4 Indeed, Trakl's first volume, Gedichte,
appeared
in 1913 as No.
Trakl - IN CONTEXT- POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE
Oxford German Studies, 41.
3, 327-347, December 2012
GEORG TRAKL (1887-1914) IN CONTEXT: POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE
BEN MORGAN
Worcester College, Oxford
This article reads Trakl's poetry in the context of his involvement with the journal 'Der Brenner'. In particular the admiration for Karl Kraus which Trakl shared with the Brenner Circle is used as a way of showing how Trakl's poetic method compares to the approaches of his cultural peers. The reading of Trakl that emerges lies between that of a critique of Kraus (Stieg) and a staging of literary fragmentation (Ba"ler). We see instead a meaningful meaningnessless that critics from the 1910s onwards, including Heidegger, have explained by grounding it in the authenticity of the poet. This strategy is read as a version of Aristotelian e-thos.
KEYWORDS: Georg Trakl, Ludwig von Ficker, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Der Brenner, Expressionism
This article will explore how the poetic techniques of Georg Trakl can be understood to relate to the cultural concerns of the 1910s, showing at the same time how the version of poetry that he came to represent - that of literature as a special, and not immediately accessible language for articulating an unacknow- ledged, unknown, or even unknowable truth - continued to be influential all the way through the twentieth century, particularly as it was elaborated by Heidegger in his essays on Trakl in the 1950s. 1 I want to show how this emphatic, modernist model of literature is in fact, despite appearances to the contrary, a version of what could be called 'common sense realism' and that that is a good thing (as opposed to something to be embarrassed about), since the way Trakl contributes to this larger realist project allows us to understand more clearly the questions to which his writing is the poetic answer. To start situating Trakl's poetic endeavours, I want to say a few words, first, about one of Trakl's poetic techniques and,
1 Heidegger discussed Trakl's poetry in lectures delivered in the early 1950s reprinted as 'Die Sprache' and 'Die Sprache im Gedicht' in Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1959), pp. 9-82. Derrida takes up Heidegger's reading of Trakl in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 83-113. For a discussion of Derrida's (unpublished) seminar on Trakl, 'Geschlecht III', see David Farrell Krell, 'Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl', CR: The New Centennial Review, 7, no. 2 (2007), 175-99.
# W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012 DOI: 10. 1179/0078719112Z. 00000000019
328 BEN MORGAN
secondly, about the poet's relation to Expressionism. This will prepare the way for a more detailed account of the milieu in which Trakl's writing found its home around 1912.
I A POETIC TECHNIQUE OF TRAKL'S
In a brief account of a poet's work, it is difficult to give proper attention to individual poems, especially if, as is the case with my argument, the aim is to present the context from which emerged not only Trakl's poetry but also the tools with which it is frequently approached. In order to convey a sense of Trakl's poetic project nevertheless, I want initially to draw attention to one particular device: the shift of focus that many of the later poems turn on and that can be seen by means of a brief comparison of three poems, one from each of Trakl's major collections of poems. The shift that I am particularly interested in is not yet at work in the poem 'Confiteor', which was included in the collection of poems that Trakl put together in 1909 but that was only published posthumously. 2 In this poem, the confessing speaker feels that he has seen through people's everyday behaviour and grasped that it is a badly written but painful play: 'Der Menschheit heldenloses Trauerspiel | Ein schlechtes Stu ? ck, gespielt auf Gra ? bern, Leichen. '3 The speaker is disillusioned, but cannot himself escape the pretence, being instead condemned by some higher force ('ein Machtgebot') to play his own part in the drama: 'Ein Komo ? diant, der seine Rolle spricht, | Gezwungen, voll Verzweiflung - Langeweile! ' (HKA, I, 246). This poem presents us with an alternative view of the world, unmasking everyday communication as artificial. But it doesn't focus on the moment when the shift of perspective itself occurs. The transformation has happened before the poem begins and the poem reports on the painful new vision.
The two other poems I want to consider register a moment of transformation in the poem itself, and one of them explicitly talks about the change in poetic, or metapoetic, terms. Even more important, however, than thematizing the change is the fact that the change goes in an opposite direction in each of the poems. The sonnet 'Verfall', included in the volume of poems Trakl published in 1913, is a slightly modified version of a poem entitled 'Herbst' included in the unpublished 1909 collection. In both versions, the speaker in the sonnet watches birds in the evening sky, following them in his imagination for the duration of the first two quatrains, until the scene changes with a typical volta: 'Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern' (HKA, I, 59). Thereafter, the birds whose flight had been likened positively to 'Pilgerzu ? gen' in the first quatrain are replaced by blue asters chilled by, and fading in, the autumn wind, and likened to children playing ring-a- ring-of-roses and all falling down. In both parts of the sonnet, the speaker sees the natural world through anthropomorphic images. But a shift occurs during the
2 For an overview of Trakl's life, see Walter Methlagl and Eberhard Sauermann, Georg Trakl 1887-1914 (Innsbruck: Forschungsinstitut 'Brenner Archiv', 1995).
3 Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1987), I, p. 246. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation HKA, in the form (HKA, I, 246).
poem, which isn't explained by anything like the 'Machtgebot' of 'Confiteor', but which plunges the speaker into a different world.
The third poem I want to draw on to present my sketch of a recurring technique in Trakl's poetry is taken from Sebastian im Traum, the volume of poems that Trakl had already sent to press in 1914 before he volunteered for active service as a member of the medical corps of the Austrian army in August 1914, but which didn't appear until 1915, a few months after Trakl's death. The poem in question is also autumnal and is entitled 'Herbstseele'. In this poem we are presented with human society in the aggressive form of the cries of hunters and the baying of their hounds: 'Ja ? gerruf und Blutgebell' (HKA, I, 107). But nature is also represented by the harsh cry of the predatory hawk. Yet the prey escapes: 'Bald entgleitet Fisch und Wild' (HKA, I, 107). And although the speaker, writing in the first person plural, talks of a separation from loved ones, a transformation occurs nevertheless: 'Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild' (HKA, I, 107). The closing, fourth strophe of the poem then draws on an explicitly religious vocabulary to describe how human beings can lay their guilt and 'rote Pein' in God's hands.
It might be tempting to construct a biographical narrative around these three poems, one that starts with 'Confiteor', an early poem that registers a sense of dislocation which the poet can't explain, moves on to the poem 'Herbst'/'Verfall' that is taken up from the 1909 collection into the 1913 volume and that begins to reflect on how the shift or dislocation occurs, and then finishes with the redemptive peace of 'Herbstseele' written later in 1913 (HKA, II, 180-81). But this teleology is in fact hard to impose on the poetry. To give two brief examples from poems to which I will be returning later in the argument: the late, prose poem 'Verwandlung des Bo ? sen' was modified by Trakl between its first appearance in the issue of the Innsbruck-based journal Der Brenner of 15 October 1913 and the version included in Sebastian im Traum. The final version added a line which destroyed the very redemption the final paragraph of the first published version had seemed to achieve: 'Dem folgt unverga ? ngliche Nacht' (HKA, I, 98). If, in Sebastian im Traum, the re-writing of 'Verwandlung des Bo ? sen' seems to overturn the optimism of 'Herbstseele', in the earlier Gedichte we can observe the opposite movement. In drafting the final version of the poem 'Psalm', Trakl adds a line which adopts precisely the redemptive perspective he denies himself in other poems: 'Schweigsam u ? ber Scha ? delsta ? tte o ? ffnen sich Gottes goldene Augen' (HKA, I, 56). In the later poems, therefore, it can be said that Trakl focuses consciously on the kind of shift described in 'Verfall' and 'Herbstseele', since it is an element he attends to as he drafts and re-drafts his poems. At the same time, the shift can go in either direction. The line: 'Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild' (HKA, I, 107) that Trakl uses in 'Herbstseele' to describe a shift in a positive direction could actually refer to a shift in either direction. All it says is that the speaker moves from one type of meaningful world to another. It does not commit us to necessarily moving in one direction.
Trakl's poetry could be read as an extended reflection on this shift: on the images by which it can be presented, and the images that might be appropriate to participating in, bringing about, or simply surrendering to the shift. Trakl's poetic world is labile. Redemption is reversible; God's presence is palpable, but sometimes only in its potential withdrawal. At the same time, his world is populated by a recurring set of figures of redemption: the figures of the prey and of
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 329
330 BEN MORGAN
the soul which appear in 'Herbstseele' are examples, but so also are named figures, like Sonja, who refers intertextually to the character of the same name in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or figures, like Elis and Helian, who are as pure and long-suffering as Dostoevsky's Sonja but are of Trakl's invention. It will be part of my argument that these characters are the key to understanding how Trakl's poetry functioned in the 1910s and beyond, creating - albeit unstable - points of identification for readers confronting the awe-inspiring lability of Trakl's poetic world. But to understand this claim, we need first to have seen more of the context from which Trakl's poetry emerged. To this end I will start by setting out the limited sense in which the term 'Expressionism' can be applied to his writing, before moving on to give a positive account of Trakl's relations to his contemporaries and peers.
