Der Wanderer (Ich komme vom Gebirge her), D 489

The migrant

(Poet's title: Der Wanderer)

All translations into English that appear on this website, unless otherwise stated, are by Malcolm Wren. You are free to use them on condition that you acknowledge Malcolm Wren as the translator and schubertsong.uk as the source. Unless otherwise stated, the comments and essays that appear after the texts and translations are by Malcolm Wren and are © Copyright.

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Translating the Title. What is a ‘Wanderer’?

Both German and English are rich in the vocabulary of travel. Most learners of English as a second language have problems distinguishing between such words as ‘travel’ and ‘a journey’, ‘a trip’ or ‘an excursion’. Words and concepts seem to overlap or to have contradictory meanings (for example, the saying ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ might be used in America to encourage people to move on, while in Britain it has usually been used to support settling down). The German verb ‘wandern’ seems to invite the English translation ‘to wander’, but the connotations of the word in the two languages are significantly different.

Anyone who has begun an Alpine walk in Bavaria or German-speaking Switzerland will be familiar with the marked ‘Wanderwege’ – the ‘wandering paths’. Signposts will indicate the distance and the time expected to reach the destination. At regular points along the way signs will remind you that you are on an established route. For English speaking people who associate ‘wandering’ with getting lost or becoming disorientated (our minds wander when we lose concentration and we usually wander aimlessly) this can create mild culture shock. ‘Wandern’ in the sense of ‘going for a long walk in the hills or the countryside’ is probably better translated then as ‘hiking’ or ‘rambling’, though again we associate ‘rambling thoughts’ with unstructured ideas. We also tend to think of hikers and long-distance path walkers as loners, whereas in German-speaking contexts this tends to be a more communal activity.

The Romantic Wanderer in the Lieder repertoire seems to be doing more than ‘going for a walk’. The speaker of Möricke´s Fußreise, set by Wolf, is perhaps just out for recreation, but many of the characters who call themselves ‘wanderers’ associate this condition with their work or their very identity. They evoke the tradition of the Wanderjahre, the years of wandering undertaken after initial apprenticeship in a medieval guild. This is a process sometimes referred to as ‘waltzing’ (being ‘auf der Walz’). The swagman of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is travelling  to find work. In early 19^th century England there was a system of people travelling the country (tramping) to develop their skills (cf. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Tramping Artisan‘ 1951). The word ‘tramp’ developed negative connotations as urbanisation changed working patterns, but ‘a tramp’ might often be a good translation for the German ‘Wanderer’. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is sometimes translated as ‘Songs of a travelling lad’ and sometimes as ‘Songs of a journeyman’. The word journeyman also captures the combination of work and travel that is often involved in the idea of the ‘Wanderer’. He is called a journeyman because he takes on work by the day (French journée – a day; a journey was originally a day trip), and he might have to travel to find work.

There are different kinds of business travel. The guild system encouraged apprentices to go away and develop their skills before returning as a master. This is presumably the situation at the beginning of Die Schöne Müllerin, where the lad takes pleasure in thinking of himself as a newly qualified miller. He will now go wandering (Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust), working in different mills, learning how things are done in different places, preparing himself for the responsibility of running his own grinding business. This sort of preparatory wandering (which still exists in the form of gap year travel, exchange studentships, work placements, internships etc) needs to be distinguished from the wandering undertaken by fully trained workers. In early modern Europe and in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister there were bands of wandering players and wandering minstrels. Entertainers and artists still ‘go on tour’ in the same way, not to learn but to do their job. They must experience the rootlessness and the sense of yearning for somewhere to call home that many of the Romantic poets saw as inherent to the condition of the Wanderer.

The anonymous but quintessential Wanderer in the poem by Schmidt von Lübeck describes this experience as being ‘ein Fremdling überall’ – a stranger everywhere. English cannot quite capture the connotations of ‘fremd’. A stranger is so-called because they are ‘strange’; they are ‘alien’. English tends to use the metaphor of inside and outside to express this attitude to foreigners – they are ‘outsiders’. In the context of work, tasks are contracted ‘out’ if they are not done by ‘in-house’ staff. In German, though, the term ‘fremd’ (alien / stranger / foreigner) is the basic metaphor. ‘Ein Fremdarbeiter’ is seen as a wandering worker, someone who will therefore at some point move on. This may not be how the worker sees himself or his prospects, though. When Karl Marx analysed the nature of industrial society in the 1840s under the influence of the Romantic generation he used the term ‘Entfremdung’ – being made into a stranger / alienation – to explain what happened to human beings who had to sell their labour in the factory system. People who had been integrated in a previous social system found that they had become ‘alien’.

Schmidt’s poem anticipated the experience of the generation that left the countryside for a better life in the industrial cities of northern and central Europe (it was a process already underway in England as he was writing). They came down from the hills but have now swapped colour and vivid nature for a duller environment. Life has lost its zest. Everywhere they go they feel like strangers. They speak a different language here.

This was what it was like to go off on the ‘Wanderjahre’ in medieval and early modern Europe. The workers who left the countryside to work in the cities of the Industrial Revolution continued the tradition. They too found that ‘wandering’ involved becoming ‘a stranger’. It continues still. As the villages of China empty and workers move to the cities the experience is repeated. They feel the conflicting needs to experience more of the world, to develop themselves, and to leave behind things of value, leaving them cut off and ‘alien’ or ‘outside’. Even going ‘home’ might increase the sense of alienation. The ex-pat builds up a false or idealised image of the world that has been left behind, or finds that the experience of going away has produced a new perception of the world that means it is no longer possible to fit in anywhere. ‘Ich bin ein Fremdling überall’, I am a stranger everywhere, in new environments but also if I attempt to go back where I came from. Migrants continue to leave their native lands for all kinds of reasons, but the sense of loss and ‘alienation’ is probably similar for all of them. Since ‘wandern’ is also the German verb for ‘migrate’ (in the sense of bird or other animal migrations), ‘Der Wanderer’ could also be fairly accurately translated as ‘The Migrant‘.

