The dead
increase
in number at dusk.
Trakl - ‘. . Und Gassen enden schwarz und sonderbar’- Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s
51 Albert Berger, Josef Weinheber 1892-1945. Leben und Werk -- Leben im Werk (Salzburg and Vienna, 1999), pp. 81-82.
52 Josef Weinheber, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. by Friedrich Jenaczek, 5 vols (Salzburg, 1970-96), iv, 617. This edition (= W) is used wherever possible and referred to (by volume and page numbers) in parentheses in the text.
mark elliott 91
greatest Austrian poet],53 and whom he located in a constellation of 'great' Modernist poets with George and Rilke (W iv, 219). 54 Weinheber's most extensive engagement with Trakl occurs in the collection Vereinsamtes Herz [Lonely Heart, 1935] (the title itself evoking a loneliness and melancholy reminiscent of Trakl) which contains a large number of poems written in the early 1920s. Indeed, as Weinheber himself declared in 1938, his most intensive reading of Trakl occurred in these years: 'Mit dreissig [i. e. in 1922] schwor ich auf Trakl als auf den einzigen Lyriker der Deutschen' [at thirty I swore by Trakl as the only German poet] (W iv, 594). There are clear Trakl resonances here, for example, in 'Spa? therbst' [Late Autumn, 1919] (W ii, 256-57) and 'Versunkene Stadt' [Sunken City, 1923] (W ii, 232), as Albert Berger has already demonstrated. 55 Of these early poems, 'Friedhof im Schnee' [Cemetery in the Snow, 1922, but unpublished in Weinheber's lifetime] (W iii, 264-65) reveals the most significant dialogue with Trakl's poetry. Berger draws a brief comparison with Trakl's 'Psalm: 2. Fassung', where Weinheber's use of the noun 'Scha? delsta? tte' [place of skulls] is the most substantial link. The graphic imagery of those killed in battle and clear textual similarities, however, again more convincingly bring to mind Trakl's 'Grodek'. For example, Weinheber's 'eingebrochene Brust des Erschlagnen' [smashed chest of the slain] echoes Trakl's 'zerbrochene Mu? nder' [shattered mouths], and the line 'Es ordnen sich in weissen Kleidern | zum Reigen die Ungebornen' [clothed in white the unborn arrange themselves for the roundel] evokes an image of the innocent unborn that recalls the closing image of 'Grodek'.
This reception of Trakl can, however, be traced into the 1930s with the poem 'Kirchenplatz in Tarascon' [Church Square in Tarascon, 1931] from Vereinsamtes Herz:
. . Und Gassen enden schwarz und sonderbar, und tra? ge Katzen schleichen krumm und schmal, und dieser Turm steht an die tausend Jahr,
und schwarzer Ba? ume Astwerk u? berbaut
mit Schatten wirr die Mauerfluchten kahl,
wo in den Winkeln sich der Unrat staut,
und schwarze Frauen mit Gesichtern fahl betreten ohne Hast und ohne Laut
den toten Platz und schwinden im Portal . . (W ii, 247)
[And streets end black and strange, and languid cats creep hunched and thin, and
this tower has stood almost a thousand years and overbuilt with the branches of
53 Weinheber, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. by Josef Nadler and Hedwig Weinheber, 5 vols (Salzburg, 1953-56), v, 396 (7 January 1939). The letters do not appear in the more recent Jenaczek edition. 54 Weinheber's reception of George and Rilke is discussed in Elliott, 'Beyond Left and Right',
pp. 917-19 and 924.
55 Berger discusses the earlier versions of these poems from the 1920 collection Der einsame
Mensch [The Lonely Man] (Berger, Josef Weinheber, pp. 87-90).
