GERMAN POETRY: 1800 TO REUNIFICATION

The French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) once wrote that between 1780 and 1830, Germany brought forth all the ideas of his age. Although somewhat hyperbolic, Taine’s pronouncement should not be taken lightly. These fifty years span the period of Romanticism in German literature, art, and philosophy, and its many innovations in poetry left their mark in a pervasive, if occasionally discontinuous, tradition.

ROMANTICISM

German Romanticism can be said to have an early and a late phase. The early period is identified chiefly with August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), his brother Friedrich (1772-1829), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). The early phase was more critical and theoretical than late Romanticism, which counted more poets among its adherents, including Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), Clemens Brentano (1778-1842), and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857).

Walter Benjamin has maintained that the German Romantics confronted their times not primarily on epistemological terms, even though these were in fact significant (for example, the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814), but instead primarily through the medium of art. Friedrich von Schlegel saw the potential of the new age in the spirit of poetry. His essay “Progressive Universalpoesie” (“Progressive Universal Poetry”) addresses a fundamental design of early Romanticism: the universal poeticization of life. Conceptually, Romantic poetry (in the broad sense) embraces all traditional genres of literary and philosophic discourse within its totalizing system. This view radically reformulated the mimetic possibilities of nature and privileged poetic perspective in new, epoch-making ways.

Novalis once wrote:

Romanticism is nothing other than a qualitative sublimation…. By giving the commonplace exceptional significance, the habitual an air of mystery, the familiar the dignity of the unfamiliar, the finite an infinite meaning—in so doing I romanticize.

Viewed against its cultural and sociohistorical context, a basic feature of early Romanticism is its systematic desystematization of what were perceived by the Romantics to be restrictive and rigid norms. Abhorring the profane and mourning the loss of life’s poetic qualities, the Romantics were among the first to recognize and react against the modern forces of social and economic alienation. They blamed the rationalization and instrumentalization of Enlightenment ideology for having emptied life of its poetry and in contrast projected the Middle Ages as the last great harmonious historical age.

The revolutionary ideas advanced in philosophy and aesthetics have their parallel in Novalis’s collection of poems Hymnen an die Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Night, 1897, 1948). Novalis suffered greatly at the deaths of his brother and his fiancé in 1797, and in 1799, he composed these six hymns, the poetic manifestation of his encounter with death (a central experience of German Romanticism). Hymns to the Night, a combination of ecstatic prose and strophic hymns, asserts that true perception of the world comes only after having acquired complete knowledge of the self. This view, related to Fichte’s philosophy, is pivotal, for it locates the human being at the center of comprehending the universe.

Novalis’s collection recounts both personal and individual experience and, through a quasi-mystical vision, projects the situation onto the dimensions of the historical-eschatological course of humankind. The objectification of Novalis’s vision reveals the central transformation of the metaphoric function of light and dark, day and night, whereby night becomes the primal force of the universe. This transvaluation of their respective ranges of meaning takes place through a foregrounding of paradox and oxymora. Evolving ultimately into myth, Novalis’s Hymns to the Night is a classic example of Romanticism, especially along those lines where its symbolism intersects with that of Christianity.

While Novalis’s work is indisputably central to any discussion of early German Romantic poetry, the fact that critics are able today to speak of a “Romantic poetry” is largely a result of other factors. One of them was the publication, in 1805, of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the boy’s magic horn), a collection of German folk songs compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Interest in folk literature had been generated earlier by the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who in fact coined the German word Volkslied (folk song) in 1775. The work of Arnim and Brentano revived this interest, a task made easier by the current of nationalism running through Germany at the time.

Nearly all writers associated with German Romanticism wrote poetry, but, in the spirit of Schlegel’s “Progressive Universal Poetry,” these poems generally formed part of a larger text, most often a novel (the privileged genre within Romantic aesthetics). Typically, the heroes of Romantic novels are poets, or at least lead “poetic lives,” and they are prone to express their emotional states—whether joy or sorrow, exhilaration or despair—in the relatively spontaneous form of the lyric poem. These factors, then, also help define the contours of Romantic poetry.

CLEMENS BRENTANO

Clemens Brentano had a great affinity for the folk song and used its features in his own verse. (The folk-song strophe, common to much nineteenth century German verse, is easily recognized by its alternating abab masculine/feminine rhyme scheme.) Brentano was a diverse and creative writer with an exceptionally active imagination. Although his poems are sometimes formally inconsistent, the tenor of his work is constant: musical, synesthetic, crafted, rich in texture. “Auf dem Rhein” (“Upon the Rhine”) reveals a characteristic fascination for the macabre, manifested (from the Romantic perspective) in the eerie dimensions of the twilight. Appearance and reality become indistinguishable and effect a strikingly modern sense of disorientation. “Sprich aus der Ferne” (“Speak from Afar”) uses the refrain as magic incantation. A desire to see all things as related informs this poem’s lyric voice: the individual and the universe, the near and the far. The structured dimensions of casual (and causal) reality give way and flow together, presented through synesthesia and oxymora. The poem’s closing rhetorical gesture reflects the universalizing tendency of Romanticism.

JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF

Joseph von Eichendorff’s poetry displays a longing for unity and simplicity. He uses nature as a medium for understanding human existence and not merely as an object of imitation. Nature becomes a grand hieroglyph, and the poet’s task is to render the most approximate translation. A fundamental Romantic dualism—nature as both demonic and divine—informs his work. The mood evoked by Eichendorff’s landscapes often suggests impending danger, perhaps the risk of losing one’s way in the dark. One critic has said of Eichendorff—who, unlike his contemporary Brentano, a late convert to Catholicism, was a devout Catholic throughout his life—that he “is not so much the poet of romantic longing as the poet of the dangers of romantic longing.”

PATRIOTIC ROMANTICS

The poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), Max von Schenckendorff (1783-1817), and Karl Theodor Körner (1791-1813) represents another dimension of German Romanticism. According to E. L. Stahl,

The patriotic verse of these soldier-poets expresses the satisfaction of an urge to share in communal life. In the same way conversion to Catholicism fulfils religious Romantic longings, Patriotic activity and traditional religiosity cause the primary Romantic impulse to abate and new attitudes to prevail. The wanderer returns home and settles down to perform his acknowledged civic and domestic tasks. The age of “bürgerlicher Realismus” [Bourgeois Realism] begins with this change in outlook which was imposed on German writers by the social developments and the political events of the post-Napoleonic era.

