The war (Heym)
The war , actually Der Krieg I , is a poem by Georg Heym . It was written from September 4 to 10, 1911 and appeared in the volume Umbra vitae a year after Heym's death . The poem is assigned to early expression . In 1919 it appeared together with twelve other Heym's poems in the Menschheitsdämmerung collection . In 1924, the volume of posthumous poems with 47 woodcuts by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was published again.
text
The war I got
up, who slept a long time, got up
from deep vaults below.
In the twilight he stands, tall and unrecognized,
And he crushes the moon in his black hand.
In the evening noise of the cities it falls far,
frost and shadow of a strange darkness,
And the round eddy of the markets turns to ice.
It gets quiet. You look around. And nobody knows.
Her shoulder is easily grasped in the alleys.
A question. No Answer. One face turns pale.
In the distance a peal whimpers thin
and the beards tremble around her pointed chin.
On the mountains he is already starting to dance.
And he screams: All you warriors, up and down.
And it resounds when he swings his black head,
with a loud chain hanging from a thousand skulls.
Like a tower he steps out of the last embers,
Where the day flees, the rivers are already full of blood.
Countless corpses are already stretched out in the reeds, Covered in
white by the birds of death.
He stands over round walls of blue flames
, over black alleys the sound of weapons.
Over gates where the guards lie across,
over bridges that are heavy with dead mountains.
In the night he chases the fire across the country
A red dog with wild mouths shrine.
The night's black world jumps out of the darkness,
its edge is terribly lit by volcanoes.
And with a thousand red
pointed hats, the dark plains are scattered flickering,
And what swarms back and forth in the streets, He
sweeps into the piles of fire, so that the flame burns more.
And the flames eat burning forest after forest,
yellow bats clawed jagged into the leaves.
He knocks his pole like a coal man
into the trees so that the fire roars properly.
A great city sank in yellow smoke,
Threw itself silently into the abyss's belly.
But above glowing rubble stands huge, Who
turns his torch three times in the wild sky,
Reflection above storm-torn clouds,
In the dead dark, cold desert,
That he withers with the fire far the night,
bad luck and fire drip down on Gomorrh.
shape
| verse | meter | rhyme |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ | a |
| 2 | - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ | a |
| 3 | - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ | b |
| 4th | - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ - υ | b |
| -: stressed syllable υ: unstressed syllable |
||
The poem consists of 11 stanzas with 4 verses each. The stanzas consist of two rhymes . Most of the verses, written in six-part trochee , have a male cadenza. Verses 10, 31, 34 and 40 have seven and verse 32 eight. Verse 38 has five exaltations. The sloping effect of the foot of the verse and the comparatively simple pair rhyme create a slow, ponderous rhythm that is carried through to the end due to the rigid adherence to the metric. This is reinforced by the use of a six-lever trochaeus instead of the usual four-lever, and the use of male rhymes, which contribute to a greater isolation of the individual verses. The "Heymian rhythm results from the fact that the world is first transferred into a state of complete paralysis, readable from the line structure, in order then to be displaced into a restlessness initiated by the author", says Klaus Günther Just with regard to Heym's poetry.
Diary entries
Georg Heym noted the following lines in his diary on July 6, 1910:
“Oh, it's awful. It couldn't have been worse in 1820 either. It's always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing, nothing, nothing happens. If something should happen that doesn't leave behind that bland taste of everyday life. When I wonder why I've lived until now I don't know the answer. Nothing like torture, suffering and misery of all kinds. [...] If something happened. Barricades would be built again. I would be the first to stand on it, I wanted to feel the rush of excitement with the ball in my heart. Or even if you just start a war, it can be unjust. This peace is as rotten, oily and greasy as a glue polish on old furniture. "
Ronald Salter judges: "Georg Heym wanted the fight, even the war as a cure for the disease of his time, the time of the Second Empire". Heym's enthusiasm for war is based on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel , according to which the war had a revitalizing effect on frozen life.
interpretation
According to Anselm Ruest and Paul Zech , who co-printed the poem in 1915/1916 in a tribute to Heym, the poet foresaw the horrors of World War I. After 1945, Hermann Kasack still shared this view and interpreted the poem as an advance notice of the two world wars as well as an anticipation of the devastation caused by the aerial warfare over German cities.