92 Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s
black trees tangled with shadow the rowed walls bare, where in the corners rubbish collects, and black women with ashen faces without haste or sound enter the dead square and vanish in the archway. ]
The opening line is a 'Kontrafaktur' of the famous line from 'Grodek': 'Alle Strassen mu? nden in schwarze Verwesung' [All roads flow into black decay] (T i, 167). Weinheber's narrow streets lead into blackness (and implicitly death) as well, but the adjective 'sonderbar' suggests an eeriness less graphic than Trakl's image of death. The scenes evoked in the poem are associatively linked as marked by the repetition of the conjunction 'und', an enumerative style particularly common in Trakl's earlier work, for example, 'Die Junge Magd' [The Young Maid] (T i, 12-15). The colour 'black' (and with it the leitmotif of death) recurs twice more, and the hushed sibilant sound of 'schwarz' resonates in all but the penultimate line, where the ghostly silence implicit in the poem is explicitly referred to, as the women move 'ohne Laut'. The motif of death culminates in the corpselike pallor of the 'black' women ('fahl' is an adjective used by Trakl some fifteen times in his work) and the image of the 'dead square' -- the ultimate destination of Weinheber's 'Gassen'. These intratextual echoes of sound and colour act like a refrain and structure the poem, a technique that was central to Trakl's poetry, where such internal resonances gave coherence to apparently unlinked strings of words and images. Weinheber uses one of Trakl's most powerful lines of poetry as the starting-point for his own melancholic reflection on the death embedded in Tarascon's mythical history. 56
Stephan Hermlin was a Marxist exiled all over Europe and the Middle East from 1936, who returned to Germany in 1945 and eventually settled in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Berlin in 1947. He significantly engaged with an array of traditions, as Wolfgang Ertl's study reveals: Ho? lderlin, the French Surrealists (such as Apollinaire), the nature poetry of Loerke and Lehmann, and the Grossstadtdichtung of Naturalism and Expressionism, particularly that of Heym. 57 Trakl receives only a very brief acknowledgement from Ertl. 58 Hermlin, however, claimed a strong personal affinity with Trakl, stating retrospectively that his 'name was, with few others, always central to my thinking and feeling, even though life has led me in a direction that is appar- ently far removed from the world expressed in his poetry'. 59 The poet indeed reworked a number of themes and motifs borrowed from Trakl's work in his earliest collection Zwo? lf Balladen von den grossen Sta? dten [Twelve Ballads of the Big
56 Tarascon in Provence is famous for the legend of the Tarasque, a mythical amphibious mon- ster (daughter of Leviathan) who terrorized and killed the inhabitants of the village before herself being killed by Saint Martha. A church was then built in Martha's honour, possibly the one to which Weinheber refers here.
57 Wolfgang Ertl, Stephan Hermlin und die Tradition (Bern, 1977).
58 Ibid. , p. 123.
59 In Antworten auf Georg Trakl, ed. by Finck and Weichselbaum, p. 71. See also the essay 'Georg
Trakl', in Stephan Hermlin, Lektu? re. U? ber Autoren, Bu? cher, Leser (Berlin, 1997), pp. 197-201.
mark elliott 93
Cities, 1944]. The leitmotifs of dream, sickness, death and loneliness, as well as biblical imagery and dystopian scenes of nature, are characteristic of Trakl, and the desolate cityscapes recall Heym. Hermlin's world is 'verloren', 'vergessen', 'verdorrt', 'verflucht' [lost, forgotten, withered, damned], the bound prefix 'ver-' often used by Trakl to convey a melancholic sense of loss and passing. The poem 'Die toten Sta? dte' [The Dead Cities] from 1940-41, in particular, integrates into its depiction of the destruction of the 'city' by war a complex of themes that are characteristic of Trakl, as the sixth strophe illustrates:
Senkt sich des Abends Ku? hle Auf die traumsu? chtige Welt, [. . . ]
Geistert die Klage der Ha? hne In der Fiebernden Ruh, Fliegen die Ungebornen
Dem Asphodelenhain zu. 60
[When the evening's coolness sinks onto the dream-addicted world, when the cock- erels' ghostly laments echo in the quiet of those ill with fever, the unborn fly towards the Fields of Asphodel. ]
The tone of the poem is characteristic of Trakl: dusk, a dream-like or fevered reality that seems on the threshold of consciousness is typical of Sebastian im Traum [Sebastian Dreaming, 1914], the adjective 'traumsu? chtig' is used by Trakl in noun form in the poem 'Unterwegs: 1. Fassung' [Travelling: 1st Version] (T i, 293), and the ominous biblical motif of the crowing cockerel. The refer- ence to the 'Ungebornen' alludes to the closing image of Trakl's 'Grodek'. However, where Trakl looks ambiguously to the future generations, Hermlin's vision is far more despairing, as the unborn are sent to their deaths in the Fields of Asphodel -- the common man's resting place in the Greek underworld.