BIEDERMEIER AND VORMÄRZ

Between 1830 and 1849, two distinct trends appeared within German poetry. The first, known as Biedermeier, was an introspective turn in response to the severe social and political repression exercised by Prince Metternich (1773-1859). The second, referred to as Vormärz, was an effort to politicize literature in the hope of effecting social and political reform. The public at large still preferred poetry to the popular novel, and in its various forms (verse epic, cycles, and ballads) its purpose was mainly to entertain and (from an ideological point of view) “distract.” Tomes of poetry, mostly traditional and derivative, depicted a charming poetic world of tranquil harmony. Against this numerically significant backdrop, the Young Germans, idealists and political activists, advanced their theory of prose. Between 1830 and 1848, social tensions grew and the political spirit turned more radical.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) recognized that even the conservative patriotic verse of the Romantic poets could play into the interests of social and political liberals, since as an ideological instrument, poetry was capable of stirring great enthusiasm among the people. Interest in the “political poem” accrued because—viewed pragmatically—it was the most appropriate literary form for subversive agitation and propaganda. Heine derided the hackneyed declarations of freedom and the ponderously didactic reflections often found in the more cumbersome representatives of ostensibly political verse. Concerned with matters of immediate social and political relevance, this poetry was often subjected to the mechanisms of censorship in Metternich’s control. (The reports of his spies frequently referred to the danger posed by these political “folk poems,” an indication that the liberals had succeeded in part in redefining the readership of poetry as well as the genre’s objectives.)

Not all poets wrote within this mainstream of events. Two of note who remained relatively aloof from political affairs are Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1779-1848) and Eduard Mörike (1804-1875). Although they did not enjoy the recognition they deserved during their lifetimes, their poetry has come to be highly valued for its complexity and its moral intensity.

ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, perceptive and intelligent, recognized the changed social conditions of her times, but family ties and the traditions of conservatism and Catholicism, coupled with a deep attachment to the countryside of her home region, Westphalia, exercised a strong authority in her poetry. Westphalia becomes the locus of her search for harmony and order between the individual and nature. In contrast to the Romantic nature imagery of forests and streams, one finds in Droste-Hülshoff for the first time in German literature the poetic treatment of the moors and heaths of her own Westphalia. The realism of her verse lies in its attention to minute detail both in nature and in human nature. The senses of sight and sound play important roles throughout her work. She felt the presence of a demoniac undercurrent in all of existence, and thus her poems are often ballads or at least balladesque. The Catholic Church provided a sanctuary for Droste-Hülshoff. She understood her role as author to be a “power by the grace of God.” Her confessional poems, such as “Geistliches Jahr” (“Spiritual Year”), show her coping with the dilemma of sin and the fall from grace.

EDUARD MÖRIKE

Eduard Mörike is often called the greatest German lyric poet of the nineteenth century. His poetry shares features with that of late Romanticism, and his use of classical forms and themes shows his affinity with classicism. Some consider his work Biedermeier because of its introspective and unpretentious nature; still others refer to the “impressionism” of his poetry. All in all, these varying assessments give testimony to the artistic complexity of his work. His poetic technique is marked by a sensitivity for chiaroscuro and for the minutely observed symbolism of the divine within nature.

Mörike sought to reconcile the ideal with the real; his poems are accompanied by a sense of despair, helplessness, and resignation. The landscape of the country idyll provides order and security. Isolated and alienated, Mörike views love and nature in his poems with melancholy. Still, his deep Christian faith seems to have counteracted his melancholy. He always returned to the central problem of death; he preferred a life of the soul, but he failed to find the ultimate harmony he desired. Unlike his contemporary Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), Mörike managed to contain his despair at least enough to resist nihilism. Showing the tensions between what Sigmund Freud later described as the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Mörike’s poems register important sociohistorical antagonisms of nineteenth century Germany.

NIKOLAUS LENAU

Nikolaus Lenau is a figure of several contradictions. At once a great Austrian revolutionary poet and a late Romantic poet of Weltschmerz, Lenau suffered the isolation characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual, and his works turn around a central moment of melancholy. His poetry documents both the individual’s revolt against the instrumentalization of human beings and the rejection of bourgeois complacency. His early poem “Einsamkeit” (“Loneliness”) best illustrates his Weltschmerz, bordering on existential dread. In his verse epic Die Albigenser (1837; the Albigensia), on the other hand, Lenau acknowledges Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Weltgeist. Lenau’s reworking of historical material (the fate of the Cathars, against whom Pope Innocent III waged war from 1209 to 1229) reveals his interest in the struggle for economic and political power, an interest not merely antiquarian. The poem begins: “Nicht meint das Lied auf Tote abzulenken” (“Not of the dead shall the song give pause to think”).

HEINRICH HEINE

Probably the most fascinating and enigmatic poet of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine is most often identified with his first volume of poetry, Buch der Lieder (1827; Book of Songs, 1856). With these poems, it became clear that Heine was both the heir and the bane of German Romantic poetry. In the vein of Romantic poets, he could create moods and turn nature into a mirror for subjective feelings, but he no longer shared their belief in the mysterious whole. For Heine, the integrity of the whole is an illusion (even though one that is longed for), and in its place there appears a sense of disintegration, nature as a collage of signs and indicators of his own subjectivity. His Byronic irony draws on both sentiment and sharp criticism. His right hand creates a sentimental mood or atmosphere which his left hand all the while is busy undermining through critical observation, exposing its illusory dimensions, rejecting them as unrealistic. The result of this double labor is the special tension characteristic of Heine’s work, the central poignancy behind his poetic voice.

Heine’s attraction and aversion to German Romanticism resulted fromthe fact that by 1830, Romanticism was a greatly inflated commodity. Backward-looking and conservative, it no longer offered appropriate solutions for dealing with the changed conditions. Heine thus distanced himself from its ideological subtext, while on the surface employing to his own advantage its artistic conventions. Thus, the special shape of Heine’s wit, a kind of “double take,” is evidenced in the poem “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen” (“A Young Boy Loves a Young Girl”). Here, the final lines reaffirm the validity of feeling after exposing it to mockery. In another poem, “Ich wandle unter Blumen” (“I Amble Among Flowers”), Heine, as the critic Robert M. Browning has observed, “does not so much ridicule feeling, the ‘romantic’ attitude, as reveal its inappropriateness as amode of social behavior. Such is the world and we have to accept it.” In “Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig” (“My Heart, My Heart Does Sorrow”), the antithesis of the pleasant surroundings and the sorrowful observer/narrator suggests at first that the cause for his mood is misfortune in love (although this is not stated explicitly). Instead, the poem is a remarkable example of the more general historical conditions of despair. When contrasted with the expressed deathwish of the observer in the final line, the peaceful, serene summer landscape appears as reified and proplike, testifying to Heine’s alienation both as lover and vis-à-vis nature. Heine’s works thus contain the central ambivalences of his time.

In “My Heart, My Heart Does Sorrow,” for example, the ambivalence of the summer idyll is juxtaposed to the ambivalence of the nostalgia expressed for an unattainable restored world. On one hand, Heine indulges his Weltschmerz, while, on the other, he exposes it as a pose, as illusionary game playing. The characteristic result is the combination of haunting appeal to sincere emotional states and their frequent reversal through pungent intellectual stimulation. The different tone of Heine’s later poetry results from its more explicit politicization. Rejecting aesthetic banality as well as profane content, such as could be found in much of the tendentious poetry of the Vormärz, Heine’s own political poetry offers successful counterexamples, as in “Die schlesischen Weber” (“The Silesian Weavers”).