II TRAKL BEFORE EXPRESSIONISM
Trakl can be called an Expressionist poet for two reasons: first, because ten of his poems were included in the book which retrospectively defined Expressionist poetry, Kurt Pinthus's Menschheitsda ? mmerung (1919); and, secondly, because the two volumes of poems which he prepared for publication in his lifetime, as well as the collection of his poems edited by Karl Ro ? ck immediately after his death, were published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag, a publishing house closely associated with Expressionism as a literary movement. 4 Indeed, Trakl's first volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1913 as No. 6/7 of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', that is to say as part of a collection of texts which the historian of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Wolfram Go ? bel, has called the most important Expressionist series. 5 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' published new work by young writers including Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Kasimir Edschmid, Iwan Goll, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Sternheim and Franz Werfel. Trakl's work thus appeared alongside that of many authors now included in Expressionist collections. But Trakl would not have called himself an Expressionist. Nor indeed would any of the other writers included in the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' in 1913 when Kurt Wolff was first creating the project. 6 From a letter the publisher sent to Trakl on 28 April 1913 explaining his idea, it is clear that Wolff himself was not thinking in terms of a unified literary movement: 'Ich bringe in den na ? chsten Wochen zu billigstem Preise (M 0,80) eine Reihe von Bu ? chern junger Autoren heraus, deren Werke (ohne da" sie selbst irgendwie zu einer gemeinsamen Gruppe oder Clique geho ? ren) das gemeinsam haben, da" sie irgend ein selbststa ? ndiger und starker Ausdruck unserer Zeit sind' (the letter is reprinted in full in HKA, II, 792).
4 The poems included in Menschheitsda ? mmerung were 'De profundis', 'Ruh und Schweigen', 'In den Nachmittag geflu ? stert', 'An den Knaben Elis', 'Elis', 'Helian', 'Der Herbst des Einsamen', 'Abendlied', 'Sebastian im Traum', and 'Gesang des Abgeschiedenen. ' For a discussion of the importance of Kurt Wolff as the publisher of Expressionism, see Wolfram Go ? bel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag 1913-1930: Expressionismus als verlegerische Aufgabe (Frankfurt a. M. : Buchha ? ndler- Vereinigung, 1977).
5 On the publication of Trakl's first volume of poems, see Go ? bel, p. 1377. Go ? bel gives a complete listing of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', pp. 1377-79, and discusses the history of the series, pp. 573-92.
6 Go ? bel, p. 568.
Trakl was one of the writers who, to Wolff, seemed symptomatic of the age. But to understand how Trakl's poetry relates to its literary and historical context it is helpful to forget the labels that have been retrospectively applied, and to see instead how he and his contemporaries positioned his writing. 7 To some of his contemporaries, Trakl's difficult writing, stretching language almost to the point of nonsense, made him appear to be a Futurist. 8 Meanwhile, if Trakl himself adopted any label, he called himself a Christian (if the testimony of Hans Limbach is to be believed). In one of the very few poetological statements he made he described poetry as an - albeit inadequate - form of expiation: 'eine unvollkommene Su ? hne'. 9 However, I do not want to argue that Trakl was a Futurist or a Christian rather than an Expressionist poet. 10 Rather than being limited by the labels people tried out on Trakl at the time, or by what Trakl said, or is thought to have said, about his work, we can look to what he did as a more reliable indicator of the cultural context to which his poetry belongs. For the last two and half years of his life, a period in which much of the poetry for which he is remembered was written, Trakl was actively involved with a group of writers and artists clustered around the Innsbruck bi-weekly journal Der Brenner that had been published by Ludwig von Ficker since 1910. 11 Indeed, he can be said to have become by 1914 the poetic figurehead of the journal. The first of his poems to be published in Der Brenner was 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' in the issue of 1 May 1912. The next poem to be published was 'Psalm', dedicated to Karl Kraus, which appeared in the issue of 1 October 1912. At least one poem by Trakl then appeared in each of the following thirty- eight consecutive issues of Der Brenner from October 1912 until spring 1915, when Ficker released a final 'Jahrbuch' before ceasing publication for the duration of the Great War. The 'Jahrbuch' contained, amongst other things, Trakl's last poems, including 'Grodek', a translation of Kierkegaard's 'Vom Tode' (one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions), Carl Dallago's translation-cum- paraphrase of Lao Tse, and an essay critical of the culture that produced the
7 For a considered account of what Trakl's writing has in common with other writers associated with Expressionism in terms of his use of the 'Reihungsstil' and his treatment of madness, see Maurice Gode ? , 'Trakl et L'expressionisme', Austriaca 65/66 (2007/2008), 115-30.
8 Eberhard Sauermann discusses contemporary reviews of Trakl's poetry in which he is called a Futurist in Eberhard Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913: Zur Produktion, Interpretation und Rezeption des Programms', Sprachkunst, 18 (1987), 181-207 (pp. 192, 195, and 197).
9 '''Ich bin Christ'' -- antwortete Trakl. ' Hans Limbach, 'Begegnung mit Georg Trakl', in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, ed. by Ludwig von Ficker (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), pp. 103-09 (p. 106). The authenticity of Limbach's record has been defended by Walter Methlagl, 'Hans Limbach ''Begegnung mit Georg Trakl''. Zur Quellenkritik', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, 4 (1985), 3-47. Trakl's brief poetological aphorism was first published in Der Brenner, 5 (1915), p. 7. It is reprinted in HKA, I, 463. The most compelling reason for treating Trakl as a Christian writer is that that is how he appeared to his contemporaries, even to those such as Carl Dallago, to whom being a Christian was not a recommendation, as Dallago explained in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker of 19 February 1914. Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1909-1914, ed. by Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1986), pp. 202-03.
10 The study which established the Christian reading of Trakl is Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1954).
11 For a survey of Trakl's key relationships with members of the Brenner circle, see Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl and the Brenner Circle (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 331
332 BEN MORGAN
war by the Kierkegaard translator Theodor Haecker. The issue was read by contemporaries as honouring Trakl more than criticizing the Great War, although Ficker had hurried the issue into print because of the topical nature of Haecker's contribution. 12
If Trakl's poetry formed the burden of the journal's farewell message in 1915, it was no less important after the war. In 1919, it was a quotation from Trakl's 'An die Verstummten' describing the labour of forging a new humanity that served as the peroration of Ficker's programmatic preface to the first issue of the new series of Der Brenner: 'Aber stille blutet in dunkler Ho ? hle stummere Menschheit, | Fu ? gt aus harten Metallen das erlo ? sende Haupt. '13 Trakl's name was invoked alongside those of the three other figures who for Ficker summed up the cultural mission of his journal as 'Wegbereiter' for a future culture in the aftermath of the Great War: Lao Tse, SOren Kierkegaard and Karl Kraus. To understand what Trakl's poetry meant in the 1910s, therefore, we need to reconstruct the cultural project embodied by Der Brenner during the first phase of its publication 1910-1915. 14 This will involve a consideration not only of Der Brenner but also of similar journals of the period, especially Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, for Kraus in particular appeared to the contributors to Der Brenner - including Georg Trakl - as an aesthetic and ethical model.
III THE CULTURAL CONCERNS OF DER BRENNER
The number of Der Brenner which initiated the uninterrupted sequence of issues containing poems by Trakl captures the journal at a moment of transition. The issue in question is the first number of the third year: 1 October 1912. 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' had been published the previous May in the penultimate issue of the second year, a fortnight before the summer break that lasted from June to the end of September. Trakl's poetry had been brought to the attention of Ficker by Robert Mu ? ller, an editor of the avant-garde cultural journal Der Ruf, published by the Akademischer Verband fu ? r Literatur und Musik in Vienna in 1912 and 1913, and bringing together different types of avant-garde culture from the Austrian metropolis: the first issue included contributions by, amongst others, Robert Mu ? ller, Hermann Bahr, Stefan Zweig, Christian Morgenstern, Adolf Loos, Arnold Scho ? nberg and Peter Altenberg; the 1913 issue on the theme 'Krieg' bore a self- portrait by Egon Schiele on the cover. 15 Der Brenner and Der Ruf had similar concerns as critically oriented, cultural journals, and Mu ? ller's recommendation of Trakl to Ficker was part of - ultimately unsuccessful - efforts by the two editors to
12 Eberhard Sauermann, 'Das ''Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915'' und seine Rezeption. Trakl- Verehrung oder Kriegsgegnerschaft? ', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, no. 20 (2001), 35-55.
13 Ludwig von Ficker, 'Vorwort zum Wiederbeginn', Der Brenner, 6 (1919), p. 4. A facsimile edition of the entire run of the journal is available on-line at ,http://corpus1. aac. ac. at/brenner/. [accessed 23 August 2012].
14 For an invaluable introduction to the journal for the period 1910-1915, with a selection of articles, see Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Erika Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne: Die Zeitschrift ''Der Brenner'' 1910-1915 (Salzburg: Haymon, 1990).
