No More Learning

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. Thus, in the second-ever issue of the journal, published on 15 June 1910, Ficker published a brief article entitled 'Karl Kraus' in which he insisted: 'da" na ? mlich dieses publizistische Pha ? nomen, das Karl Kraus hei"t, nicht zu erlesen, nur zu erleben ist, indem es eine geistige Bekanntschaft vermittelt, die man erst tief erlitten haben mu", ehe man das Recht hat, sich ihrer zu erfreuen'. 29 The intertwining of Kraus's linguistic critique with his moral experience persisted in the articles that appeared on the editor of Die Fackel with titles such as 'Karl Kraus, der Mensch', or 'Karl Kraus als Erzieher' (playing on the title of Nietzsche's
26 The origin of this tendency can, for Kraus, be traced back to Heine: 'Ohne Heine kein Feuilleton. ' Karl Kraus, 'Heine und die Folgen', Die Fackel, Nr. 329-330 (31 August 1911), 7. For an account of the critique of contemporary journalism that Kraus develops through his reading of Heine, see Anthony Phelan, Reading Heirich Heine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3-13.
27 Die Fackel, Nr. 351-352-353 (21 June 1912), 53.
28 Kraus, 'Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie', p. 27.
29 Fortunat [5Ludwig von Ficker], 'Karl Kraus', Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 46-48 (p. 48).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 335
336 BEN MORGAN
third 'untimely meditation' Schopenhauer als Erzieher). 30 In 'Karl Kraus, der Mensch', Carl Dallago presents Kraus as a mythical Siegfried, whose confronta- tion with the world has hardened his exterior, as Siegfried was made invincible by the blood of the dragon he slayed: 'Kraus ist hart geworden. Alle Grausamkeiten unsrer Zeit traten auf sein Inneres. Die Unkultur einer ganzen Gro"stadt trampelte auf ihm herum. Es machte seine Gu ? te zuletzt wohl ho ? rnern wie das Drachenblut die Haut Siegfrieds. '31 Later in the essay, this Viennese Siegfried is hailed as a creative warrior ('Auch Kraus ist scho ? pferischer Krieger') and compared to Napoleon. 32 An admiration for Kraus's writing, and linguistic critique is thus inseparable from a certain mythologizing of his person. In a similar vein, in 'Karl Kraus als Erzieher', Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich views Kraus as the conscience of Austrian culture, or of what he hyperbolically terms 'the world': 'In der Tat: nicht allein dem Geschehnis gegenu ? ber, das seine edle Empfindsamkeit herausfordert, waltet sein ethisches Pathos; auch gegen die Sprache selbst, in welcher er die Herausforderung beantwortet, zeigt er sich von einer Gewissenhaftigkeit, die vor ihm unbekannt gewesen ist. Karl Kraus wirkt als das Gewissen der Welt, die unter ihm lebt. '33 Kraus's writing and Kraus's person are here once again collapsed into each other, and the amalgam is said to be policing language as such.
Trakl shared this admiration for Kraus, and, indeed, as Alfred Doppler has pointed out, he uses terms similar to those in which Dallago and Heinrich express their praise for the editor of Die Fackel in a short aphorism that appeared in the Brenner of 15 June 1913 as his contribution to the 'Rundfrage u ? ber Karl Kraus' organized and published by the journal in response to an article attacking Kraus which was printed in the Munich-based magazine Zeit im Bild. 34 Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind and many other contemporary figures contributed their own short defences of Kraus. Wedekind regretted that Kraus did not put his talents to use on the stage; Mann praised him whilst also judiciously differentiating between his own concerns as an artist and those of Kraus the polemical anti-journalist. 35 Trakl's response, as it was printed in the journal, was as follows:
Georg Trakl:
Karl Kraus: wei"er Hohepriester der Wahrheit,
Kristallne Stimme, in der Gottes eisiger Odem wohnt,
Zu ? rnender Magier,
Dem unter schwarzem Mantel der blaue Panzer des Kriegers klirrt. 36
30 Carl Dallago, 'Karl Kraus, der Mensch', Der Brenner, 2 (1911/12), 871-94 (15 May 1912); Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich, 'Karl Kraus als Erzieher', Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 373-85 (1 February 1913).