A CHANGE IN STYLES

The political poetry typical of the Vormärz virtually disappeared with the failed revolution of 1848. Complacency, disillusionment, and a conservative patriotism prevailed. Derivative didactic poetry predominated, represented by the work of the Munich Circle of poets, the most popular of whom was Emanuel Geibel (1815-1884). The more significant writers and poets of the genre known as Bourgeois Realism relied on the tradition of the Erlebnislyrik, or poetry of personal experience, such as that initiated by Goethe and practiced widely by the Romantics. This tradition, as well as that of the Stimmungsgedicht, or mood poem, ran its course in the period from 1850 to 1880.

REALISM

It is not customary to speak of lyric poetry in terms of realism, although one can consider it from this point of view, keeping in mind that the term “realism” has a range of meanings. Gottfried Keller’s (1819-1890) realism is to be found in the unpretentious experience of his Erlebnislyrik and in the restraint of emotion. Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863) and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898) showed an exacting attention to poetic form and rejected the highly rhetorical declamatory mode of earlier lyric diction. The realism of Theodor Storm (1817-1888) resides in his affinity for the folk song and in the acoustic sensitivity of his poems. Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) used everyday speech and eschewed the predominant bombastic style of the ballad of his day. The realists sought poetic experience in a balance or harmony among the divergent forces acting upon the self and the world around them, forces of alienation and isolation. On the whole, their poems display a preference for simple motifs and rhythms, uncomplicated strophes and lines of verse. Brevity and modesty proved more conducive to a sincere personal tone. Antiquated forms, viewed as rhetorically empty, fell into disrepute. Themes of love and nature, joy and sorrow, longing and remembrance prevailed, with an underlying tone of resignation evident. With some poets, especially Storm and Meyer, one senses an aura of Spätzeitlichkeit, the feeling of having been born too late, a condition suggested by the increasing artistic stylization of their poetry. Meyer’s symbolic imagery finally broke with the conventions of the Erlebnisgedicht (poem of personal experience) more completely than any of his predecessors, and he stands at the threshold of what we commonly acknowledge to be modern poetry.

FRIEDRICH HEBBEL

Friedrich Hebbel’s poetry is pensive and intellectual. He rejected the tendentious poetry of his day, but his own verse sometimes suffers because of its highly intellectualized reflection, especially evident in his later sonnets and epigrams. As a postclassicist, Hebbel was drawn between the reflection and speculation characteristic of Schiller’s work and the emotion and immediacy essential to Goethe’s. Hebbel’s imagery tends to be static, with the intellectual tension and the unnatural syntax of his poems countering the illusion of immediacy. He treats the themes of dream and night, pain and death, in a dialectic fashion. The antithesis of the individual and the universe provides a central tension at the core of his lyric ego. The poetic symbol overcomes the fundamental opposition of self and universe.

THEODOR STORM

With Theodor Storm, the poetic symbol loses its comprehensive meaning and evolves into something more psychological and impressionistic, an attribute of a given mood, disposition, or atmosphere. Storm always proceeds from a single experience and then, through precise observations—particularly acoustic ones—achieves the artistic translation of this moment into compelling figurative language. Aware of the interdependency of form and content, Storm considered the brevity of the lyric poem structurally appropriate to the intense communication of states or moods. After 1848, his often sentimental lyric subjectivity gave way to a preoccupation with external reality in distinct, descriptive language. His nature poems, like those of Droste-Hülshoff, reveal close ties with his own home region, Schleswig-Holstein. Storm’s later poems became more acerbic and, as with Meyer, the strong presence of death and isolation within Storm’s lyric voice suggests a sense of Spätzeitlichkeit.

CONRAD FERDINAND MEYER

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s poetry marks a significant historical moment between the realists’ reformulation of the Erlebnisgedicht and the Symbolism of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Some scholars therefore speak of Meyer’s poetry as “anachronistic,” while others stress those features of his work which point toward the future and the predominant course of modern poetry into the twentieth century. Meyer dealt continuously and in various ways with the problem of existence. Caught in the historical currents of pessimism and the accompanying sense of the loss of values which afflicted the late nineteenth century, Meyer preached the instructive and redemptive power of poetry. His own poetry evolves toward the poetic figuration of a subjective moment. His collection of poems from 1882 evidences a new kind of language, one intent on uncovering the essence of things through objectification. Even the most personal experience undergoes a transformation that objectifies it as a symbol or an allegorical image. In contrast to the more conventional mode of the Erlebnisgedicht, direct speech in Meyer’s poetry is rare and generally recedes entirely behind the distance of intellectuality. The formal perfection of his poems is one means of coping with suffering and death, as in, for example, “Eingelegte Ruder” (inlaid rudder) or “Im Spätboot” (in the late boat). In “Zwei Segel” (two sails), the fundamental experience of human love is transformed and objectified in a symbolically rich texture of images.

NATURALISM

The publication of Moderne Dichtercharaktere (characters of modern poets) in 1885, an anthology showcasing the revolutionary bravado of the younger generation and its new aesthetic program, introduced naturalist poetry. Few of the original contributors, however, became significant poets, perhaps because the aesthetics of naturalism were not compatible with the conventions of lyric poetry.

ARNO HOLZ

Arno Holz (1863-1929), an avid experimentalist, was the most accomplished poet among the German naturalist writers. His Buch der Zeit (1885; book of this time), a pithy, coarse, and “thoroughly modern” collection of poems, rejected the artifice and pretense of conventional poetic diction. Phantasus (1898, enlarged 1916, 1925, 1929, 1961) shows his indebtedness to Walt Whitman’s rhythms, his pathos, and his nontraditional use of form.

DETLEV VON LILIENCRON

Although unaffiliated with any literary movement, Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909) realized in his verse many of the objectives of naturalist aesthetics. He achieved a naturalist effect in his combination of simple and precise perceptions, a technique which could just as well be called impressionistic in several instances. (Some critics have remarked that Liliencron’s poems are “impressionistic” insofar as they are snapshots of reality as viewed from the surface, evocative glimpses of life, strung together according to the principle of juxtaposition and showing disdain for conventional rules of grammar and syntax.) His poems display spontaneity, rich imagery, and sensitivity to rhythm. The evocative atmosphere of his poems creates a depth which haunts the imagination. Adjutanternritte (1883; rides of an adjutant), his first book of poems, proved to be his most lasting; the quality of his later work generally did not live up to its promise.

TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

While the naturalist poem per se remained more a concept than a reality, the abundance of poetry written around the turn of the twentieth century displayed a variety of forms, styles, and graces. There was the neo-Romantic balladry of Agnes Miegel (1879-1964), Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen (1874-1945), and Lulu von Strauss und Torney (1873-1956), generally traditional in form and content and conservative in ideology. There was also a revival of nature poetry in the vein of Heimatkunst (provincial art). At the same time, the style known as Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau, emerged. With its penchant for the charming and the ornate, Jugendstil was naturally drawn toward poetry. Some of Stefan Zweig’s (1881-1942) poems can be considered representative of this style: They deal frequently with death, particularly its paradoxical relation to the centrifugal forces of life. Jugendstil experiences nature as a palliative for moroseness, pain, and suffering.

Around the same time, Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) and others were writing much satirical poetry, often with a political thrust, popular above all in the cabarets of large cities such as Berlin and Munich. The work of Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) was singular in the tenor of his keen, penetrating questions of reality. Then as now, his poems have proved to be enormously popular. The work of Richard Dehmel (1863-1920) met with great success during his own lifetime, but today Dehmel’s passionate vitalism is chiefly of historical interest. Erotic and sexual overtones dominate his later poems, and his equation of “poetic power” with “divine power,” influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, reveals a fundamental ideological interest of the time.

