Inventory (Günter Eich)
Inventory is a poem by the German poet Günter Eich . Based on Eich's experiences in a prisoner of war camp , it was written between 1945 and 1946 and was first published in 1947. The poem captures the mood of the immediate post-war period . A person uses simple words to list his small belongings. Everyday objects become precious possessions for him, a pencil lead, with which he writes poetry, is his most valuable asset. The realistic, time-related content and the laconic, barren language made inventory one of the best-known examples of the poetry of clear-cut or rubble literature . It is considered one of the most important German post-war poems .
content
The poem begins with the verses:
"This is my hat,
this is my coat,
here my shaving kit
in a linen pouch."
In the further course, the lyrical ego enumerates further objects of its belongings: a tin can, which serves as a plate like a mug, and in which it has scratched its name with a “precious” nail. In bread bags are socks
"And some things that I wo
n't tell anyone,"
and what is used as a pillow at night. The most beloved possession is a pencil lead.
"During the day she writes me verses that
I invented at night."
Finally, other items in the inventory are listed: notebook, canvas,
"This is my towel,
this is my thread."
Text analysis
The poem consists of seven stanzas , each containing four verses . It does not follow any specific meter or rhyme ; due to frequent enjambements , the verses are "open". The sentences are arranged in paratax . The laconic language hardly uses rhetorical stylistic devices , no metaphors . The focus is on nouns , which are seldom defined by attributes such as adjectives . The simple verbs mostly only name the function of the objects. In the sparse language, the superlative “most” (v. 22) falls out of the ordinary .
The lyric self is not specified in terms of age and origin. His living conditions come to light indirectly through the listing of his belongings. The relation of possession to the person is reinforced by the possessive pronoun "my" (cf. vv. 1-3). Through the demonstrative pronoun “this”, partly as an anaphor (cf. vv. 25-28), as well as the adverb “here” (v. 9), the mere enumeration becomes a demonstrative showing of the objects.
For Hans Helmut Hiebel, the verses are not prosaic despite the lack of a metric . The shortness of the lines creates a rhythm, each verse consists of two accents in a trochee , iambus or dactylus . The syntactic parallels ensure a uniform sound, the uniform sentence formations lead to a grammatical rhyme . Hiebel was reminded of Ernest Hemingway's sentence melodies .
Jürgen Zenke saw the poem in three parts. In the clear structure of the first stanza the subject of the inventory is introduced, in the following five internal stanzas it is developed in a flowing rhythm, while the closing stanza takes up the theme and the form of the first stanza as a recapitulation . The fourth stanza forms the culmination point of the symmetrically constructed poem. Instead of explicitly shown objects, we are talking about the hidden. On the way to this axis of symmetry , the line structure becomes more and more blurred through enjambements, the emphasized vowels become darker and darker, in the second part the structure solidifies again, the vowel color becomes lighter. In the second and third stanzas there are onomatopoeic e-accumulations in the tin can, and i-accumulations in the squeaky engraving of the name. The poem ascends in a speech-rhythmic crescendo up to the middle stanza, which forms the climax of the lyrical expression, and then ebbs away again in a decrescendo . Zenke also analyzed that exactly half of the 28 verses of the poem begin with an uplift without an opening. Half of these are in the two corner stanzas, while the remaining seven verses play a central role in the inner stanzas. The subject of writing is shaped in them.
interpretation
Jürgen Zenke summarized the content of the poem in the sentence: "A prisoner of war names his precious belongings". The everyday things of the internee, according to Hans-Ulrich Treichel , are exaggerated into an existential importance. From them a world emerges that is not only the reality of the prisoner's life, but also a world opposite to the traumatic experiences of the Second World War. From the overwhelming questions of guilt and innocence, perpetrators and victims, the amalgamation in history, the individual withdraws to reflect on what is immediately available.
Hans Helmut Hiebel continued: At the end of the Second World War, the National Socialist society had disintegrated, social ties destroyed, the individual isolated and isolated, thrown back on himself and his remaining possessions. Their enumeration only raises awareness of their insignificance. Apparently the lack of any mementos, photos or other remnants of a social bond. The meager ownership is defined by the functional use and makes the individual self-sufficient. Everyday objects that have become treasures are marked by name as protection against theft, the other with his "covetous eyes" is perceived as a threat. Food appears in the poem only because of its absence: the bread bag is used as a container for socks.
Only in the penultimate stanza is a feeling suddenly named: the love of the lyrical self for its pencil lead. It is only this emotion that characterizes the ego; with it emerges from the general type of the returnees , who could be one among millions, an individual who achieves something special through his literary impulse. The pencil lead enables a form of communication, an awareness of one's own situation, its processing in literature. The writing of the “verses” becomes a moment of self-referentiality , the creation of the poem on its own topic. Ina Hartwig saw in inventory the attempt to maintain what is one's own with minimal possibilities and, as a consequence, a triumph of the subject. In the material and moral defeat the ego realizes that it is still there, that it thinks, writes and loves writing. The poem is about "[v] on the recapture of an undisputed subjectivity".
Gerhard Kaiser pointed out that you are missing from the poem. The ego draws a line against the hostile outside, isolates itself in self-assertion and pride, the only pronoun apart from the first person is "nobody". Even nature is only named once and perceived as inhospitable: "Earth", against which a cardboard pad must protect. To the same extent as the ego expresses itself, it also hides itself. The contents of the bread bag remain mysterious. He was spoken to, but not revealed. The I step back so far behind things that its secret does not lie in the heart but in the bag. In the solitude of the self, language has a magical effect. The marking of the box with one's own name, the cardboard separating the self from the world, the pencil lead that writes independently become images of poetry as word magic, the pencil lead the anima of the man. In the end, the I step back behind the objects, but it has received an orientation through the act of creation of writing. “Twist” is the last word of the poem, and by sewing reality together in writing, an order becomes visible in the chaos and a future world can be built.
For Rolf Selbmann, the self had inscribed itself in the objects at the end. It marked them and gave them a new quality. The things that initially determined the ego become the products of the ego through the creative process of writing. The text demonstrates that in truth there has never been a zero hour in literary history . The title, the reference to the commercial inventory , suggests that it is not about marking an empty space, but about viewing what still exists. From the existing things of one's own past, the openly exhibited as well as the hidden, a new self-concept emerges through the poetic act of creation.
History of origin and relation to other works
Towards the end of the Second World War , Günter Eich was interned as a soldier in the German Wehrmacht from April to summer 1945 in the American prisoner of war camp Goldene Meile near Sinzig and Remagen . There is the origin of a series of poems that deal with the captivity of war and the stay in a camp, including an inventory . The exact time the poems were written is unknown. Originally, the research assumed that the poems were written directly in captivity, but later information is more cautious and coarse in terms of time. For example, when Axel Vieregg published Günter Eich's collected works in 1991, he dated the “Poetry of Prisoner of War” to “1945/46”. Was first published in inventory in 1947 in the anthology your sons Europe. Poems by German prisoners of war by Hans Werner Richter . In 1948 this was followed by a publication in Eich's volume of poetry Abgere Gehöfte . After the first publication in Richter's anthology, Eich made another change to the text of the poem. While verse 17 was originally "this is how it serves as a pillow", the passage in Remote Homesteads has already been changed to "this is how it serves as a pillow". The clear reference to the bread bag as a pillow has been transformed into a vague reference to “some”, the hidden content of the bag.
For Gerhard Kaiser, inventory took a prominent position in Eich's work. In both its tone and style, it stands out clearly from the other captive poems. While these included pathos , irony , melancholy or accusation, such elements were completely absent in the linguistic lacony of inventory . In contrast, many later studies referred to a poem by the Czech poet Richard Weiner with the title Jean Baptiste Chardin , which is very similar in structure to the inventory . The German translation published in 1916 begins with the verses:
“This is my table,
this is my slipper,
this is my glass,
this is my pot.
[...] "
In addition to the formal analogy, Gerhard Kaiser pointed out the analogy between the two works. In Weimer's poem, too, a person steps back behind an enumeration of their property, the painter Jean Siméon Chardin hides behind the image of a philistine. Nevertheless, Eich's artistic achievement is not diminished by the similarity with the earlier poem. In Weiner's enumeration of the withdrawn artist's life , for example, there is no existential self-assertion from the inventory , which for Kaiser was not created in the prison camp, but "in the literature laboratory, [...] handling templates". Eich himself, on the other hand, always denied having known of the existence of the forerunner. Independent of Eich's knowledge of the forerunner, Hans-Ulrich Treichel drew the conclusion from Weiner's poem that a real, unconditional new beginning was not possible in literature either.
reception
Günter Eich's poem Inventur is considered to be one of the most important, in some cases the most important poem in immediate post-war literature . It is also considered the poem of the " zero hour " in Germany. Heinz Ludwig Arnold recognized in him, as in Eich's other famous post-war poem Latrine, “clear signals of the changed consciousness of a changed world”. Günter Kaiser described the inventory as a " poetological poem" and "the only German poem known to me that marks a point zero". It became as famous as Paul Celan's death fugue .