31 Dallago, 'Karl Kraus, der Mensch', p. 874.
32 Dallago, 'Karl Kraus, der Mensch', pp. 882-83.
33 Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich, 'Karl Kraus als Erzieher', p. 378.
34 '''Der Brenner'' als Kontext zur Lyrik Georg Trakls', in Doppler, pp. 97-98. Doppler
points out the parallels between Trakl's formulations and those of Dallago and Heinrich but does not consider how Trakl changes them by compressing them in his poem.
35 'Rundfrage u ? ber Karl Kraus', Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 839-40. 36 Ibid. , p. 840.
The poem was then taken up in Sebastian im Traum. The later version makes the words 'Karl Kraus' the title of the poem, and changes an epithet in the final line: 'unter schwarzem Mantel' becomes 'unter flammendem Mantel' (HKA, I, 123). The poem consists in an apostrophe to a figure described as priest, magician and warrior (like Dallago's Siegfried or Napoleon), whose attributes are whiteness, a crystalline voice, wrath, a black or flaming mantle and a blue suit of armour (hardening his exterior, as the dragon's blood did for Dallago's Siegfried-Kraus; the Man in Kokoschka's Mo ? rder Hoffnung der Frauen (1908/1910) is similarly described as 'blaugepanzert'). 37 The stakes are set very high: the figure is a high priest of Truth, and his voice is inhabited by God. At the same time, the figure does nothing in particular in the poem. Rather, the text performatively summons the figure up: creates him by its declarations and links the figure to Kraus through the occasion (in the 'Rundfrage' edition of Der Brenner) or through the title (in Sebastian im Traum).
IV MEANINGFUL MEANINGLESSNESS: TRAKL'S POETIC METHOD
We can now return to Trakl's poetic method to analyse it in more detail and so explore further how it engaged with the concerns of his peers and associates. For Dallago and Heinrich, Kraus becomes a mythological or rhetorical figure (Siegfried, Napoleon, or the embodiment of a personified Conscience). For Trakl, too, he is mythologized, but the invocation is not merely hyperbolic but excessive even to the point of meaninglessness. The images of Siegfried and Napoleon reinforce each other as aspects of an underlying warrior archetype. But the epithets used by Trakl are not so easily subsumable: priest, magician, warrior; whiteness, crystal, wrath, do not straightforwardly combine. Indeed, the change from a 'black' to a 'flaming' mantel might even be explained by the fact that wrath and blackness fit too easily, as do white and black as simple opposites. Despite the changes, moving the poem further from immediately comprehensible oppositions, the poem is nevertheless evocative. It presents a moral authority that is incontrovertible and embodied in a real person (so part of this world), but at the same time, the language challenges the tropes available for domesticating that authority: Kraus is not simply a hero.
Gerald Stieg has argued that the poem is striking because of the way it differs in attitude from other straightforwardly adulatory responses to Kraus in the 'Rundfrage'. Indeed, for Stieg, the poem pre-empts the critical line that the Brenner circle will come to take on Kraus in the 1920s. 38 I will in the end be disagreeing with Stieg, but it is useful to follow his lead and think a little more about other responses to Kraus published in the 'Rundfrage' and elsewhere. As we have seen, both Wedekind and Mann had a sense of a realm in relation to which Kraus's project could be understood: theatre, in the case of Wedekind, or art, in the case of Mann. They knew how to deal with Kraus, insofar as they could measure his authority by their preferred standard. Scho ? nberg's response to the
37 Oskar Kokoschka, Schriften 1907-1955, ed. by Hans Maria Wingler (Munich: Langen Mu ? ller, 1956), pp. 137-51 (p. 141).
38 'Karl Kraus und Georg Trakl', in Gerald Stieg, Der Brenner und Die Fackel: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Karl Kraus (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1976), pp. 261-71 (pp. 269-70).
