End of the world (Jakob van Hoddis)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

End of the world is a poem by Jakob van Hoddis and a work from the early days of Expressionism .

It was first published in 1911 in the Berlin magazine Der Demokratie . At this time, the views of impressionism were still widespread, the poem marks a new chapter in literary history.

End of the world

The citizen's hat flies from his pointed head,
It echoes like screams in all the air.
Roofers fall down and go in two
And on the coasts - one reads - the tide is rising.
The storm is here, the wild seas are bouncing
On land to crush thick dams.
Most people have a cold.
The railroads fall from the bridges.

shape

Formally, the poem is kept conventional. It consists of two four-line stanzas. The meter in the first stanza consists of an iambic five-key and has an encircling rhyme (abba). The second stanza also consists of iambic five-cusps, but they are hypercatalectic with feminine cadence . Another difference to the first stanza is the cross rhyme (abab), which is feminine , i.e. two-syllable, according to the cadence .

The verses are unconnected one behind the other, they are lined up, this is called the leaning style . Each verse forms a unit of meaning, except for line five, where the end of the line is exceeded, it is called the enjambement .

content

In the first stanza, the lyrical speaker describes the end of the world with unusual images: citizens have pointed heads, roofers “go in two”. Only the rising tide is a picture that at least the Judeo-Christian reader would expect, but this more real picture is only conveyed through a medium, while the verses before it offered a direct description.

The tide is taken up again in the second stanza by an unusual image: the seas are jumping. At the same time, an intention is imputed to the seas ( personification ), namely to “crush thick dams” ( all-in-all ). The third and fourth verses continue the ordering style from the first stanza. The "sniffles" contrasts with the scenario of railroads falling from the bridges.

interpretation

Around 1910 there was a real apocalyptic fear of Halley's Comet : people were afraid that it would collide with the earth. The incoherence of the descriptions of the end of the world together with the hint “one reads” can be understood as media criticism. Bad news is good news: every day there is a new disaster.

The text seeks expression for the rapidly changing reality (the crumbling empire, technical progress) and derails semantically like the railroad. The imagery conveys a new type of perception, while the formal aspects (meter, rhyme, stanza structure) remain conventional. To what extent the poem makes fun of contemporaries' fears of doom must remain open. The poet's mental derangement, which began in 1912, provides a further interpretation of the end of the world imagined in curious individual images.

reception

Van Hoddis enjoyed great success with his contemporaries, and his poetry was highly valued by literary critics and intellectuals of the time. Weltende opened what is probably the most famous expressionist poetry anthology, Menschheitsdämmerung , published by Kurt Pinthus in 1919 .

End of the world became a cult poem. It remains almost the only poem by van Hoddis that achieved fame, but it does bring him a reputation as a pioneer of Expressionism. The revolutionary row style was adopted by the Expressionists, but also later.

Around 1950 only the poem "End of the World" and the sixteen poems collection of the same name, which was published in 1918 by Franz Pfemfert , are known to other circles. In 2005, Marcel Reich-Ranicki included the end of the world - as the only poem by van Hoddis - in the canon of German-language works worth reading .

expenditure

  • Paul Pörtner (Ed.): Jakob van Hoddis, End of the World. Collected seals. Arche, Zurich 1958

literature

  • Helmut G. Hermann: Jakob van Hoddis: End of the world. In: Poems of the Twilight of Man. Interpretations of Expressionist Poetry. Ed. V. Horst Denkler. Munich: Fink 1971, pp. 56-68.
  • Karl Riha : “Citizens lose their hats from their pointed heads”. In: Harald Hartung (ed.): Poems and interpretations. Volume 5: From Naturalism to the Mid-Century. Reclam, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-15-007894-6 , pp. 118-125
  • Thomas Kopfermann: "Poetry in Expressionism". In: Dietrich Steinbach (ed.): Poems in your epochs. Klett, Stuttgart 1992
  • Vivian Liska , Bernd Witte: End of the world. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 351–356.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut G. Hermann (1971, p. 57) calls the poem a "cabaret-brash version of an imaginary end of the world".
  2. ↑ Cf. Matthis Kepser, Ulf Abraham : Literaturdidaktik Deutsch. 4th, updated u. exp. Ed. 2016, pp. 251f.