The eighth strophe again recalls Trakl's line that begins 'Alle Strassen mu? nden . . . ', as Hermlin's streets lead explicitly into a powerful image of death:
Zickzack gleich Flederma? usen Falln wir in Strassen hinein: Todes murmelnde Schleusen, Tra? ume von Blut und Wein.
[Zigzag like bats we drop into streets, into murmuring floodgates of death, dreams of blood and wine. ]
The colon accentuates the moment of entering the street and creates, as it were, a visual river-mouth that flows into the noun 'death' in the following line. The inversion of the genitive subject ('Todes') makes the encounter with
60 Stephan Hermlin, Gedichte und Nachdichtungen (Berlin and Weimar, 1990), p. 19.
94 Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s
death all the more abrupt and unexpected. The noun 'Schleuse' evokes the vivid image of a street swimming with death as does Trakl's use of the verb 'mu? nden' [flow into]. The placement of the 'gate' image at the end of the line again leaves the reader on a threshold, the movement of 'hinein' has yet to be fulfilled. This occurs in the next line where the scene shifts from the brutal reality of the war-torn city into a sinister dream world of 'Blut und Wein'. This is a parody of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and an intertextual echo of the motif that can be found throughout Trakl's work (it occurs some thirteen times) and famously in the title of Ho? lderlin's poem 'Brod und Wein' [Bread and Wine].
Metapoetic references to earlier poets and the theme of imitation in Zwo? lf Balladen reflect Hermlin's highly developed engagement with tradition. For example, he envisages himself as part of a 'Poeten Bru? derschaft' [brother- hood of poets], similar to Weinheber's 'Bruderexistenzen' above, elsewhere naming 'Percy, Friedrich, Wolfgang'. 61 He equally parodies the classical motif of 'virgin soil' (a metaphor for originality dating back as far as Horace): 'O wie ist die Wanderung weit | Auf spurenlosem Pfad! ' [O how far the journey is on untrodden paths! ]. 62 Hermlin's theoretical stance on the rela- tionship between poet and tradition is clearly evident in a speech given later in 1964: 'Er [der Schriftsteller] arbeitet unweigerlich in einem Universum, das von den Ausstrahlungen und Spuren all seiner Vorga? nger und seiner Zeitgenossen erfu? llt ist' [The writer unavoidably works in a universe that is filled with the emissions and traces of all his predecessors and contemporar- ies]. 63 This conception of tradition clearly suggests a 'simultaneous order', but the poet's engagement with the past is 'unavoidable', which recalls the inevitability of the artists' relationship with the past in Hofmannsthal. This makes the dialogue with tradition more passive than Eliot's model, whereby tradition can only be obtained 'by great labour', and reflects Hermlin's more subtle use of allusion that invites recognition by the reader, in contrast to the more conspicuous use of montage in Eliot's work.
Karl Krolow, one of Scha? fer's younger generation of 'non-National Socialist' writers, critically explored his own relationship with his poetic forefathers retrospectively in the essay 'Literarische Vorbilder' [Literary Exempla, 1968]: 'man [ko? nne] sich literarische Vorbilder nicht aussuchen [. . . ], wie man sich auch literarische Tradition nicht aussuchen kann. Man findet sie vor, diese grosse, nicht abreissende Entwicklungskette, in die man sich einfu? gen wird, der man nicht entrinnen kann, die einen bei der eigenen Arbeit einholt, wie sie vor Beginn der eigenen Arbeit da war' [you cannot
61 Ibid. , pp. 28 and 58. Hermlin is referring here to Shelley, Ho? lderlin and Mozart (see p. 389).
62 Ibid. , p. 16. See also Horace, Epistles, ed. by Roland Mayer, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1989-94), i, 84.