Inventory is often categorized as a classic example of clear-cut or rubble literature. This short-term literary flow after the Second World War was formative for German post-war literature and also determined the first years of Group 47 , to which Eich had belonged since 1948. Its director, Hans Werner Richter , placed "the extraordinary verses of Günter Eichs, which he headed inventory ", at the beginning of the group's almanac for its 15-year existence in 1962 and quoted Wolfgang Weyrauch : "The bald-headers catch on in language, substance and conception at the front. […] The method of taking stock. The intention of the truth. Both at the price of poetry. Where the beginning of existence is, there is also the beginning of literature. ”However, by the time Eich accepted the first prize from Group 47 in 1950 , his poetry had already moved away from clear-cut to a more complex, modern natural poetry . Inventory remained his most famous poem. The poem was often printed in school books and discussed in class. Nonetheless, Eich, who otherwise subsequently protested against those of his works that the public perceived as catchy and easily usable, included the poem in his self-compiled selection of works Ein Lesebuch .
Eich's poem has been adapted several times by other writers. Kurt Drawert's Second Inventory in 1987 described the retreat into the hermetically sealed world of objects in one's own apartment. Michael Bauer's inventory in 1993 became a chatty demonstration of the status symbols of the information society. In 1989 a modern dance piece based on Eich's poem was choreographed in Philadelphia .
literature
Publications
- Hans Werner Richter (Ed.): Your sons, Europe. Poems by German prisoners of war . Nymphenburger, Munich 1947, p. 17.
- Günter Eich: Remote homesteads. Schauer, Frankfurt am Main, 1948, pp. 38-39.
Secondary literature
- Gerhard Kaiser : Günter Eich: Inventory . Poetology at zero. In: Olaf Hildebrand (Hrsg.): Poetologische Lyrik. Poems and interpretations . Böhlau, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-8252-2383-3 , pp. 269–285. ( Online as a PDF file)
- Jürgen Zenke: Günter Eich: Inventory. Poetic order as the positioning of the poet. In: Walter Hinck (Ed.): Poems and interpretations. Volume 6: Present . Reclam's Universal Library 7895. Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-007895-4 , pp. 71-82.
- Hans Helmut Hiebel: The spectrum of modern poetry: Interpretations of German-language poetry 1900-2000 in the international context of modernity, Part 2. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3201-2 , pp. 19-25.
- Rolf Selbmann: Günter Eich's “Inventory” and the poetics of the zero hour. In: Sprachkunst. Contributions to literary studies. No. 38 (2007), 1st half volume. Pp. 203-207.
- Hans-Ulrich Treichel : No new beginning. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.): Hundred poems of the century . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-458-17012-X , pp. 330-332.
Web links
- Ina Hartwig : Beloved pencil lead . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 3, 2005.
Individual evidence
- ^ Hiebel: The spectrum of modern poetry. Pp. 23-24.
- ^ Zenke: Günter Eich: Inventory. 1982, pp. 75-78.
- ^ Zenke: Günter Eich: Inventory. 1982, p. 72.
- ↑ Hans-Ulrich Treichel: No new beginning. Pp. 287-288.
- ^ Hiebel: The spectrum of modern poetry. Pp. 20-23.
- ↑ Ina Hartwig : Beloved pencil lead . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 3, 2005.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, pp. 271-277.
- ↑ Selbmann: Günter Eich's “Inventory” and the poetics of the zero hour. Pp. 204, 206.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, pp. 269-270.
- ↑ Selbmann: Günter Eich's “Inventory” and the poetics of the zero hour. P. 205.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, pp. 270-271.
- ^ Richard Weiner : Jean Baptiste Chardin . Transferred from JV Löwenbach. On ngiyaw-ebooks.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, pp. 282-283.
- ↑ Hans-Ulrich Treichel: No new beginning. P. 289.
- ↑ Dieter Bänsch: How do you live without despair? About Günter Eich's poetry . In Marburger Forum , issue 6, 2007.
- ^ Hiebel: The spectrum of modern poetry. P. 19.
- ^ Heinz Ludwig Arnold : The three leaps of West German literature. A memory. Wallstein, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-89244-062-X , p. 19.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, pp. 283-284.
- ^ Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventory. 2003, p. 270.
- ↑ Hans Werner Richter (Ed.): Almanach der Gruppe 47 1947–1962. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1962, p. 9.
- ↑ Helmut Böttiger : Forgotten Rebel . Deutschlandfunk from January 28, 2007.
- ^ Manfred Jobst: Günter Eich: Inventory . In Marburger Forum , issue 1, 2007.
- ↑ Selbmann: Günter Eich's “Inventory” and the poetics of the zero hour. Pp. 206-207.
- ↑ Georg Guntermann: Some stereotypes for group 47. In: Stephan Braese (Hrsg.): Inventories. Studies on group 47. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-503-04936-3 , pp. 24-25.
- ^ Anna Kisselgoff: Reviews / Dance; A Troupe's German Roots . In: The New York Times . January 29, 1989.