Life & Wisdom Quote by Franz Grillparzer

A startling pledge of self-enslavement is doing more than courting outrage; it’s baiting the reader into seeing how obscene “different laws for different people” really is. Grillparzer weaponizes extremity: if a society is willing to codify unequal personhood, then the speaker will embrace the logical endpoint and volunteer for the role that system quietly requires. The line turns hypocrisy inside out. Instead of arguing about fairness in the abstract, it drags hierarchy into the body: who belongs to whom, who gets to command, who is reduced to property.

The intent isn’t masochism; it’s moral blackmail aimed upward. “I’d relinquish myself unto you” reads like courtly submission, but the courtesy is poisonous. It forces the addressee - the ruler, the lawgiver, the complacent beneficiary - to hear their own premise spoken plainly. Unequal law can’t stay genteel; it must eventually admit the master/slave relation it implies.

In Grillparzer’s era, the Habsburg world ran on rank, privilege, and censorship, while Europe was still metabolizing the aftershocks of the French Revolution and Napoleon: promises of legal equality colliding with restored aristocratic order. As a poet and dramatist navigating a state that policed speech, he often threaded critique through rhetorical indirection. This line is that strategy sharpened to a point: an apparently personal vow that is actually a political indictment, using the most intimate surrender to expose how “special laws” are just domination with paperwork.