Oxford German Studies, 41. 3, 000–000, December 2012 GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT: POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE BEN MORGAN Worcester College, Oxford This article reads Trakl’s poetry in the context of his involvement with the journal ‘Der Brenner’. In particular the admiration for Karl Kraus which Trakl shared with the Brenner Circle is used as a way of showing how Trakl’s poetic method compares to the approaches of his cultural peers. The reading of Trakl that emerges lies between that of a critique of Kraus (Stieg) and a staging of literary fragmentation (BaÞler). We see instead a meaningful meaningnessless that critics from the 1910s onwards, including Heidegger, have explained by grounding it in the authenticity of the poet. This strategy is read as a version of Aristotelian e-thos. ; KEYWORDS: This article will explore how the poetic techniques of Georg Trakl can be understood to relate to the cultural concerns of the 1910s, showing at the same time how the version of poetry that he came to represent – that of literature as a special, and not immediately accessible language for articulating an unacknowledged, unknown, or even unknowable truth – continued to be influential all the way through the twentieth century, particularly as it was elaborated by Heidegger in his essays on Trakl in the 1950s.1 I want to show how this emphatic, modernist model of literature is in fact, despite appearances to the contrary, a version of what could be called ‘common sense realism’ and that that is a good thing (as opposed to something to be embarrassed about), since the way Trakl contributes to this larger realist project allows us to understand more clearly the questions to which his writing is the poetic answer. To start situating Trakl’s poetic endeavours, I want to say a few words, first, about one of Trakl’s poetic techniques and, 1 Heidegger discussed Trakl’s poetry in lectures delivered in the early 1950s reprinted as ‘Die Sprache’ and ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ in Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1959), pp. 9–82. Derrida takes up Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 83–113. For a discussion of Derrida’s (unpublished) seminar on Trakl, ‘Geschlecht III’, see David Farrell Krell, ‘Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 7, no. 2 (2007), 175–99. # W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012 DOI: 10.1179/0078719112Z.00000000019 Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:44 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 2 BEN MORGAN secondly, about the poet’s relation to Expressionism. This will prepare the way for a more detailed account of the milieu in which Trakl’s writing found its home around 1912. I A POETIC TECHNIQUE OF TRAKL’S In a brief account of a poet’s work, it is difficult to give proper attention to individual poems, especially if, as is the case with my argument, the aim is to present the context from which emerged not only Trakl’s poetry but also the tools with which it is frequently approached. In order to convey a sense of Trakl’s poetic project nevertheless, I want initially to draw attention to one particular device: the shift of focus that many of the later poems turn on and that can be seen by means of a brief comparison of three poems, one from each of Trakl’s major collections of poems. The shift that I am particularly interested in is not yet at work in the poem ‘Confiteor’, which was included in the collection of poems that Trakl put together in 1909 but that was only published posthumously.2 In this poem, the confessing speaker feels that he has seen through people’s everyday behaviour and grasped that it is a badly written but painful play: ‘Der Menschheit heldenloses Trauerspiel | Ein schlechtes Stück, gespielt auf Gräbern, Leichen.’3 The speaker is disillusioned, but cannot himself escape the pretence, being instead condemned by some higher force (‘ein Machtgebot’) to play his own part in the drama: ‘Ein Komödiant, der seine Rolle spricht, | Gezwungen, voll Verzweiflung – Langeweile!’ (HKA, I: 246). This poem presents us with an alternative view of the world, unmasking everyday communication as artificial. But it doesn’t focus on the moment when the shift of perspective itself occurs. The transformation has happened before the poem begins and the poem reports on the painful new vision. The two other poems I want to consider register a moment of transformation in the poem itself, and one of them explicitly talks about the change in poetic, or metapoetic, terms. Even more important, however, than thematizing the change is the fact that the change goes in an opposite direction in each of the poems. The sonnet ‘Verfall’, included in the volume of poems Trakl published in 1913, is a slightly modified version of a poem entitled ‘Herbst’ included in the unpublished 1909 collection. In both versions, the speaker in the sonnet watches birds in the evening sky, following them in his imagination for the duration of the first two quatrains, until the scene changes with a typical volta: ‘Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern’ (HKA, I: 59). Thereafter, the birds whose flight had been likened positively to ‘Pilgerzügen’ in the first quatrain are replaced by blue asters chilled by, and fading in, the autumn wind, and likened to children playing ring-aring-of-roses and all falling down. In both parts of the sonnet, the speaker sees the natural world through anthropomorphic images. But a shift occurs during the 2 For an overview of Trakl’s life, see Walter Methlagl and Eberhard Sauermann, Georg Trakl 1887-1914 (Innsbruck: Forschungsinstitut ‘Brenner Archiv’, 1995). 3 Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1987), I, p. 246. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation HKA, in the form (HKA, I: 246). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 3 poem, which isn’t explained by anything like the ‘Machtgebot’ of ‘Confiteor’, but which plunges the speaker into a different world. The third poem I want to draw on to present my sketch of a recurring technique in Trakl’s poetry is taken from Sebastian im Traum, the volume of poems that Trakl had already sent to press in 1914 before he volunteered for active service as a member of the medical corps of the Austrian army in August 1914, but which didn’t appear until 1915, a few months after Trakl’s death. The poem in question is also autumnal and is entitled ‘Herbstseele’. In this poem we are presented with human society in the aggressive form of the cries of hunters and the baying of their hounds: ‘Jägerruf und Blutgebell’ (HKA, I: 107). But nature is also represented by the hard cry of the predatory hawk. Yet the prey escapes: ‘Bald entgleitet Fisch und Wild’ (HKA, I: 107). And although the speaker, writing in the first person plural, talks of a separation from loved ones, a transformation occurs nevertheless: ‘Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild’ (HKA, I: 107). The closing, fourth strophe of the poem then draws on an explicitly religious vocabulary to describe how human beings can lay their guilt and ‘rote Pein’ in God’s hands. It might be tempting to construct a biographical narrative around these three poems, one that starts with ‘Confiteor’, an early poem that registers a sense of dislocation which the poet can’t explain, moves on to the poem ‘Herbst’/’Verfall’ that is taken up from the 1909 collection into the 1913 volume and that begins to reflect on how the shift or dislocation occurs, and then finishes with the redemptive peace of ‘Herbstseele’ written later in 1913 (HKA, II: 180–81). But this teleology is in fact hard to impose on the poetry. To give two brief examples from poems to which I will be returning later in the argument: the late, prose poem ‘Verwandlung des Bösen’ was modified by Trakl between its first appearance in the issue of the Innsbruck-based journal Der Brenner of 15 October 1913 and the version included in Sebastian im Traum. The final version added a line which destroyed the very redemption the final paragraph of the first published version had seemed to achieve: ‘Dem folgt unvergängliche Nacht’ (HKA, I: 98). If, in Sebastian im Traum, the re-writing of ‘Verwandlung des Bösen’ seems to overturn the optimism of ‘Herbstseele’, in the earlier Gedichte we can observe the opposite movement. In drafting the final version of the poem ‘Psalm’, Trakl adds a line which adopts precisely the redemptive perspective he denies himself in other poems: ‘Schweigsam über Schädelstätte öffnen sich Gottes goldene Augen’ (HKA, I: 56). In the later poems, therefore, it can be said that Trakl focuses consciously on the kind of shift described in ‘Verfall’ and ‘Herbstseele’, since it is an element he attends to as he drafts and re-drafts his poems. At the same time, the shift can go in either direction. The line: ‘Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild’ (HKA, I: 107) that Trakl uses in ‘Herbstseele’ to describe a shift in a positive direction could actually refer to a shift in either direction. All it says is that the speaker moves from one type of meaningful world to another. It does not commit us to necessarily moving in one direction. Trakl’s poetry could be read as an extended reflection on this shift: on the images by which it can be presented, and the images that might be appropriate to participating in, bringing about, or simply surrendering to the shift. Trakl’s poetic world is labile. Redemption is reversible; God’s presence is palpable, but sometimes only in its potential withdrawal. At the same time, his world is populated by a recurring set of figures of redemption: the figures of the prey and of Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 4 BEN MORGAN the soul which appear in ‘Herbstseele’ are examples, but so also are named figures, like Sonja, who refers intertextually to the character of the same name in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or figures, like Elis and Helian, who are as pure and long-suffering as Dostoevsky’s Sonja but are of Trakl’s invention. It will be part of my argument that these characters are the key to understanding how Trakl’s poetry functioned in the 1910s and beyond, creating – albeit unstable – points of identification for readers confronting the awe-inspiring lability of Trakl’s poetic world. But to understand this claim, we need first to have seen more of the context from which Trakl’s poetry emerged. To this end I will start by setting out the limited sense in which the term ‘Expressionism’ can be applied to his writing, before moving on to give a positive account of Trakl’s relations to his contemporaries and peers. II TRAKL BEFORE EXPRESSIONISM Trakl can be called an Expressionist poet for two reasons: first, because ten of his poems were included in the book which retrospectively defined Expressionist poetry, Kurt Pinthus’s Menschheitsdämmerung (1919); and, secondly, because the two volumes of poems which he prepared for publication in his lifetime, as well as the collection of his poems edited by Karl Röck immediately after his death, were published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag, a publishing house closely associated with Expressionism as a literary movement.4 Indeed, Trakl’s first volume, Gedichte, appeared in 1913 as No. 6/7 of the series ‘Der Jüngste Tag’, that is to say as part of a collection of texts which the historian of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Wolfram Göbel, has called the most important Expressionist series.5 ‘Der Jüngste Tag’ published new work by young writers including Johannes R. Becher, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Kasimir Edschmid, Iwan