SYMBOLISM

Of more lasting significance for modern poetry was Symbolism, which includes the works of Stefan George (1868-1933), Rilke, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929).

STEFAN GEORGE

As Robert M. Browning has said, “modern poetry in the eminent sense begins in Germany” with Stefan George. George sought to retrieve the forces of creativity that the forces of materialism had either inhibited or destroyed. Through beauty, he sought to restore magic and majesty to art. Incorporating the tradition of Symbolism from the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud, George was a language purist, striving for precision and perfection in his highly sculptured works. His aesthetics of art for art’s sake evolved to accommodate a view of the poet as seer and teacher. George identified himself with Dante and with Hölderlin and advocated a kind of pagan beauty and aristocratic conservatism, behind which resided an ideology of hero-worship. The manner in which George flaunted his “eccentricity”—from his homosexual Maximin cult and his antiphilistine typographical innovations to the liturgical earnestness with which he read his own verse—repelled and impressed his contemporaries, frequently both. His highly aristocratic view of poetry and his technique of pictorial stylization, whereby the meaning of life can be grasped only as an aesthetic phenomenon, reveal a debt to Nietzsche.

HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL

Nearly all of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetry was written between 1890 and 1900, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. His Ein Brief (1901; Letter to Lord Chandos, 1952) is a central document for understanding much of the poetry that preceded it. Here, Hofmannsthal confronts the language crisis which plagued him at the time (for a period immediately before and after the fictitious letter, he produced almost nothing). The letter envisions a way out of the dilemma—by seeking a new language, one of ciphers and symbols which allow objects to speak directly. This path was, however, to be Rilke’s, not Hofmannsthal’s; the latter rejected this kind of aestheticism. One of Hofmannsthal’s best-known poems is the “Ballade des äusseren Lebens” (ballad of external life). While the title addresses the external life, it implies an internal—and qualitatively superior—plane of existence, which the poem reveals through an aesthetics of the moment that rescues objects and life from transitoriness and gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. As such, it anticipates the magic exorcism of language as described in the Chandos letter.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke is unrivaled in its aesthetic richness and its capacity to induce new modes of vision. After reading Rilke’s poetry, one simply sees the world differently from before. The best example of this transforming power can be found in “Archaischer Torso Apollos,” with its thematization of art’s redemptive value, as expressed in the final line: “Du musst Dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”). This notion of “art’s redemptive value” was not new with Rilke, but it is articulated with particular force in his works. It is a notion basic to what one might term the ”ideology of art” as it first developed with Romanticism: namely, that art can claim a specific visionary power not common to other forms of human activity and production. Coupled with this fundamental tenet is the assumption that art is not divorced from life, that it has real, affective functions—which is why the lyric voice in Rilke’s poem on Apollo, itself a work of art, is compelled to acknowledge its “redemptive effect.” Rilke’s first volume, Leben und Lieder (1894; life and songs), was followed by five more before 1900. Much of the early work reveals that Rilke was still struggling for a distinctive poetic voice. This he found by the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with Die frühen Gedichte (1909; early poems), Das Buch der Bilder (1902, 1906; The Book of Images, 1994), Das Stundenbuch (1905; Poems from the Book of Hours, 1941), and culminating in his Neue Gedichte (1907, 1908; New Poems, 1964). In The Book of Images, he moved tentatively toward a more objective poetry. From Auguste Rodin, Rilke had learned a new definition of artistic creativity, emphasizing craftsmanship rather than inspiration. In these poems, and later ones, he sought to be as plastic as possible. Poems from the Book of Hours depicts a Russian monk seeking God and the essence of all things through confession and prayer. Ultimately, this search proves futile, but the prayers are from the very start imbued with an underlying sense of doubt; all of Rilke’s overtly religious poetry is informed by a modern skepticism. Rilke then abandoned his search for God and concentrated on creating a type of poem known as the Dinggedicht, or “object poem.” Instead of a conventional portrayal of the symbolic confluence of the individual and nature, Rilke sought an “objective art.” “Der Panther” (“The Panther”), from New Poems, was the first text in which Rilke realized this technique to an absolute degree. The poem articulates no sentimentality or “human” sympathy; instead, the affective possibilities of the poem are left entirely to the dimensions of the object itself, the panther.

Rilke’s later volumes of poetry, Duineser Elegien (1923; Duinese Elegies, 1931; better known as Duino Elegies) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936), written after a decade of silence, celebrate the transmutative power of feeling, a power capable of transforming the material world into spirit. By rendering the physical world “invisible,” Rilke hoped to rescue it from the forces of transitoriness, to secure it forever within a dimension beyond space and time. As Browning has commented:

The world is here to be felt and we are in the world to feel it. We can feel it because of our awareness of transiency, i.e., because we know death. Death is therefore Rilke’s theme of themes. But for the poet feeling is not enough; the poet must also say. In saying, the rest of humanity is given to understand what is to be felt. In this way, the poet’s work extends our consciousness.

EXPRESSIONISM

Rilke’s work spans the period of German expressionism, although he should not be identified with it. The strident bravado of the new poetry of expressionism was chiefly concerned with shocking the complacent bourgeoisie. Moralistic pathos and visionary élan exploded the baser constraints on form and material, and the boldness of imagery challenged established perspectives and advocated novel and free modes of perception. Kurt Pinthus (1886-1975), editor of the influential anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (1920; twilight of humanity), wrote in 1915 that the new poetry surged forth “out of torment and scream, out of admiration and disdain, analysis and honor … toward the essential, toward the essence not only of appearance, but of Being.” Expressionist poetry countered the forces which rendered language automatic and void of meaning by introducing innovative syntax and imagery, thus creating novel dimensions within the newly discovered relations of space and time and making manifest a new hermetic reality. Reality was transformed into word and sign, transfigured as cipher. Alienating meter and rhyme effected a grotesque refraction of reality, also an essential feature of expressionist poetry.

The first phase of German expressionism in particular (roughly from 1911 to 1914) discarded the “sensibility wasting in reflection” of much nineteenth century poetry and urged a sensibility animated and absorbed in construction, in presenting simultaneously the “what” and the “how” of perception. Expressionist poetry experimented with the possibilities of metaphor, substituting a fusion of image and idea for the older parallelism of image and idea. Reality and referentiality were thus made problematic. Foreign influence was also a factor. George’s translation in 1901 of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1909) was an important contribution to the German literary scene. Whitman was introduced to the German public in 1868, but the popular edition of his poems appeared only in 1901, translated by Johannes Schlaf (1862-1941). Translations of François Villon and Rimbaud also appeared. Rimbaud’s influence was chiefly in the realm of imagery, and his idea that “the Poet becomes a seer through an extended, immense and consistent disordering of all the senses” compelled Georg Trakl (1887-1914) and others to break with the concept of purely rational continuity. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Italian Futurism also encouraged German poets to experiment with linguistic innovations.

