Literature

Forget Felder!

Franz Michael Felder (right) with his family.

(Bild: Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek)

He was only 29 years old. Nevertheless, the legacy of Franz Michael Felder is upheld in Vorarlberg to this day. Author Robert Schneider cannot do much with this form of "hero worship". 

This unread man, whose writings and memory are only saved from complete oblivion by a publicly subsidized archive and an association (for how much longer?), whose name every fourth-grade schoolchild has to recite once (for how much longer?), only to forget it again immediately, this name, Franz Michael Felder, known even in this country almost only by hearsay, is only given artificial respiration because his socio-economic reforms have burned themselves into the memory, the enormous courage of a peasant boy from Schoppernau in the middle of the 19th century, but not his writings.

If you switch off the life-support measures, Franz Michael Felder is forgotten for literature. His work is not trusted. People don't believe that his books will find their own way.

"What a noble man"
It's time to forget Felder as he was drummed into us: the socially committed do-gooder. The first, impeccable leftist in Vorarlberg. His literature doesn't deserve that. It deserves even less to be constantly connoted with biographical information. Knowing what a miserable life the writer had to live, how radical and prophetic he was in his time, what a noble man, has an impact on the reading experience and also on literary judgment.

The reverse is also true, as can be seen in the biography of Martin Heidegger. Biographies are disturbing. Using them to explain a work is inadmissible. What kind of gain in knowledge is it to think of Schubert as a syphilitic, poor and misunderstood drip who has left this world so much incredible beauty? His music would have been just as all-encompassing if he had lived on a lifelong, princely allowance and been celebrated and revered far and wide.

Author Franz Michael Felder.

(Bild: Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek)

Drawing breath out of oneself
Literature is to be judged apart from anything purely biographical. This is precisely what Felder's care in this country has failed to do for far too long. The reformer has always outshone the man of letters. Felder must be read as a writer again. And one should also have the courage to switch off the oxygen machine, perhaps to see that his texts draw breath from themselves after all. He would have called it breath. He didn't have the dramaturgical finesse of a Jeremias Gotthelf, but he did manage to write errant passages of ephemeral beauty that remain.

The passage about the death of his father in "Aus meinem Leben", for example, where the pain of loss takes on an almost numinous quality and even the starry night sky begins to tell of it: "There he stands alone in the dark; but above, a thousand and more stars beckon, drawing him into the infinite, and his being begins to expand wonderfully, so that he no longer longs for the noise of the day, no longer wishes to be caught up in the restless, dissatisfied hustle and bustle of people. ("From my life", Chapter VII, p. 74, Libelle-Verlag, 2004).

Difficult circumstances
Felder's writing does not become more literary in the knowledge that he had to cope with almost unbearable strokes of fate and died all too young at the age of twenty-nine. That he had to accept the death of his wife Anna six months before his demise and was left alone with five children. Fate says nothing about a book. The biography does not shed light on the trade secret of a work of art. I read Dostoyevsky with no less amazement because I know that he was epileptic and addicted to gambling, and that he dictated his manuscripts to his wife - also an Anna - in extreme financial hardship. The circumstances make me more interested in Dostoyevskaya, in the fate of Felder's orphans, and less in the text itself.

These are the sentences of a deeply poetic soul who, through her social commitment, has also founded a cheese-making association. Yes, also, but that doesn't matter when reading, the two may have gone together in life.

Remembering the poet
Felder's sentences still stand out, and their quality should be mentioned in the same breath as the passage about the nocturnal appearance of light in Adalbert Stifter's "Bergkristall". You have to forget Felder to remember the poet he was. Without a biography. Biography is for procrastinators, for those who seek explanations. Poetry is radical. It does not justify itself and finds no explanation.