Goll, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Carl Sternheim and Franz Werfel. Trakl’s work thus appeared alongside that of many authors now included in Expressionist collections. But Trakl would not have called himself an Expressionist. Nor indeed would any of the other writers included in the series ‘Der Jüngste Tag’ in 1913 when Kurt Wolff was first creating the project.6 From a letter the publisher sent to Trakl on 28 April 1913 explaining his idea, it is clear that Wolff himself was not thinking in terms of a unified literary movement: ‘Ich bringe in den nächsten Wochen zu billigstem Preise (M 0,80) eine Reihe von Büchern junger Autoren heraus, deren Werke (ohne daÞ sie selbst irgendwie zu einer gemeinsamen Gruppe oder Clique gehören) das gemeinsam haben, daÞ sie irgend ein selbstständiger und starker Ausdruck unserer Zeit sind’ (the letter is reprinted in full in HKA, II: 792). 4 The poems included in Menschheitsdämmerung were ‘De profundis’, ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, ‘In den Nachmittag geflüstert’, ‘An den Knaben Elis’, ‘Elis’, ‘Helian’, ‘Der Herbst des Einsamen’, ‘Abendlied’, ‘Sebastian im Traum’, and ‘Gesang des Abgeschiedenen.’ For a discussion of the importance of Kurt Wolff as the publisher of Expressionism, see Wolfram Göbel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag 1913-1930: Expressionismus als verlegerische Aufgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: BuchhändlerVereinigung, 1977). 5 On the publication of Trakl’s first volume of poems, see Göbel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag, p. 1377. Göbel gives a complete listing of the series ‘Der Jüngste Tag’, pp. 1377–79, and discusses the history of the series, pp. 573–92. 6 Göbel, Der Kurt Wolff Verlag, p. 568. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 5 Trakl was one of the writers who, to Wolff, seemed symptomatic of the age. But to understand how Trakl’s poetry relates to its literary and historical context it is helpful to forget the labels that have been retrospectively applied, and to see instead how he and his contemporaries positioned his writing.7 To some of his contemporaries, Trakl’s difficult writing, stretching language almost to the point of nonsense, made him appear to be a Futurist.8 Meanwhile, if Trakl himself adopted any label, he called himself a Christian (if the testimony of Hans Limbach is to be believed). In one of the very few poetological statements he made he described poetry as an – albeit inadequate – form of expiation: ‘eine unvollkommene Sühne’.9 However, I do not want to argue that Trakl was a Futurist or a Christian rather than an Expressionist poet.10 Rather than being limited by the labels people tried out on Trakl at the time, or by what Trakl said, or is thought to have said, about his work, we can look to what he did as a more reliable indicator of the cultural context to which his poetry belongs. For the last two and half years of his life, a period in which much of the poetry for which he is remembered was written, Trakl was actively involved with a group of writers and artists clustered around the Innsbruck bi-weekly journal Der Brenner that had been published by Ludwig von Ficker since 1910.11 Indeed, he can be said to have become by 1914 the poetic figurehead of the journal. The first of his poems to be published in Der Brenner was ‘Vorstadt im Föhn’ in the issue of 1 May 1912. The next poem to be published was ‘Psalm’, dedicated to Karl Kraus, which appeared in the issue of 1 October 1912. At least one poem by Trakl then appeared in each of the following thirtyeight consecutive issues of Der Brenner from October 1912 until spring 1915, when Ficker released a final ‘Jahrbuch’ before ceasing publication for the duration of the Great War. The ‘Jahrbuch’ contained, amongst other things, Trakl’s last poems, including ‘Grodek’, a translation of Kierkegaard’s ‘Vom Tode’ (one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions), Carl Dallago’s translation-cumparaphrase of Lao Tse, and an essay critical of the culture that produced the 7 For a considered account of what Trakl’s writing has in common with other writers associated with Expressionism in terms of his use of the ‘Reihungsstil’ and his treatment of madness, see Maurice Godé, ‘Trakl Et L’expressionisme’, Austriaca 65/66 (2007/2008), 115–30. 8 Eberhard Sauermann discusses contemporary reviews of Trakl’s poetry in which he is called a Futurist in Eberhard Sauermann, ‘Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913: Zur Produktion, Interpretation und Rezeption des Programms’, Sprachkunst, 18 (1987) 181–207 (pp. 192, 95, and 197). 9 ‘‘‘Ich bin Christ’’ — antwortete Trakl.’ Hans Limbach, ‘Begegnung mit Georg Trakl’, in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, ed. by Ludwig von Ficker (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), pp. 103–09 (p. 106). The authenticity of Limbach’s record has been defended by Walter Methlagl, ‘Hans Limbach ‘‘Begegnung mit Georg Trakl’’. Zur Quellenkritik’, Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, 4 (1985), 3–47. Trakl’s brief poetological aphorism was first published in Der Brenner, 5 (1915), p. 7. It is reprinted in HKA, I: 463. The most compelling reason for treating Trakl as a Christian writer is that that is how he appeared to his contemporaries, even to those such as Carl Dallago, to whom being a Christian was not a recommendation, as Dallago explained in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker of 19 February 1914. Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1909-1914, ed. by Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1986), pp. 202–03. 10 The study which established the Christian reading of Trakl is Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakls (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1954). 