father come tell me about the war

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father come tell about the war is a poem by the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl , which was written on October 31, 1966. The following year it was published as part of an anthology under the title Peace . 1973 took Jandl father come tell from the war in his poetry collection arrest on. In six straight lines, a child asks his father to report on the war . In the end, it turns out that the father in the war fallen is. According to Jandl, the absurdity of this situation expresses the absurdity of the war.

Content and form

Ernst Jandl
father come tell us about the war
Link to the full text of the poem
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A child asks his father to tell about the war. The father should report how he went to war, how he shot, how he was wounded, and finally how he fell. The poem ends with the child again asking the father to tell about the war.

father come tell about the war consists of six lines and a total of thirty-five words, although they only consist of thirteen different words. According to Magda Motté, it forms a visual “block” in which each line begins with the words “father come tell”. The theme “father come tell about the war” is outlined in the first line and repeated at the end in a kind of refrain that frames the poem, but also suggests a repetition of the narrative process ad infinitum . The four inner lines play through the topic of "people in war" in different verbs and, with one exception, are in the perfect tense of the active .

In the metric of the poem, according to Ulrich Weinzierl, there is “the military parade of the troches ”, which, however, stumbles at the moment of the wounding: “father come tell how you were wounded”. The constant formulations increase the intensity of the poem, the Austrian colloquial language creates the atmosphere of a family scene. In his Frankfurt poetics lectures, Jandl spoke of a stereotypical form of address and linguistic "awkwardness throughout", which was evident in the dialect contractions of words and the omission of vowels in weak syllables.

interpretation

The child as a mouthpiece

Jandl set the age of the speaker as "between five and eight" years due to the demonstrated persistence, the always the same sentence beginnings and language weaknesses. Magda Motté calls father, come tell about the war a “children's poem for parents”: “The child serves as a mouthpiece to make adults aware of the absurdity of war.” While childish begging takes the “story of war” in the realm of children's stories and fairy tales move, the grotesque of the poem is that it is not about a fictional story, but about reality, and that its account is required of the actually dead.

According to Motté, the child's role is that of a provocator: his naivety and curiosity reveal to the adult reader the annihilation machinery of war. At the same time, however, behind the supposed innocence of the child , she also unmasked a rawness and lustfulness to hear again and again about the terrible events, which are also shown in cruel children's games on the subject of death and war: “The question remains in the reader whether there are children learn something from the experiences of their parents. "

The absurdity of war

Jandl called the penultimate line of the poem “father come tell how you fell” “absurd, but absurd like the war, not in any other way absurd.” Ralf Schnell explains that the poem is “not an abstract, possibly philosophically determined absurdity” Give expression. Jandl's poems "do not point beyond themselves, as symbols, metaphors and images claim in traditional poetics."

Ulrich Weinzierl describes the entire life of a soldier in the six lines of the poem, beginning with the heroic entry and shooting to the pathetic end through wounding and death. He contrasts father, come tell about the war with another war poem by Jandl - "naturally an anti-war poem": schtzngrmm . While this refers to the literary tradition of Expressionism and Dadaism , Weinzierl sees vater komm telling about the war in its severity, simplicity and laconicity as well as its function as a didactic poem close to Bertolt Brecht . The message of the poem is conveyed through its form. The naive questions get entangled in their own contradiction: "The logic of talking about war comfortably is just as absurd as the war itself."

For Karl Müller , Jandl addresses “the silence of the generation of fathers” in vater komm tale von krieg , which results from unprocessed memories and unacknowledged guilt. Opposite the silence of the fathers is the unsatisfied and piercing thirst for knowledge of a generation of sons and daughters, "whose fantasies even reach into the absurd." Rudolf Drux sees communication about the war ad absurdum in vater komm tell vom war : "In his last, The war cannot be mediated with deadly consequences ”.

Publication and reception

father come tell about the war was written on October 31, 1966. Jandl submitted it to a competition run by the Jugenddienst-Verlag , in which it won the prize for the best peace poem worth 200 DM. The award winners were published by Peter Hammer Verlag in 1967 in the anthology Thema Frieden . 1973 took Jandl father come tell from the war in his poetry collection arrest , which in Luchterhand Literaturverlag appeared. According to Hermann Korte , father comes tell about the war is one of the ten poems by Jandl most frequently printed in school books and teaching materials.

In the dialect supplement of the Neue Banater Zeitung on November 3, 1984, a counterfacture of vater komm tell von krieg by the German-Romanian dialect poet Josef Hornyacsek in Banat dialect appeared: grandfather, miscount vum crawl . Jandl commented on the "interpolation of a further generation" of the war dead mentioned: "It is fortunate when the needs of a ten-year-old today can only be met by transforming a father into a grandfather in Europe."

Ulrich Weinzierl, however, disagreed with Jandl's finding that time had passed beyond his poem: “The new old way of saying father come and tell about the war is here to stay. It sounds ingeniously simple and therefore remains simply ingenious. "

expenditure

  • Ulf Miehe (Ed.): Topic Peace . Hammer, Wuppertal 1967, p. 120.
  • Ernst Jandl: fixed . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1973, ISBN 3-472-61121-9 , p. 178.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ulrich Weinzierl: New old way of war , p. 339.
  2. ↑ a b Magda Motté: Modern Children's Lyric , p. 39.
  3. ↑ a b c Ernst Jandl: The opening and closing of the mouth . Frankfurt poetics lectures . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1985, ISBN 3-472-61567-2 , p. 84.
  4. ↑ Magda Motté: Modern Children's Lyric , pp. 38–39.
  5. ↑ Ernst Jandl: The opening and closing of the mouth , p. 85.
  6. ^ Ralf Schnell : History of German-language literature since 1945 . Metzler, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-476-01900-4 , p. 293.
  7. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl: New old way of war , pp. 338-340.
  8. ↑ Karl Müller : Pictures from World War II in Austrian literature after 1945 . In: Moritz Csáky , Klaus Zeyringer (Hrsg.): Staging of collective memory. Self-images, external images . Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2002, ISBN 3-7065-1772-8 , p. 147.
  9. ^ Rudolf Drux: Ernst Jandl . In: Gunter E. Grimm, Frank Rainer Max (Ed.): German poets. Volume 8: Present. Reclam, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-15-030008-8 , p. 305.
  10. ^ Hermann Korte : Jandl in school. Didactic considerations for dealing with contemporary literature . In: Andreas Erb (Hrsg.): Construction site contemporary literature. The nineties . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 1998, ISBN 3-531-12894-9 , p. 204.
  11. ↑ Ernst Jandl: The opening and closing of the mouth , pp. 85–86.
  12. ↑ Ulrich Weinzierl: New old way of war , p. 340.