Participants
Slobodan Grubačić, University of Belgrade
The Ballad Treasury, Based on an Unknown Serbian Legend of the Kalenić Monastery, and Its Poet Joseph von Auffenberg
The great renewal of the lost culture of memory has opened up room for investigating mentality within the framework of a broad area of literary studies – from attempts to review the relationship between “laughter and tears” in troubadour poetry to essays which, in our contemporary world, reveal the magical influence of ancient myths on the shaping of national consciousness and cultural models. And they mostly find these influences in the intellectual and emotional processes of the past and the present. Of the two “windows onto time” that enable orientation in the present – a window onto the past and a window onto the future – the former does not, as some claim, obstruct the view of the latter, but quite the opposite. Especially when borderline phenomena emerge into the foreground – the kind of phenomena that, very convincingly, establish a dialogue with events from the immediate present. With life.
When attempting ourselves to cross, very cautiously, this opium threshold, we notice that we are enchanted by civilisation, our drug, to such an extent that our attachment to it tends to manifest the characteristics of a habit: a mixture of attraction and repellence. Hence analyses of this kind afford a more sober insight if certain national cultures are mutually contrasted. Only in that light do we discover that, in the given historical and geopolitical circumstances, certain character traits or a certain temperament can become a mark of some collective consciousness, visible in a small, inconspicuous segment of a text. It is not only one hand that has written into it its gift, fear, superstition.
Despite the vague contours of the very term mentality, it clearly follows from the above that what is in focus are emotions – their social regulation, intense projections of human wishes and thought processes initiated by them. Of greatest interest in this are neither the combative poets-nationalists nor the bitter opponents of descent, blood and soil. Neither are those who would like to limit the notion of nation with quotation marks as if with manacles, nor those poets who get carried away with their home country, dreaming of orange rivers of monarch butterflies that flow only through the streets of their village. Are, then, only those despised or banned poets, whose works in public libraries were placed upside down, lest some sensitive eyes should be scandalised at the sight of them, the only ones that are of real interest?
No, the most interesting ones are those who are entirely unknown. Those poetae minores whose significance earlier epochs strove to elevate as the “greatness of the little”. Writers like Baron Auffenberg, the Grand Ducal Guard in Baden, the author of a tragic romance – a little known historical ballad on the Kalenić monastery, written almost two centuries ago on the slopes of the Black Forest, by the very fountainhead of the Danube. But – why Auffenberg? And why little known poems, but not the classical texts serving as proof of imagology: the study of “images” of a foreign people? Because they are, each in its own way, iconic creations, for they have the strength of a corporative image which condenses, within the tiny area it occupies, some immense field of experience.
