„Die Bäume wachsen nicht in den Himmel“ – Überlieferung, Verwendung und Bedeutung eines Sprichwortes
“The Trees Don’t Grow to the Sky” – Transmission, Use, and Meaning of a Proverb

Summary/Abstract: The German proverb “Es ist dafür gesorgt, daß die Bäume nicht in den Himmel wachsen” with its shortened variant “Die Bäume wachsen nicht in den Himmel” has been transmitted since the early sixteenth century. Its written documentation begins 1526 with Martin Luther, and it appears since 1590 in numerous variants in proverb collections. Goethe quoted it in his autobiography, and it is present in the works of Heinrich Heine, Joseph von Eichendorff, Georg Herwegh, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Andersch, and others. Max Weber and Rosa Luxemburg made socio-political use of it, and that is also true for Winston S. Churchill, who played a part in distributing it in English translation as “Care is taken that trees don’t grow to the sky” and “Trees don’t grow to the sky”. Joseph Goebbels quotes it repeatedly as a propagandistic leitmotif, and it also plays a role in political contexts by chancellors Conrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Schmidt. Especially aphoristic writers as Dietmar Beetz, Erwin Chargaff, Peter Maiwald, Felix Renner, and Gerhard Uhlenbruck have dealt with it critically by changing it into anti-proverbs. By way of many contextualized references it is shown how the proverb developed during five centuries and how it is marked to this day by its polysituativity, polyfunctionality, and polysemanticity.

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