bavarikon4UEmanuel Geibel. Ein Gedenkblatt
This document presents a printed review by Julius Grosse (1828-1902) on a literary personality in the context of the "crocodiles": Emanuel Geibel (1815-1884). Further reviews can be found in the estate of Friedrich Bodenstedt (1819-1892) and Hermann Lingg (1820-1905). While Bodenstedt and Lingg were celebrated as poets on their 70th birthdays, the memorial sheet to Geibel is a personal obituary of the deceased.
As a celebrated and great poet, Emanuel Geibel returned to his hometown of Lübeck, where he would die in 1884 after a long and serious illness. Already during his lifetime he had earned his place himself in the history of literature as the most popular German poet of his time and as "singer of the empire". His "crocodile" colleague Julius Grosse also described him in the present memorial sheet in this sense: "With Emanuel Geibel, the most popular poet German literature has had since Platen [1796-1835], Rückert [1788-1866] and Uhland [1787-1862] has departed from life". Nevertheless, it was only after Geibel's death that the time had come to put together an overall picture of the poet and of "what he had wanted and achieved".
In this memorial sheet Grosse follows these traces and draws a picture of Geibel during his time in Munich from 1852 until the death of King Max II (1811-1864): "What he [Geibel] worked on during these short intervals as leader and musagetes, as a friend and advisor through personal inspiration, has so far never been properly appreciated, at times it was even completely misjudged."