63 Hermlin, 'Zu einem Kolloquium', in his Lektu? re. 1960-1971 (Berlin and Weimar, 1973), pp. 253-59 (p. 257).
mark elliott 95
choose your literary influences, just as you cannot choose literary tradition. You come across it, this big indestructible chain of development, which you add yourself to, which you cannot escape, which you acquire for your own work, just as it was there before you started your own work]. 64 Krolow's 'chain of development' seems rigidly linear and in tension with his own more dynamic concepts of a 'Kraftfeld von Reizungen' [forcefield of attractions] and an 'Ausstrahlungsbereich' [radiation zone] (recalling Hermlin's 'emis- sions' above) elsewhere in the essay. 65 There is, however, a logic to Krolow's apparent conflict of ideas. On the one hand, the course of history is linear, an indestructible chain governed by the second law of thermodynamics. The moment of creation, on the other hand, whereby the poet is added to this historical order, can be conditioned by 'simultaneity', by the presence of the past. Krolow's model is, like Hermlin's, more passive than Eliot's, suggesting again that literary dialogue is more subtly manifest.
There have been a number of studies on the interface with tradition in Krolow's work, but there is almost no mention of Trakl, the focus falling rather on Rilke, Lehmann and Heym. 66 According to Rolf Paulus, however, Krolow read Trakl extensively in 1934 and 1935. 67 Indeed, an informed reading of Trakl's work is clearly evident in Krolow's article 'Zur Gegenwartslyrik' [On Contemporary Poetry, 1942] which identifies intertextual echoes of Trakl in a number of contemporary poets, including the Austrian writer Hermann Stu? ppack. 68 Krolow's poetry of this period equally reveals active dialogue with Trakl's work. The poem 'In der Fremde' [In Foreign Parts] from 1944 shows marked reception of images and themes central to Trakl's work:
In mein vom Traum verwu? stetes Gesicht. Geist des Mariengarns umspinnt es dicht. Das blaue Mohnkorn ist mit ihm verbu? ndet, Das mu? de macht und in den Schla? fen sticht. [. . . ]
Laut pocht das Herz im Hals aus kalter Grube. Die Toten nehmen in der Da? mmrung zu.
Sie schweben -- Bast und Ba? rlapp in den Haaren. 69
64 Karl Krolow, Ein Gedicht entsteht. Selbstdeutungen, Interpretationen, Aufsa? tze (Frankfurt a. M. , 1973), pp. 101-09 (p. 101).
65 Ibid. , p. 103.
66 See Artur Ru? mmler, Die Entwicklung der Metaphorik in der Lyrik Karl Krolows (1942-1962). Die Beziehung zu deutschen, franzo? sischen und spanischen Lyrikern (Frankfurt a. M. , 1972), and Jong Ho Pee, Karl Krolow und die lyrische Tradition. Ironie und Selbstreflexion (Cologne, 1991).
67 Rolf Paulus, Lyrik und Poetik Karl Krolows 1940-1970. Produktionsa? sthetische, poetologische und interpretatorische Hauptaspekte seines 'offenen Gedichts'. Mit einer bibliographischen Dokumentation der Vero? ffentlichungen Karl Krolows (Lyrik, Prosa, Aufsa? tze, Rezensionen, U? bersetzungen) (Bonn, 1980), p. 285.
68 Krolow, 'Zur Gegenwartslyrik', Das innere Reich, 10/ii (1943), 165-97 (pp. 190-91). There is further evidence of Krolow's 'learned' tendency towards criticism in, for example, his 'Der Lyriker als Kritiker', Der Literat, 7/ii (1965), 28-29.