“Weltende” (“End of the World”), by Jakob von Hoddis (1887-1942), is typical of the apocalyptic visions manifest in early expressionist poetry; its discontinuities were intended to reflect the dissolution of civilization. After undergoing psychiatric treatment in 1915, von Hoddis was finally committed to a mental institution in the 1920’s. Still, his work struck a central nerve of the time. Writing initially in the fashion of Symbolism, von Hoddis found a distinctive character in his apocalyptic projections. His compression of contemporary thought and emotion into signs and iconic formulas typified the grotesque and cynical expressions of the crisis-consciousness of these years. Similarly, “Der Gott der Stadt” (“The God of the City”), by George Heym (1887-1912), locates the source of eschatological anxiety in the modern metropolis, where Baal rules as the god of material pleasure. The poem “Morgen” (“Morning”), by Alfred Lichtenstein (1889-1914), is yet another example of the expressionist vision of the world on the brink of destruction, where failure to communicate forebodes the ultimate demise of society.

This basically imagist poetry, which privileged visionary experience over visual experience (expressionism versus impressionism), resulted in a diversity of individual poetic dictions. The contours of the early years of German expressionism are marked by a sharp disdain for the bourgeois conventions of poetry and by experimentation with new techniques of montage and imagery. After 1914, as the critic and translator Michael Hamburger has written, “its craft of imagery was vulgarized and, at the same time, its mental climate became predominantly political.” Behind the outrage and the utterances—sometimes cynical, sometimes grotesque—one senses the urgent longing for the “New Man.”

GEORG HEYM

Despair, fear, and the presentiment of catastrophe are the constant themes of Georg Heym’s poetry. Heym experienced life as a prison-house and suffered existential ennui, from which even death promised no escape. Melancholy pervades his eschatological visions; elements of Christian belief are transformed, as with Trakl’s poetry, into apocalyptic images. His verse is largely paratactic, and this simple poetic syntax is supported by a predominance of iambic pentameters or rhymed tetrameters. As the poems develop, however, along simple syntactic lines, images are superimposed, one over the other, creating a density and tension that belie the surface simplicity of the discourse.

ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER

The poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler (1876-1945) is charged with anxiety, Weltschmerz, and ennui. Her poems exhibit a longing for a return to the beliefs of the “fathers” and celebrate mythical origins in transparent and yet enigmatic language. Expressionism with Lasker-Schüler becomes a liberation of the imagination. Her poems exude the sense of security peculiar to dreams.

GEORG TRAKL

Georg Trakl viewed in his poems an “all too faithful reproduction of a godless, cursed century.” Hyperaccentuated guilt and the experience of horror and degeneration inform his poems. Trakl claimed that his work was an “incomplete attempt” to expiate “guilt,” both of the individual and of humankind. Nature objectifies his own inner strife and reveals the lack of harmony within Trakl’s poetic world. The recurrence of a few central images in his poems has led one critic to speak of Trakl’s oeuvre as “one poem.” Trakl’s experimentation with drugs heightened his apocalyptic visions. Remembrance, dream, and drug-induced intoxication, along with lines from Maurice Maeterlinck and Rimbaud, produce an evocative poetry, a singular accomplishment of German expressionist writing.

Hamburger maintains that Trakl best understood the nature of the crises that he and his generation faced, exploring how it is that modern men and women relate to death and to evil, whereas Heym (to cite a counterexample) avoided analysis of the crisis by projecting onto the landscapes of his text images of death and evil and suggesting their omnipresence and inexorability. Hamburger also notes that a distinction can be made between Heym’s consistently dark view of nature and Trakl’s more variable imagery. The effect of the latter’s, even if only vague and highly mediated, is to uncover the traces of a paradise that is perhaps not forever lost.

A NEW FREEDOM

Expressionism was the first literary movement in Germany that made the anticlassicist tendency a mass phenomenon, but the disruption of old realities and old poetic conventions created at the same time a new freedom, or at least the perception that freedom (and novelty) were real possibilities. From then on, every poet had to decide what to do with this potential freedom. Since the time of expressionism, there has been no authoritative norm governing the production and reception of poetry which one could manipulate in order to shock and to draw attention to the work of art (“épater les bourgeois”) and to the possibility of new experiences. Expressionism broke with all norms and thereby created an utterly new situation (which, significantly, itself soon became an established and “authoritative” convention).

ERNST STADLER

Ernst Stadler (1883-1914), thoroughly versed in the European literary tradition, experienced the early years of the twentieth century less as an end than as a beginning, seeing in them not the disintegration of modern society but the promise of its transformation. Initially, he had difficulty achieving an individual tone and style. Ultimately, after experimenting with Symbolism, he adopted a dithyrambic voice of political activism—what he called a “new joyous, all-embracing world feeling.” His verse espouses an ecstatic devotion to fellow human beings, a longing for freedom, and an acceptance of life’s abundance. Rather than viewing the city as the locale of degenerate corruption and destruction, Stadler saw it as a cause for celebration, as the facilitator of ecstatic union.

JOHANNES R. BECHER

The early radical poems of Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958) struck out at the bourgeois world in which he grew up. Immoderate and shrill, their forceful imagery “spits in the face” of his immediate milieu and social mores; rhetorical exposition disrupts the traditional form of these poems. With the advent of war, he sent out an urgent appeal for a “new syntax,” a “catastrophic syntax” that would raze conventions: Word and deed were coterminous for Becher the political activist. Much later, his voice lost resonance; his visions largely unfulfilled, Becher wrote that “The poem cannot survive without truth.”

FRANZ WERFEL

The dithyrambic prophecies of human redemption and reconciliation found in the work of Franz Werfel (1890-1945) struck a resonant chord among his generation. As the conscience of his time, Werfel, whose poetry sought to transform feelings into music, represents a significant dimension of expressionism. Werfel celebrates the redemptive value of the poetic word and projects an optimism utterly open to the world, while at the same time humbly acknowledging the presence of God. Art and theology thus blend; political activism yields to a “Christian mission” sustained by verbal dynamism and full-toned musicality. Werfel experienced his poems acoustically and was more concerned with emotive charge than with formal consistency.

GOTTFRIED BENN

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) drew upon Nietzsche’s philosophy of art to form his concept of artistry and perspectivism, whereby form becomes the “primary instance,” taking precedence over all contextual considerations. Benn’s first volume of poetry, Morgue, und andere Gedichte (1912; morgue, and other poems), used montage and calculated scientific jargon mixed with profane colloquialisms to achieve a shocking alienation. Benn confronted the empty prophecies and shabby progress of his time with the final reality of death. Disease, decay, and death are his themes in the early poems; humans are portrayed as helpless creatures—miserable, pitiful, despicable. The volume Söhne (1913; sons), the central theme of which is the characteristically expressionistic father-son conflict, reveals a futuristic aspect (again typical of expressionism) with its projection of a “New Man,” an artist who will overcome death in ecstatic vision.

ALFRED LICHTENSTEIN

Alfred Lichtenstein (1887-1914) applies the grotesque to expose reality as absurd—a juxtaposition of the ridiculously banal and the sublimely tragic. His lyric voice, marked by alienation and the dislocation of images and motifs, is often compared with that of Jakob von Hoddis. Objects in Lichtenstein’s poems are always distorted and displaced, always perceived from bizarre, radical, and unsettling perspectives.