15 The five issues of the journal are reprinted as Der Ruf: ein Flugblatt an junge Menschen (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
ally their publications. 16 However, after Ficker met Trakl in May 1912, his interest in his poetry came to be driven by more than just strategic concerns. The whole focus of the journal changed from 1912 to 1915, moving away from a vitalist critique of early twentieth-century urban culture propounded in the essays that Carl Dallago contributed to the journal, to the more religiously-oriented view of a fragile, suffering humanity articulated by the poetry of Trakl and by the translations of works by Kierkegaard that began to appear from May 1914. 17 When, therefore, Der Brenner resumed publication after the summer break in 1912 with the first of the sequence of Trakl publications, a milestone had been reached in the development of the journal.
Trakl's poetry can thus be seen to formulate a model of human fragility that was used, in the pages of Der Brenner from 1912, as a perspective from which to articulate a mild form of social critique. So far so good. Yet to reconstruct Trakl's poetic project it helps to consider not only the new impulses found in the journal with which Trakl's poetry was more directly aligned, such as the turn towards Kierkegaard, but also the wider array of positions associated with Der Brenner. For Trakl shared the concerns and took part in the conversations of the circle, and the poems published in the journal often read as variations on themes that other contributors were also dealing with. 18 Something of the journal's cultural affiliation is registered in the few advertisements it carried. In order to maintain independence, Der Brenner did not include commercial advertisements. 19 Instead, the two-page advertising section at the end of the issue of 1 October 1912 promotes reprints of essays by Dallago, but it also contains advertisements for books by Karl Kraus and for the architectural school about to be opened by Adolf Loos. 20 Both figures were important for the journal because of their critique of empty ornamentation, be it in architecture or in the phrase-making of journalistic style.
4 Indeed, Trakl's first volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1913 as No. 6/7 of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', that is to say as part of a collection of texts which the historian of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Wolfram Go ? bel, has called the most important Expressionist series. 5 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' published new work by young writers including Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Kasimir Edschmid, Iwan Goll, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Sternheim and Franz Werfel. Trakl's work thus appeared alongside that of many authors now included in Expressionist collections. But Trakl would not have called himself an Expressionist. Nor indeed would any of the other writers included in the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' in 1913 when Kurt Wolff was first creating the project. 6 From a letter the publisher sent to Trakl on 28 April 1913 explaining his idea, it is clear that Wolff himself was not thinking in terms of a unified literary movement: 'Ich bringe in den na ? chsten Wochen zu billigstem Preise (M 0,80) eine Reihe von Bu ? chern junger Autoren heraus, deren Werke (ohne da" sie selbst irgendwie zu einer gemeinsamen Gruppe oder Clique geho ? ren) das gemeinsam haben, da" sie irgend ein selbststa ? ndiger und starker Ausdruck unserer Zeit sind' (the letter is reprinted in full in HKA, II, 792).
4 The poems included in Menschheitsda ? mmerung were 'De profundis', 'Ruh und Schweigen', 'In den Nachmittag geflu ? stert', 'An den Knaben Elis', 'Elis', 'Helian', 'Der Herbst des Einsamen', 'Abendlied', 'Sebastian im Traum', and 'Gesang des Abgeschiedenen. ' For a discussion of the importance of Kurt Wolff as the publisher of Expressionism, see Wolfram Go ? bel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag 1913-1930: Expressionismus als verlegerische Aufgabe (Frankfurt a. M. : Buchha ? ndler- Vereinigung, 1977).
5 On the publication of Trakl's first volume of poems, see Go ? bel, p. 1377. Go ? bel gives a complete listing of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', pp. 1377-79, and discusses the history of the series, pp. 573-92.
6 Go ? bel, p. 568.
Trakl was one of the writers who, to Wolff, seemed symptomatic of the age. But to understand how Trakl's poetry relates to its literary and historical context it is helpful to forget the labels that have been retrospectively applied, and to see instead how he and his contemporaries positioned his writing. 7 To some of his contemporaries, Trakl's difficult writing, stretching language almost to the point of nonsense, made him appear to be a Futurist. 8 Meanwhile, if Trakl himself adopted any label, he called himself a Christian (if the testimony of Hans Limbach is to be believed). In one of the very few poetological statements he made he described poetry as an - albeit inadequate - form of expiation: 'eine unvollkommene Su ? hne'. 9 However, I do not want to argue that Trakl was a Futurist or a Christian rather than an Expressionist poet. 10 Rather than being limited by the labels people tried out on Trakl at the time, or by what Trakl said, or is thought to have said, about his work, we can look to what he did as a more reliable indicator of the cultural context to which his poetry belongs. For the last two and half years of his life, a period in which much of the poetry for which he is remembered was written, Trakl was actively involved with a group of writers and artists clustered around the Innsbruck bi-weekly journal Der Brenner that had been published by Ludwig von Ficker since 1910. 11 Indeed, he can be said to have become by 1914 the poetic figurehead of the journal. The first of his poems to be published in Der Brenner was 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' in the issue of 1 May 1912. The next poem to be published was 'Psalm', dedicated to Karl Kraus, which appeared in the issue of 1 October 1912. At least one poem by Trakl then appeared in each of the following thirty- eight consecutive issues of Der Brenner from October 1912 until spring 1915, when Ficker released a final 'Jahrbuch' before ceasing publication for the duration of the Great War. The 'Jahrbuch' contained, amongst other things, Trakl's last poems, including 'Grodek', a translation of Kierkegaard's 'Vom Tode' (one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions), Carl Dallago's translation-cum- paraphrase of Lao Tse, and an essay critical of the culture that produced the
7 For a considered account of what Trakl's writing has in common with other writers associated with Expressionism in terms of his use of the 'Reihungsstil' and his treatment of madness, see Maurice Gode ? , 'Trakl et L'expressionisme', Austriaca 65/66 (2007/2008), 115-30.
8 Eberhard Sauermann discusses contemporary reviews of Trakl's poetry in which he is called a Futurist in Eberhard Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913: Zur Produktion, Interpretation und Rezeption des Programms', Sprachkunst, 18 (1987), 181-207 (pp. 192, 195, and 197).
9 '''Ich bin Christ'' -- antwortete Trakl. ' Hans Limbach, 'Begegnung mit Georg Trakl', in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, ed. by Ludwig von Ficker (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), pp. 103-09 (p. 106). The authenticity of Limbach's record has been defended by Walter Methlagl, 'Hans Limbach ''Begegnung mit Georg Trakl''. Zur Quellenkritik', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, 4 (1985), 3-47. Trakl's brief poetological aphorism was first published in Der Brenner, 5 (1915), p. 7. It is reprinted in HKA, I, 463. The most compelling reason for treating Trakl as a Christian writer is that that is how he appeared to his contemporaries, even to those such as Carl Dallago, to whom being a Christian was not a recommendation, as Dallago explained in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker of 19 February 1914. Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1909-1914, ed. by Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1986), pp. 202-03.
10 The study which established the Christian reading of Trakl is Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1954).
11 For a survey of Trakl's key relationships with members of the Brenner circle, see Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl and the Brenner Circle (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 331
332 BEN MORGAN
war by the Kierkegaard translator Theodor Haecker. The issue was read by contemporaries as honouring Trakl more than criticizing the Great War, although Ficker had hurried the issue into print because of the topical nature of Haecker's contribution. 12
If Trakl's poetry formed the burden of the journal's farewell message in 1915, it was no less important after the war. In 1919, it was a quotation from Trakl's 'An die Verstummten' describing the labour of forging a new humanity that served as the peroration of Ficker's programmatic preface to the first issue of the new series of Der Brenner: 'Aber stille blutet in dunkler Ho ? hle stummere Menschheit, | Fu ? gt aus harten Metallen das erlo ? sende Haupt. '13 Trakl's name was invoked alongside those of the three other figures who for Ficker summed up the cultural mission of his journal as 'Wegbereiter' for a future culture in the aftermath of the Great War: Lao Tse, SOren Kierkegaard and Karl Kraus. To understand what Trakl's poetry meant in the 1910s, therefore, we need to reconstruct the cultural project embodied by Der Brenner during the first phase of its publication 1910-1915. 14 This will involve a consideration not only of Der Brenner but also of similar journals of the period, especially Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, for Kraus in particular appeared to the contributors to Der Brenner - including Georg Trakl - as an aesthetic and ethical model.
III THE CULTURAL CONCERNS OF DER BRENNER
The number of Der Brenner which initiated the uninterrupted sequence of issues containing poems by Trakl captures the journal at a moment of transition. The issue in question is the first number of the third year: 1 October 1912. 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' had been published the previous May in the penultimate issue of the second year, a fortnight before the summer break that lasted from June to the end of September. Trakl's poetry had been brought to the attention of Ficker by Robert Mu ? ller, an editor of the avant-garde cultural journal Der Ruf, published by the Akademischer Verband fu ? r Literatur und Musik in Vienna in 1912 and 1913, and bringing together different types of avant-garde culture from the Austrian metropolis: the first issue included contributions by, amongst others, Robert Mu ? ller, Hermann Bahr, Stefan Zweig, Christian Morgenstern, Adolf Loos, Arnold Scho ? nberg and Peter Altenberg; the 1913 issue on the theme 'Krieg' bore a self- portrait by Egon Schiele on the cover. 15 Der Brenner and Der Ruf had similar concerns as critically oriented, cultural journals, and Mu ? ller's recommendation of Trakl to Ficker was part of - ultimately unsuccessful - efforts by the two editors to
12 Eberhard Sauermann, 'Das ''Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915'' und seine Rezeption. Trakl- Verehrung oder Kriegsgegnerschaft? ', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, no. 20 (2001), 35-55.
