Latrine (poem)

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Latrine is a poem by the German poet Günter Eich . It was published in 1946 in the magazine Der Ruf and in 1948 was included in Eich's first collection of poems from the post-war period Remote Homesteads . The poem was written during or shortly after the Second World War , as a result of which Eich became an American prisoner of war as a soldier in the Wehrmacht .

Eich describes the activities on a makeshift latrine and contrasts aesthetic considerations with the excretion of excrement . He quotes the poem Andenken by Friedrich Hölderlin , a poet who was particularly venerated during the National Socialist era , and contrasts it with a present marked by illness and death. The rhyme of “Hölderlin” on “ urine ” was particularly shocking to contemporary reception. But it was also understood as a break with outdated conventions and a signal for a new beginning in German literature after the Second World War. Latrine is a typical work of clear-cut literature and is one of Günter Eich's most famous poems.

content

The poem begins with the verses :

" I crouch on my knees over a stinking ditch,
paper full of blood and urine
,
swirling around with sparkling flies ."

While the lyrical self's gaze wanders into the distance, perceives wooded banks, gardens, a stranded boat, the clapping of the excrement can be heard.

"
Verses by Hölderlin ring out in my ears ."

In the snow, the clouds are reflected in the urine. The ego remembers verses from Hölderlin's poem Mementos : “But go now and greet / The beautiful Garonne ”. A look down shows:

"The
clouds swim away under the swaying feet ."

Background and origin

Information sign on a latrine in World War II

In its creation, the latrine was often attributed to Eich's time as an American prisoner of war, where he was interned as a former soldier in the German Wehrmacht from April to summer 1945 in the Goldene Meile camp near Sinzig and Remagen . The poems from this period such as inventory , hospital or Camp 16 are in part summarized under the term “camp poems”. Axel Vieregg suspected when publishing Eich's Gesammelter Werke in 1991, however, that Latrine could have been created during Eich's basic training as a recruit in France in 1940, a phase to which Vieregg also attributed the motivically similar poems Truppenübungsplatz and Puy de Dôme . Latrine was first published in the seventh edition of the young journal Der Ruf by Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter on November 15, 1946. In 1948, Eich took the poem into his collection of poetry Abgere Gehöfte , which was published by Georg Kurt Schauer with four woodcuts by Karl Rössing . It was not until 20 years after the first edition that Eich, who was meanwhile critical of many of his early poems, agreed to a new edition of this volume in the edition suhrkamp .

A surviving first version of the poem Latrine consists only of two stanzas, which roughly correspond to the first and third stanzas of the later published version. There the verses of Hölderlin heard in the fever rhyme: “In the mirror image of the latrine / the whitest clouds move.” Robert Savage identifies three essential semantic differences in the later final version: the change of rhyme from Hölderlin to urine, the verses of Hölderlin that no longer resound “in fever” but “crazy”, and the added “purity” of the clouds. He traces the development back to Eich's changed perspective in the post-war period, in which he is no longer just concerned with the contrast between dirt and poetry, but also with their historical entanglement. While the distortion of Hölderlin's verses in the first version is still due to the fever of the narrator, the “wrong” in the final version allows for the expanded possibility of a general misleading or a wrong path of Hölderlin's poetry in National Socialism.

The poem Andenken , which Eich quotes at the beginning of the last stanza, is one of Friedrich Hölderlin's late poems . Most interpreters take 1803 as the year of creation. In the previous year, Holderlin had spent a few months in Bordeaux before returning to Stuttgart, where he arrived in a confused state in June 1802 after a long hike. The subject of the poem are Hölderlin's memories of the sensual experiences in southern France and their transformation into poetry. The final verse of the hymn , in particular, is well-known and parodied : “What remains, the poets create.” Kurt Binneberg suspects that Eich's reference to Hölderlin's poem resulted from a parallel life situation, the move to France and its failure. Before he was drafted into World War II, Eich had learned numerous poems by heart as literary provisions, and the image of “Holderlin in a knapsack ” was a symbol of the “spiritual strengthening” that was to be brought about in the German soldier. For example, the Hölderlin Society, which was founded under the patronage of Joseph Goebbels , saw it as its task to "give every German student a Holderlin breviary with them in the field" by means of so-called field post issues. The Hölderlin field selection , co-edited by the main cultural office of the NSDAP , was published in an edition of 100,000 copies and also contained the poem Keepsake .

