The German Poets of the First World War

Patrick Bridgwater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000769364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1985, this book provides a full survey of the best and most significant work of German writers to the First World War. Including (in both German and English) the texts of all the main poems discussed, this book contains many not readily available elsewhere. Authors discussed include Trakl, Rile and George as well as less familiar names. The book not only corrects the distorted view of the subject perpetuated by most histories of German literature, but will also help to English First World War poetry into perspective.

1

The Aesthetics of War

Whereas between the Thirty Years War and the First World War most war poetry was poetry idealising and glorifying war, from winter 1914 onwards most war poetry worth the title has been anti-war poetry written by poets in the line of death. This break with the heroic tradition was caused by the barbarous technology of the ‘Great War for Civilisation’, which brought about a change in the general attitude towards war and with it a change in the nature of war poetry. So long as war remained essentially a matter of hand-to-hand combat, man versus man, it could be seen in a chivalrous and heroic light and was in fact still seen in such a light in the initial period of euphoria in 1914. But once it had finally become a matter of mechanised (and compulsory) murder, man versus machine, war could no longer be seen in a positive light, could no longer be defined in the basically chivalrous vocabulary and concepts of traditional war poetry, for survival had become a matter of luck rather than of virtue.

The downright impossibility of reconciling modern methods of warfare with traditional concepts of heroism forms the subject of a vitriolic satire by Karl Kraus, entitled ‘Der neue Krieg’, which could not be published until the end of the war:

Am schwersten in diesem Krieg wird mir:

Gasmaske zu einen und Panier.

Wie ist das? Die vor dem Feind nicht weichen,

den Tod ihm mit chemischen Mitteln reichen,

die chlorreich bei der Waffe geblieben,

ob auch die Sonne über uns scheint -

sie wurden nicht aus der Armee getrieben

für rühmliche Feigheit vor dem Feind?

The word ‘chlorreich’ is coined to pun on Glor- (‘glory’) and Chlor- (‘chlorine’) because the latter is one sure way of attaining the former.

The typical front-line poet of the First World War portrays the suffering and tragedy around him as an implicit or - if he is a satirist -explicit protest against the war in which he is involved. He is committed not to the imperatives of heroic action, but to exposing the futility of heroic action and the tragedy of war. As early as 1914-15 we see the old heroic tradition of war poetry starting to give way to what, in retrospect, can be seen to be a new tradition.

War poetry, and especially modern war poetry, raises some of the fundamental problems of poetry in peculiarly acute forms. Above all it raises the question of the relationship between poetry and morality and obliges us to think through our aesthetic criteria to the point where they merge into moral ones.

The inadequacy of conventional criteria was unwittingly shown by W.B. Yeats, who excluded all British poems of the Great War from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’. The relevant part of his introduction reads as follows:

I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war… The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity … but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agin-court, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road - that is all.

If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering …

This must be one of the silliest remarks about poetry by a great poet. Yeats’s dictum arises from an exclusive concern with aesthetic qualities and criteria and therefore from a failure of the imagination: a failure (occasioned, no doubt, by his own non-involvement) to understand the nature of modern war and therefore of modern war poetry. He seems to have wanted some heroic gesture, seems to reject modern war poetry because it was in every sense anti-heroic and therefore could not be absorbed into his own hero-myth. It could be said that Yeats has simply got his aesthetic categories wrong and that it is downright absurd to reject modern war poetry out of hand because it happens to be elegiac, for in reality the elegy, in the modern sense of poetry on a subject for which Roman poets would have used elegiacs, notably mourning for the dead, is the natural poetic mode of the war; Owen refers to his ‘elegies’ and Schnack defined his work as elegiac. This is not to say, of course, that all modern war poems are elegiac, for fear of death could, exceptionally, lead to an intensification of experience and of being which seemed to call for lyrical celebration:

Sick with delight

At life’s discovered transitoriness,

Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.¹

In reality it might be truer to say that the omnipresence of seducer death sometimes blew the mind, for it is impossible to celebrate any feeling of being ‘sick with delight’, impossible to celebrate the excitement and camaraderie of war, that is, without finding oneself, silently, in a pro-war posture. The most forgettable front-line war poems were written by those who ‘waived the mind’.

Expression of a similar irrelevant and therefore irresponsible aestheticism can be found also in poems by two of Yeats’s German contemporaries: Rilke and George. To substantiate this point, let us consider Rilke’s ‘Fünf Gesänge, August 1914’ (1914) and George’s Der Krieg (1917).

Rilke’s cycle of hymns² was written in the first days of the war amid the intense patriotism unleashed by the Declaration and subsequent mobilisation. That Rilke starts by echoing the nationalistic and militaristic sentiments of the day is hardly surprising. While avoiding the jingoism of so many lesser poets, in the first hymn Rilke welcomes war in a way which points straight to Heym’s magnificent ‘Der Krieg’ (discussed in the next chapter):

I

ZUM erstenmal seh ich dich aufstehn,

hörengesagter, fernster, unglaublicher Kriegs-Gott.

Wie so dicht zwischen die friedliche Frucht

furchtbares Handeln gesät war, plötzlich erwachsenes.

Gestern war es noch klein, bedurfte der Nahrung, mannshoch

steht es schon da: morgen

überwächst es den Mann. Denn der glühende Gott

reisst mit Einem das Wachstum

aus dem wurzelnden Volk, und die Ernte beginnt…

Endlich ein Gott. Da wir den friedlichen oft

nicht mehr ergriffen, ergreift uns plötzlich der Schlacht-Gott,

schleudert den Brand: und über dem Herzen voll Heimat

schreit, den er donnernd bewohnt, sein rötlicher Himmel.

