“The spring wreth” by Bettina von Arnim: meanings and contexts

The article is devoted to the meaning of the title of Bettina von Arnim’s novel “Spring Wreath” in the context of the work of the writer herself and her brother Clemens Brentano, the correspondence with whom formed the basis of the book. The creation of the novel is considered as the fulfillment of the poet’s will after his death to weave him a wreath of letters, which is stated in the full title of the novel and one of its epigraphs. The epigraphs express Clemens’s attitude to the correspondence as a sacred space, a “garden of the soul”, where the “sister” from the biblical “Song of Songs” is prefigured in the image of his sister Bettina, and the poet reveals his “best self”. The image of a spring wreath is revealed in a number of scenes of the novel, in relation to floral symbolism and metaphors of Catholic culture, texts from the collection “The Boy’s Magic Horn” and Clemens Brentano’s “Romances about the Rosary”, as well as in the context of the “religion of soaring” (Schwebereligion) and Bettina von Arnim’s philosophy of life, represented both in “Spring Wreath” and in her earlier novels “Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child” and “Günderode”. The technique of weaving a wreath from letters expresses the organic experience of life’s impressions, opposing the rationalistic philosophical discourse rejected by the writer, and at the same time refers to a rethought principle of the rosary beads. Bettina, for whom Catholicism was not the final, but the starting point of the search for God, rehabilitates her brother’s early lyrics, in accordance with her ideas about poetic creativity as a manifestation of the image of God in man, defending her view of Clemens Brentano and the right to his poetic heritage.