AUGUST STRAMM

The poetry of August Stramm (1874-1915), characterized by a constructivist style, is not easily accessible. A tremendous diversity is evident within his modest oeuvre, and estimations of his work range from “thoroughly expressionistic” to “pretense and sham.” Striving to reunite meaning and sound, Stramm dispenses with tradition in order to allow the individual word to appear in untrammeled isolation. Such deformation effects an unusual concentration of expression. In allowing the word to exercise its own effect, his poems turn programmatically from empirical reality. The resulting abstraction is charged with the currents of eros and chaos.

THE 1920’S THROUGH 1940’S

Following the strong element of subjectivity evident in the poetry of expressionism, the 1920’s ushered in a new responsiveness to the factual and the objective. The human being was of such central interest to the poetry of German expressionism that nature as such found little room there. By the mid-1920’s, however, nature was once again a central theme of poetry, often perceived as the only medium through which objectivity and precision of detail could be achieved. As Alfred Döblin proclaimed in 1925: “Art is boring, we want facts, facts.” In part, this trend encouraged a revival of nature poetry, in German referred to as naturmagisch, focusing on the objective details of nature and celebrating their cosmic relevance. The particular dimensions of this cosmic order vary among poets. For Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1950), for example, the order is largely determined by Christian ideas, while Günther Eich (1907-1972) concentrates on the parameters of language per se.

NATURE POETS

Both Langgässer and Eich worked in a circle of poets connected with a poetry journal called Kolonne (column), whose contributors included Peter Huchel (1903-1981), Hermann Kasack (1896-1966), and Georg von der Vring (1889-1968). In the works of these naturmagische poets, visible nature is considered “wondrous”; their realism is thus “magical” to the extent that their poetic diction is a kind of invocation. Lyric expression is thus an act of revelation as well as of interpretation.

PETER HUCHEL

Peter Huchel wrote nature poetry typical of the Kolonne group. Nature here appears not as a romantic object of poetic longing, for an elegiac tone is mixed with contemporary metaphors of struggle and warfare. Natural processes are depicted in crystalline, precise language that often reveals their underlying violence. Huchel’s nature poetry never simply flees into boundless and timeless space; the poet delivers testimony as an eyewitness.

GÜNTHER EICH

Günther Eich first began writing poetry in the company of the Kolonne group. His early nature poems are both subjective and reflective; one can see in them the first steps toward the dispassionate stance and the extreme brevity which characterize his poems after 1945. Contemplating specific, concrete objects, such as the blue feather in “Die Häherfeder” (“Jay Feather”), Eich searches for the deeper reality behind “signs” and “omens.” Still, language—at least the cognitive, rational faculties of the mind—proves unyielding, for the “sly answer” lies somewhere just beyond the dimensions of habituated thought and perception. The sudden surprise initiated by the sign is thus a central moment for Eich’s work.

WILHELM LEHMANN

Wilhelm Lehmann’s (1882-1968) poetry deals with nature and myth, the dual constituents of meaning and order in his universe. The individual, subjective ego of the poet recedes behind the objectivity of language, which, through precise concentration on objects, attempts to open vistas to that level of order which transcends the individual. The unreal and the dreamlike are also part of Lehmann’s poetic world. There is a certain consistency within or behind Lehmann’s poetic landscape, but the imagery is not static; instead, it moves as part of a larger cosmic cycle, as the passing of seasons relates to mythical signs.

ELISABETH LANGGÄSSER

Depictions of nature and the presence of myths also determine the imagination of Elisabeth Langgässer, but are used as portals through which to recognize the underlying order of Christianity. This sense of order is not always achieved in her poetry, but where it is absent one at least senses that a struggle has taken place to realize it. During the war, Langgässer held on to the “magical” qualities of reality as a vehicle for hope and for redemption in the Christian sense.

OSKAR LOERKE AND GEORG BRITTING

The poetry of Oskar Loerke (1884-1941) gives expression to the complete poetic universe. Balancing intellect and emotion, the static and the fluid, Loerke achieves a consistency and sense of order that extends beyond his own subjectivity. Loerke’s concise observations result in a spiritualization of nature.

Georg Britting (1891-1964) was the poet of the Bavarian landscape. He stressed the idyllic and the bucolic but experienced nature as magical, disclosing it as a sign of a larger cosmic order. This combination of the sensuous and the intellectual makes Britting’s poetry representative of the so-called Magical Realism.

TOPICAL POETRY

The objectivity of another group of poets, including Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) and Erich Kästner (1899-1974), was directed toward social conditions. Their poems read like warnings of imminent catastrophe; their efforts to awaken the public rested on a faith in the social efficacy of the poetic word. In the 1920’s, this objective poetry was best represented by the song, the broadsheet, and the ballad. The work of Tucholsky falls into this category, as does that of Kästner and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

The epic quality of Brecht’s anti-Aristotelian theater figures in his poetry as well: It is distancing, descriptive, and critical rather than sentimental and empathetic. His poems break with the bourgeois tradition of aestheticism, nature, and confessional poetry. His description of these years as a “bad time for poetry” did not imply a rejection of poetry altogether, but rather only a rejection of the conventional forms and traditional subject matter of poetry, which were no longer adequate to the changed historical circumstances. Brecht thus tried to rejuvenate art, but not (like Rilke) exclusively through formal and aesthetic means, although he was sensitive to the historical necessity of formal experimentation. In his verse, Brecht admits to a longing for the conventional elements of lyric poetry, but since “a talk about trees is almost a crime/ because it implies silence about so many horrors,” he does not indulge this desire. His vocabulary and poetic diction are strict and sober, marked by clear and unsentimental precision.

Countermovements against the new objective tone are visible in the poetry of Rudolf Alexander Schröder (1878-1962) and Hans Carossa (1878-1956), whose conservative political and aesthetic orientation drew them toward the classical heritage in both form and content. They were more interested in the timeless aspects of poetic diction than in the merely topical. With the advent of National Socialism, their posture became a kind of inner emigration, problematic because, if from the point of view of the individual, political abstinence was a kind of mute contradiction to the Hitler regime, as a whole the totalitarian system was able to disenfranchise their voices, if not actually coopt them altogether. Schröder’s work represents a consistent effort to preserve the Western cultural heritage. He had a keenly developed sense for form, which he applied to his humanistic religious poetry. Carossa strived in his verse for harmony and moderation; his artistic perspective was that of a pious humanist, his models Goethe and Stifter. Carossa’s conservatism and classicism were manipulated to the advantage of Nazi ideology.

THE NAZI REGIME

Poetry written in accordance with the ideology of National Socialism largely eschewed the principles of precise objectivity. Characterized by the frequent use of archaic words and phrases, it shied away from formal innovation. Josef Weinheber (1892-1945) studied the example of the classics and was concerned primarily with questions of form and aesthetics. He became well known with the volume Adel und Untergang (1932, 1934; nobility and decline) and was supported at the time of its publication by the Nazis. Some of his later writings reciprocated this support, and toward the end of the war, suffering from severe depression after having acknowledged his misguided affiliation with National Socialism, he took his own life.