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 337
338 BEN MORGAN
'Rundfrage', in contrast, is more emphatic but less secure. Here the issue seems to be precisely that it was hard not simply to imitate Kraus: 'Ich habe von Ihnen [Kraus] vielleicht mehr gelernt, als man lernen darf, wenn man noch selbsta ? ndig bleiben will. '39 Mann and Wedekind can avoid being overwhelmed by Kraus, or the Krausian ethical project, because they know how to situate it culturally. Scho ? nberg lacks an equivalent sovereignty. But that need not be seen as a problem. In a note written almost twenty years later, but thinking about the influence of Kraus on his intellectual development, Wittgenstein similarly abandons the claim to independence. Kraus, alongside other figures like Loos, Russell, Frege, is one of the writers in relation to whom Wittgenstein's own thought was simply reproduktiv. The terms in which Wittgenstein then explains to himself what he contributes despite this intellectual recycling are relevant to an understanding of Trakl's poetic project. Wittgenstein concludes: 'Was ich erfinde sind neue Gleichnisse. '40
To contemporaries, it seems, Kraus, and the ethical project he represented were a force to be reckoned with. If his authority could not be conceptually contained, it demanded simply to be emulated. Wittgenstein's response, as he reflected in the 1930s, was to find a way of inventing new images with which the ethical enterprise to which he was committed could be furthered. In contrast, Trakl could be said not to have invented new images but to stage the failure of existing literary idioms. Tropes and topoi do not combine in Trakl's text, as Siegfried and Napoleon can join to conjure the ultimate warrior of the spirit. The figures of the priest, magician, and warrior gesture towards an authority that cannot directly be invoked, but is rather experienced through the failure of the images to represent it. Kraus's power speaks through, and precisely because of, the equivocations of the poem. Or, to put it another way: Trakl's Kraus poem evokes a powerful idea of human experience, but one which doesn't settle into a easily identifiable figure.
Here we can return to Stieg's reading which copes with the challenge of Trakl's poem by downplaying any conflict between images and claiming that the magician represents a critique of the means used by the priest-warrior in his service of the truth. 41 Stieg has been questioned on philological and biographical grounds. 42 But more important in relation to the view of Trakl that I am presenting here is that Stieg's reading harmonizes the tensions of the poem, arranging them to form a narrative, in this case, of critique. Moritz Ba"ler has taken issue with this sort of approach to Trakl. In a reading of the prose poem 'Verwandlung des Bo ? sen', he argues that Trakl's poetry positively undermines any attempt to generate from it recognizable situations, characters or narratives. The main semantic unit of the
39 'Rundfrage u ? ber Karl Kraus', p. 843.
40 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright, Heikki Nyman, and Alois Pichler, trans. by Peter Winch, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 16 (MS 154 15v: 1931).
41 'Die wei"e Magie ist kein Weg zur Wahrheit. ' Stieg, Der Brenner und Die Fackel, p. 269.
42 Stieg's reading depends on a decoding of Trakl's colour scheme which ignores the change
from 'black' to 'flaming' in the revision of the poem for Sebastian im Traum. See Sigurd Paul Scheichl's review of Stieg's book, Sprachkunst, 8 (1977), 144-47. Doppler (p. 98) argues that the critique of Kraus Stieg finds was simply not yet on the agenda for the Brenner circle in 1913, Trakl included.
