and Caves

Theodore Ziolkowski, in his German Romanticism and its Institutions (1990), reminds us of just how many German writers (in the mould of Martin Luther) had professional experience of the saltworks or mines: their numbers include Novalis, Brentano, Wackenroder, Tieck and Eichendorff. Moreover, Kleist, Hoffmann and Humboldt all wrote memorably about the underworld; and Goethe, although he had no formal training in the subject, threw himself into the technological and administrative aspects, as a privy councillor in Saxony-Weimar, of reopening the silver mines at Ilmenau. Below was the Earth-Spirit, the generative matrix which crops up in Faust I, and is imagistically associated with the spinning Fates: the miners were obstetricians who went down into the innards of the earth to assist their labour at the loom of time. In the dark some miners pursued what resembled a solar religion, or came to realise, like Faust, that the experience of the sublime cannot be brought about by using language as a tool.

Jean Paul, although he was not an engineer, called himself the chief miner ('Berg-Hauptmann') whose task it was to explore the caves of the human soul; Hölderlin too resorted to geological imagery in his poems. Between 1790 and 1810, hardly an intellectual had not been down the mines; 'the descent into a mine rapidly became a requisite of the walking tour that every German student undertook'.

Significantly, when they thought of mines, German writers thought not of coal and iron, but of ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image