13 Ludwig von Ficker, 'Vorwort zum Wiederbeginn', Der Brenner, 6 (1919), p. 4. A facsimile edition of the entire run of the journal is available on-line at ,http://corpus1. aac. ac. at/brenner/. [accessed 23 August 2012].
14 For an invaluable introduction to the journal for the period 1910-1915, with a selection of articles, see Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Erika Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne: Die Zeitschrift ''Der Brenner'' 1910-1915 (Salzburg: Haymon, 1990).
15 The five issues of the journal are reprinted as Der Ruf: ein Flugblatt an junge Menschen (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
ally their publications. 16 However, after Ficker met Trakl in May 1912, his interest in his poetry came to be driven by more than just strategic concerns. The whole focus of the journal changed from 1912 to 1915, moving away from a vitalist critique of early twentieth-century urban culture propounded in the essays that Carl Dallago contributed to the journal, to the more religiously-oriented view of a fragile, suffering humanity articulated by the poetry of Trakl and by the translations of works by Kierkegaard that began to appear from May 1914. 17 When, therefore, Der Brenner resumed publication after the summer break in 1912 with the first of the sequence of Trakl publications, a milestone had been reached in the development of the journal.
Trakl's poetry can thus be seen to formulate a model of human fragility that was used, in the pages of Der Brenner from 1912, as a perspective from which to articulate a mild form of social critique. So far so good. Yet to reconstruct Trakl's poetic project it helps to consider not only the new impulses found in the journal with which Trakl's poetry was more directly aligned, such as the turn towards Kierkegaard, but also the wider array of positions associated with Der Brenner. For Trakl shared the concerns and took part in the conversations of the circle, and the poems published in the journal often read as variations on themes that other contributors were also dealing with. 18 Something of the journal's cultural affiliation is registered in the few advertisements it carried. In order to maintain independence, Der Brenner did not include commercial advertisements. 19 Instead, the two-page advertising section at the end of the issue of 1 October 1912 promotes reprints of essays by Dallago, but it also contains advertisements for books by Karl Kraus and for the architectural school about to be opened by Adolf Loos. 20 Both figures were important for the journal because of their critique of empty ornamentation, be it in architecture or in the phrase-making of journalistic style. Ficker would go on to publish brief essays by Loos in Der Brenner. 21 For Kraus, he organized readings in Innsbruck and Munich, but he and other contributors also discussed, praised and emulated Kraus in the pages of the Innsbruck publication from the very outset. Trakl himself not only dedicated his 'Psalm' to Kraus but published a poem with Kraus as its subject, so it will be worth following up the relation between the Brenner circle and Kraus in more detail to show what Trakl and Kraus had in common.
16 Sieglinde Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit: Kontext und Rezeption (Innsbruck: Institut fu ? r Germanistik, 1990), pp. 148-56.
17 'Nicht mehr der heroische Mensch, der die sich ihm feindlich entgegengesetzte Welt als intakte Perso ? nlichkeit u ? berwindet, sondern der Leidende und der am Leiden der Mitwelt Teilnehmende begann fu ? r Ficker seit der Begegnung mit Trakl vorbildhaft zu werden. Dieses neue Menschenbild fand Ficker in den Schriften Kierkegaards beispielhaft vorgezeichnet [. . . ]. ' Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, pp. 173-74.
18 '''Der Brenner'' als Kontext zur Lyrik Georg Trakls', in Alfred Doppler, Die Lyrik Georg Trakls: Beitra ? ge zur poetischen Verfahrensweise und zur Wirkungsgeschichte (Vienna: Bo ? hlau, 1992), 94-103.
19 Klettenhammer and Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne, p. 11.
20 Der Brenner, 4 (1912/1913), pp. 47-48.
21 Adolf Loos, 'Regeln fu ? r den, der in den Bergen baut', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/1914), pp.
40-41 (1 October 1913). Adolf Loos, 'Keramika', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), 224-30 (1 December 1913).
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334 BEN MORGAN
Kraus was the editor and, from 1910, sole author of Die Fackel, which he had starting publishing in April 1899, throwing down the gauntlet before a public caught, as he put it, between obstinacy and apathy, between empty phrases and thoughtlessness. 22 Die Fackel counted as a model of enlightened, ethical writing to the men associated with the newer journal Der Brenner. 23 Kraus characterized his approach in a stinging attack he wrote on Stefan Zweig in Die Fackel in 1913, contrasting his own style with the moneyed dilettantism he disapproved of in Zweig: 'Ich habe den Fehler, Halt zu machen bei den Dingen und die Phrasen konsequent zu Ende zu denken. Das ist nicht scho ? n von mir. Das ist ungemu ? tlich fu ? r die Jugend. '24 It was his thinking through the consequences of the use and abuse of language that particularly won him admiration from the Brenner circle.
But how did Kraus's linguistic critique compare to other cultural endeavours of the early twentieth century? Kraus set out the relation as he saw it in an article entitled 'Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie' that he published in Die Fackel in December 1912 lambasting a new generation that was directing its critical energies in the wrong direction. Kraus focuses in particular on the use of language, the status of art in its relation to commercial interests and the press, and attitudes to technology and war. The article seems to have been prompted by a photograph that particularly enraged Kraus showing a cafe ? owner with his wife being praised for their inspired idea of driving their customers home for a fee if the customers required:
Ich sehe zum Beispiel irgendwo ein Bild: ein Ehepaar. Er ein Charakterkopf. Darunter steht - wie eben immer die Tat, die den Mann beru ? hmt gemacht hat, mit einem Schlagwort, gleich unter dem Bild und vor der eigentlichen Biographie, umrissen wird: 'Cafetier Anton Stern, der Besitzer des Wiener Cafe ? Pru ? ckl, und seine Gattin, die in eigenen Autos die Ga ? ste gegen Erlag einer Krone in ihre Wohnungen fu ? hren lassen. ' So hat er ausgesehen, das hat er vollbracht; ein Blick, und man u ? bersieht ein Leben und ein Werk. U ? berall Bild und Wort zur Feier genialer Initiative. 25
Kraus is worried by the attitudes to language and the narrativization of experience that this episode betrays. The caption to the photograph not only reduces a life to a pithy one-liner, but creates a world in which we experience only phrases and advertising slogans. More importantly, it reflects a world in which reporting an event bleeds into promoting the cafe ? in question, erasing the boundary between cultural comment and commerce. Kraus is aware that his readers might think that, in fixing on a random photo in a newspaper and connecting it to wider social changes, he is making a mountain out of a molehill (or, in the German idiom, an 'elephant out of a flea'). But he nevertheless sees the episode as an indicator of how a journalistic language that is essentially the language of advertising is eroding the
22 Die Fackel, Nr. 1 (April 1899), 1: 'einer O ? ffentlichkeit gegenu ? ber, die zwischen Unentwegtheit und Apathie ihr phrasenreiches oder vo ? llig gedankenloses Auskommen findet [. . . ]'.
23 Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, p. 239.
24 Karl Kraus, 'Der Schmock, das Talent und die Familie', Die Fackel, Nr. 366-367 (11 January 1913), 28.
25 Karl Kraus, 'Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie', Die Fackel, Nr. 363-364-365 (12 December 1912), 1-28 (p. 2).
separate sphere of culture. 26 The celebration of war and technology evident in an issue of Der Sturm of June 1912 appears to Kraus as a further symptom of this erasure of intellectual life. Kraus would prefer a younger generation that marched emptily around a candelabrum to the posturing of what in a polemic earlier in the year he disparagingly dismissed as 'Futuristen, Neo-pathetikern, Neoklassizisten und sonstigen Inhabern von Titeln'. 27 Indeed, he would prefer almost anything:
neben den Pathetikern der Maschine, die einem Chauffeur die Pferde ausspannen wollen, und neben den Krafttinterln, die die Technik deshalb dem Ingenium vorziehen, weil sie vor diesem verloren, hinter jener aber, selbst sie, Helden sind. Man kurbelt; das ist so schnell wie schreiben und noch unperso ? nlicher. 28
The younger generation prizes technology because it allows them to cast themselves as heroes, inducing in them a misplaced sense of agency and achievement. A more responsible writing, for Kraus, requires an allergic attention to the abuse of language as set phrase or slogan, requires a thinking of ideas through, and an acknowledgement of the distinction between aesthetic and journalistic language, which nevertheless does not retreat into an aesthetic sphere to avoid engaging with the issue of the day. What we find in Kraus's essays, therefore, is critical engagement with standardized forms of language, and a position on art which combines aesthetic autonomy with ethical responsibility. This situates him between l'art pour l'art on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the celebration of passing movements which he thought irresponsibly collapsed art into journalism.
The contributors to Der Brenner valued the critique of language. But they also prized the experience from which they believed it to be inseparable, explaining Kraus's moral authority in terms of his person, and of a particular sort of experience, which readers must share with Kraus if they are to understand him properly. The result was a mythologization of the figure of Kraus himself in which Trakl also participated.