Form and text analysis

Latrine consists of four stanzas of four verses each, which form a heterogeneous cross rhyme . For Bruno Hillebrand , this fixed structure is “[m] ot possible formally meant as a parody ”. And Dieter Breuer also describes: "The smooth, conventional versification is led to absurdity by the completely non-standard statement". For Herbert Heckmann , language remains limited to the essentials, sober and laconic . Eich does not mean that he is simply registering without any rhetorical or aesthetic commitment. The verses are lined up like in a shorthand , with the rhyme connecting the unconnected observations through a common rhythm. In the rhyme image as well as in the metrical structure Werner Weber sees an alternation between stability and lack of stability, order and disorder: every second verse ends without rhymes and without consonance: "Dig", "Fly", "Shore", "Decay". Fixed, non-swinging rhymes are set in between.

For Gerhard Kaiser resulting metric of the poem entirely of Hölderlin quoted verse, "But go now and greet", whose three elevations determine the whole poem. Together with the evocative rhymes, this works like a rigid grid in relation to Holderlin's free rhythms . Only the second verse of Holderlin "the beautiful Garonne -" stands out due to its duality. In terms of sound, the beginning of the poem is dominated by an I-vowelism, which carries the defensive sound of disgust before the sound mood with the Ö-sound in Hölderlin and the Ü-rhyme turns into pleasant sounds. There is also a comparable development from discordant to euphonic sound with the accumulations and alliterations of consonants : the cacophony "claps [...] feces" at the end turns into the euphony "fluctuating [...] the clouds swim". For Kaiser, the "sparkling flies" also convey a "nauseating beauty".

According to Kurt Binneberg, the formal means of the poem illustrate the radical contrast between latrine reality and imagined poetry , between beauty and ugliness. The first half of the poem draws an "aesthetic of the ugly", the images of disgust in verse eight increase to an acoustic effect - the excrement "claps". At the beginning of the third stanza a second acoustic effect answers: There are "echoing" of Hölderlin verses that are quoted in the second half of the poem. Exactly in the middle of the poem, two completely different spheres collide: excrement and poetry. According to Binneberg, the merging of the opposites in the two contrasting halves of the poem is illustrated by the rhyme and sound connections as well as the semantic references, which suggest a parallel between the first and third as well as the second and fourth stanza. For example, the messages “dig” and “sound” as well as “flies” and “reflect” create an assonance , the visual impression of the “sparkling” blowflies in the reflecting clouds is repeated semantically and the “paper full of blood and urine” corresponds with it the verses recorded on paper. In the contrast between faeces and poetry, the double rhyming word “urine” has a special meaning, which is used the second time against “Hölderlin”, which Binneberg calls “a shocking rhyme”.

interpretation

Starting position

POW camp PWTE C-3 in Heilbronn 1945

According to Gerhard Kaiser, the initial situation, the situation of a prisoner of war between hardship, agony and humiliation, must first be determined from the abrupt beginning . From the petrified feces of a blockage , the blood of an intestinal infection to the "mud of putrefaction", all signs point to illness and death . In the embryonic posture of the crouching person, thrown back on the mere metabolism, only the gaze roaming through nature remains free, but this too gets caught in a stranded boat. Peter Horst Neumann sees the stranded boat as a parody of the “good trip” from Hölderlin's hymn and at the same time a symbol of failure, both for the individual and for the German nation as a whole. The beauties of nature remain inaccessible to the self, behind bars. His gaze is directed downwards, where he can only perceive the purity of the clouds through the mirror of the urine.

The reversal from above and below in the image of the reflecting clouds symbolizes a world that has fallen apart for Kaiser. The vertical movement prevails over the horizontal movement in the poem, the “under” of the last sentence answers the “over” of the beginning. Like the prisoner's body, his mind is also dysfunctional, hallucinating “crazy” Hölderlin verses, citing Hölderlin's mental illness and transferring it to a lost, mad present. For Herbert Heckmann, the lyrical ego withdraws to mere observation in the face of the out of joint world. It describes a moment of its perception without passion, pathos or sentimentality and seeks rescue from its fear in a relentlessly all-registering vigilance. Hans Dieter Schäfer refers to the conditions in prisoner-of-war camps in which tree trunks had to be used as latrines over trenches on the barbed wire fence . Often the prisoners would have sought the spiritual escape from this reality into a remembered culture or to natural phenomena. But like the poem, nature in the latrine remains inaccessible and limited to the function of a quotation .

Contrast between reality and poetry

For Neumann , Latrine derives its tension, which extends to the limits of what is bearable, from the contrast between civilization and culture . On the one hand, the need to act publicly means breaking one of the strongest taboos in civilization and deep cultural humiliation. On the other hand, with Holderlin and his poem In memory, there is the world of poetry, cheerfulness, humanity and beauty, which seems so strange in the presence of the prisoner that it is only possible as a quotation. The connection between the opposites of that “crazy” rhyme Hölderlin / Urin takes to extremes. According to Neumann, the simultaneity of two irreconcilable principles may "never have been put into such a frightening rhyme in German poetry as here."

For Kaiser, on the other hand, the opposites are combined, the human longing for beauty is manifested in excrement, despair and insanity. In the image of the clouds reflected in the urine, the purity of the clouds and the impurity of the urine, happiness and pain, illusion and disillusionment coincide. A “poetic reconstruction of the world” is being created in the latrine. The design of the world through poetry was born out of humiliation, but in the end it proclaims the triumph of imagination and inspiration. By demonstrating the power of poetry with a view of the abyss to awaken hope, Latrine confirms Eich's poem the last verse from Hölderlin's cited memory : "What remains, the poets donate."

Regarding Hölderlin

Portrait of Friedrich Hölderlin by Franz Karl Hiemer , 1792

As an exploration of Hölderlin, to which Eichmann in his later writings, as in his prose poems moles , decidedly repeatedly referred, Michael Kohl Bach reads the poem. Latrine is a real antithesis to Hölderlin's memory . Its “heavy airs” become “stinking ditches”, the ships that Hölderlin says “bring together / The beautiful earth” is contrasted with a “stranded boat” with Eich, and while with Hölderlin despite “mortal ones / Thoughts “in the end what remains of the poets, decay takes hold in the latrine . Gerhard Kaiser emphasizes the same point of departure for both poems. Hölderlin's memory is also the expression of a longing to get out of the cramped local conditions to an ideal landscape. In the end the poet broke down not to make any sense of a history of salvation in the world. Eich went one step further, in that in his world, which was hopelessly out of joint, Holderlin's creation of a spiritual landscape from a historical-philosophical context was only possible as a quotation.

According to Kohlenbach, even in Eich's contradiction to Holderlin, the spiritual reference to him still comes to light. Eich's poem is to be understood in its translation of the Hölderlin verses into the present and their simultaneous alienation as a "poetic compensation" to the author, who was ideologically exploited during the time of National Socialism and thus almost illegible in 1945. Where in 1943 Martin Heidegger, for example , drew the interpretation of “remaining in one's own” of the German character from Hölderlin's memory , the same poem in Eich proves its fleeting nature and becomes the measure of a historically conditioned alienation . Herbert Heckmann sees Hölderlin's rhyme with urine ultimately as a correction of the blatant distance between high style and reality that arose through the veneration of Hölderlin in the Third Reich . Eich puts the real things in the center, without exaggerating them by an interpretation. Latrine is the attempt to learn the falsified language again from a consciousness of shame .

Hans Dieter Schäfer refers to Eich's friend Martin Raschke , a writer who also wrote National Socialist propaganda during the Third Reich . He introduced his collection of German songs , published in 1940 and containing Hölderlin's hymn souvenirs , with the words: “Not written so that you forget yours while reading, but so that you need it like a weapon.” And in a front report two years later he struck the bridge of soldiers who read poetry in the glow of the flashlight, and a quotation from Hölderlin souvenirs to the question: "Has the war [...] not being fought around the world applicability of our language?" for Shepherd turns calibration in a satire against his friend's demeanor. With the quote from Hölderlin's hymn, he contrasts "a piece of abused cultural property" with the truth enforced by the defeat and thus dismantles the intention of war propaganda to "authenticate the murder by the German classics."

perspective

The "intellectual and existential disorientation" of post-war Germany expresses Latrine for Kurt Binneberg. The humanism in Hölderlin's verses has proven to be utopia . They are as unreal as the clouds, which are only perceived as reflections and can no longer be made part of their reality by the person they swim away from under their feet. In the end, there remains “the empty urine level”. Gerhard Kaiser, on the other hand, emphasizes that the clouds do not simply swim away, but that they also carry the movement of the river, the Garonne, with them and thus the wishes and hopes of those who remain physically trapped. The floating clouds arouse flight fantasies, and their impulse to move is repeated in the swaying of the feet, reminiscent of numerous wandering, exhausted and longing wanderers of German intellectual history from Holderlin himself to Büchner's Lenz .

Peter von Matt admires that the poem's speaker stands upright on "unsteady feet". At a time when actually no more words seem possible, he speaks of the brown cesspool of history that lies behind and below him. By facing the unbearable, he helps prevent forgetting. It is not only about general cultural criticism , but also about Günter Eich's own biography, who himself wrote systematic radio plays with echoes of the blood-and-soil ideology of National Socialism in the Third Reich . In this respect, the poem does not herald a “'new beginning' of an innocent generation”, but Eich's work documents the entire “literary process” that has taken place in Germany since his first poems in 1927.

reception

According to von Matt, the contemporary recording understood Latrine as a literary program that stood for clearing and zero hour . The poem was stylized as the hour of birth of German literature after 1945, and Eich was celebrated as a pioneer by other writers, for example from Group 47 . In particular, the rhyme of “Hölderlin” on “Urin” marked a beacon for a radical new beginning, but it also triggered a shock and scandal in public. Bruno Hillebrand also spoke of a “ culture shock ” caused by the poem. Looking back, Norbert Rath saw the first publication “a certain amount of excitement among some Hölderlin protectors”, who believed that “German culture has really come to an end” with this rhyme. For Gerhard Kaiser, the latrine heralded "a modernity that was unprecedented in Germany at the time of its creation".

Benno von Wiese warned the reader in 1959 that latrine was “in no way suited to please you. But it does not have that intention at all, since it is far more likely to snub and shock the reader with a view to reality and to break through a taboo sphere, but certainly not to charm them. "Six years later, Manfred Seidler turned critically against" that Pretentious [...], the wanton exaggeration ”, which is in the rhyme Urin-Hölderlin, for example, and which is considered important“ out of sheer uncertainty about such poetry ”. In 1972 Ludwig Büttner found the soldier reality “decidedly distorted” and criticized: “What we dislike is the disgusting scene and the tasteless rhyme, presented in an artful form to cause a sensation and amazement. [...] The intended shock effect distracts from the actual and serious topic. [...] However, the latrine-like coarsening of the subject turns it into the serious and ridiculous and the veneration of Hölderlin is belittled or ironicized. "Werner Weber asked in 1967:" Is the poem disgusting, isn't it moral? "His answer posed the thesis: “The moral of the material is called form. Accordingly: A poem with a disgusting motif has become a beautiful, moral poem through fulfilled art. ”In 2007 Michael Braun only spoke of“ poetically well-dosed shocks that are administered here in casually rhymed folk song verses ”.

Heinz Ludwig Arnold rated the latrine as a "necessary breach of conventions", whereby Eich did not destroy the literary canon , but rather placed it in a new relationship. Poems like latrine or inventory are "clear signals of the changed awareness of a changed world". After the Second World War, Eich wrote only a few such programmatic texts and soon turned to modern natural poetry . On Eich's 100th birthday, Wulf Segebrecht found that the public recognition that the poet received was based on only a handful of poems. Among them, Latrine "attracted continued attention" not least because of the scandal it caused. Joachim Scholl and Barbara Sichtermann summed up: "The author never escaped the fame of these notorious verses."

literature

Publications

  • First publication: Poems by Günter Eich . In: Der Ruf , issue 7 of the 1st volume of November 15, 1946, p. 12.
  • Günter Eich: Remote homesteads . Schauer, Frankfurt am Main 1948, p. 44.
  • Günter Eich: Remote homesteads . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 41.

