The German Genius

happening, was that “the war may mark the end of man as a spiritual being”:
    Am Abend tönen die herbstlichen Wälder
Von tödlichen Waffen, die goldnen Ebenen
Und blauen Seen, darüber die Sonne
Düstrer hinrollt; umfängt die Nacht
Sterbende Krieger, die wilde Klage
Ihrer zerbrochenen Münder.
Doch stille sammelt im Weidengrund
Rotes Gewölk, darin ein zürnender Gott wohnt,
Das vergossne Blut sich…
     
    Die heisse Flamme des Geistes nährt heute ein gewaltiger Schmerz,
Die ungebornen Enkel.
     
    (In the evening autumn forests ring with deadly weapons, gold plains and blue lakes, over which the sun more darkly rolls; night embraces dying warriors, the wild lament of their broken mouths. Yet silently in the willow-grove a red cloud gathers, in which an angry god resides, shed blood gathers…a mighty grief today feeds the hot flame of the spirit, the unborn grandchildren.) 6
     
    Even when Trakl is describing red clouds, shed blood, and the hot flame of the spirit, his words are sparing; his effect is achieved by the cumulative nature of cool, honed images, icy and invigorating, stopping short of sentimentality.
    The poems of August Stramm were much shorter than Trakl’s, than anyone else’s for that matter, making use of onomatopoeic and alliterative devices, neologisms and word layout, all designed to intensify the poetic experience, just as war intensified all experience associated with it. 7 Born in Münster, Westphalia, in 1874, Stramm was called up immediately on the declaration of war. He served on the Western Front to begin with, saw heavy fighting in northern France, and had won the Iron Cross by January 1915. In April he was transferred to the Eastern Front, where he again saw heavy fighting and was recommended for the Iron Cross (First Class). His publishers negotiated a release for him from the military, but he refused to take up the offer of “an alibi” and continued to serve. He had seen action seventy times when, on September 1, 1915, he was shot in the head in hand-to-hand fighting on the Rokitno marshes. 8
    Clearly a brave man, Stramm was nonetheless against the war and did not write a single chauvinistic poem even when hundreds of people around him were doing so. He wrote instead about how fear turns to courage, how ordinary law-abiding people are converted into murderers, and how—again—there is nothing heroic about modern warfare. Most of his poems were published in Der Sturm and collected after his death. This is “Schlachtfeld” (Battlefield), written in the autumn of 1914.
    Schollenmürbe schläfert ein das Eisen
Blute filzen Sickerflecke
Roste krumen
Fleische schleimen
Saugen brünstet um Zerfallen.
Mordesmorde
Blinzen
Kinderblicke.
     
    (Clod softness lulls iron off to sleep, bloods clot ooze patches, rusts crumble, fleshes slime, sucking ruts around decay. Child eyes blink murder upon murder.) 9
     
    The neologisms (bloods, not blood; rusts, not rust; fleshes, not flesh) emphasize that there are many men—not just the poet—who suffer, the lack of punctuation conveys the way everything in the battlefield is chaos, one thing running into another, just as dying can be achieved by oozing to death as by being killed outright in a flash. Iron sleeps, iron weapons can be killed as people can—there is no difference here in No Man’s Land. 10
     
     
    In “Angststurm” (Attack of Fear)
    Grausen
Ich und Ich und Ich und Ich
Grausen Brausen Rauschen Grausen
Träumen Splittern Branden Blenden
Sterneblenden Brausen Grausen
Rauschen
Grausen
Ich
     
    (Dread. Me and me and me and me. Dreading roaring crashing dreading. Dreaming splintering burning dazzling. Dazzling star-shells roaring dreading. Crashing. Dread. Me.) 11
     
    This poem has been described as a chain of battle sounds and the reactions they provoke, themselves set out as a rattle, the “ au ” sound similar to a cry of pain.
    Born in 1892 at Rieneck in Unterfranken, Anton Schnack produced a steady stream of verse from January 1917 onward, mainly in broken sonnet form, the most important examples of which were collected in his Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier , released in 1920, and consisting of sixty war poems. Generally regarded as the best single collection of war poems produced by a German poet, it has been compared with the works of the Britons Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. The poems juxtapose original observations cheek-by-jowl with more ordinary, even banal, images, reminding us that “poetry is not an end in