poem, for Ba"ler, is not the sentence or even the phrase but individual words, which seem luminous because of the way Trakl's dictions draw on existing traditions: Symbolist and Romantic poetry and the language of the Bible. 43
Ba"ler's argument draws attention to aspects of Trakl's poetic technique that Stieg's rationalizing account overlooks. However, I would not go so far as Ba"ler in insisting on the complete disintegration of the poem into a luminous literariness. 44 While the sense of a literary tradition to which he is responding is indeed an important aspect of the poetry, Trakl did something more than staging the impossibility of literary meaning. To his contemporaries, his poems also contained something positive. This is most succinctly expressed in the comment Wittgenstein recorded in his diary on being sent offprints of Trakl's poems 'Helian' and 'Kaspar Hauser Lied' by Ficker in November 1914. 45 On 24 November 1914, Wittgenstein noted: 'Ficker sandte mir heute Gedichte des armen Trakl, die ich fu ? r genial halte ohne sie zu verstehen. Sie taten mir wohl. Gott mit mir. '46 Wittgenstein's comments could perhaps be read as a contemporary confirmation of the reading Ba"ler elaborated eighty years later. The poems convey an aesthetic aura (they are recognized as 'genial') but are incomprehensible: a case of luminous literariness if ever there was one. However, this account omits Wittgenstein's final comments: 'Sie taten mir wohl. Gott mit mir. ' The poems provoke in Wittgenstein a sense of metaphysical comfort. Now, it turns out they have this positive effect only if Wittgenstein's own work is going well. When he was sent a copy of Sebastian im Traum in February 1915, and his own flow of inspiration had dried up, Wittgenstein felt only that he had no space in his head for other people's thoughts, and he noted, without the same sense of involvement, that the poems are 'probably very good', but did not record the same emotional effect as in November of the previous year. 47 Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's record of the experience of reading Trakl as, as it were, a sympathetic onlooker of his literary endeavours in the 1910s, suggests that the poems did something to readers which is neither the clearly articulated critique of rival cultural positions found by Stieg nor the equally unequivocal questioning of meaning uncovered by Ba"ler. The effect of the poems lay somewhere between these two readings. They were, in other words, an inspiring or invigorating form of nonsense.
Wittgenstein was not the only contemporary to react to Trakl's poems in this way. Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich is the author of the first published response to Trakl's poetry, published as his second 'Brief aus der Abgeschiedenheit' in Der
43 Moritz Ba"ler, 'Wie Trakls Verwandlung des Bo ? sen gemacht ist', in Gedichte von Georg Trakl, ed. by Hans-Georg Kemper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), pp. 121-41.
44 Hanna Klessinger develops a similar critique of Ba"ler's approach, seeing in Trakl's poetry a literary response to the ethical problems of the society he lived in. Hanna Klessinger, Krisis der Moderne: Georg Trakl im intertextuellen Dialog mit Nietzsche, Dostojewskij, Ho ? lderlin und Novalis (Wu ? rzburg: Ergon, 2007).
45 The information as to which poems Wittgenstein was sent is derived from the editorial material accompanying the publication of Ficker's correspondence of November 1914: Ficker, Briefwechsel 1914-1925, ed. Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Haymon, 1988), p. 468.
46 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright and Walter Methlagl (Salzburg: Otto Mu ? ller, 1969), p. 15.
47 Cf. letter to Ficker, 9 February 1915; and Wittgenstein's diary entry of 8 February 1915, in Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, p. 26.
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 339
340 BEN MORGAN
Brenner in March 1913. 48 Like Wittgenstein, Heinrich is responding to the poem 'Helian'. He contrasts Trakl's poetry with easily consumable verse that poses no emotional challenge for the reader: 'hu ? bsche, glatte, wohlgereimte Sachen gleich Pillen [. . . ], die man nach dem Essen und vorm Einschlafen auf dem Kanapee zu sich nehmen kann'. 49 He looks forward to an era when not only most of what people read, but most of what they do will have changed radically enough for them to understand what Trakl has communicated in 'Helian': 'Helian hat Zeit, bis dahin und noch la ? nger. '50 Nonsense in the present but meaning in or for a possible future is also what Josef Anton Steuer heard when he attended the reading that Trakl performed of 'Helian' and other poems in Innsbruck in December 1913. The review he published in the Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger on 13 December 1913 is worth quoting at some length, even though it is readily accessible in the Historisch- Kritische Ausgabe of Trakl's poems (HKA, II, 718-20), because it offers a view of Trakl by a contemporary who is outside the Brenner circle yet is sceptically sympathetic. Moreover, Ficker took up and re-wrote excerpts from the review for publication in Der Brenner, an editorial intervention which allows us to see clearly the issues with which Trakl's poetry was connected in the 1910s.
