A secret thing: Forgetting the author in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's “Das erste Gedicht”

Abstract

This article examines the notion of secrecy in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's poem “Das erste Gedicht” (1846), pursuing its inquiry through a critical analysis of the gendering of space and authorship in Walter Benjamin's commentary on her poetics in Deutsche Menschen. Eine Folge von Briefen (1936). Critics have understood “Das erste Gedicht” as an autobiographical and exemplary expression of Droste-Hülshoff's authorial origins in secrecy and shame. By contrast, my article shows how the poem foregrounds forgetting rather than remembering as a poetological figure, thus challenging the notion that authorship originates in a singular past. In dismantling conventional ideas about the relation among time, memory, and writing, Droste-Hülshoff seems to anticipate literary modernism. Drawing on her manuscripts and letters, this article further shows how the poem's literary genesis reveals a critical engagement with shame and secrecy as gendered affects conventionally attributed to women writers in mid-19th-century Germany.