Dietmar von Aist: Vielschichtige Poetik. Studien zu einer literarhistorischen und forschungsgeschichtlichen Standortbestimmung

Research on Minnesang, the Middle High German art form first practiced by members of the aristocracy from the mid-twelfth century onward, has often focused on the songs of the generation of Heinrich von Morungen and Walther von der Vogelweide, composing in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In comparison, “early” Minnesang has not commonly been used to illustrate and explain this genre of love lyric. Authors such as Kürenberger, Kaiser Heinrich, Meinloh von Sevelingen, or Dietmar von Aist tend to be treated as precursory special cases, of little import to the “development” of the genre (Lahr, p. 63). The books by Leidinger and Lahr aim to correct this imbalance by convincingly pleading for a focus on the “diversity” (Lahr) and “multi-layered poetics” (Leidinger) of early Minnesang, as their titles suggest. Both are revised Ph.D. dissertations, and even though defended at different universities (Leidinger's in Tübingen, Lahr's in Mainz), their goals are closely related, no doubt because the books are based on research that was funded through the same project based at the University of Tübingen and sponsored by the German Research Foundation. The books are complementary in providing different perspectives on the same period: Lahr takes a stab at providing new perspectives on the whole genre of Minnesang in its early phase, while Leidinger focuses on one of the most significant poets of this generation, Dietmar von Aist (who is an “early” author only if our dating is correct).The subject of Leidinger's study is the lyrical work transmitted under the name of this author, who has always been seen as a figure of transition from earlier forms and topics to the high Minnesang mode of Friedrich von Hausen, Heinrich von Morungen, Reinmar, and others. As is the case for all of early Minnesang, no music notation is extant: thus, analyses of the vast majority of German love lyric need to rely on the words and metrical structures alone. Dietmar's songs are transmitted in different versions in two of the most important German Minnesang manuscripts, the Codex Manesse (C) and the Weingartner Liederhandschrift (B), which date from around 1300—that is, over 100 years after the presumed composition of the songs. Some songs and stanzas can be found elsewhere attributed to different authors, such as Heinrich von Veldeke, Leuthold von Seven, and der Junge Spervogel in the Kleine Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (A). One stanza even made its way anonymously into the Carmina Burana. Dietmar von Aist's lyric has long been seen as marking a bridge from early to high Minnesang mode, the latter of which appeared to be much more clearly influenced by French and Provençal models. Leidinger shows that this established opinion, while appropriate, becomes more nuanced when taking the varied transmission of Dietmar's songs into account. B and C provide different “images” of Dietmar's poetry, and according to Leidinger both corpora expand the poetic possibilities of early Minnesang in different ways. In Leidinger's view, the Dietmar corpora in B and C do not reveal a single author but instead presented their respective audiences with quite distinct “versions” of the author Dietmar von Aist, with different foci and emphases in form and content (pp. 92–94).As is the case for many Minnesingers, little can be said about the author with any kind of certainty. One Dietmar von Aist is attested for a noble family residing near the river Aist, a left tributary of the Danube in what is now Upper Austria. This person can be confirmed as living during the period of 1139 to 1169—in 1171 he is mentioned as deceased. If this is the author, then his Minnesang belongs indeed to the early phase of Minnesang, which is believed to have begun to form in German-speaking lands at that time. The time span between the composition and the creation of the extant manuscripts would probably have contributed to the variance of song attestations, as well as to the diversity of the extant corpora of Dietmar's songs in B and C.Leidinger's close analysis of the transmission of this poetry (pp. 59–94) provides the foundation for her argument about its “multi-layered poetics.” She also discusses the modern editing history in great detail and shows how different “images” of Dietmar were formed by editors striving to establish a more coherent author style than the transmission actually supports (pp. 94–160). From its inception in the nineteenth century, Minnesang philology has selected and modified Dietmar's stanzas and songs, and sorted them into “authentic” and “inauthentic” categories. Thus, as Leidinger posits, modern editions created their own images of Dietmar. Partially based on ahistorical expectations of coherence, they often constructed more polished corpora than were actually displayed or supported by the medieval manuscripts themselves.The latter part of Leidinger's book is devoted to interpretations of individual texts as they are transmitted in the corpora of B and C. Leidinger highlights the songs’ “experimental” variability in form and theme (p. 179). She also tackles the ever-present questions of whether, how, and in what ways formally related stanzas establish coherences between one another, which in turn touches upon the question of whether these are multistanza songs or rather melodically similar single stanzas—a vexed question in view of the lack of musical notation and considering the likelihood that coherence expectations of medieval audiences differed decisively from modern sensibilities.The book is rounded out by translations of Dietmar's C-corpus into modern German. Translating Minnesang in a way that does not eliminate the beauty of the medieval language and imagery, while still staying true to the originals, is a near-impossible task. Leidinger does a very fine job indeed, retaining some echoes of the beauty of Dietmar's Middle High German while not falling into the trap of making it sound antiquated. For example, Leidinger's translation of the famous woman stanza addressing a flying falcon as a symbol of freedom of choice (“A Lady Stood Alone”) renders the central lines beautifully, echoing the significance of kiesen (choose/see) and weln (elect/choose) in conjunction with the prefix er-: Du fliegst, wohin es dir beliebt.Du schaust dir in dem Waldeeinen Baum aus, der dir gefällt.Genau so habe ich es auch gemacht: Ich erschaute mir selbst einen Mann,den erwählten meine Augen.