The dawn

The Twilight is a poem by Alfred Lichtenstein , which is one of the most famous expressionist poems in German literature . It first appeared on March 18, 1911 in the magazine “ Der Sturm ”. The poem's title was also used for the author's only collection of poems in 1913 before it fell in 1914 in the first weeks of the First World War .

The poem

Imprint in "Simplicissimus"

A fat boy is playing with a pond.
The wind caught itself in a tree.
The sky looks lost and pale
As if he had run out of make-up.

Bent down crooked on long crutches
And two lame ones crawl in the field, chatting.
A blonde poet may go mad.
A horse stumbles over a lady.

A fat man is stuck to a window.
A young man wants to visit a soft woman.
A gray clown puts on his boots.
A stroller screams and dogs curse.

Publication history and classification

After it was first published in March 1911, it was also published in “ Simplicissimus ” in October of the same year . The poem was also included in the collection of the same name, which was published in 1913 in Alfred Richard Meyer's "Lyrische Flyer" series. In 1920 Kurt Pinthus included it in the anthology of expressionist poetry " Menschheitsdämmerung ".

Lichtenstein is considered to be the “finisher and popularizer of the sequential style poem ”. Twilight is a good example of this. The exemplary expressionist poem is reminiscent of Jakob van Hoddis ' recently composed poem “ Weltende ” , whereby Lichtenstein “in his poem the series of small and large catastrophes that point to the 'end of the world', to a basic state of mind of the expressionist generation shortly before Attributed to the First World War: to the experience of living in a world gone mad ”.

literature

• Wolfgang Max Faust : The poem as an unsettling language world. On Alfred Lichtensteins : The twilight. In: Harald Hartung (ed.): Poems and interpretations. Volume 5: From Naturalism to the Mid-Century. Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-15-007894-6 , pp. 148-157.

Web links

Wikisource: The Twilight  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The storm. No. 55/1911 (PDF; 1.9 MB)
2. ^ Peter Sprengel : History of German-Language Literature 1900–1918. From the turn of the millennium to the end of the First World War. (= History of German literature from the beginning to the present. Volume IX, 2). C. H. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52178-9 , p. 675.
3. ↑ Wulf Segebrecht : Crazy World. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 19, 2010, p. Z4 (pictures and times). (= Contribution to the Frankfurt anthology )