The German Genius

(six in Europe, four overseas), Russia fought thirteen wars (ten European), Great Britain fought seventeen wars (three in Europe, four in Africa, ten in Asia), and the United States was engaged in seven significant wars. 48 Dupuy’s point was that there is no evidence that Prussians, or Germans, are excessively militaristic in any genetic or historical sense.
    Instead, he argued, as Paul Kennedy argued (as discussed in Chapter 22), that the Germans’ superior fighting ability was due to their institutionalization of military excellence. These same characteristics, he said, would distinguish the German soldiers in World War II as well. “It was only Hitler who was rigid and inflexible.”
    Still on the technical war front, the Germans—surprisingly enough, given their level of technological and industrial development—were slower than the Allies in bringing in scientists to aid the war effort. They did do work on communications with submarines, and they developed some flame-throwing devices, but their tank experiments were too late to have any real impact on events. As the fighting turned against Germany, the enhancement of food production became a scientific priority. Two dark areas where Germany did lead the way were in the realms of chemical and aerial warfare. Under Fritz Haber, himself a future winner of the Nobel Prize, three other future laureates were pressed into service in the design and production of chlorine gas as a weapon—James Franck, Gustav Herz, and Otto Hahn, the future discoverer of nuclear fission. 49
     
     
    At the beginning of 1918, the Wehrmann in Vienna was abandoned. “The number of visitors grew smaller and smaller as the war stretched on, until finally nobody looked after him at all,” reported one newspaper. Another noted, shortly after the war, that golden nails donated to the Wehrmann by Austria’s allies had been stolen. “The last visitor was, then, a thief.”

Prayers for a Fatherless Child: The Culture of the Defeated
     
    A t no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form, as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry “never got over the Great War.” 1 It was no different in Germany where, according to one estimate, some 2 million war poems were written in the German language during the course of the war, and where in August 1914, 50,000 poems were written every day . Five hundred were submitted to newspapers every day and one hundred printed. 2 As with British war poetry, says Patrick Bridgwater, most of the German poems broke with tradition in that, until then, most war poetry had glorified war, in particular the heroic and chivalrous aspects of hand-to-hand combat. The advent of mechanized war changed all that.
    German poets differed from their British equivalents in several ways. 3 Both Georg Heym and Georg Trakl wrote poems about war, or predicting war, well before hostilities broke out, as a test of heroic qualities. Once the fighting started, both Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George wrote verse (“hymns” in Rilke’s case) about the war without actually seeing any action. George showed a marked indifference to the fighting, an indifference to others’ suffering, revealing his conviction that modern war is “bestial rather than heroic,” and most deaths had no dignity:
    Zu jubeln ziemt nicht: kein triumph wird sein
Nur viele untergänge ohne würde…
Heilig sind nur die säfte
Noch makelfrei verspritzt—ein ganzer strom.
     
    (There is no call for rejoicing: there will be no triumph, only many deaths without dignity…Holy alone the blood which is spilled innocently, a great river.)
     
    Change came in the second winter of the war, with a more direct reaction to the horrors the poets were seeing around them, though it was slower in coming to the Germans than to the British. 4 Within this general picture, and against a background where, in an ideal world, perhaps, a dozen poets would be worth considering, three stood out—Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Anton Schnack.
    Trackl was Austrian, a man obsessed, as he put it himself, with his own “criminal melancholy.” 5 He actually wrote very few war poems—just five—but they were all memorable. Trackl’s gift was for very dense images, in the manner of Hölderlin, and his central message, once war had broken out, and once he could see what was