Language eruptions.

For a year devoted to the theme of language, Klassik Stiftung Weimar has scattered quotations in the city centre of Weimar – like fragments scattered by ‘Language Eruptions’. Here in Frauenplan, in front of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s residence, you see a line from Goethe’s Tame Xenia.

The complete epigram is:

„Der Alte schlummert wie das Kind,
Und wie wir eben Menschen sind,
Wir schlafen sämmtlich auf Vulkanen.“

That is, in English:

 "The old man slumbers like the child,
And, simply human as we are,
We all are sleeping on volcanoes."

The Roman poet Martial used to accompany his gifts with epigrams that he called xenia – ‘hospitality gifts’. Goethe adapted this form in the late 18th century in collaboration with Friedrich von Schiller as a medium for their critical response to the literary world. They published more than 400 ‘xenia’ in Schiller’s literary yearbook Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1797, and many of the authors they critiqued submitted rebuttals in the same form. The disputes were on such topics as the German language, the literary scene, and the literary qualities of specific writers.

Some 30 years later, Goethe collected epigrams and aphorisms in his Zahme Xenien, or ‘tame xenia’.

Goethe lived in a time of rapid change – just as we do. The text quoted here can be read as a comment on such upheaval.