The most significant party-line poet was Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer (1878-1962). The stylistic diversity of his work reveals its fundamental confusion. He greeted the rise of National Socialism as a historical necessity, explaining its emergence through digressions on philosophy, politics, history, economics, biology, religion, and culture. The appeal of his work is utterly totalitarian. Party slogans and verse become indistinguishable in his monumental panegyric to the supremacy of the German spirit in all of its manifestations. As a member of the Prussian Academy of Poets and as the recipient of several distinctions, Kolbenheyer was one of the most forceful poetic voices on the literary scene of the Third Reich. Other party-line poets included Hanns Johst (1890-1978) and Gerhard Schumann (1911-1995).

POSTWAR POETRY AND MODERNISM

The situation for poetry after 1945 was at first ambivalent. On one hand, historical conditions presented German writers with an enormous challenge. On the other hand, the devastation, frustration, and overwhelming loss of orientation made a direct confrontation with the immediate past something to be avoided. Poets inherited a language corrupted in the Nazi era, and they recognized the need to replace it with a new idiom.

Under these circumstances, it is not hard to understand that, initially at least, issues of content mattered more than issues of form. The immediate task of assessing the relation of the present to the past rendered aesthetic considerations secondary. Historically, this phase was probably necessary, because postwar German poetry could become credible once again only after having expunged its affiliation with National Socialism. Gradually, however, aesthetic considerations emerged from the background. A critical factor in this development was the influence of foreign literatures, in particular the force of modernism.

One could therefore consider postwar German poetry along two lines: the politicalsocial, and the linguistic-formal. Progressive experimentation in poetry was impeded by the presence of hackneyed lyric phrases and the failure to confront sociopolitical reality. Formal traditionalism and a social isolation resulting in escapism and indifference toward politics coexisted. It is significant that the most important mode of expression for the immediate postwar years was not poetry but narrative prose, above all the short story. Here, authors pursued the necessary confrontation with contemporary sociopolitical issues, while poetry continued its preoccupation with the vestiges of Surrealism, on the one hand, and the tradition of nature poetry, on the other. These coexisting trends can be visualized as four principal constellations dominating the postwar poetry scene. One of these was a political conscience combined with formal traditionalism. A second resided as well within traditional poetic forms but shied away from political commentary. The other two possibilities were a combination of formal modernism with either a political or an apolitical attitude. While such a scheme is helpful, it should be noted that a distinction between “political poetry” and “poetic escapism” can be misleading. One need only read the works of Hans Magnus Enzensberger (born 1929) to realize that these two descriptions are not mutually exclusive.

Poem after poem of the postwar years revealed that poetry in the service of spiritual and ethical rejuvenation could afford little room for new aesthetic solutions. In this regard, the poetics of Benn—namely, the rejection of everything contextual in the attempt to approximate the “absolute poem”—appears as a historically necessary step in the development of postwar German poetry. Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) pronounced that, after Auschwitz, it was no longer possible to write a poem, necessitating a reconsideration of the content, the form, and the function of poetry.

Postwar poetry can be said to have begun not in 1945 but in 1948, for it was in the latter year that the first postwar poems of Benn, Eich, Huchel, and Karl Krolow (1915-1999) appeared, not to mention the first volume by Celan (1920-1970). These poets are all identified with the tradition of Hermetic poetry, and they represent the primary avenues through which postwar German poetry drew upon the traditions of modernism. In a sense, then, German postwar modernist poetry represents no really new beginning, but instead the realization, continuation, and extension of established modernist movements. The resonance with which modernism appeared on the postwar German literary scene suggested something radically new; the war obscured lines of development reaching back into the 1930’s and earlier.

The overwhelming presence of this obscured tradition was best articulated not by a poet but by a scholar. In 1956, Hugo Friedrich published The Structure of Modern Poetry, an attempt to reveal the unity of European-American poetry since the midnineteenth century through a study of its genesis and its various typologies. His work dominated scholarly discussions of poetry in Germany for some time. Tracking the development of modern poetry from its origins in Mallarmé, Friedrich isolated its more significant features, such as the rejection of old taboos, a preoccupation with darkness, an overwhelming sense of isolation and anxiety, and an insistence on the logic of discontinuity. Friedrich’s book has much in common with the spirit of postwar German poetry, for he neglects the sociohistorical constituents of modern poetry and highlights instead its phenomenological-existential dimensions. Benn epitomizes this orientation among poets.

KARL KROLOW

Karl Krolow once wrote that metaphor determines “the economy of the single poem.” Krolow’s imagery reveals the development of his poetry as a whole, as well as the shift in poetics which marked the postwar years. Krolow’s first metaphors belong to the category of “traditional nature.” Later, he moved to more aggressive, expressionistic, and even surrealistic metaphors. Then, he focused on decidedly intellectual images, gradually relying less and less on rhyme or regular strophes while developing a laconic style.

INGEBORG BACHMANN

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) published her first volume of poems, Die gestundete Zeit (borrowed time), in 1953 and immediately established her reputation as a poet with a keen ability to articulate her doubts about the meaning of history and her anticipation of catastrophe, an anxiety shared by many Western European intellectuals during the Cold War. The specific accomplishment of this volume lies in its suggestive interrelation of societal perplexity and individual despair. Several of her poems combine poetic diction and utopian thought, while others suggest their ultimate irreconcilability. In the tension between “superfluous objects” and words “for the lowest classes,” Bachmann exposes as illegitimate the traditional mode of poetic speech and in its place suggests the possibility of a documentary, didactic literature.

PAUL CELAN

The difficulty in understanding the poetry of Paul Celan results less from the allusions embedded in his texts than from his concentration on the expressive possibilities and limits of language. This problem is often the central preoccupation of his poems. The “incontrovertible testimony” of the poet can be achieved only after the utmost exertion, where language is pressed to its limits. Celan’s poems are always “under way,” in search of a partner in conversation.

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

By the late 1950’s, the tradition of nature poetry had run its course. Already during the mid-1950’s, West German poetry was becoming more explicitly political. A fundamental problem thus emerged: that of achieving the aesthetic political poem, of articulating both literary and political progressiveness. The new politicized poetry displayed a certain disenchantment with the state of things, preferred sobriety to ceremony, and, in a sense—because of its basic distrust of any “magical powers” residing in the poetic word—depoeticized poetic diction and renounced the traditional notion of “lyrical” by presenting primarily a cerebral appeal.

The successful articulation of both aesthetic and political progressiveness is perhaps best illustrated in the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Initially, Enzensberger relied on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” for the theoretical basis of his work but soon incorporated the philosophy of Adorno. In the 1950’s, Enzensberger conceived experimental poetry and social criticism as mutually dependent. The background of his early poetry is the Cold War, the atomic threat, the rearmament of West Germany, and in particular, the economic recovery of the Konrad Adenauer era, a process which Enzensberger viewed as threatening to the integrity of the individual. In the 1960’s, Enzensberger turned increasingly toward political writings. He remains impatient with the cheap (commodified) utopias of would-be reformists. A socialist by choice, a skeptic by nature, and a realist through practice of acute observation, Enzensberger always imbued his poetry with his unmistakable mark. The work of Erich Fried (1921-1988) is likewise politically keen. Fried’s poetry achieved recognition in the turbulent decade of the 1960’s and is noted for its laconic style, coupled with Brechtian techniques of paradox, antithesis, and dialectic reversal.

