1913 (46 page)

When Georg Trakl comes back from Venice to Austria, the declining city becomes a source of retrospective inspiration. In the last months of 1913 poetry assails him with unanticipated force, so much so that his skull almost shatters. A linguistic frenzy reveals his internal inferno.

‘Everything is breaking apart’, he writes in November. What happened there will never be quite explained, but we may assume that his beloved sister Grete is pregnant. Whether by her husband (who really existed, in Berlin), by himself or by his friend Buschbeck, whom he suspects of having a relationship with her, is completely unclear. We know only that in a poem by Trakl from November the word ‘unborn’ appears, and that he will write three months later that his sister has had a miscarriage. But who knows? He had such a tortured soul that life alone was quite enough to tear him in two.

Out of gratitude to his patron and saviour Ludwig von Ficker he allows himself to be persuaded to make a public appearance, in spite of his desolate state of mind. He reads at the fourth literary soirée of Ficker’s magazine
Der Brenner
in the Innsbruck Musikvereinssaal. And the poet must have spoken as if he were still mumbling as he walked along the beach of the Lido in Venice: ‘Unfortunately the poet read too faintly, as if from things hidden, things past or yet to come, and only later could one discern from the monotonously prayer-like murmurings
the words and phrases, then images and rhythms that form his futuristic poetry.’ So wrote Josef Anton Steurer in the
Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger
.

Between these two disastrous appearances, at the Lido and before the Musikverein, one of the central chapters of twentieth-century German-language lyric poetry is produced. A total of fifty-nine poems, including the major works ‘Sebastian in a Dream’ and the ‘Kaspar Hauser Lied’ (one devoted to the Venice-lover Adolf Loos, the other to his wife, Bessie), and ‘Transformation of Evil’. In fact, he produces 499 poems, or 4,999, because Trakl’s poems are never finished; there are countless versions, over-writings, rewritings, corrections and variants. Again and again he picks up his pen, changes the manuscripts; again and again he writes to the publishers of the magazines that publish his poems, that this word must be changed to that, and that to this. A ‘blue’ can become a ‘black’, a ‘quiet’ a ‘wise’. You can see him dragging motifs around with him, trying to capture them verse by verse and, if it still doesn’t work, crossing them out again and then carrying them on to the next poem, to the next year. ‘In an elevated sense unimprovable’, Albert Ehrenstein wrote of Georg Trakl. But that is incorrect. Even he still needed improving. But only by himself. His poems are montages of things heard and things read (above all, Rimbaud and Hölderlin), and things sensed. But it may also happen to him, as in the poem ‘Transfiguration’ from November 1913, that what begins as a ‘blue spring’ that ‘breaks from the dead rocks’ turns finally into the ‘blue flower’, ‘which sounds quietly among the gilded rocks’. Romanticism is always the starting-point, but it is also the longed-for destination of Trakl, the quiet musician. Nine times the blue flower blooms in Trakl’s poems in autumn 1913 alone. But in his inscription for the grave of the nineteen-century poet Novalis it already blossoms in an early version. But no sooner has the ‘blue’ faded and been crossed out than many new verbal experiments follow. Then the flower can be anything: first ‘nocturnal’, then ‘radiant’ and finally ‘rosy’. In their bid to sound prophetic, Trakl’s poems lack concision. Instead, what glimmers here in all its magnificence, in all its power, is the vocabulary of the German language of the Salzburg late Baroque, before Trakl opens the door to
the engine room of his inspiration and allows the pestilential breath of death to blow over it, the icy breath of his soul. Everywhere flowers are dying, the forests darkening, the deer fleeing, voices falling mute.

These everlasting
vanitas
experiences seem too existentially lived to be accused of verbal frenzy, even kitsch. Trakl could only express himself through poetry; his corrections and rewritings are his autobiography. He saw the dark, he captured the fleeting, he interrogated the intangible. He looked within himself and thus became the witness of the invisible, with an imagination only truly liberated through introspection.

Trakl hones his words, battles with his language until he knows he can release it into the world. A world in which he himself cannot survive. His poems – even those about the last days of mankind – do not herald disaster. In them history has long since taken what Friedrich Dürrenmatt calls ‘the worst possible turn’, precisely because it has now been thought and written down as poetry.

Robert Musil is tired and goes to bed before his wife. But he can’t get to sleep, and eventually he hears her going to the bathroom to get herself ready. Then he takes his notepad, which always lies on his bedside table, and his pencil, and simply writes down what he is experiencing:

Love is also apparent in feeling, marvelling, enthusiastic, tender hearing and observing.

On 1 November, King Otto of Bavaria is officially declared insane. The doctors diagnose the ‘final stage of a long-lasting psychical illness’. This makes the accession to the throne of the Prince Regent Ludwig as Ludwig III a legal possibility.

Woyzeck is mad and hallucinates: ‘Everything is in flames above the city! A fire blazes around the sky and a roar as if of trombones.’ On 8 November in the Residenztheater in Munich the unfinished drama
Woyzeck
, written in 1836 by Georg Büchner, who was born in 1813, is given its première, after years of lobbying by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It belongs wonderfully in this year and has chosen exactly the right moment to enter the public consciousness. What a play, what language, what pace! Almost eighty years old, and still quite contemporary. It is a parallel story to Heinrich Mann’s novel
Man of Straw
, except much more violent and archaic. Woyzeck is abused by a doctor for medical experiments, and then by the army captain, who humiliates him. When his beloved Marie betrays him with the brash ‘drum major’, he can no longer control his aggression and stabs her. The victim becomes the perpetrator. ‘The central point becomes’, in the words of the critic Alfred Kerr – ‘tormenting humanity, not the tormented human being.’ It is a proletarian drama,
a play of revolt and rebellion. Rilke is speechless with enthusiasm: ‘It is a play like no other, that abused human being standing in his stable-jacket in the universe,
malgré lui
, in the infinite procession of the stars. That is theatre, that is what theatre could be.’ But it is above all the celebration of a unique kind of language that runs around between hallucination and fairy tale, the gutter and poetry, and comes down on you like a buzzard. At the end of the play a fairy tale is told about a lonely child:

This was a fairy tale very much in line with the taste of 1913. Unconsoling, beyond any utopian thoughts but full of poetry.

Ernst Jünger has ‘inwardly made excessively great preparations’. His desire for danger drives him to Bad Rehburg, the spa town that smells of cows and turf and old people, and out of the parental home, whose bull-glass windows the light barely penetrates.

In August he had climbed to his father’s greenhouse in his winter clothes to prepare his body for extreme conditions. Now he feels ripe for Africa. For years he has read adventure stories of journeys into the heart of darkness under his desk at school. Now he wants to go there himself. ‘One damp and misty autumn afternoon I went into a junk shop with much fear and trembling to buy a six-shooter revolver with ammunition. It cost 12 Marks. I left the shop with a feeling of triumph, before going immediately into a bookshop and
buying a fat book,
The Secrets of the Dark Hemisphere
, which I considered indispensable.’

Then, with book and revolver in his bag, he sets off on 3 November without telling a soul. But how do you get from Rehburg to Africa by train? Unfortunately geography has never been his strong point. Now Ernst Jünger buys a pipe so he feels grown up and to strengthen his adventurous heart, and then he buys a fourth-class ticket and travels south-west from station to station. He travels on, first to Trier and then through Alsace-Lorraine; Jünger keeps on going and eventually, after an aimless odyssey, on 8 November he has reached Verdun, where he joins the Foreign Legion. He is assigned to the 26th Instruction Regiment as number 15,308, and taken to Marseille, where he boards a ship for the promised land: Africa. The local newspaper reports: