Karin Tebben

Tannhäuser

Biographie einer Legende

1. Edition 2010
247 pages
ISBN 978-3-525-20867-0
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

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For more than 800 years the story of Tannhäuser, the rebellious German Minnesänger and courtier at the court of Frederick II of Austria, has moved people and influenced poetry written in his style. His name came to be synonymous with that of an eccentric artist who takes up fights with the mores of the day to the edge of self-destruction. Tannhäuser’s attacks were directed at the very foundation of Christian order, held in that day to be unshakeable: Lovemaking was subject to the laws of convention and moral order. His revolt against society’s strict norms of ideal love, however, was only one of the things we associate with Tannhäuser; his deviations from the strict rules of minnesong was of his very own construction.

What makes Tannhäuser’s poetic legend so interesting for later generations is not only his proclamation of uninhibited sexual love, but above all the revolt he instituted with his new artistic ideal against the traditional ideals of his day. The artists of the next centuries re-designed his work and re-adapted him to the respective era. That is to say, his basic conception of the artist was that of a rebel, as depicted in the figure of Tannhäuser, who rejects the social norms by discrediting existing codices of love with his own innovative, rhetorically and stylistically sharpened means. The subsequent Tannhäuser image thus becomes a culture historical reflection of one’s own understanding of love and socially defined norms – and with it the reflection of modern understanding of art and society at large.