With the publication of documents on Heym's work, this interpretation is considered obsolete. Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach adds that even in the numerous reviews of the poem on the occasion of the publication of the volume Umbra Vitae Heym, no premonition of the war was said. This interpretation was favored by the contextualization of the poem - Kurt Pinthus had published it in the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung in the chapter "Fall und Schrei" (Fall and Scream).
The creation of the poem coincides with the Second Morocco Crisis . Marianne Kesting refers to the widespread fear of a war with France , which was suspected of wanting to 'flood' the German Empire with black African colonial troops. Instead of a warning about war, Heym's poem is about a “desire for annihilation” directed against the citizen. Therefore Heym let the war in the "shape of a Korybantisch dancing Negro " start against the citizens. In this sense, the poem contrasts the decay of the bourgeois world with the vitalism of war.
reception
The poem has been included in numerous anthologies . Along with twelve other poems by Heym, it appeared in the expressionist collection Menschheitsdämmerung in 1919 .
Konstantin Wecker set the poem to music in his 2015 album Without Why .
literature
Text output
- Georg Heym: The war . In: Umbra vitae. Postponed poems . Edited by Elmar Jansen . Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 1968, pp. 3–4.
- Georg Heym: The War I . In: Seals and Writings . Edited by Karl Ludwig Schneider. Vol. 1. Ellermann, Hamburg 1964, pp. 346-347.
Secondary literature
- Günter Dammann, Karl Ludwig Schneider , Joachim Schöberl: Georg Heyms poem "The War". Manuscripts and documents; Investigations into the history of origin and reception . Winter, Heidelberg 1978 (= supplements to Euphorion 9), ISBN 3-533-02700-7 .
- Friedrich Leiner: Georg Heym. The war . In: Interpretations of Modern Poetry . On the occasion of the Germanist Association Conference ed. from the German History Section in the Bavarian Association of Philologists . 6th edition. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Regensburg 1959, pp. 40–47.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Karl Eibl : Expressionism . In: Walter Hinderer (Hrsg.): History of German poetry from the Middle Ages to the present . 2nd edition, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-8260-1999-7 , pp. 420–438, here p. 430.
- ↑ Klaus Günther Just: From the early days to the present. History of German Literature since 1871 . Francke, Bern / Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7720-1056-3 , p. 295.
- ^ Georg Heym: Second diary. May 23, 1907 to May 5, 1910 . In: Seals and Writings. Diaries, dreams, letters . Edited by Karl Ludwig Schneider. Vol. 3, Ellermann, Hamburg 1960, pp. 138-139.
- ↑ Ronald Salter: Georg Heyms Lyrik. A comparison of word art and image art . Fink, Munich 1972, p. 187.
- ↑ a b Thomas Anz , Joseph Vogl : Afterword. In: The poets and the war. German poetry 1914–1918. Carl Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-446-13470-0 , pp. 225–248, here pp. 228 f .; Peter Sprengel : Literature in the Empire. Studies on modernity . Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-503-03064-6 , p. 268; Hans-Jörg Knobloch: End times visions. Studies of literature since the dawn of modernity . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3859-4 , p. 16.
- ^ Hermann Kasack: The War (Georg Heym) . In: Dieter E. Zimmer (Ed.): My poem. Encounters with German poetry . Limes, Wiesbaden 1961, p. 109.
- ↑ a b c d Marianne Kesting: The wait is over . In: Gerhard R. Kaiser (Ed.): Poetry of the Apocalypse . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1991, ISBN 3-88479-570-8 , p. 173.
- ↑ a b Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach: Georg Heym: The War . In: Andreas Böhn (Ed.): Poetry in a historical context. Festschrift for Reiner Wild . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-4062-7 , p. 276.