Opponents of vaccination and separatists occasionally gather at his feet in Bolzano. It doesn’t bother him, he stands there as he has stood there since 1889, a symbol for a yesterday that can hardly be understood. At the inauguration, a Viennese newspaper wrote: “The German spirit keeps watch at the statue of Walther on the Johannisplatz.” Where the “power of the insinuating Italian lute” already stretched into Bozen, like the New Free Press fearful of being overwhelmed by foreigners, the marble poet demonstrated for his contemporaries that Germany really stretched from the Belt down to the Etsch.
This Walther is said to have been born very close by, in Lajen in the Eisack Valley, the field name Vogelweide is used several times there, Walter with or without an h is a good German name, so why not? Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle was convinced that Vogelweider was a Tyrolean. In 1874, the Innsbruck professor for German language and literature even managed to persuade the Germanic professors, who had rushed to a conference from all German districts, to make an excursion to Laion, where the Vogelweiderhof stood, which was quickly elevated to the poet’s birthplace by means of a commemorative plaque.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Middle Ages were completely reinvented. The process of becoming an empire is prepared and initiated by a great deal of culture, the older, the better and more German. The Cologne Cathedral is finally completed, German studies are developed, the manuscript of the Nibelungenlied is discovered and jousting becomes Richard Wagner. Walther doesn’t fit in there at all, but he was made to fit.
If in his elegy “Ôwê war sint verswound alliu miniu jâr” he not only sighs for his vanished youth, the rhyming couplet “prepared ist daz velt, verhouwen ist der walt” can easily be interpreted as an eco-fundamentalist lament. The German-national Tyroleans understood the following metaphor “wan daz daz wazzer fliuzet,/als ez wîlent flôz,/for wâr, I wânde, /mîn unlücke became grôz” (in the adaptation by Peter Rühmkorf: “If there wasn’t still water flowing where it always flowed/truly, my misfortune seemed seamless”) not only as an expression of the homesickness of the Vogelweider, but also as proof that the water that was supposed to flow there had to mean the Eisack (Italian: Isarco). Walther was a Tyrolean, he had to be one.
Did he come from Tyrol, the Austrian Waldviertel or even from Franconia?
Little is known about the minstrel Walther von der Vogelweide, but it is certain that he lived, wrote poetry and sang eight hundred years ago. If not from Tyrol, it could come from the Austrian Waldviertel or from Franconia. He was certainly an upstart, not an aristocrat, one of the first for whom art made it possible to rise to higher social circles, no small achievement in the strictly hierarchical Middle Ages. Like a poet, he struggled through, trying to make himself popular at the Viennese court, where he learned from Reinmar how the “hövesche sanc” sounded in such a way that it flattered the ears of the gentlemen and threw in one or the other fee. “I’m learning to sing and say Ze Ôsterrîche,” he will say later, and at least for a while he got his living from Hermann von Thüringen. Otherwise he worked his way from court to court, politicized, criticized, sang.
He definitely had something to do with Passau and the bishop there, who is also considered the patron of the still unknown author of the Nibelungenlied. In the travel accounts of this Bishop Wolfger von Erla, there is a fee in kind under November 12, 1203: “Walthero cantori de vogelweide pro pellicio v solidos longos”, the minstrel Walther von der Vogelweide was paid five shillings for a fur coat.
His poems were unusually revealing
The artist had to beg and, when in doubt, to make fools of his masters. He had to be thankful when winter quarters could be found behind the kitchen, but still within reach of the compassionate maids. Walther thanked him and learned from it, and very rudely composed the song of all love songs, assigned by the withered literary historians to the “low courtesy” because it is more free than anywhere else in contemporary poetry: “Under the linden/on the heath/dâ our two Bette was,/da muget ir vinden/beautiful both/broken flowers and grass./Before the forest in a valley,/tandaradei/ beautiful sanc diu nahtegal.” It’s not the traveling singer, a girl is singing about this story under the linden tree, and it’s really love and not a tragedy like later with poor, dishonored Gretchen.
Not even where the greatest German poet died and is buried is known. He insulted the clergy, but according to a plaque he is said to be buried there in the cloister of the Neumünster in Würzburg. In any case, a bird bath is provided there, the birds were his muses. But is it true?
“I saz ûf Einem steine”, begins Walther’s melancholy speech, in which he considers, like a poet, how one should live properly. “Dô dahte I leg with leg./I put my elbow there;/I smooched in mine hant/daz chin and a mîn cheek./dô I thought a lot,/how one should live in peace./dehinen advice I agree” – and honestly don’t have any advice. The homeless found a surprising asylum in Samuel Beckett’s last text, “Stirrings Still”. Beckett varies this position, which has become Walther’s trademark. Where there was no stone on which to sit cross-legged like Walther, all he could do was stand there, frozen. So the poets don’t know any better either, but they try to maintain their composure.