GEORG TRAKL (1887-1914) IN CONTEXT: POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE
BEN MORGAN
Worcester College, Oxford
This article reads Trakl's poetry in the context of his involvement with the journal 'Der Brenner'. In particular the admiration for Karl Kraus which Trakl shared with the Brenner Circle is used as a way of showing how Trakl's poetic method compares to the approaches of his cultural peers. The reading of Trakl that emerges lies between that of a critique of Kraus (Stieg) and a staging of literary fragmentation (Ba"ler). We see instead a meaningful meaningnessless that critics from the 1910s onwards, including Heidegger, have explained by grounding it in the authenticity of the poet. This strategy is read as a version of Aristotelian e-thos.
KEYWORDS: Georg Trakl, Ludwig von Ficker, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Der Brenner, Expressionism
This article will explore how the poetic techniques of Georg Trakl can be understood to relate to the cultural concerns of the 1910s, showing at the same time how the version of poetry that he came to represent - that of literature as a special, and not immediately accessible language for articulating an unacknow- ledged, unknown, or even unknowable truth - continued to be influential all the way through the twentieth century, particularly as it was elaborated by Heidegger in his essays on Trakl in the 1950s. 1 I want to show how this emphatic, modernist model of literature is in fact, despite appearances to the contrary, a version of what could be called 'common sense realism' and that that is a good thing (as opposed to something to be embarrassed about), since the way Trakl contributes to this larger realist project allows us to understand more clearly the questions to which his writing is the poetic answer. To start situating Trakl's poetic endeavours, I want to say a few words, first, about one of Trakl's poetic techniques and,
1 Heidegger discussed Trakl's poetry in lectures delivered in the early 1950s reprinted as 'Die Sprache' and 'Die Sprache im Gedicht' in Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1959), pp. 9-82. Derrida takes up Heidegger's reading of Trakl in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 83-113. For a discussion of Derrida's (unpublished) seminar on Trakl, 'Geschlecht III', see David Farrell Krell, 'Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl', CR: The New Centennial Review, 7, no. 2 (2007), 175-99.
# W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012 DOI: 10. 1179/0078719112Z. 00000000019
328 BEN MORGAN
secondly, about the poet's relation to Expressionism. This will prepare the way for a more detailed account of the milieu in which Trakl's writing found its home around 1912.
I A POETIC TECHNIQUE OF TRAKL'S
In a brief account of a poet's work, it is difficult to give proper attention to individual poems, especially if, as is the case with my argument, the aim is to present the context from which emerged not only Trakl's poetry but also the tools with which it is frequently approached. In order to convey a sense of Trakl's poetic project nevertheless, I want initially to draw attention to one particular device: the shift of focus that many of the later poems turn on and that can be seen by means of a brief comparison of three poems, one from each of Trakl's major collections of poems. The shift that I am particularly interested in is not yet at work in the poem 'Confiteor', which was included in the collection of poems that Trakl put together in 1909 but that was only published posthumously. 2 In this poem, the confessing speaker feels that he has seen through people's everyday behaviour and grasped that it is a badly written but painful play: 'Der Menschheit heldenloses Trauerspiel | Ein schlechtes Stu ? ck, gespielt auf Gra ? bern, Leichen. '3 The speaker is disillusioned, but cannot himself escape the pretence, being instead condemned by some higher force ('ein Machtgebot') to play his own part in the drama: 'Ein Komo ? diant, der seine Rolle spricht, | Gezwungen, voll Verzweiflung - Langeweile! ' (HKA, I, 246). This poem presents us with an alternative view of the world, unmasking everyday communication as artificial. But it doesn't focus on the moment when the shift of perspective itself occurs. The transformation has happened before the poem begins and the poem reports on the painful new vision.
The two other poems I want to consider register a moment of transformation in the poem itself, and one of them explicitly talks about the change in poetic, or metapoetic, terms. Even more important, however, than thematizing the change is the fact that the change goes in an opposite direction in each of the poems. The sonnet 'Verfall', included in the volume of poems Trakl published in 1913, is a slightly modified version of a poem entitled 'Herbst' included in the unpublished 1909 collection. In both versions, the speaker in the sonnet watches birds in the evening sky, following them in his imagination for the duration of the first two quatrains, until the scene changes with a typical volta: 'Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern' (HKA, I, 59). Thereafter, the birds whose flight had been likened positively to 'Pilgerzu ? gen' in the first quatrain are replaced by blue asters chilled by, and fading in, the autumn wind, and likened to children playing ring-a- ring-of-roses and all falling down. In both parts of the sonnet, the speaker sees the natural world through anthropomorphic images. But a shift occurs during the
2 For an overview of Trakl's life, see Walter Methlagl and Eberhard Sauermann, Georg Trakl 1887-1914 (Innsbruck: Forschungsinstitut 'Brenner Archiv', 1995).
3 Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1987), I, p. 246. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation HKA, in the form (HKA, I, 246).
poem, which isn't explained by anything like the 'Machtgebot' of 'Confiteor', but which plunges the speaker into a different world.
The third poem I want to draw on to present my sketch of a recurring technique in Trakl's poetry is taken from Sebastian im Traum, the volume of poems that Trakl had already sent to press in 1914 before he volunteered for active service as a member of the medical corps of the Austrian army in August 1914, but which didn't appear until 1915, a few months after Trakl's death. The poem in question is also autumnal and is entitled 'Herbstseele'. In this poem we are presented with human society in the aggressive form of the cries of hunters and the baying of their hounds: 'Ja ? gerruf und Blutgebell' (HKA, I, 107). But nature is also represented by the harsh cry of the predatory hawk. Yet the prey escapes: 'Bald entgleitet Fisch und Wild' (HKA, I, 107). And although the speaker, writing in the first person plural, talks of a separation from loved ones, a transformation occurs nevertheless: 'Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild' (HKA, I, 107). The closing, fourth strophe of the poem then draws on an explicitly religious vocabulary to describe how human beings can lay their guilt and 'rote Pein' in God's hands.
It might be tempting to construct a biographical narrative around these three poems, one that starts with 'Confiteor', an early poem that registers a sense of dislocation which the poet can't explain, moves on to the poem 'Herbst'/'Verfall' that is taken up from the 1909 collection into the 1913 volume and that begins to reflect on how the shift or dislocation occurs, and then finishes with the redemptive peace of 'Herbstseele' written later in 1913 (HKA, II, 180-81). But this teleology is in fact hard to impose on the poetry. To give two brief examples from poems to which I will be returning later in the argument: the late, prose poem 'Verwandlung des Bo ? sen' was modified by Trakl between its first appearance in the issue of the Innsbruck-based journal Der Brenner of 15 October 1913 and the version included in Sebastian im Traum. The final version added a line which destroyed the very redemption the final paragraph of the first published version had seemed to achieve: 'Dem folgt unverga ? ngliche Nacht' (HKA, I, 98). If, in Sebastian im Traum, the re-writing of 'Verwandlung des Bo ? sen' seems to overturn the optimism of 'Herbstseele', in the earlier Gedichte we can observe the opposite movement. In drafting the final version of the poem 'Psalm', Trakl adds a line which adopts precisely the redemptive perspective he denies himself in other poems: 'Schweigsam u ? ber Scha ? delsta ? tte o ? ffnen sich Gottes goldene Augen' (HKA, I, 56). In the later poems, therefore, it can be said that Trakl focuses consciously on the kind of shift described in 'Verfall' and 'Herbstseele', since it is an element he attends to as he drafts and re-drafts his poems. At the same time, the shift can go in either direction. The line: 'Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild' (HKA, I, 107) that Trakl uses in 'Herbstseele' to describe a shift in a positive direction could actually refer to a shift in either direction. All it says is that the speaker moves from one type of meaningful world to another. It does not commit us to necessarily moving in one direction.
Trakl's poetry could be read as an extended reflection on this shift: on the images by which it can be presented, and the images that might be appropriate to participating in, bringing about, or simply surrendering to the shift. Trakl's poetic world is labile. Redemption is reversible; God's presence is palpable, but sometimes only in its potential withdrawal. At the same time, his world is populated by a recurring set of figures of redemption: the figures of the prey and of
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 329
330 BEN MORGAN
the soul which appear in 'Herbstseele' are examples, but so also are named figures, like Sonja, who refers intertextually to the character of the same name in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or figures, like Elis and Helian, who are as pure and long-suffering as Dostoevsky's Sonja but are of Trakl's invention. It will be part of my argument that these characters are the key to understanding how Trakl's poetry functioned in the 1910s and beyond, creating - albeit unstable - points of identification for readers confronting the awe-inspiring lability of Trakl's poetic world. But to understand this claim, we need first to have seen more of the context from which Trakl's poetry emerged. To this end I will start by setting out the limited sense in which the term 'Expressionism' can be applied to his writing, before moving on to give a positive account of Trakl's relations to his contemporaries and peers.
