Tieck

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853)

Tieck lived long into the 19th century, but this website locates him in the 18th century because he was present at the birth of German Romanticism in the 1790s together with his friend Wackenroder, and worked with him on one of the founding texts of early Romanticism: Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders; Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk (1797).

Tieck produced prose fiction, poetry, plays, and translations, but he is best known for the three volumes of ‘folk tales’ (Volksmärchen) which he published in 1797 under the pseudonym Peter Leberecht and which contain his most famous story: 

Der blonde Eckbert; Blond Eckbert (1797)

This tale purports to be a traditional ‘folk tale’ (Volksmärchen) but it is in fact an invented, artfully constructed fairy tale (Kunstmärchen). Events start suspiciously, and soon go from bad to worse. In the first paragraph a sense of unease is already introduced as we learn that Eckbert and his wife Bertha both love solitude, they are childless, and they ‘seem’ to love each other.

The tale was written in response to a Märchen published in 1786 by Musäus, ‘Ulrich mit dem Bühel’. A pregnant noble lady gets lost in the woods and is taken in by a mysterious old woman who has a bird that lays golden eggs. The lady steals the bird and becomes wealthy, and her daughter marries a knight (see reading list below, M. E. Atkinson, 1952, p. xxiii).

Eckbert and Bertha feel an irresistible urge to confess their secret (‘einen unwiderstehlichen Trieb, sich ganz mitzuteilen’) and so one autumn evening Bertha tells Walther (their best friend) her story. She warns Walther that her story is not a fairy tale, no matter how strange it seems; this highlights the problematic status of her story: is it true as she claims, or is it a delusion? She tells how her father - a shepherd - called her ‘useless’ and beat her until she ran away from home. Even as a child Bertha had a rich fantasy life: she imagined being rich and she saw spirits who gave her pebbles which turned into gemstones. Bertha travels through villages and cliffs until she comes to a forest where she is taken in by an old woman who lives with a dog and a singing bird which lays eggs containing gemstones and pearls. The old woman warns Bertha not to stray from the path of righteousness: ‘wenn man von der rechten Bahn abweicht, die Strafe folgt nach, wenn auch noch so spät’ (‘if you stray from the right path then the punishment will catch up with you, no matter how long it takes’)

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/tieck/eckbert/Kapitel1.html

Bertha is now fourteen and ‘es ist ein Unglück für den Menschen, daß er seinen Verstand nur darum bekömmt, um die Unschuld seiner Seele zu verlieren’ (‘it is a misfortune for human beings that when they reach the age of reason they lose their soul’s innocence’) https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/tieck/eckbert/Kapitel1.html

The old woman tells Bertha she is going away for some time. Bertha ties up the dog and runs away with the bird; she knows that she has condemned the dog to death because the old woman is not due back for a long time. When the bird starts to sing a melancholy song Bertha kills the bird too. Then she starts to fear that her maid could rob or kill her just as she has robbed and killed. Then she marries Eckbert, who had no money of his own. Walther comments that he can well imagine Bertha feeding Strohmian, and Bertha is terrified: how could Walther know the name of the dog which she herself had forgotten (or repressed)? Instead of asking Walther this question directly Bertha worries herself to death; Eckbert becomes paranoid and kills Walther. Shortly afterwards he descends into madness.

This is one of the most haunting texts that German literature has to offer. It shows how desire and fear can be interlinked: Bertha and Eckbert are torn between the desire for friendship and the fear of intimacy. Human relationships are portrayed as enticing but dangerous; solitude (‘Einsamkeit’) is both tempting and sinister. The narrative technique remains tied to the perspectives of Eckbert and Bertha: since they are both unreliable and confused witnesses, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish between reality and delusion.  

Further Reading

M. E. Atkinson, ‘Introduction’, in M. E. Atkinson (ed.) Tieck: Der blonde Eckbert, Brentano: Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. ix-xliii

Gordon Birrell, The boundless present: space and time in the literary fairy tales of Novalis and Tieck (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)

Michael Boehringer, The Telling Tactics of Narrative Strategies in Tieck, Kleist, Stifter and Storm (New York: Peter Lang, 1999)

Mark Falkenberg, Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005)

Gail Finney, ‘Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann’, The German Quarterly 56:2 (1983), 243-56

William J. Lillyman, Reality’s dark dream: the narrative fiction of Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979)

Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)

Heather Sullivan, The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works (New York: Peter Lang, 1997)

Martin Swales, ‘Reading one’s life: an analysis of Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert”’, German Life and Letters 29 (1975), 165-75

Maria Tatar, ‘Unholy Alliances: Narrative Ambiguity in Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert”’, Modern Language Notes 102:3 (1987), 608-26

James Trainer, ‘Ludwig Tieck’, in German Men of Letters, ed. by Alex Natan, vol. 1 (London: Wolff, 1961), pp. 39-57

Web Link

https://annotext.dartmouth.edu/texts?language_id=10000

Der blonde Eckbert in German; click on a word for the English translation