What is "venusberg"

Venusberg may refer to:

• Venusberg (mythology), in Teutonic myth, a subterranean temple of Venus
• Venusberg, Saxony, a municipality in Saxony, Germany
• Venusberg (novel), a 1932 novel by Anthony Powell
• Venusberg is also a locality in the city of Bonn.

Venusberg is the second novel by the English writer Anthony Powell. Published in 1932, it is set in an unidentified Baltic country which draws clearly on Powell's experiences in Finland and Estonia. Some see the novel as part of the Ruritanian tradition (cf. The Prisoner of Zenda), perhaps a modernist pastiche of the form.

The novel continues Powell's humorously critical examination of society, its various forms and fashions, this time against a background largely removed from London and English life. Romantic entanglements and the dissatisfactions of love remain a major concern and the novel maintains Powell's characteristic mingling of comedy and embarrassment. Of Powell's novels, Venusberg makes the greatest use of short chapters and quick changes of scene in the plot.

As might be supposed from the title, the novel treats aspects of the Tannhäuser legend. The Baedeker quotation Powell uses as an epigraph is a key to understanding the role the Tannhäuser legend plays. Baedeker combines the myth with reality–stressing the good view from the top of the mountain–signalling to the reader the need to rise above the pettiness in which most of the novel's characters are entrammeled in order to see clearly. Venusberg is thus an anti-Tannhäuser: an anticlimactic, anti-Wagnerian, anti-romantic tone pervades a story in which everyone is somehow let down.

Venusberg ( German: "Venus mountain") or Hörselberg is the name of a mythical mountain in Germany situated between Gotha and Eisenach and celebrated in German poetry. Caverns in the mountain housed the court of Venus, goddess of love which was supposed to be perfectly hidden from mortal men: to enter the Venusberg was to court eternal perdition. However, the legendary knight Tannhäuser spent a year there worshipping Venus and returned there after believing that he had been denied forgiveness for his sins by Pope Urban IV; this is described in the sixteenth-century Lied von dem Danheüser, the principal source for Richard Wagner's large three-act opera Tannhäuser (1845), which changes a few story elements and is known for including a scandalous depiction of the revels of Venus's court in its first scene. In Heinrich Heine's laconic poem Tannhäuser: A Legend, the hero spent seven years there before departing for Rome. Algernon Charles Swinburne tells the story in the first person in his poem Laus Veneris. Ludwig Tieck wrote a story on the subject, and Anthony Powell called an early novel of his Venusberg. Another visitor was Thomas the Rhymer (Thomas Ercildoune, c 1220-97).

The Tannhauser Gate of film and fiction originated as an allusion to the pathway that the knight used to discover and travel to this supposed place of ultimate erotic adventure. Venusberg is also a locality in the city of Bonn and in Flensburg.

Venusberg is a 1963 West German comedy drama film directed by Rolf Thiele and starring Marisa Mell, Nicole Badal and Monica Ekman.