II TRAKL BEFORE EXPRESSIONISM
Trakl can be called an Expressionist poet for two reasons: first, because ten of his poems were included in the book which retrospectively defined Expressionist poetry, Kurt Pinthus's Menschheitsda ? mmerung (1919); and, secondly, because the two volumes of poems which he prepared for publication in his lifetime, as well as the collection of his poems edited by Karl Ro ? ck immediately after his death, were published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag, a publishing house closely associated with Expressionism as a literary movement. 4 Indeed, Trakl's first volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1913 as No. 6/7 of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', that is to say as part of a collection of texts which the historian of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Wolfram Go ? bel, has called the most important Expressionist series. 5 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' published new work by young writers including Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Kasimir Edschmid, Iwan Goll, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Sternheim and Franz Werfel. Trakl's work thus appeared alongside that of many authors now included in Expressionist collections. But Trakl would not have called himself an Expressionist. Nor indeed would any of the other writers included in the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' in 1913 when Kurt Wolff was first creating the project. 6 From a letter the publisher sent to Trakl on 28 April 1913 explaining his idea, it is clear that Wolff himself was not thinking in terms of a unified literary movement: 'Ich bringe in den na ? chsten Wochen zu billigstem Preise (M 0,80) eine Reihe von Bu ? chern junger Autoren heraus, deren Werke (ohne da" sie selbst irgendwie zu einer gemeinsamen Gruppe oder Clique geho ? ren) das gemeinsam haben, da" sie irgend ein selbststa ? ndiger und starker Ausdruck unserer Zeit sind' (the letter is reprinted in full in HKA, II, 792).
4 The poems included in Menschheitsda ? mmerung were 'De profundis', 'Ruh und Schweigen', 'In den Nachmittag geflu ? stert', 'An den Knaben Elis', 'Elis', 'Helian', 'Der Herbst des Einsamen', 'Abendlied', 'Sebastian im Traum', and 'Gesang des Abgeschiedenen. ' For a discussion of the importance of Kurt Wolff as the publisher of Expressionism, see Wolfram Go ? bel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag 1913-1930: Expressionismus als verlegerische Aufgabe (Frankfurt a. M. : Buchha ? ndler- Vereinigung, 1977).
5 On the publication of Trakl's first volume of poems, see Go ? bel, p. 1377. Go ? bel gives a complete listing of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', pp. 1377-79, and discusses the history of the series, pp. 573-92.
6 Go ? bel, p. 568.
Trakl was one of the writers who, to Wolff, seemed symptomatic of the age. But to understand how Trakl's poetry relates to its literary and historical context it is helpful to forget the labels that have been retrospectively applied, and to see instead how he and his contemporaries positioned his writing. 7 To some of his contemporaries, Trakl's difficult writing, stretching language almost to the point of nonsense, made him appear to be a Futurist. 8 Meanwhile, if Trakl himself adopted any label, he called himself a Christian (if the testimony of Hans Limbach is to be believed). In one of the very few poetological statements he made he described poetry as an - albeit inadequate - form of expiation: 'eine unvollkommene Su ? hne'. 9 However, I do not want to argue that Trakl was a Futurist or a Christian rather than an Expressionist poet. 10 Rather than being limited by the labels people tried out on Trakl at the time, or by what Trakl said, or is thought to have said, about his work, we can look to what he did as a more reliable indicator of the cultural context to which his poetry belongs. For the last two and half years of his life, a period in which much of the poetry for which he is remembered was written, Trakl was actively involved with a group of writers and artists clustered around the Innsbruck bi-weekly journal Der Brenner that had been published by Ludwig von Ficker since 1910. 11 Indeed, he can be said to have become by 1914 the poetic figurehead of the journal. The first of his poems to be published in Der Brenner was 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' in the issue of 1 May 1912. The next poem to be published was 'Psalm', dedicated to Karl Kraus, which appeared in the issue of 1 October 1912. At least one poem by Trakl then appeared in each of the following thirty- eight consecutive issues of Der Brenner from October 1912 until spring 1915, when Ficker released a final 'Jahrbuch' before ceasing publication for the duration of the Great War. The 'Jahrbuch' contained, amongst other things, Trakl's last poems, including 'Grodek', a translation of Kierkegaard's 'Vom Tode' (one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions), Carl Dallago's translation-cum- paraphrase of Lao Tse, and an essay critical of the culture that produced the
7 For a considered account of what Trakl's writing has in common with other writers associated with Expressionism in terms of his use of the 'Reihungsstil' and his treatment of madness, see Maurice Gode ? , 'Trakl et L'expressionisme', Austriaca 65/66 (2007/2008), 115-30.
8 Eberhard Sauermann discusses contemporary reviews of Trakl's poetry in which he is called a Futurist in Eberhard Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913: Zur Produktion, Interpretation und Rezeption des Programms', Sprachkunst, 18 (1987), 181-207 (pp. 192, 195, and 197).
9 '''Ich bin Christ'' -- antwortete Trakl. ' Hans Limbach, 'Begegnung mit Georg Trakl', in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, ed. by Ludwig von Ficker (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), pp. 103-09 (p. 106). The authenticity of Limbach's record has been defended by Walter Methlagl, 'Hans Limbach ''Begegnung mit Georg Trakl''. Zur Quellenkritik', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, 4 (1985), 3-47. Trakl's brief poetological aphorism was first published in Der Brenner, 5 (1915), p. 7. It is reprinted in HKA, I, 463. The most compelling reason for treating Trakl as a Christian writer is that that is how he appeared to his contemporaries, even to those such as Carl Dallago, to whom being a Christian was not a recommendation, as Dallago explained in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker of 19 February 1914. Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1909-1914, ed. by Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1986), pp. 202-03.
10 The study which established the Christian reading of Trakl is Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1954).
11 For a survey of Trakl's key relationships with members of the Brenner circle, see Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl and the Brenner Circle (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 331
332 BEN MORGAN
war by the Kierkegaard translator Theodor Haecker. The issue was read by contemporaries as honouring Trakl more than criticizing the Great War, although Ficker had hurried the issue into print because of the topical nature of Haecker's contribution. 12
If Trakl's poetry formed the burden of the journal's farewell message in 1915, it was no less important after the war. In 1919, it was a quotation from Trakl's 'An die Verstummten' describing the labour of forging a new humanity that served as the peroration of Ficker's programmatic preface to the first issue of the new series of Der Brenner: 'Aber stille blutet in dunkler Ho ? hle stummere Menschheit, | Fu ? gt aus harten Metallen das erlo ? sende Haupt. '13 Trakl's name was invoked alongside those of the three other figures who for Ficker summed up the cultural mission of his journal as 'Wegbereiter' for a future culture in the aftermath of the Great War: Lao Tse, SOren Kierkegaard and Karl Kraus. To understand what Trakl's poetry meant in the 1910s, therefore, we need to reconstruct the cultural project embodied by Der Brenner during the first phase of its publication 1910-1915. 14 This will involve a consideration not only of Der Brenner but also of similar journals of the period, especially Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, for Kraus in particular appeared to the contributors to Der Brenner - including Georg Trakl - as an aesthetic and ethical model.
III THE CULTURAL CONCERNS OF DER BRENNER
The number of Der Brenner which initiated the uninterrupted sequence of issues containing poems by Trakl captures the journal at a moment of transition. The issue in question is the first number of the third year: 1 October 1912. 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' had been published the previous May in the penultimate issue of the second year, a fortnight before the summer break that lasted from June to the end of September. Trakl's poetry had been brought to the attention of Ficker by Robert Mu ? ller, an editor of the avant-garde cultural journal Der Ruf, published by the Akademischer Verband fu ? r Literatur und Musik in Vienna in 1912 and 1913, and bringing together different types of avant-garde culture from the Austrian metropolis: the first issue included contributions by, amongst others, Robert Mu ? ller, Hermann Bahr, Stefan Zweig, Christian Morgenstern, Adolf Loos, Arnold Scho ? nberg and Peter Altenberg; the 1913 issue on the theme 'Krieg' bore a self- portrait by Egon Schiele on the cover. 15 Der Brenner and Der Ruf had similar concerns as critically oriented, cultural journals, and Mu ? ller's recommendation of Trakl to Ficker was part of - ultimately unsuccessful - efforts by the two editors to
12 Eberhard Sauermann, 'Das ''Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915'' und seine Rezeption. Trakl- Verehrung oder Kriegsgegnerschaft? ', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, no. 20 (2001), 35-55.
13 Ludwig von Ficker, 'Vorwort zum Wiederbeginn', Der Brenner, 6 (1919), p. 4. A facsimile edition of the entire run of the journal is available on-line at ,http://corpus1. aac. ac. at/brenner/. [accessed 23 August 2012].
14 For an invaluable introduction to the journal for the period 1910-1915, with a selection of articles, see Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Erika Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne: Die Zeitschrift ''Der Brenner'' 1910-1915 (Salzburg: Haymon, 1990).
15 The five issues of the journal are reprinted as Der Ruf: ein Flugblatt an junge Menschen (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
ally their publications. 16 However, after Ficker met Trakl in May 1912, his interest in his poetry came to be driven by more than just strategic concerns. The whole focus of the journal changed from 1912 to 1915, moving away from a vitalist critique of early twentieth-century urban culture propounded in the essays that Carl Dallago contributed to the journal, to the more religiously-oriented view of a fragile, suffering humanity articulated by the poetry of Trakl and by the translations of works by Kierkegaard that began to appear from May 1914. 17 When, therefore, Der Brenner resumed publication after the summer break in 1912 with the first of the sequence of Trakl publications, a milestone had been reached in the development of the journal.
