Object #14

Richard Dehmel
Ein Stelldichein [A rendezvous]
Weib und Welt [Woman and world]
Berlin 1896

Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien

Richard Dehmel’s symbolist texts with their passionate, religious-erotic character and their vivid, immediate, lyric language helped young Schönberg to find “the new sound […] that was to become my own” (Schönberg’s letter to Dehmel, November 1912). 

A Rendezvous

It was like this even then. The stifling air
hung so silently over the earth,
and under the roof of the mourning beeches
the scent of elder blooms
got caught up at the garden’s edge;
silently she took my moist hand,
silent with happiness.

It was like the smell of the grave... I am not at fault!
You pale shade over there in the mist,
how you stand like a shrouded ghost –
fade out, you reminder of a broken soul!
Why do you stare at me with godlike eyes?
I did not break her; she did it herself. Why do I torment 
myself with others’ misfortune?

The ground becomes gray; the night brings no spark,
in the fog the willows look like smoke,
the heavy sky seems to have sunken into the grain.
The foliage hangs silently on the wet shrubs
as if the leaves had drunk poison;
now she lies so motionlessly too.
I wish for my death.