Marie Luise Kaschnitz e Gustave Courbet. "La verità, non il sogno"

This essay focuses on the determining influence which the poet Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s reflection on the life and paintings of the French artist Gustave Courbet had on the development of her lyric writing; this converged in the biography published in 1950 with the title Gustave Courbet. Roman eines Malerlebens, which was re-published in 1967, unchanged but for the title: Die Wahrheit, nicht der Traum. Das Leben des Malers Courbet. Critics unanimously identify two stages in the lyric production of Kaschnitz, one of the most significant voices in German poetry in the twentieth century; the first is still tied to traditional modes and forms, the second features an expressive incisiveness of great modernity. The poet has often mentioned her work on Courbet, which was carried out during the war years in a Frankfurt which was devastated by the bombings, as a divide in the development of her lyric writing, which moved away from the representation of nature and turned increasingly towards the tragedies of contemporary man. In spite of this, the way in which this change takes place had never been investigated: this essay therefore intends to fill a gap, following the lyric production composed by Kaschnitz before and parallel to her writing of the biography of Courbet and relating the final analysis carried out on the work and on the aesthetics of the Realist French painter with the metamorphosis of her poetic style; the analysis of the collections Im Osten (1932-1937) and Dunkle Zeit (1939-1944) make it possible not only to clearly follow the disappearance of the centrality of nature in favour of the flooding in of human tragedy and pain in the poet’s work, but also to catch the first signs of a stylistic change, of lyric writing which loses the exuberance of the metaphors and the traits of a style of classical-romantic influence in favour of the sobriety and essential style typical of the language of modern poetry, which has experienced the horrors of the nineteen hundreds.