Die Krokodile ('The Crocodiles') was a small poets' society in Munich which existed from 1856 to the 1870s.
Die Krokodile ('The Crocodiles') was a small poets' society in Munich which existed from 1856 to the 1870s.
King Ludwig I had constructed the Glyptothek and the Pinakothek to house art collections. Part of his intention was to attract intellectual luminaries to Munich, with little result before the efforts made by his successor Maximilian II. Among others came the chemist Justus von Liebig, the ethnologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and the historian Heinrich von Sybel.
Two poets who arrived in Munich were Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse. In 1852 they joined the cultural society Die Zwanglosen , founded in 1838, which was intended to serve as a meeting-place for both native Bavarians and the new arrivals, the so-called Nordlichter ("northern lights"). However the two groups became fractious and in 1858 Geibel left. Heyse had already created a new society, following the model of the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin, of which both he and Geibel had been members.
Heyse and Julius Grosse held the inaugural meeting on 5 November 1856 in the coffee-house Zur Stadt München. In the first years Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Felix Dahn, Wilhelm Hertz and Hermann Lingg joined. It was claimed by Felix Dahn that the name of the society came about because of the coincidence that both Geibel and Lingg had recently written poems about crocodiles, but it seems more probable that Lingg's poem Das Krokodil von Singapur was the sole inspiration.
| Das Krokodil von Singapur Im heil'gen Teich zu Singapur Es ist ganz alt und völlig blind, | The Crocodile of Singapore The Holy Pond of Singapore It's old and now completely blind, |
"The sublime character of this amphibian seemed to us an admirable example to idealistic poets, and we hoped that in our 'holy pond' we should be able to armour ourselves against the base prosaic world, just as we always used to, minding nothing except maybe changes in temperature." (Paul Heyse: Jugenderinnerungen und Bekenntnisse)
At meetings, recent works both foreign and local were examined and discussed. As in the Tunnel über der Spree, members adopted pseudonyms: Geibel for example was the Urkrokodil. A complete list of members has not survived.
The group is distinguishable from the Young Germany movement by its non-political stance. The Crocodiles preferred to see poetry as a pure and almost sacred art, ideally following ancient, medieval, and even Oriental models; the result was an eclectic body of work, often of the highest craftsmanship but lacking literary substance. Not coincidentally, most of what has survived has been translations and adaptations, such as Bodenstedt's reworking of Oriental sources and Hertz's poems based on medieval material.
After the death of Maximilian II in 1864, policies changed and the grooming of immigrant artists was discontinued. Die Krokodile had lost their main sponsor and public role. An attempt to produce a second group anthology in 1866 was a failure. The society remained in existence chiefly as a social club.
Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry, 177 short stories, and about sixty dramas. The sum of Heyse's many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. He was awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories." Wirsen, one of the Nobel judges, said that "Germany has not had a greater literary genius since Goethe." Heyse is the fifth oldest laureate in literature, after Alice Munro, Jaroslav Seifert, Theodor Mommsen and Doris Lessing.
Emanuel von Geibel was a German poet and playwright.
A Burschenschaft is one of the traditional Studentenverbindungen of Germany, Austria, and Chile . Burschenschaften were founded in the 19th century as associations of university students inspired by liberal and nationalistic ideas. They were significantly involved in the March Revolution and the unification of Germany. After the formation of the German Empire in 1871, they faced a crisis, as their main political objective had been realized. So-called Reformburschenschaften were established, but these were dissolved by the Nazi regime in 1935/6. In West Germany, the Burschenschaften were re-established in the 1950s, but they faced a renewed crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, as the mainstream political outlook of the German student movement of that period started learning more towards the left. Roughly 160 Burschenschaften exist today in Germany, Austria and Chile.
Karl Stieler was a German lawyer and author.
Ingeborg Bronsart von Schellendorf was a Finnish-German composer.
Adolf Emil Büchner was a German conductor and bandmaster. He wrote a number of compositions, including operas, chamber music, choral works, and symphonies.
Hermann Lingg was a German poet who also wrote plays and short stories. His cousin, Maximilian von Lingg, was Bishop of Augsburg.
Members of the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art, awarded to acknowledge and reward excellent and outstanding achievements in the fields of science and art. It is based in Bavaria, Germany.
Johann Wilhelm Hill was a German pianist and composer.
Ignaz Sebastian Ježower was a Polish-German cultural historian, writer and translator in Berlin.
Große Berliner Kunstausstellung , abbreviated GroBeKa or GBK, was an annual art exhibition that existed from 1893 to 1969 with intermittent breaks. In 1917 and 1918, during World War I, it was not held in Berlin but in Düsseldorf. In 1919 and 1920, it operated under the name Kunstausstellung Berlin. From 1970 to 1995, the Freie Berliner Kunstausstellung was held annually in its place.
Gustav Adolf Kröner, from 1905 von Kröner, was a German publisher and chairman of the Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler. He became particularly well known for his demand for fixed prices for books, which was implemented in the so-called Kröner Reform and is still in force today. The publishing houses he managed, especially J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, which he had acquired and expanded in 1889, were also among the most important publishers in the field of humanities and literary publications, especially at the beginning of the 19th century and 20th centuries.