MID- TO LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A significant experimental phase of West German poetry, one which shared a skepticism of traditional metaphoric expression and poetic diction, was concrete poetry, best represented by Eugen Gomringer (born 1925), Franz Mon (born 1926), and Ernst Jandl (1925-2000). The term was introduced by Gomringer in analogy to concrete art, and by it he meant to distinguish a linguistically experimental literature which reflected and thematized its own raw material—that is, language. Applying the principles of functionality, clarity, simplicity, communicability, objectivity, and play, concrete poetry sought to reintegrate literature into social life. Using techniques of reduction and permutation, concrete poetry focused on the presentation of language and linguistic elements and not on the representation of reality beyond language. Ultimately, however, the experimentalism of concrete poetry soon rigidified into rather predictable patterns. Challenging (and entertaining) material was written by Jandl, whose keen wit and linguistic sensitivity inform the foreground of his work. While focusing on the acoustic and optical valences of language, Jandl at the same time recognized the social implications of his work, for language as the material of his art was also the material of his thought and speech and, as such, material shared by a significant portion of Western society.

In 1965, Walter Höllerer (1922-2003) presented a call for the “long poem,” understood as an alternative to the then predominant Hermetic poem. This reformulation of poetic diction was carried out by Günter Herburger (born 1932), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940-1975), and Nicolas Born (1937-1979), among others, who advocated a new subjective realism in the 1970’s. For Jürgen Theobaldy (born 1944), a significant representative of the youngest poets, the long poem of the late 1960’s gave way to the “new poem” of the 1970’s, when several younger poets tried to relocate the self, rearticulating the individual as socially and politically relevant. This renewed emphasis on the self becomes most comprehensible when viewed as a reaction to the agitprop poetry of the late 1960’s and the disillusionment of the intellectual Left in the early 1970’s.

Poets of this New Subjectivity movement flourished throughout the 1970’s, and their concern with personal experience and the intricacies of daily life struck a chord with the public. Theobaldy’s “Schnee im Büro” (snow at the office) details the daydreams of an office worker for whom the evenings and vacations with his lover barely compensate for his mundane eight-hour workday, during which he feels “imprisoned” and a mere “number.”

More women poets saw publication of their works, and gained prominence and attention to their poetry, which often defied categorization and invigorated the poetic scene. Elisabeth Borchers (born 1926) displays an acute awareness for the nuances of language, and the poems of her Gedichte (1976; poems) use startlingly ironic imagery such as “solid” ruins, and are infused with her personal experience, as in “Das Begräbnis in Bollschweil” (the funeral in Bollschweil). Here, memory fails the poet to compose a proper eulogy, and the death of a close one leaves behind nothing but “small, slow ghosts” scurrying between the mourners.

Hilde Domin (1909-2006) similarly includes allusions to her personal life in her poetry, which is also concerned with the play of language, and occasionally conjures up Surrealist images and associations. In “Mauern Sortieren” (sorting walls), in her Gesammelte Gedichte (1987; collected poems), a look at “textile patterns” in a mail-order catalog reminds the persona of “patterns of walls,” which later form the alliterative “Mauern aus Menschenfleisch” (walls of human flesh) to crescendo in the paradoxical coupling of “Mutter/Mauer” (mother/wall) which lies “zwischen Geschwistern/ jeder auf seiner Seite/ Berlin” (between siblings/ each on his own side/ Berlin), bringing the poem to a personal conclusion.

The 1980’s saw a surprising return to formal poetry, with rhymes and meters replacing the ubiquitous free verse of the preceding two decades. Poets such as Krolow returned to rhymed lines, and Ulla Hahn (born 1946) abandoned her earlier, political poetry in exchange for poems following traditional forms, and quite surprised her readers. Enzensberger and Jandl returned to traditional reflections on the meaning of being, and even love poetry was read by a serious audience again.

On the other hand, the political issues of the decade, most noticeably environmentalism and the squatter movement in some of the larger cities like Hamburg and Berlin, spawned a flurry of poetic activities, often arising out of the alternative scene. Concerns over America’s stationing of short-range nuclear missiles in Germany briefly brought back political passions in poetry. In 1989, the momentous changes in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe caught quite a few German poets in the West by surprise. By October 3, 1990, before one year had passed after East Germany allowed the breaching of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989, Germany became reunified. German poets in the West and the East now had to grapple with the challenges brought forth by the reintegration of two quite different societies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appleby, Carol. German Romantic Poetry: Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin. Maidstone, Kent, England: Crescent Moon, 2008. Contains a discussion of the themes that were basic to the literature of Romanticism, along with critical studies of the major poets and philosophers of the period.

Baird, Jay W. Hitler’s War Poets: Literature and Politics in the Third Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. An analysis of the ideas that motivated Germany’s Nazi poets, including their interpretation of history and their hopes for the future. Also includes their life stories and assesses the influence of what are now recognized as inferior works. Bibliographical references and index.

Bohm, Arnd. Goethe’s Faust and European Epic: Forgetting the Future. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2007. By placing Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1838) within the context of earlier works in the genre, the author supports his belief that the work should be viewed as a Christian epic. An important new study by a highly respected scholar. Bibliography and index.

Boland, Eavan, ed. and trans. After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. One of Ireland’s major woman poets has collected poems by German women who survived the war, some of them well known for their literary works, others obscure. The German and English versions of the poems are on facing pages. Illustrated. Bibliography and index.

Donahue, Neil H., ed. A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005. Essays on the philosophical background of expressionism, as well as on specific writers, including all the major poets involved in the movement. Also contains critical overviews and textual analyses.

Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Looks at the views expressed in the writings of German minorities, including immigrants from other countries, German Jews, and Germans who grew up in the German Democratic Republic. A much-needed study. Bibliography and index.

Harper, Anthony, and Margaret C. Ives. Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe, 1749-1832. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Includes translations of the poems into English and further bibliographical references. Highlights a freshly emerging aspect of German Romanticism from a mostly feminist perspective.

Hofmann, Michael, ed. Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. A collection of superb translations of the works of major German poets, assembled by a noted poet and translator. Bilingual format.

Koelb, Clayton, and Eric Downing, eds. German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832-1899. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005. Volume 9 in the Camden House History of German Literature series. Sums up the political, cultural, and literary movements of the period and discusses important writers in detail. Includes list of primary and secondary sources.

Nader, Andrés José, ed. Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933-1945. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2007. Combines a study of the motivations that impelled inmates of the camps to write poetry with the poems that survived, presented both in the original and in translation. A valuable contribution to Holocaust studies and to the history of German poetry.

Vanchena, Lorie A. Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. An innovative approach to the subject, with detailed bibliographical references and index. Shows how some poets were quite ardent German Nationalists, and illustrates how popular periodicals helped disseminate nationalistic ideas among educated citizens.

Richard Spuler
Updated by R. C. Lutz