Steuer's review starts by noting that it wasn't very easy to hear Trakl as he sat at a table in the big space of the Musikvereinsaal:
Der Dichter las leider zu schwach, wie von Verborgenheiten heraus, aus Vergangenheiten oder Zuku ? nften, und erst spa ? ter konnte man in dem monotonen gebethaften Zwischensprachen dieses schon a ? u"erlich ganz eigenartigen Menschen Worte und Sa ? tze, dann Bilder und Rythmen [sic] erkennen, die seine futuristische Dichtung bilden. Alles wird Bild und Gleichnis in ihm, tauscht sich in seiner Seele zu andern Ausdrucksmo ? glichkeiten um, die dann den Menschen von heute nicht liegen, aber doch so u ? berzeugend gebracht werden, da" man ihre Mo ? glichkeit glaubt. (HKA, II, 720)51
Like Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich, Steuer hears in Trakl's poetry an emphatically articulated and genuine experience formulated in a way that is not accessible to the present, that is to say to 'die Menschen von heute'. At the same time, Steuer also talks about Trakl's poetic method. Trakl's approach apparently transforms everyday language, achieving what we could call a form of total indirection where nothing seems to mean what we expect it to mean: 'Alles wird Bild und Gleichnis in ihm'. For Steuer, this makes Trakl a Futurist. But positioning Trakl in the literary landscape in this way and so exercising a degree of control over the otherwise uncontrollable poetic utterance is an aspect of Steuer's review that
48 Karl Borroma ? us Heinrich, 'Brief aus der Abgeschiedenheit II: Die Erscheinung Georg Trakls', Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 508-16.
49 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 509.
50 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 514.
51 The HKA corrects spelling in the review. I am quoting from the unrevised text as it is
reprinted in Sauermann, 'Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913', p. 192.
Ficker chooses to cut when he reprints excerpts in Der Brenner. 52 Indeed, Ficker suggests that it is too early to offer an interpretation of Trakl's poetry. It is better to let the poems themselves, as they appear in the pages of Der Brenner reflect 'das, was dunkel und was licht in ihnen erscheint'. 53
We are now in a position to connect my first sketch of Trakl's poetic techniques with the view of his poetry which has emerged on putting his writing back in the context of Der Brenner from which it first emerged. When we first looked at Trakl's poetry, we observed a shift of perspective which could take the poem either closer to a sense of redemption or irrevocably remove it. In either case 'Sinn' and 'Bild' could change abruptly. This technique now appears analogous to those that Trakl uses in his aphorism on Kraus, since this poem similarly deprives the reader of a framework with which to make sense of the intense experience with which they have nevertheless become involved. Reading Trakl's poetry, we participate in a shift of perspective of which we cannot say whether it is redemptive or not: we can say only that our perspective alters radically. For Trakl's contemporaries, this shift of perspective and the associated experience of meaninglessness was felt to be both uplifting and significant. It moved the reader beyond stale patterns of understanding. At the same time, readers needed some way of coping with the sense of vertigo the poetry engendered. To put the strategy they developed in a wider context, I want to consider the cultural legacy of Trakl's poetic techniques as it can be seen in the responses of Adorno and Heidegger to the poetry. This will prepare the way for understanding the relation between Trakl's difficult modernist poetry and what I called at the very start of the argument 'common sense realism'.