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The full text of the poem can be found, for example, on deutschelyrik.de with a reading by Fritz Stavenhagen .
  2. ↑ a b Friedrich Hölderlin : Souvenirs . On project Gutenberg-DE .
  3. ^ Günter Eich: Collected works in four volumes. Revised edition. Volume I . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-40209-9 , p. 37.
  4. ↑ For example with Christoph Perels: Not beauty, but truth . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie Volume 9 . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-458-14280-0 , p. 188.
  5. ^ Günter Eich: Collected works in four volumes. Revised edition. Volume I , pp. 438 and 442.
  6. ^ Preliminary remark in: Günter Eich: Remote homesteads . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 2.
  7. ↑ Cf. Günter Eich: Collected works in four volumes. Revised edition. Volume I , p. 442, where the complete first version is also printed.
  8. ^ Robert Savage: Hölderlin after the catastrophe. Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht . Camden House, Rochester 2008, ISBN 978-1-57113-320-5 , pp. 2-4.
  9. ↑ Anja Ross: Sensuality and Danger. “Memory as a tragic process” . In: Uwe Beyer (Ed.): Hölderlin. Readings of his life, poetry and thought . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, ISBN 3-8260-1232-1 , p. 77.
  10. ^ A b 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, here p. 280. ( online as PDF file)
  11. ↑ Kurt Binneberg: Interpretation Aids . Deutsche Lyrik 1945–1989 , pp. 100–102.
  12. ^ Susanne Mack: Books under arms. Front book issues from two world wars . In Deutschlandradio Kultur on November 19, 2008.
  13. ↑ Hans Dieter Schäfer: Eichs Fall , p. 261 and footnote 26, p. 440.
  14. ^ A b Bruno Hillebrand : Singing and swan song of German poetry from Goethe to Celan . V&R unipress, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-89971-734-1 , pp. 494-495.
  15. ^ Dieter Breuer: German metrics and verse history . Fink, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7705-2711-9 , p. 376.
  16. ^ A b Herbert Heckmann: Günter Eich: "Latrine" , p. 129.
  17. ↑ a b Werner Weber: The moral of the material is called form . In: Die Zeit of November 17, 1967.
  18. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , pp. 692-694.
  19. ↑ Kurt Binneberg: Interpretation Aids . Deutsche Lyrik 1945–1989 , pp. 98–101.
  20. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , pp. 691–692.
  21. ↑ Peter Horst Neumann: The rescue of poetry in nonsense. The anarchist Günter Eich , pp. 53–54.
  22. ↑ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , p. 692.
  23. ↑ Hans Dieter Schäfer: Eichs Fall , pp. 260-263.
  24. ↑ Peter Horst Neumann: The rescue of poetry in nonsense. The anarchist Günter Eich , pp. 52–54.
  25. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , p. 695.
  26. ^ Michael Kohlenbach: Günter Eichs late prose. Some characteristics of the moles. Bouvier, Bonn 1982, ISBN 3-416-01679-3 , pp. 92-94.
  27. ↑ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , p. 693.
  28. ^ Michael Kohlenbach: Günter Eichs late prose. Some characteristics of the moles , pp. 95–96.
  29. ^ Herbert Heckmann: Günter Eich: "Latrine" , pp. 131–132.
  30. ↑ Hans Dieter Schäfer: Eichs Fall , pp. 261–263 and footnote 26, p. 440.
  31. ↑ Kurt Binneberg: Interpretation Aids . Deutsche Lyrik 1945–1989 , p. 102.
  32. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German lyric poetry from Heine to the present , p. 694.
  33. ↑ Peter von Matt: On swaying feet , pp. 159-160.
  34. ↑ Peter von Matt: On swaying feet , p. 158.
  35. ^ Norbert Rath: War comrade Holderlin. Quotes on the history of meaning . In: Uwe Beyer (Ed.): New ways to Hölderlin . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1994, ISBN 3-88479-692-5 , p. 226.
  36. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: History of German poetry from Heine to the present , p. 695.
  37. ^ Benno von Wiese : The German poetry of the present. In: Wolfgang Kayser : German literature in our time . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1959, p. 39.
  38. ^ Manfred Seidler: Modern poetry in German lessons . Hirschgraben, Frankfurt 1965, p. 89.
  39. ↑ Ludwig Büttner: From Benn to Enzensberger. An introduction to contemporary German poetry. Carl, Nuremberg 1972, p. 63.
  40. ↑ Michael Braun : 17 footnotes to Günter Eich . In: die horen Volume 226. Wirtschaftsverlag NW, Bremerhaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-86509-636-4 , p. 18.
  41. ^ Heinz Ludwig Arnold : The three leaps of West German literature. A memory. Wallstein, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-89244-062-X , pp. 18-19.
  42. ↑ Wulf Segebrecht : Be silent about the hunters . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 1, 2007.
  43. ↑ Joachim Scholl, Barbara Sichtermann : Fifty classics: poetry. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2544-6 , p. 212.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on January 20, 2012 in this version .