11 For a survey of Trakl’s key relationships with members of the Brenner circle, see Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl and the Brenner Circle (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 6 BEN MORGAN war by the Kierkegaard translator Theodor Haecker. The issue was read by contemporaries as honouring Trakl more than criticizing the Great War, although Ficker had hurried the issue into print because of the topical nature of Haecker’s contribution.12 If Trakl’s poetry formed the burden of the journal’s farewell message in 1915, it was no less important after the war. In 1919, it was a quotation from Trakl’s ‘An die Verstummten’ describing the labour of forging a new humanity that served as the peroration of Ficker’s programmatic preface to the first issue of the new series of Der Brenner: ‘Aber stille blutet in dunkler Höhle stummere Menschheit, | Fügt aus harten Metallen das erlösende Haupt.’13 Trakl’s name was invoked alongside those of the three other figures who for Ficker summed up the cultural mission of his journal as ‘Wegbereiter’ for a future culture in the aftermath of the Great War: Lao Tse, SØren Kierkegaard and Karl Kraus. To understand what Trakl’s poetry meant in the 1910s, therefore, we need to reconstruct the cultural project embodied by Der Brenner during the first phase of its publication 1910–1915.14 This will involve a consideration not only of Der Brenner but also of similar journals of the period, especially Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel, for Kraus in particular appeared to the contributors to Der Brenner – including Georg Trakl – as an aesthetic and ethical model. III THE CULTURAL CONCERNS OF DER BRENNER The number of Der Brenner which initiated the uninterrupted sequence of issues containing poems by Trakl captures the journal at a moment of transition. The issue in question is the first number of the third year: 1 October 1912. ‘Vorstadt im Föhn’ had been published the previous May in the penultimate issue of the second year, a fortnight before the summer break that lasted from June to the end of September. Trakl’s poetry had been brought to the attention of Ficker by Robert Müller, an editor of the avant-garde cultural journal Der Ruf, published by the Akademischer Verband für Literatur und Musik in Vienna in 1912 and 1913, and bringing together different types of avant-garde culture from the Austrian metropolis: the first issue included contributions by, amongst others, Robert Müller, Hermann Bahr, Stefan Zweig, Christian Morgenstern, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg and Peter Altenberg; the 1913 issue on the theme ‘Krieg’ bore a selfportrait by Egon Schiele on the cover.15 Der Brenner and Der Ruf had similar concerns as critically oriented, cultural journals, and Müller’s recommendation of Trakl to Ficker was part of – ultimately unsuccessful – efforts by the two editors to 12 Eberhard Sauermann, ‘Das ‘‘Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915’’ und seine Rezeption. TraklVerehrung oder Kriegsgegnerschaft?’, Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv, no. 20 (2001), 35–55. 13 Ludwig von Ficker, ‘Vorwort zum Wiederbeginn’, Der Brenner, 6 (1919), p. 4. A facsimile edition of the entire run of the journal is available on-line at ,http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/brenner/. [accessed 23 August 2012]. 14 For an invaluable introduction to the journal for the period 1910–1915, with a selection of articles, see Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Erika Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in Die Moderne: Die Zeitschrift ‘‘Der Brenner’’ 1910–1915 (Salzburg: Haymon, 1990). 15 The five issues of the journal are reprinted as Der Ruf: ein Flugblatt an junge Menschen (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus reprint, 1969). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 7 ally their publications.16 However, after Ficker met Trakl in May 1912, his interest in his poetry came to be driven by more than just strategic concerns. The whole focus of the journal changed from 1912 to 1915, moving away from a vitalist critique of early twentieth-century urban culture propounded in the essays that Carl Dallago contributed to the journal, to the more religiously-oriented view of a fragile, suffering humanity articulated by the poetry of Trakl and by the translations of works by Kierkegaard that began to appear from May 1914.17 When, therefore, Der Brenner resumed publication after the summer break in 1912 with the first of the sequence of Trakl publications, a milestone had been reached in the development of the journal. Trakl’s poetry can thus be seen to formulate a model of human fragility that was used, in the pages of Der Brenner from 1912, as a perspective from which to articulate a mild form of social critique. So far so good. Yet to reconstruct Trakl’s poetic project it helps to consider not only the new impulses found in the journal with which Trakl’s poetry was more directly aligned, such as the turn towards Kierkegaard, but also the wider array of positions associated with Der Brenner. For Trakl shared the concerns and took part in the conversations of the circle, and the poems published in the journal often read as variations on themes that other contributors were also dealing with.18 Something of the journal’s cultural affiliation is registered in the few advertisements it carried. In order to maintain independence, Der Brenner did not include commercial advertisements.19 Instead, the two-page advertising section at the end of the issue of 1 October 1912 promotes reprints of essays by Dallago, but it also contains advertisements for books by Karl Kraus and for the architectural school about to be opened by Adolf Loos.20 Both figures were important for the journal because of their critique of empty ornamentation, be it in architecture or in the phrase-making of journalistic style. Ficker would go on to publish brief essays by Loos in Der Brenner.21 For Kraus, he organized readings in Innsbruck and Munich, but he and other contributors also discussed, praised and emulated Kraus in the pages of the Innsbruck publication from the very outset. Trakl himself not only dedicated his ‘Psalm’ to Kraus but published a poem with Kraus as its subject, so it will be worth following up the relation between the Brenner circle and Kraus in more detail to show what Trakl and Kraus had in common. 