V MODERNIST TRAKL AND BEYOND
The reading suggested by Heinrich and Steuer (Trakl's poetry articulating a meaning which is beyond meaning, but not the undermining of meaning tout court) is an early version of what could be called the strong Modernist account of Trakl which is clearly set out in the analyses by Adorno and Heidegger. For Adorno, Trakl's poetry is an example of an aesthetic logic beyond logic, rigorously combining elements without subjecting them to standard patterns of communica- tion, a form of everyday speech stylized beyond itself, and yet neither clearly distinguishable from the speech patterns the poet hopes to overcome nor protected from an oneiric collapse of all forms of communication. 54 Similarly for Heidegger, turning to Trakl to help him gloss his own thought in the seminar he gave to explicate his lecture 'Zeit und Sein' in 1962, poetry written by a generation of poets which includes Trakl but also Rilke and Benn, articulates a form of purpose
52 Ficker drops the epithet 'Futurist' as well as softening the critique of Trakl's style of declamation: 'Der Dichter las leider etwas zu schwach, wie von Verborgenheiten heraus, aus Vergangenheiten oder Zuku ? nften, und erst spa ? ter konnte man in dem monotonen gebethaften Insichsprechen dieses schon a ? u"erlich ganz eigenartigen Menschen Worte und Sa ? tze, dann Bilder und Rhythmen erkennen, die das Gefu ? ge seiner Dichtung bilden. ' 'Vorlesungen von Robert Michel und Georg Trakl', Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), 336-38 (p. 338).
53 Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), p. 338. . .
54 For a discussion of Trakl and aesthetic logic, from Asthetische Theorie, see Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1970-), VII, 431-42. For a discussion of Trakl and free verse, from Minima Moralia, see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 250-51.
GEORG TRAKL IN CONTEXT 341
342 BEN MORGAN
beyond human purpose. Heidegger makes this point by engaging with a specific formulation used by Trakl which it is worth looking at in detail since it illustrates very clearly what is at stake in the modernist reading of his poetry.
Heidegger picks up a recurring linguistic pattern that Trakl uses in two poems he wrote under the influence of Karl Klammer's translations of Rimbaud, which translated the il y a of Rimbaud's prose poem Enfance as 'Es ist': 'Es ist eine Uhr, die nicht schla ? gt, | Es ist ein Schneeloch mit einem Nest von wei"en Tieren. | Es ist eine Kathedrale, die versinkt, und ein See, der u ? berschwillt. '55 In his 'Psalm', which he dedicated to Kraus, and in 'De profundis', both written in 1912, Trakl took up and radicalized the formulation he found in Klammer's Rimbaud, using it to open each of the poems by sketching situations that are at once striking and disturbed. 56 'De profundis' starts with a series of declarations in which the epithets (black, brown, lonely, empty) highlight the inadequacy of the information being communicated rather than filling in the blanks, only to unexpectedly reveal that the scene is being described by someone affected by its sadness: 'Es ist ein Stoppelfeld, in das ein schwarzer Regen fa ? llt. | Es ist ein brauner Baum, der einsam dasteht. | Es ist ein Zischelwind, der leere Hu ? tten umkreist. | Wie traurig dieser Abend' (HKA, I, 46). Similarly, 'Psalm' begins with an inexplicably devastated scene: 'Es ist ein Licht, das der Wind ausgelo ? scht hat. /[. . . ] Es ist ein Weinberg, verbrannt und Schwarz mit Lo ? chern voll Spinnen. ' This is contrasted with a South Sea idyll at once cultic, sensual and violent, and then, once again, we hear the voice of a speaker to whom the contrast between devastation and a lost world matters deeply emerging from the apparently neutral declarations: 'O unser verlorenes Paradies' (HKA, I, 55).
Heidegger is interested in Trakl's use of the Es ist, which he contrasts with the more usual Es gibt. The latter phrase, as it is used in everyday language, articulates human purposes. We might, for instance, use it to let someone know there is a good trout stream in the vicinity. To speak in this way, and relate the world to the sorts of things human beings do in it, is preferable, for Heidegger, to adopting an attitude of false neutrality otherwise associated with the verb 'to be'. Yet even more revealing is Trakl's Es ist. Like the phrase Es gibt, it is addressed to and includes human beings, and so acknowledges the way we are addressed by the world, and involved in it. At the same time, it presents us with a world that speaks to us but without being reducible to human purposes, an address to the listener
55 Arthur Rimbaud, Leben und Dichtung, trans. by K. L. Ammer [5 Karl Klammer] (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1921) p.