In other words, Rilke’s starting-point is not actuality, but art in the form of Heym’s ‘Der Krieg’. The prophetic grandeur of Heym’s poem has become a poetic pose. Rilke’s ‘war-god’ is a far more ambiguous and less terrifying figure than Heym’s demon; he is a mythical god and as such at most a source of awe rather than terror. Rilke’s ‘war-god’ is a ‘sacred’ figure deriving from the heroic world, while the whole point of Heym’s demon is his profanity. Rilke’s god comes ultimately from Olympos; Heym’s demon comes straight from that Hell where youth and laughter go. And there is a further point, for Rilke’s first and second hymns are also reminiscent of Hölderlin in terms of diction, syntax and attitude. The rhetorical first and second hymns are based on Hölderlin’s view of the poet as the prophetic voice of his people and on his cyclic view of history, which enables Rilke to view the war as necessary. The borrowed prophetic mien is remarkable and basically spurious. It means that Rilke has fallen into the same trap as other, lesser poets in going back to the patriotic tradition of Romantic poetry. His choice of the grotesquely inappropriate hymn form was a clear indication of what was to come.

Three days later, in the third hymn, the poet’s attitude has changed, although the god of war is still seen as a primitive demonic force, and as such is still described in language reminiscent of Heym’s ‘Der Krieg’:

SEIT drei Tagen, was ists? Sing ich wirklich das Schrecknis,

wirklich den Gott, den ich als einen der frühern

nur noch erinnernden Götter ferne bewundernd geglaubt?

Wie ein vulkanischer Berg lag er im Weiten. Manchmal

flammend. Manchmal im Rauch. Traurig und göttlich.

Nur eine nahe vielleicht, ihm anliegende Ortschaft

bebte. Wir aber hoben die heile

Leier anderen zu: welchen kommenden Göttern?

Und nun aufstand er: steht: höher

als stehende Türme, höher

als die geatmete Luft unseres sonstigen Tags.

Steht. Übersteht. Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,

in ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.

So auch bin ich nicht mehr; aus dem gemeinsamen Herzen

schlägt das meine den Schlag, und der gemeinsame Mund

bricht den meinigen auf.

Now, however, Rilke begins to have doubts about the way in which he welcomed the advent of this legendary war-god. He begins to realise that he has allowed himself to be carried away by his amoral, aesthetic enthusiasm for this radical phenomenon, an enthusiasm shared by his fellow-countrymen. This very reminder that he is speaking for so many others brings the realisation that war, however ‘great’ in a purely aesthetic sense, is a blind and destructive power. So far so good. If the hymns had ended here, it would have been better. Rilke after all has realised the true nature of war long before most of his contemporaries. The trouble is that the hymns continue and, in so doing, become increasingly irrelevant. Rilke now sees it as his task to praise not the feeling of being ‘in gloriously experienced danger, holy to all’, but rather the pain and grief which underlie this feeling and which are the real product of war. In the final hymn this ‘endless lament’ leads to a mystique of Schmerz, so that war is virtually idealised for the depth of the grief that it causes:

AUF, und schreckt den schrecklichen Gott! Bestürzt ihn.

Kampf-Lust hat ihn vor Zeiten verwöhnt. Nun dränge der Schmerz euch,

dränge ein neuer, verwunderter Kampf-Schmerz

euch seinem Zorne zuvor.

Wenn schon ein Blut euch bezwingt, ein hoch von den Vätern

kommendes Blut: so sei das Gemüt doch

immer noch euer. Ahmt nicht

Früherem nach, Einstigem. Prüfet,

ob ihr nicht Schmerz seid. Handelnder Schmerz. Der Schmerz hat

auch seine Jubel. O, und dann wirft sich die Fahne

über euch auf, im Wind, der vom Feind kommt!

Welche? Des Schmerzes. Die Fahne des Schmerzes. Das schwere

schlagende Schmerztuch.

After hovering between enthusiasm and doubt, Rilke ends by appropriating war into his private mythology, where it does not belong, in the guise of Grief. The lines just quoted clearly anticipate the Landscape of Grief of the tenth Duino Elegy. In the course of the cycle Rilke’s language indeed becomes more and more clearly the rhetorical, emotionally charged and yet abstract language of the Duino Elegies. The real events of August 1914 are absorbed into Rilke’s esoteric view of life; war is turned into so much poetry. The real insight of the third hymn deserves all praise, but the cycle as a whole begins and ends with an aestheticism which is not only amoral, but arguably immoral. These hymns are certainly the work of the most considerable German poet of the time and they contain some of the best poetry written during the war; but it could be argued that they are too poetic, too literary and rhetorical to rank highly as war poetry. The decisive criticism was made in August 1914 by the worker-poet Gerrit Engelke, who said that there is too much ‘Hölderlin’ here.³

Rilke’s reactions may be sensitive, but he is in some ways too far from his subject. The great war poetry of 1914-18 was written by the front-line poets for whom the ‘horrible beastliness of war’ (Wilfred Owen) was a matter not of sensitivity, but of grim personal experience and terror. If Wilfred Owen was right to stress that he was ‘not concerned with Poetry’, then Rilke by contrast appears to be too much concerned with ‘Poetry’. While Owen’s poetry is deeply personal, Rilke’s hymns are personal only in the sense of being esoteric. Otherwise they are impersonal in their lack of deep and genuine emotion, a masterful mistake. It would have been better if Rilke had refused, like Oskar Loerke, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contens
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Aesthetics of War
• 2. Georg Trakl
• 3. August Stramm
• 4. Lichtenstein, Ball and Klemm
• 5. Anton Schnack
• 6. Lerch, Bröger and Engelke
• 7. Epilogue
• Translations of German Quotations
• Bibliography
• Index of Poems