trampled man blues

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trodden man blues is a poem by the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl . The poem was written in 1962 and first appeared in 1974 in Jandl's text collection for all at Luchterhand Literaturverlag . Using the stylistic devices of the blues , Jandl tells of a person who is beaten to death after refusing to say hello. Elements of the plot refer to the time of National Socialism .

Content and form

Ernst Jandl
trampled man blues
Link to a reading of the poem
(please note copyrights )

Peter Wapnewski sums up the content of the poem: “A beaten person tells his end” in the first person and in “apparently artless, apparently improvised statements about the person.” First he stands, is hit, falls, crawls, is kicked until he is no longer crawl and fall in the end in his grave. His movements form a downward curve from standing, crawling, lying down to falling. The images used, from the refused Hitler salute , the "brown man" in boots and brown shirt of the storm department to the "bone sack" in the mass grave, arouse associations with the Third Reich and the National Socialist terror, according to Karl Thönnisse .

Wapnewski describes the shape as “simple and of a hammering or even stepping monotony”. The fifteen lines are arranged in five stanzas , with all lines of a stanza ending in the same rhyme . The most striking design feature is a repetition of the first line in the second line, reminiscent of the blues form, between each of which a link is inserted, which Wapnewski describes as “stage directions and roll call”. The first stanza goes something like this:

“I can't raise my hand in greeting. look here:
I can't raise my hand up in greeting.
     when I know how bad it has to end. "

The syntax of the first line, which has been transformed compared to the usual usage, specifies the meter of the remaining syntactically inconspicuous lines, which each consist of ten syllables with five feet and stand in the alternating rhythm of the iambus . The insertions against the poem are an exception. The wandering caesuras in the final lines of the stanzas and the enjambement in line eight ensure small irregularities in the order . The stanza's content also takes up the alternating movement. In the beginning of the verse, victims and perpetrators alternate as actors, while the last lines belong to the victim. The actions of the perpetrator in the straight stanzas form a response to those of the victim in the previous stanzas, whose reaction in the final lines cancels the previous resolution: "This time I'll raise my hand", "and I'll beg too".

Wapnewski perceives a unity between content and form - "breathlessly and repeating words and sentences like sobbing" - while for Thönnern, on the contrary, the progressive destruction of the lyrical self leads to a linguistic distancing and stylization from the simple expressions of the first stanza to the expressionistic “thrashed face” and the phrases “a boot giant dances on my stomach”, “I eat fire” and “sack of bones”. In the last stanza there is a change of perspective from the immediate present tense to a look into the future, as well as from the address of the witness to the “ho ruck” of the perpetrator who gets rid of the dehumanized dead.

interpretation

Jandl's Blues

Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker at a reading, Vienna 1974

According to Peter Wapnewski, the title trampled man blues already gives the poem's program: “The blues is the song of the trampled man. And so he sings ”. In the poem he finds numerous elements of the blues, "that song of the troubled and laden": the first-person form with a personal statement, the improvisation in the narrative, the two-part structure and the call with its repetition. The musicologist Jürgen Schwab also recognizes a blues form in the poem: "Statement, repetition, an answer - so an AAB form". The jazz musician Dieter Glawischnig confirms: "This is a real blues form: Stollen , Stollen, Abgesang ."

Karl Thönnis, on the other hand, misses the typical "blues feeling". He lists various stylistic elements of the musical genre that have no equivalent in the poem. The blues does not have the order and uniformity of the poem's meter, the narrative is not epic but is based on direct experience, and the stylistic element of repetition also arises from an inner necessity that is missing in Jandl's poem. Rather, the Austrian lyric poet created a “German-speaking blues” that was not based on the American tradition out of a playful preoccupation with linguistic forms, which became a specifically “Jandlian blues”.

Song of the dead and didactics

For Peter Wapnewski, trampled man is blues “ litany , death song and lament for death”, which is sung to the executioners and butchers from the grave. The attitude of the first stanza is still determined by defiance and rebellion, by brave refusal of the requested greeting, although the "yes" already knows that the resistance is futile. The “(but) yet” in the second stanza also tells of futility, now of the futility of late obedience. Even in the third stanza, the defeated person retains remnants of his resistance in the “but” and does not beg for Gande. This resistance also breaks under the death dance of the fourth stanza, and the person danced to death begs, be it for his life or his death. In the last stanza the ego is deformed into a mere “bone sack” that does not even have the resting place of its own grave. But the horror of the mass grave becomes the last consolation. Anyone who only faces enemies in life will at least find comrades-in-arms and friends here. In the end, the erased person wins back a remnant of his self.

Karl Thönnis, however, resists a “ didactic calculation”, which for him is behind Jandl's poem and “which could probably rightly hope for a certain effectiveness in a politically interested German lesson.” He sees in the pictures of “Bonesack” and “Mass Grave “ Exploited the Holocaust and the murder of millions of Jews . The course of action from the refused Hitler salute to the mass grave seems to him constructed, the poem draws its effect primarily from the dramatically charged images that encourage the reader to be "taken by surprise".

Publications and settings

Ernst Jandl published trampled man blues in his collection of poems and prose for all in 1974 , which, according to the Luchterhand literary publisher, contained "the author's most politically committed texts", with trodden man blues being referred to as the "concentrate of the so-called final solution ". In 2005, Marcel Reich-Ranicki included the poem in his canon of German literature .

In a joint performance , Jandl performed the poem with jazz trumpeter Manfred Schoof , reading the text, according to Ilse Schweinsberg-Reichart, “with the usual creaky voice, sharply articulating, the words staccato-like ”, while Schoof intoned blues and passages like that Creeping of the beaten accompanied by sequences of program music. The jazz musician Christian Muthspiel also set trampled man blues to music as part of his solo performance for and with Ernst .

expenditure

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Wapnewski: litany of death , pp. 212-213.
  2. Jump up ↑ Karl Thönnern: Dreaded interpreter Blues , pp. 278–279.
  3. ^ Peter Wapnewski: litany of death , pp. 212, 214.
  4. ↑ Ernst Jandl: trampled man blues . In: for everyone . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1974, p. 86.
  5. Jump up ↑ Karl Thönnern: Dreaded interpreter Blues , pp. 267–269.
  6. ↑ a b Peter Wapnewski: litany of death , p. 212.
  7. Jump up ↑ Karl Thönissen: Embraced interpreter Blues , p. 269.
  8. ↑ Wolfram Knauer (Ed.): Jazz and Language. Language and jazz. Volume 5 of the Darmstadt Contributions to Jazz Research. Wolke, Hofheim 1998, ISBN 3-923997-79-5 , p. 72.
  9. Jump up ↑ Karl Thönnern: Entertetener Interpret Blues , pp. 269–273, 280.
  10. ↑ Peter Wapnewski: litany of death , pp. 213-214.
  11. Jump up ↑ Karl Thönnern: Dreaded interpreter Blues , pp. 278–281.
  12. ↑ Ernst Jandl: for everyone . Luchterhand collection. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Darmstadt 1984, ISBN 3-472-61566-4 , p. 2.
  13. ↑ Ilse Schweinsberg-Reichart: Performance . Scriptor, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-589-20838-4 , p. 110.