16 Sieglinde Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit: Kontext und Rezeption (Innsbruck: Institut für Germanistik, 1990), pp. 148–56. 17 ‘Nicht mehr der heroische Mensch, der die sich ihm feindlich entgegengesetzte Welt als intakte Persönlichkeit überwindet, sondern der Leidende und der am Leiden der Mitwelt Teilnehmende begann für Ficker seit der Begegnung mit Trakl vorbildhaft zu werden. Dieses neue Menschenbild fand Ficker in den Schriften Kierkegaards beispielhaft vorgezeichnet […].’ Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, pp. 173–74. 18 ‘‘‘Der Brenner’’ als Kontext zur Lyrik Georg Trakls’, in Alfred Doppler, Die Lyrik Georg Trakls: Beiträge zur Poetischen Verfahrensweise und zur Wirkungsgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 1992), 94–103. 19 Klettenhammer and Wimmer-Webhofer, Aufbruch in die Moderne, p.11. 20 Der Brenner, 4 (1912/1913), pp. 47–48. 21 Adolf Loos, ‘Regeln für den, der in den Bergen baut’, Der Brenner, 4 (1913/1914), pp. 40–41 (1 October 1913). Adolf Loos, ‘Keramika’, Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), pp. 224–230 (1 December 1913). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 8 BEN MORGAN Kraus was the editor and, from 1910, sole author of Die Fackel, which he had starting publishing in April 1899, throwing down the gauntlet before a public caught, as he put it, between obstinacy and apathy, between empty phrases and thoughtlessness.22 Die Fackel counted as a model of enlightened, ethical writing to the men associated with the newer journal Der Brenner.23 Kraus characterized his approach in a stinging attack he wrote on Stefan Zweig in Die Fackel in 1913, contrasting his own style with the moneyed dilettantism he disapproved of in Zweig: ‘Ich habe den Fehler, Halt zu machen bei den Dingen und die Phrasen konsequent zu Ende zu denken. Das ist nicht schön von mir. Das ist ungemütlich für die Jugend.’24 It was his thinking through the consequences of the use and abuse of language that particularly won him admiration from the Brenner circle. But how did Kraus’s linguistic critique compare to other cultural endeavours of the early twentieth century? Kraus set out the relation as he saw it in an article entitled ‘Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie’ that he published in Die Fackel in December 1912 lambasting a new generation that was directing its critical energies in the wrong direction. Kraus focuses in particular on the use of language, the status of art in its relation to commercial interests and the press, and attitudes to technology and war. The article seems to have been prompted by a photograph that particularly enraged Kraus showing a café owner with his wife being praised for their inspired idea of driving their customers home for a fee if the customers required: Ich sehe zum Beispiel irgendwo ein Bild: ein Ehepaar. Er ein Charakterkopf. Darunter steht – wie eben immer die Tat, die den Mann berühmt gemacht hat, mit einem Schlagwort, gleich unter dem Bild und vor der eigentlichen Biographie, umrissen wird: ‘Cafetier Anton Stern, der Besitzer des Wiener Café Prückl, und seine Gattin, die in eigenen Autos die Gäste gegen Erlag einer Krone in ihre Wohnungen führen lassen.’ So hat er ausgesehen, das hat er vollbracht; ein Blick, und man übersieht ein Leben und ein Werk. Überall Bild und Wort zur Feier genialer Initiative.25 Kraus is worried by the attitudes to language and the narrativization of experience that this episode betrays. The caption to the photograph not only reduces a life to a pithy one-liner, but creates a world in which we experience only phrases and advertising slogans. More importantly, it reflects a world in which reporting an event bleeds into promoting the café in question, erasing the boundary between cultural comment and commerce. Kraus is aware that his readers might think that, in fixing on a random photo in a newspaper and connecting it to wider social changes, he is making a mountain out of a molehill (or, in the German idiom, an ‘elephant out of a flea’). But he nevertheless sees the episode as an indicator of how a journalistic language that is essentially the language of advertising is eroding the 22 Die Fackel, Nr. 1 (April 1899), p. 1: ‘einer Öffentlichkeit gegenüber, die zwischen Unentwegtheit und Apathie ihr phrasenreiches oder völlig gedankenloses Auskommen findet […]’. 23 Klettenhammer, Georg Trakl in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, p. 239. 24 Karl Kraus, ‘Der Schmock, das Talent und die Familie’, Die Fackel, Nr. 366–367 (11 January 1913), p. 28. 25 Karl Kraus, ‘Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie’, Die Fackel, Nr. 363-364-365 (12 December 1912), 1–28 (p. 2). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 9 separate sphere of culture.26 The celebration of war and technology evident in an issue of Der Sturm of June 1912 appears to Kraus as a further symptom of this erasure of intellectual life. Kraus would prefer a younger generation that marched emptily around a candelabrum to the posturing of what in a polemic earlier in the year he disparagingly dismissed as ‘Futuristen, Neo-pathetikern, Neoklassizisten und sonstigen Inhabern von Titeln’.27 Indeed, he would prefer almost anything: neben den Pathetikern der Maschine, die einem Chauffeur die Pferde ausspannen wollen, und neben den Krafttinterln, die die Technik deshalb dem Ingenium vorziehen, weil sie vor diesem verloren, hinter jener aber, selbst sie, Helden sind. Man kurbelt; das ist so schnell wie schreiben und noch unpersönlicher.28 The younger generation prizes technology because it allows them to cast themselves as heroes, inducing in them a misplaced sense of agency and achievement. A more responsible writing, for Kraus, requires an allergic attention to the abuse of language as set phrase or slogan, requires a thinking of ideas through, and an acknowledgement of the distinction between aesthetic and journalistic language, which nevertheless does not retreat into an aesthetic sphere to avoid engaging with the issue of the day. What we find in Kraus’s essays, therefore, is critical engagement with standardized forms of language, and a position on art which combines aesthetic autonomy with ethical responsibility. This situates him between l’art pour l’art on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the celebration of passing movements which he thought irresponsibly collapsed art into journalism. The contributors to Der Brenner valued the critique of language. But they also prized the experience from which they believed it to be inseparable, explaining Kraus’s moral authority in terms of his person, and of a particular sort of experience, which readers must share with Kraus if they are to understand him properly. The result was a mythologization of the figure of Kraus himself in which Trakl also participated. Thus, in the second-ever issue of the journal, published on 15 June 1910, Ficker published a brief article entitled ‘Karl Kraus’ in which he insisted: ‘daÞ nämlich dieses publizistische Phänomen, das Karl Kraus heiÞt, nicht zu erlesen, nur zu erleben ist, indem es eine geistige Bekanntschaft vermittelt, die man erst tief erlitten haben muÞ, ehe man das Recht hat, sich ihrer zu erfreuen’.29 The intertwining of Kraus’s linguistic critique with his moral experience persisted in the articles that appeared on the editor of Die Fackel with titles such as ‘Karl Kraus, der Mensch’, or ‘Karl Kraus als Erzieher’ (playing on the title of Nietzsche’s 26 The origin of this tendency can, for Kraus, be traced back to Heine: ‘Ohne Heine kein Feuilleton.’ Karl Kraus, ‘Heine und die Folgen’, Die Fackel, Nr. 329–330 (31 August 1911), p. 7. For an account of the critique of contemporary journalism that Kraus develops through his reading of Heine, see Anthony Phelan, Reading Heirich Heine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3–13. 27 Die Fackel, Nr. 351-352-353 (21 June 1912), p. 53. 28 Kraus, ‘Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie’, p. 27. 29 Fortunat [5Ludwig von Ficker], ‘Karl Kraus’, Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 46–48 (p. 48). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 10 BEN MORGAN third ‘untimely meditation’ Schopenhauer als Erzieher).30 In ‘Karl Kraus, der Mensch’, Carl Dallago presents Kraus as a mythical Siegfried, whose confrontation with the world has hardened his exterior, as Siegfried was made invincible by the blood of the dragon he slayed: ‘Kraus ist hart geworden. Alle Grausamkeiten unsrer Zeit traten auf sein Inneres. Die Unkultur einer ganzen GroÞstadt trampelte auf ihm herum. Es machte seine Güte zuletzt wohl hörnern wie das Drachenblut die Haut Siegfrieds.’31 Later in the essay, this Viennese Siegfried is hailed as a creative warrior (‘Auch Kraus ist schöpferischer Krieger’) and compared to Napoleon.32 An admiration for Kraus’s writing, and linguistic critique is thus inseparable from a certain mythologizing of his person. In a similar vein, in ‘Karl Kraus als Erzieher’, Karl Borromäus Heinrich views Kraus as the conscience of Austrian culture, or of what he hyperbolically terms ‘the world’: ‘In der Tat: nicht allein dem Geschehnis gegenüber, das seine edle Empfindsamkeit herausfordert, waltet sein ethisches Pathos; auch gegen die Sprache selbst, in welcher er die Herausforderung beantwortet, zeigt er sich von einer Gewissenhaftigkeit, die vor ihm unbekannt gewesen ist. Karl Kraus wirkt als das Gewissen der Welt, die unter ihm lebt.’33 Kraus’s writing and Kraus’s person are here once again collapsed into each other, and the amalgam is said to be policing language as such. Trakl shared this admiration for Kraus, and, indeed, as Alfred Doppler has pointed out, he uses terms similar to those in which Dallago and Heinrich express their praise for the editor of Die Fackel in a short aphorism that appeared in the Brenner of 15 June 1913 as his contribution to the ‘Rundfrage über Karl Kraus’ organized and published by the journal in response to an article attacking Kraus which was printed in the Munich-based magazine Zeit im Bild.34 Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind and many other contemporary figures contributed their own short defences of Kraus. Wedekind regretted that Kraus did not put his talents to use on the stage; Mann praised him whilst also judiciously differentiating between his own concerns as an artist and those of Kraus the polemical anti-journalist.35 Trakl’s response, as it was printed in the journal, was as follows: Georg Trakl: Karl Kraus: weiÞer Hohepriester der Wahrheit, Kristallne Stimme, in der Gottes eisiger Odem wohnt, Zürnender Magier, Dem unter schwarzem Mantel der blaue Panzer des Kriegers klirrt.36 30 Carl Dallago, ‘Karl Kraus, der Mensch’, Der Brenner, 2 (1911/12), 871–894 (15 May 1912); Karl Borromäus Heinrich, ‘Karl Kraus als Erzieher’, Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 373–85 (1 February 1913). 31 Carl Dallago, ‘Karl Kraus, der Mensch’, p. 874. 32 Carl Dallago, ‘Karl Kraus, der Mensch’, pp. 882–83. 33 Karl Borromäus Heinrich, ‘Karl Kraus als Erzieher’, 378. 34 ‘‘‘Der Brenner’’ als Kontext zur Lyrik Georg Trakls’, in Doppler, Die Lyrik Georg Trakls, pp. 94–103 (pp. 97–98). Doppler points out the parallels between Trakl’s formulations and those of Dallago and Heinrich but does not consider how Trakl changes them by compressing them in his poem. 35 ‘Rundfrage über Karl Kraus’, Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), pp. 839–40. 36 ‘Rundfrage über Karl Kraus’, Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 840. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 11 The poem was then taken up in Sebastian im Traum. The later version makes the words ‘Karl Kraus’ the title of the poem, and changes an epithet in the final line: ‘unter schwarzem Mantel’ becomes ‘unter flammendem Mantel’ (HKA I: 123). The poem consists in an apostrophe to a figure described as priest, magician and warrior (like Dallago’s Siegfried or Napoleon), whose attributes are whiteness, a crystalline voice, wrath, a black or flaming mantle and a blue suit of armour (hardening his exterior, as the dragon’s blood did for Dallago’s Siegfried-Kraus; the Man in Kokoschka’s Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen (1908/1910) is similarly described as ‘blaugepanzert’).37 The stakes are set very high: the figure is a high priest of Truth, and his voice is inhabited by God. At the same time, the figure does nothing in particular in the poem. Rather, the text performatively summons the figure up: creates him by its declarations and links the figure to Kraus through the occasion (in the ‘Rundfrage’ edition of Der Brenner) or through the title (in Sebastian im Traum). IV MEANINGFUL MEANINGLESSNESS: TRAKL’S POETIC METHOD We can now return to Trakl’s poetic method to analyse it in more detail and so explore further how it engaged with the concerns of his peers and associates. For Dallago and Heinrich, Kraus becomes a mythological or rhetorical figure (Siegfried, Napoleon, or the embodiment of a personified Conscience). For Trakl, too, he is mythologized, but the invocation is not merely hyperbolic but excessive even to the point of meaninglessness. The images of Siegfried and Napoleon reinforce each other as aspects of an underlying warrior archetype. But the epithets used by Trakl are not so easily subsumable: priest, magician, warrior; whiteness, crystal, wrath, do not straightforwardly combine. Indeed, the change from a ‘black’ to a ‘flaming’ mantel might even be explained by the fact that wrath and blackness fit too easily, as do white and black as simple opposites. Despite the changes, moving the poem further from immediately comprehensible oppositions, the poem is nevertheless evocative. It presents a moral authority that is incontrovertible and embodied in a real person (so part of this world), but at the same time, the language challenges the tropes available for domesticating that authority: Kraus is not simply a hero. Gerald Stieg has argued that the poem is striking because of the way it differs in attitude from other straightforwardly adulatory responses to Kraus in the ‘Rundfrage’. Indeed, for Stieg, the poem pre-empts the critical line that the Brenner circle will come to take on Kraus in the 1920s.38 I will in the end be disagreeing with Stieg, but it is useful to follow his lead and think a little more about other responses to Kraus published in the ‘Rundfrage’ and elsewhere. As we have seen, both Wedekind and Mann had a sense of a realm in relation to which Kraus’s project could be understood: theatre, in the case of Wedekind, or art, in the case of Mann. They knew how to deal with Kraus, insofar as they could measure his authority by their preferred standard. Schönberg’s response to the 37 Oskar Kokoschka, Schriften 1907–1955, ed. by Hans Maria Wingler (Munich: Albert Langen Georg Müller, 1956), pp. 137–51 (p. 41). 38 ‘Karl Kraus und Georg Trakl’, in Gerald Stieg, Der Brenner und Die Fackel: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Karl Kraus (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1976), pp. 261–71 (pp. 69–70). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 12 BEN MORGAN ‘Rundfrage’, in contrast, is more emphatic but less secure. Here the issue seems to be precisely that it was hard not simply to imitate Kraus: ‘Ich habe von Ihnen [Kraus] vielleicht mehr gelernt, als man lernen darf, wenn man noch selbständig bleiben will.’39 Mann and Wedekind can avoid being overwhelmed by Kraus, or the Krausian ethical project, because they know how to situate it culturally. Schönberg lacks an equivalent sovereignty. But that need not be seen as a problem. In a note written almost twenty years later, but thinking about the influence of Kraus on his intellectual development, Wittgenstein similarly abandons the claim to independence. Kraus, alongside other figures like Loos, Russell, Frege, is one of the writers in relation to whom Wittgenstein’s own thought was simply reproduktiv. The terms in which Wittgenstein then explains to himself what he contributes despite this intellectual recycling are relevant to an understanding of Trakl’s poetic project. Wittgenstein concludes: ‘Was ich erfinde sind neue Gleichnisse.’40 To contemporaries, it seems, Kraus, and the ethical project he represented were a force to be reckoned with. If his authority could not be conceptually contained, it demanded simply to be emulated. Wittgenstein’s response, as he reflected in the 1930s, was to find a way of inventing new images with which the ethical enterprise to which he was committed could be furthered. In contrast, Trakl could be said not to have invented new images but to stage the failure of existing literary idioms. Tropes and topoi do not combine in Trakl’s text, as Siegfried and Napoleon can join to conjure the ultimate warrior of the spirit. The figures of the priest, magician, and warrior gesture towards an authority that cannot directly be invoked, but is rather experienced through the failure of the images to represent it. Kraus’s power speaks through, and precisely because of, the equivocations of the poem. Or, to put it another