Schmidt’s Images

The land and the landscape

The speaker has been in the hills. He has not simply been climbing one specific mountain, for he has come ‘vom Gebirge’ – from a group of hills or from a mountain range, or perhaps just from ‘the uplands’. He has come down a ‘steaming’ valley (he sees the low cloud as steam or smoke rising from a furnace below) towards a ‘roaring’ or ‘rumbling’ sea. He has arrived in a region where the sun is cold and the flowers have faded; this is not a land or a landscape where he feels that he belongs. He is not Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, this land is not his land[1].

For him the sun should be warmer, roses should be brighter and things should be green with hope. The lack of colour and warmth, the fact that he has come ‘down’, his sense that nature is speaking to him in ’empty noise’, all of this points to the fact that he is depressed. He may be bipolar, remembering a former high. The outer landscape presents an inner topography.

Then there is the social element. This is a land where he has no friends, where those he has lost (‘meine Toten’, my dead) are achingly absent, where people do not speak his language. He expects the word ‘land’ to refer to something more than rocks and soil; it should be a shared territory, a region that belongs to ‘us’, a ‘land made for you and me’. He is a ‘displaced person’. The more he travels and the more alienated he feels, the more convinced he is that there IS a land where he belongs and the more intensely he feels his displacement.

Noise and silence

If this speaker is so alone, if noone speaks his language, we cannot really think of him as a ‘speaker’ at all. The questions he is asking are unspoken torment. ‘Ich wandle still’, he says (I walk around quietly / making no noise / in silence). We are not sure if the sigh which asks ‘where?’ is carried by the external breeze or exhaled on his own breath. The sun and the flowers carry a message for him in their ’empty noise’ (or ’empty reverberation’), but that is just as likely to be an echo of his own thought: ‘You are a stranger everywhere’. Because this land does not ‘speak’ his language, we can deduce that it ‘speaks’ a language that he does not understand; it is not silent. The only meaningful sentence he hears comes to him as a ghostly breath, the echo of his own repeated question ‘where?’: ‘happiness is elsewhere, not where you are’. The world outside and the pain within are united in this utterance. There is nothing more that can be said.

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[1] Guthrie’s song (This land is your land) shares many of the same images:

This land is your land and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
Saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
All around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me

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Original Spelling and note on the text

Der Wanderer

Ich komme vom Gebirge her, 
Es dampft das Thal, es braust das Meer, 
Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh, 
Und immer fragt der Seufzer: wo?  

Die Sonne dünkt mich hier so kalt, 
Die Blüte welk, das Leben alt, 
Und was sie reden, leerer Schall, 
Ich bin ein Fremdling überall.  

Wo bist du, mein geliebtes Land, 
Gesucht, geahnt und nie gekannt? 
Das Land, das Land so hoffnungsgrün, 
Das Land, wo meine Rosen blühn?  

Wo meine Freunde wandelnd gehn, 
Wo meine Todten auferstehn; 
Das Land, das meine Sprache spricht, 
O Land, wo bist du1?  

Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh, 
Und immer fragt der Seufzer: wo? 
Im Geisterhauch tönt´s mir zurück: 
»Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück!«

1  Schubert changed this line from 'Und alles hat, was mir gebricht' (And which has everything that I lack) to ' O Land, wo bist du' (Oh land, where are you)

Schubert almost certainly found this text in ‘Dichtungen für Kunstredner‘ (Herausgegeben von Deinhardstein. Wien und Triest, 1815), where the author is named as Werner (Zacharias Werner, 1758 – 1832) and the title is given as ‘Der Unglückliche’ (The Unhappy Person). By the time it was published as Schubert’s Opus 4 Number 1 in 1821, the true authorship had been clarified. Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck had by then revised and lengthened the poem, and this version had been published in 1813 (though Schubert did not know it):

Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Schubert’s source, Dichtungen für Kunstredner.Herausgegeben von Deinhardstein. Wien und Triest, 1815. Im Verlage der Geistingerschen Buchhandlung, pages 149-150; with Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen. Achtzehnter Jahrgang 1808. Herausgegeben von W. G. Becker. Leipzig in der Niemannschen Buchhandlung, page 143; and with Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. Vierzehnter Jahrgang vom 1. Januar 1812 bis 30. December 1812. I. N. Forkel. Leipzig, bei Breitkopf und Härtel, No. 51. Den 16ten December 1812, Beylage No. V.

Note: The poem was first published 1808 in a version with five stanzas in Becker’s Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen “Mit Musik von Herrn Zelter”. It was also set by Kuhlau and was published 1812 in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, but with “Werner” as the author’s name. Schubert’s text source was Deinhardstein’s Dichtungen für Kunstredner, where the poem has the title Der Unglückliche and again “Werner” as author. Schmidt von Lübeck revised his poem and added three stanzas between stanza 1 and 2; this final version was published 1813 in Becker’s Guirlanden

Confirmed with Guirlanden. Herausgegeben von W. G. Becker. Drittes Bändchen. Leipzig bei Johann, Friedrich Gleditsch. 1813, pages 117-119; and with Lieder von Schmidt von Lübeck. Herausgegeben von H. C. Schumacher, Professor der Astronomie, R.v.D. Altona, bey J. F. Hammerich. 1821, pages 65-66.

To see an early edition of the text, go to page 149 [157 von 530] here: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ103558809