Trakl's poetry can thus be seen to formulate a model of human fragility that was used, in the pages of Der Brenner from 1912, as a perspective from which to articulate a mild form of social critique. So far so good. Yet to reconstruct Trakl's poetic project it helps to consider not only the new impulses found in the journal with which Trakl's poetry was more directly aligned, such as the turn towards Kierkegaard, but also the wider array of positions associated with Der Brenner. For Trakl shared the concerns and took part in the conversations of the circle, and the poems published in the journal often read as variations on themes that other contributors were also dealing with. 18 Something of the journal's cultural affiliation is registered in the few advertisements it carried. In order to maintain independence, Der Brenner did not include commercial advertisements. 19 Instead, the two-page advertising section at the end of the issue of 1 October 1912 promotes reprints of essays by Dallago, but it also contains advertisements for books by Karl Kraus and for the architectural school about to be opened by Adolf Loos. 20 Both figures were important for the journal because of their critique of empty ornamentation, be it in architecture or in the phrase-making of journalistic style.
4 Indeed, Trakl's first volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1913 as No. 6/7 of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', that is to say as part of a collection of texts which the historian of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Wolfram Go ? bel, has called the most important Expressionist series. 5 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' published new work by young writers including Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Kasimir Edschmid, Iwan Goll, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Sternheim and Franz Werfel. Trakl's work thus appeared alongside that of many authors now included in Expressionist collections. But Trakl would not have called himself an Expressionist. Nor indeed would any of the other writers included in the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag' in 1913 when Kurt Wolff was first creating the project. 6 From a letter the publisher sent to Trakl on 28 April 1913 explaining his idea, it is clear that Wolff himself was not thinking in terms of a unified literary movement: 'Ich bringe in den na ? chsten Wochen zu billigstem Preise (M 0,80) eine Reihe von Bu ? chern junger Autoren heraus, deren Werke (ohne da" sie selbst irgendwie zu einer gemeinsamen Gruppe oder Clique geho ? ren) das gemeinsam haben, da" sie irgend ein selbststa ? ndiger und starker Ausdruck unserer Zeit sind' (the letter is reprinted in full in HKA, II, 792).
4 The poems included in Menschheitsda ? mmerung were 'De profundis', 'Ruh und Schweigen', 'In den Nachmittag geflu ? stert', 'An den Knaben Elis', 'Elis', 'Helian', 'Der Herbst des Einsamen', 'Abendlied', 'Sebastian im Traum', and 'Gesang des Abgeschiedenen. ' For a discussion of the importance of Kurt Wolff as the publisher of Expressionism, see Wolfram Go ? bel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag 1913-1930: Expressionismus als verlegerische Aufgabe (Frankfurt a. M. : Buchha ? ndler- Vereinigung, 1977).
5 On the publication of Trakl's first volume of poems, see Go ? bel, p. 1377. Go ? bel gives a complete listing of the series 'Der Ju ? ngste Tag', pp. 1377-79, and discusses the history of the series, pp. 573-92.
6 Go ? bel, p. 568.
Trakl was one of the writers who, to Wolff, seemed symptomatic of the age. But to understand how Trakl's poetry relates to its literary and historical context it is helpful to forget the labels that have been retrospectively applied, and to see instead how he and his contemporaries positioned his writing. 7 To some of his contemporaries, Trakl's difficult writing, stretching language almost to the point of nonsense, made him appear to be a Futurist. 8 Meanwhile, if Trakl himself adopted any label, he called himself a Christian (if the testimony of Hans Limbach is to be believed). In one of the very few poetological statements he made he described poetry as an - albeit inadequate - form of expiation: 'eine unvollkommene Su ? hne'. 9 However, I do not want to argue that Trakl was a Futurist or a Christian rather than an Expressionist poet. 10 Rather than being limited by the labels people tried out on Trakl at the time, or by what Trakl said, or is thought to have said, about his work, we can look to what he did as a more reliable indicator of the cultural context to which his poetry belongs. For the last two and half years of his life, a period in which much of the poetry for which he is remembered was written, Trakl was actively involved with a group of writers and artists clustered around the Innsbruck bi-weekly journal Der Brenner that had been published by Ludwig von Ficker since 1910. 11 Indeed, he can be said to have become by 1914 the poetic figurehead of the journal. The first of his poems to be published in Der Brenner was 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' in the issue of 1 May 1912. The next poem to be published was 'Psalm', dedicated to Karl Kraus, which appeared in the issue of 1 October 1912. At least one poem by Trakl then appeared in each of the following thirty- eight consecutive issues of Der Brenner from October 1912 until spring 1915, when Ficker released a final 'Jahrbuch' before ceasing publication for the duration of the Great War. The 'Jahrbuch' contained, amongst other things, Trakl's last poems, including 'Grodek', a translation of Kierkegaard's 'Vom Tode' (one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions), Carl Dallago's translation-cum- paraphrase of Lao Tse, and an essay critical of the culture that produced the
7 For a considered account of what Trakl's writing has in common with other writers associated with Expressionism in terms of his use of the 'Reihungsstil' and his treatment of madness, see Maurice Gode ? , 'Trakl et L'expressionisme', Austriaca 65/66 (2007/2008), 115-30.
8 Eberhard Sauermann discusses contemporary reviews of Trakl's poetry in which he is called a Futurist in Eberhard Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913: Zur Produktion, Interpretation und Rezeption des Programms', Sprachkunst, 18 (1987), 181-207 (pp. 192, 195, and 197).
9 '''Ich bin Christ'' -- antwortete Trakl. ' Hans Limbach, 'Begegnung mit Georg Trakl', in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, ed. by Ludwig von Ficker (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), pp. 103-09 (p. 106). The authenticity of Limbach's record has been defended by Walter Methlagl, 'Hans Limbach ''Begegnung mit Georg Trakl''. Zur Quellenkritik', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, 4 (1985), 3-47. Trakl's brief poetological aphorism was first published in Der Brenner, 5 (1915), p. 7. It is reprinted in HKA, I, 463. The most compelling reason for treating Trakl as a Christian writer is that that is how he appeared to his contemporaries, even to those such as Carl Dallago, to whom being a Christian was not a recommendation, as Dallago explained in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker of 19 February 1914. Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1909-1914, ed. by Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1986), pp. 202-03.
10 The study which established the Christian reading of Trakl is Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1954).
11 For a survey of Trakl's key relationships with members of the Brenner circle, see Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl and the Brenner Circle (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 331
332 BEN MORGAN
war by the Kierkegaard translator Theodor Haecker. The issue was read by contemporaries as honouring Trakl more than criticizing the Great War, although Ficker had hurried the issue into print because of the topical nature of Haecker's contribution. 12
If Trakl's poetry formed the burden of the journal's farewell message in 1915, it was no less important after the war. In 1919, it was a quotation from Trakl's 'An die Verstummten' describing the labour of forging a new humanity that served as the peroration of Ficker's programmatic preface to the first issue of the new series of Der Brenner: 'Aber stille blutet in dunkler Ho ? hle stummere Menschheit, | Fu ? gt aus harten Metallen das erlo ? sende Haupt. '13 Trakl's name was invoked alongside those of the three other figures who for Ficker summed up the cultural mission of his journal as 'Wegbereiter' for a future culture in the aftermath of the Great War: Lao Tse, SOren Kierkegaard and Karl Kraus. To understand what Trakl's poetry meant in the 1910s, therefore, we need to reconstruct the cultural project embodied by Der Brenner during the first phase of its publication 1910-1915. 14 This will involve a consideration not only of Der Brenner but also of similar journals of the period, especially Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, for Kraus in particular appeared to the contributors to Der Brenner - including Georg Trakl - as an aesthetic and ethical model.
III THE CULTURAL CONCERNS OF DER BRENNER
The number of Der Brenner which initiated the uninterrupted sequence of issues containing poems by Trakl captures the journal at a moment of transition. The issue in question is the first number of the third year: 1 October 1912. 'Vorstadt im Fo ? hn' had been published the previous May in the penultimate issue of the second year, a fortnight before the summer break that lasted from June to the end of September. Trakl's poetry had been brought to the attention of Ficker by Robert Mu ? ller, an editor of the avant-garde cultural journal Der Ruf, published by the Akademischer Verband fu ? r Literatur und Musik in Vienna in 1912 and 1913, and bringing together different types of avant-garde culture from the Austrian metropolis: the first issue included contributions by, amongst others, Robert Mu ? ller, Hermann Bahr, Stefan Zweig, Christian Morgenstern, Adolf Loos, Arnold Scho ? nberg and Peter Altenberg; the 1913 issue on the theme 'Krieg' bore a self- portrait by Egon Schiele on the cover. 15 Der Brenner and Der Ruf had similar concerns as critically oriented, cultural journals, and Mu ? ller's recommendation of Trakl to Ficker was part of - ultimately unsuccessful - efforts by the two editors to
12 Eberhard Sauermann, 'Das ''Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915'' und seine Rezeption. Trakl- Verehrung oder Kriegsgegnerschaft? ', Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, no. 20 (2001), 35-55.