(C Dietm 12, p. 269)(You fly wherever you desire. In the forest, you pick a tree you like. I did the same: I picked a man, my eyes chose him.)In sum, Leidinger draws a comprehensive and fascinating picture of Dietmar's songs. The study also benefits from Leidinger's deep knowledge of every nook and cranny of this lyric and its transmission, an expertise also evident in her 2019 digital edition and commentary of Dietmar's songs (https://www.ldm-digital.de/autoren.php?au=Dietm). By necessity, good editors such as Leidinger cannot evade the complexities of transmission variance and need to think deeply about hermeneutical paths as well as impasses for each individual stanza. This expertise has also benefitted the monograph, which deepens our understanding of this poetry and its complex transmission as well as its position within the fascinating burst of poetic activity in twelfth-century German love lyric. In the end, Leidinger argues convincingly in favor of reading the Dietmar corpora in B and C as two heterogenous examples of experimentation that expand the formal and expressive capabilities of Minnesang (p. 265).Lahr's Diversität als Potential casts the net wider, without sacrificing depth of argument. She reads the early poets as experimenting with new poetic language and forms to find novel modes of expressing individualized and nonreligious forms of love. The parameters of Lahr's study are gender, emotion, space/time/nature, and fictionality, each of which forms the foundation of a chapter and is applied to the eighty-two stanzas that she identifies as the earliest Minnesang corpus (a helpful appendix lists all of these stanzas, pp. 431–33). After discussing the state of research (pp. 25–65), Lahr gives an overview of what is known about the authors and discusses potential historical and geographical contexts in which the songs might have originated (pp. 67–132). She highlights the probability of literary exchange within Germany and between German and French/Provençal courts, which is an important argument against nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist positions that the early Minnesang was an autochthonous, “German” development.Lahr's discussion of significant thematic parameters first focuses on gender. She discusses the comparatively large number of stanzas in women's voices as well as a good number of stanzas which cannot be clearly assigned to a male or female voice (Lahr calls them “androgyne Strophen,” pp. 235–58). Lahr regards the variability of gendered stanzas, and especially the “androgynous” stanzas, as literary and social probing of typical gender expectations (pp. 256–57). She speculates that the dense and allusive language of these stanzas aids the gender-indeterminacy, thereby allowing historical audiences to find flexible constructions of gender and probe gender roles. It is significant that Lahr sees this not as limited to early Minnesang, but rather argues in favor of a reevaluation of the whole Minnesang corpus with an eye to gendered stanzas.Readers missing the engagement with English-language research on medieval gender (for example, James Schultz's work on Minnesang within the medieval history of sexuality, which is not mentioned at all) will find that this lack becomes even more obvious in the next thematic chapter, which discusses emotions (and theories of emotions) and exclusively touches on German-language research. Surely, the vast international research on medieval emotions might have deepened the analysis. Lahr investigates a variety of affects presented in the corpus (sorrow, joy, fear, anger/hate/jealousy, love) and their verbal and bodily expression, as well as manifestations of their social effects within the texts, as much as one can deduce these from the very brief and allusive scenarios the stanzas evoke. Lahr reads the texts as probing gestures (“Suchbewegungen,” p. 330) towards expressions of individual love. According to Lahr, the stanzas develop a flexible language of love (“bewegliche Sprache der Liebe,” p. 331) to bring this about.The remaining chapters on space, time, and nature, and on “fictionality” are informative but do not add much new methodological insight in comparison with previous research. Lahr reads the frequent allusions to nature and to secluded places in these early poems as creating spaces and times inherently connected to love—they set the stage for individualized minne between two people and for love in thoughts and memory of solitary figures. In the chapter on “fictionality,” Lahr follows well-trodden paths in German Medieval Studies along the lines of the “discovery” or “institutionalization” of “fictionality” in the twelfth century, but the question remains whether Minnesang's role-playing, which Lahr convincingly describes earlier in the book as historical experiments in questioning gender roles and finding individualized love concepts, can really be appropriately captured by any concept of “fictionality.”Such quibbles aside, Leidinger's and Lahr's books can be read as significant parallel studies furthering our understanding of the presumed early phases of the genre and providing some crucial building blocks towards a new and more complex history of the earliest Middle High German love lyric.

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