69 Krolow, Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt a. M. , 1965- ), i, 7-8.
96 Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s
[In my dream-ravaged face. The gossamer's spirit enwraps it tightly. The blue poppy seed is its ally, bringing tiredness and throbbing temples. The heart beats loudly in the throat from the cold grave.
The dead increase in number at dusk. They float -- bark and moss in their hair. ]
The combination of the dreamlike and twilit reality, and the equation of autumn with decay and death, together with explicit textual allusions, are very reminiscent of Trakl. The most striking similarity is the unusual image of the 'dream-ravaged face', an intertextual reworking of Trakl's 'wu? stes Traumgesicht' [desolate dream-face] (T i, 246) from the early poem 'Confiteor'. The motif of the 'poppy' here (as a sleep-inducing narcotic) recurs throughout Trakl's Sebastian im Traum, and the association of sleep with 'Schla? fen' -- itself an implicit visual word-play ('Schla? fe' / 'schlafen') -- echoes Trakl's use of the 'temple' image, where it is the site of sleep, fever and often death, as in, for example, the 'schwarzer Tau' [black dew] that forms on Elis's temples (T i, 84). The theme of death itself is introduced with the image of the 'cold grave', followed immediately by the explicit reference to 'die Toten'. Krolow plays vividly here with an image of the dead leaves of autumn and of zombie-like figures risen from the grave, bark and moss still clinging in their hair.
Trakl's voice resounds in the poetry written in the 1930s and 40s, with melancholic dreamscapes, evocations of death, and the interplay between autumn (as the death of nature) and the violence of war central to 'Grodek'. The poet was clearly a literary model of great importance for writers in the period. The reception of Trakl (and specifically of Trakl within an implicit canon of Modernist poets, alongside George and Rilke) demonstrates a significant historical continuity with the poetry of the pre-1930 period that questions the legitimacy of supposedly 'restorative' aesthetic (1930) and politi- cal (1933) period boundaries. This active reception process has provided a snapshot view that reveals a coherence of discourse extending beyond the political and geographical fragmentation caused by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. What is more, the intertextual dialogue with Trakl that can be discerned in the poetry of this period cannot adequately be understood in terms of mere 'Orientierungsversuche' [stylistic experimentations] on the part of young poets. 70 These literary echoes rather invite recognition, and suggest a stylized engagement with tradition that can be most productively understood in the rhetorical tradition of the 'learned' poet. The conscious or unconscious adaptation of existing poetic models was more subtle and dynamic than Scha? fer's rigid model of aesthetic conservatism, and was theo- retically vindicated by poets' individual concepts of the nexus between poet and the 'simultaneous order' of tradition. Adler appositely locates Steiner's methods of intertextuality within the context of a Janus-faced conception of Modernism derived from Robert Alter, who characterizes Kafka, Benjamin
70 Scha? fer, Das gespaltene Bewusstsein, p. 42.
mark elliott 97
and Scholem as 'modernists with their faces turned toward the backward vista of tradition'. 71 This vivid image encapsulates the 'historical sense' manifest in Hermlin's 'Ausstrahlungen' or Weinheber's 'Bruderexistenzen'.
The extent to which Eliot, in particular, acted as a role model for the aspiring poeta doctus in Germany and Austria in the post-1930 period is a significant intercultural reception process that has yet to be explored. Marie Luise Kaschnitz, another of Scha? fer's younger generation of writers, retro- spectively confirmed the impact of foreign literature and of Eliot above all on German writers in the 1920s and 30s: 'between the wars one tended to look over the border in Germany, and so I got to know Eliot's Waste Land in the 1920s'. 72 Eliot's influence on German poets after 1930 could uncover another important diachronic continuity with the pre-1930 period and further help repair the existing gulf between Modernism on the one side and the 'Stunde Null' [Zero Hour] on the other.
71 Robert Alter, Necessary Angels. Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 67; quoted in Jeremy Adler, '"The Step Swings Away" and other poems by Franz Baermann Steiner', Comparative Literature, 16 (1994), 139-68 (p. 147).
72 Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Christian Bu? ttrich and Norbert Miller, 7 vols (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig, 1981-89), vii, 706.