13 Ludwig von Ficker, 'Vorwort zum Wiederbeginn', Der Brenner, 6 (1919), p. 4. A facsimile edition of the entire run of the journal is available on-line at ,http://corpus1. aac. ac. at/brenner/. [accessed 23 August 2012].
14 For an invaluable introduction to the journal for the period 1910-1915, with a selection of articles, see Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Erika Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne: Die Zeitschrift ''Der Brenner'' 1910-1915 (Salzburg: Haymon, 1990).
15 The five issues of the journal are reprinted as Der Ruf: ein Flugblatt an junge Menschen (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
ally their publications. 16 However, after Ficker met Trakl in May 1912, his interest in his poetry came to be driven by more than just strategic concerns. The whole focus of the journal changed from 1912 to 1915, moving away from a vitalist critique of early twentieth-century urban culture propounded in the essays that Carl Dallago contributed to the journal, to the more religiously-oriented view of a fragile, suffering humanity articulated by the poetry of Trakl and by the translations of works by Kierkegaard that began to appear from May 1914. 17 When, therefore, Der Brenner resumed publication after the summer break in 1912 with the first of the sequence of Trakl publications, a milestone had been reached in the development of the journal.
Trakl's poetry can thus be seen to formulate a model of human fragility that was used, in the pages of Der Brenner from 1912, as a perspective from which to articulate a mild form of social critique. So far so good. Yet to reconstruct Trakl's poetic project it helps to consider not only the new impulses found in the journal with which Trakl's poetry was more directly aligned, such as the turn towards Kierkegaard, but also the wider array of positions associated with Der Brenner. For Trakl shared the concerns and took part in the conversations of the circle, and the poems published in the journal often read as variations on themes that other contributors were also dealing with. 18 Something of the journal's cultural affiliation is registered in the few advertisements it carried. In order to maintain independence, Der Brenner did not include commercial advertisements. 19 Instead, the two-page advertising section at the end of the issue of 1 October 1912 promotes reprints of essays by Dallago, but it also contains advertisements for books by Karl Kraus and for the architectural school about to be opened by Adolf Loos. 20 Both figures were important for the journal because of their critique of empty ornamentation, be it in architecture or in the phrase-making of journalistic style. Ficker would go on to publish brief essays by Loos in Der Brenner. 21 For Kraus, he organized readings in Innsbruck and Munich, but he and other contributors also discussed, praised and emulated Kraus in the pages of the Innsbruck publication from the very outset. Trakl himself not only dedicated his 'Psalm' to Kraus but published a poem with Kraus as its subject, so it will be worth following up the relation between the Brenner circle and Kraus in more detail to show what Trakl and Kraus had in common.
16 Sieglinde Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit: Kontext und Rezeption (Innsbruck: Institut fu ? r Germanistik, 1990), pp. 148-56.
17 'Nicht mehr der heroische Mensch, der die sich ihm feindlich entgegengesetzte Welt als intakte Perso ? nlichkeit u ? berwindet, sondern der Leidende und der am Leiden der Mitwelt Teilnehmende begann fu ? r Ficker seit der Begegnung mit Trakl vorbildhaft zu werden. Dieses neue Menschenbild fand Ficker in den Schriften Kierkegaards beispielhaft vorgezeichnet [. . . ]. ' Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, pp. 173-74.
18 '''Der Brenner'' als Kontext zur Lyrik Georg Trakls', in Alfred Doppler, Die Lyrik Georg Trakls: Beitra ? ge zur poetischen Verfahrensweise und zur Wirkungsgeschichte (Vienna: Bo ? hlau, 1992), 94-103.
19 Klettenhammer and Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne, p. 11.
20 Der Brenner, 4 (1912/1913), pp. 47-48.
21 Adolf Loos, 'Regeln fu ? r den, der in den Bergen baut', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/1914), pp.
40-41 (1 October 1913). Adolf Loos, 'Keramika', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), 224-30 (1 December 1913).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 333
334 BEN MORGAN
Kraus was the editor and, from 1910, sole author of Die Fackel, which he had starting publishing in April 1899, throwing down the gauntlet before a public caught, as he put it, between obstinacy and apathy, between empty phrases and thoughtlessness. 22 Die Fackel counted as a model of enlightened, ethical writing to the men associated with the newer journal Der Brenner. 23 Kraus characterized his approach in a stinging attack he wrote on Stefan Zweig in Die Fackel in 1913, contrasting his own style with the moneyed dilettantism he disapproved of in Zweig: 'Ich habe den Fehler, Halt zu machen bei den Dingen und die Phrasen konsequent zu Ende zu denken. Das ist nicht scho ? n von mir. Das ist ungemu ? tlich fu ? r die Jugend. '24 It was his thinking through the consequences of the use and abuse of language that particularly won him admiration from the Brenner circle.
But how did Kraus's linguistic critique compare to other cultural endeavours of the early twentieth century? Kraus set out the relation as he saw it in an article entitled 'Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie' that he published in Die Fackel in December 1912 lambasting a new generation that was directing its critical energies in the wrong direction. Kraus focuses in particular on the use of language, the status of art in its relation to commercial interests and the press, and attitudes to technology and war. The article seems to have been prompted by a photograph that particularly enraged Kraus showing a cafe ? owner with his wife being praised for their inspired idea of driving their customers home for a fee if the customers required:
Ich sehe zum Beispiel irgendwo ein Bild: ein Ehepaar. Er ein Charakterkopf. Darunter steht - wie eben immer die Tat, die den Mann beru ? hmt gemacht hat, mit einem Schlagwort, gleich unter dem Bild und vor der eigentlichen Biographie, umrissen wird: 'Cafetier Anton Stern, der Besitzer des Wiener Cafe ? Pru ? ckl, und seine Gattin, die in eigenen Autos die Ga ? ste gegen Erlag einer Krone in ihre Wohnungen fu ? hren lassen. ' So hat er ausgesehen, das hat er vollbracht; ein Blick, und man u ? bersieht ein Leben und ein Werk. U ? berall Bild und Wort zur Feier genialer Initiative. 25
Kraus is worried by the attitudes to language and the narrativization of experience that this episode betrays. The caption to the photograph not only reduces a life to a pithy one-liner, but creates a world in which we experience only phrases and advertising slogans. More importantly, it reflects a world in which reporting an event bleeds into promoting the cafe ? in question, erasing the boundary between cultural comment and commerce. Kraus is aware that his readers might think that, in fixing on a random photo in a newspaper and connecting it to wider social changes, he is making a mountain out of a molehill (or, in the German idiom, an 'elephant out of a flea'). But he nevertheless sees the episode as an indicator of how a journalistic language that is essentially the language of advertising is eroding the
22 Die Fackel, Nr. 1 (April 1899), 1: 'einer O ? ffentlichkeit gegenu ? ber, die zwischen Unentwegtheit und Apathie ihr phrasenreiches oder vo ? llig gedankenloses Auskommen findet [. . . ]'.
23 Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, p. 239.
24 Karl Kraus, 'Der Schmock, das Talent und die Familie', Die Fackel, Nr. 366-367 (11 January 1913), 28.
25 Karl Kraus, 'Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie', Die Fackel, Nr. 363-364-365 (12 December 1912), 1-28 (p. 2).
separate sphere of culture. 26 The celebration of war and technology evident in an issue of Der Sturm of June 1912 appears to Kraus as a further symptom of this erasure of intellectual life. Kraus would prefer a younger generation that marched emptily around a candelabrum to the posturing of what in a polemic earlier in the year he disparagingly dismissed as 'Futuristen, Neo-pathetikern, Neoklassizisten und sonstigen Inhabern von Titeln'. 27 Indeed, he would prefer almost anything:
neben den Pathetikern der Maschine, die einem Chauffeur die Pferde ausspannen wollen, und neben den Krafttinterln, die die Technik deshalb dem Ingenium vorziehen, weil sie vor diesem verloren, hinter jener aber, selbst sie, Helden sind. Man kurbelt; das ist so schnell wie schreiben und noch unperso ? nlicher. 28
The younger generation prizes technology because it allows them to cast themselves as heroes, inducing in them a misplaced sense of agency and achievement. A more responsible writing, for Kraus, requires an allergic attention to the abuse of language as set phrase or slogan, requires a thinking of ideas through, and an acknowledgement of the distinction between aesthetic and journalistic language, which nevertheless does not retreat into an aesthetic sphere to avoid engaging with the issue of the day. What we find in Kraus's essays, therefore, is critical engagement with standardized forms of language, and a position on art which combines aesthetic autonomy with ethical responsibility. This situates him between l'art pour l'art on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the celebration of passing movements which he thought irresponsibly collapsed art into journalism.
The contributors to Der Brenner valued the critique of language. But they also prized the experience from which they believed it to be inseparable, explaining Kraus's moral authority in terms of his person, and of a particular sort of experience, which readers must share with Kraus if they are to understand him properly. The result was a mythologization of the figure of Kraus himself in which Trakl also participated.