way: Trakl’s Kraus poem evokes a powerful idea of human experience, but one which doesn’t settle into a easily identifiable figure. Here we can return to Stieg’s reading which copes with the challenge of Trakl’s poem by downplaying any conflict between images and claiming that the magician represents a critique of the means used by the priest-warrior in his service of the truth.41 Stieg has been questioned on philological and biographical grounds.42 But more important in relation to the view of Trakl that I am presenting here is that Stieg’s reading harmonizes the tensions of the poem, arranging them to form a narrative, in this case, of critique. Moritz BaÞler has taken issue with this sort of approach to Trakl. In a reading of the prose poem ‘Verwandlung des Bösen’, he argues that Trakl’s poetry positively undermines any attempt to generate from it recognizable situations, characters or narratives. The main semantic unit of the 39 ‘Rundfrage über Karl Kraus’, p. 843. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright, Heikki Nyman, and Alois Pichler, trans. by Peter Winch, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 16 (MS 154 15v: 1931). 41 ‘Die weiÞe Magie ist kein Weg zur Wahrheit.’ Stieg, Der Brenner und Die Fackel, p. 269. 42 Stieg’s reading depends on a decoding of Trakl’s colour scheme which ignores the change from ‘black’ to ‘flaming’ in the revision of the poem for Sebastian im Traum. See Sigurd Paul Scheichl’s review of Stieg’s book, Sprachkunst, 8 (1977), 144–47. Doppler argues that the critique of Kraus Stieg finds was simply not yet on the agenda for the Brenner circle in 1913, Trakl included, see Doppler, Die Lyrik Georg Trakls, p. 98. 40 Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 13 poem, for BaÞler, is not the sentence or even the phrase but individual words, which seem luminous because of the way Trakl’s dictions draw on existing traditions: Symbolist and Romantic poetry and the language of the Bible.43 BaÞler’s argument draws attention to aspects of Trakl’s poetic technique that Stieg’s rationalizing account overlooks. However, I would not go so far as BaÞler in insisting on the complete disintegration of the poem into a luminous literariness.44 While the sense of a literary tradition to which he is responding is indeed an important aspect of the poetry, Trakl did something more than staging the impossibility of literary meaning. To his contemporaries, his poems also contained something positive. This is most succinctly expressed in the comment Wittgenstein recorded in his diary on being sent off-prints of Trakl’s poems ‘Helian’ and ‘Kaspar Hauser Lied’ by Ficker in November 1914.45 On 24 November 1914, Wittgenstein noted: ‘Ficker sandte mir heute Gedichte des armen Trakl, die ich für genial halte ohne sie zu verstehen. Sie taten mir wohl. Gott mit mir.’46 Wittgenstein’s comments could perhaps be read as a contemporary confirmation of the reading BaÞler elaborated eighty years later. The poems convey an aesthetic aura (they are recognized as ‘genial’) but are incomprehensible: a case of luminous literariness if ever there was one. However, this account omits Wittgenstein’s final comments: ‘Sie taten mir wohl. Gott mit mir.’ The poems provoke in Wittgenstein a sense of metaphysical comfort. Now, it turns out they have this positive effect only if Wittgenstein’s own work is going well. When he was sent a copy of Sebastian im Traum in February 1915, and his own flow of inspiration had dried up, Wittgenstein felt only that he had no space in his head for other people’s thoughts, and he noted, without the same sense of involvement, that the poems are ‘probably very good’, but did not record the same emotional effect as in November of the previous year.47 Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s record of the experience of reading Trakl as, as it were, a sympathetic onlooker of his literary endeavours in the 1910s, suggests that the poems did something to readers which is neither the clearly articulated critique of rival cultural positions found by Stieg nor the equally unequivocal questioning of meaning uncovered by BaÞler. The effect of the poems lay somewhere between these two readings. They were, in other words, an inspiring or invigorating form of nonsense. Wittgenstein was not the only contemporary to react to Trakl’s poems in this way. Karl Borromäus Heinrich is the author of the first published response to Trakl’s poetry, published as his second ‘Brief aus der Abgeschiedenheit’ in Der 43 Moritz BaÞler, ‘Wie Trakls Verwandlung des Bösen gemacht ist’, in Gedichte von Georg Trakl, ed. by Hans-Georg Kemper (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), pp. 121–41. 44 Hanna Klessinger develops a similar critique of BaÞler’s approach, seeing in Trakl’s poetry a literary response to the ethical problems of the society he lived in. Hanna Klessinger, Krisis der Moderne: Georg Trakl im Intertextuellen Dialog mit Nietzsche, Dostojewskij, Hölderlin und Novalis (Würzburg: Ergon, 2007). 45 The information as to which poems Wittgenstein was sent is derived from the editorial material accompanying the publication of Ficker’s correspondence of November 1914: Ficker, Briefwechsel 1914–1925, ed. Ignaz Zangerle and others (Salzburg: Haymon, 1988), p. 468. 46 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright and Walter Methlagl (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969), p. 15. 47 Cf. letter to Ficker, 9 February 1915; and Wittgenstein’s diary entry of 8 February 1915, in Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficke, p. 26. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 14 BEN MORGAN Brenner in March 1913.48 Like Wittgenstein, Heinrich is responding to the poem ‘Helian’. He contrasts Trakl’s poetry with easily consumable verse that poses no emotional challenge for the reader: ‘hübsche, glatte, wohlgereimte Sachen gleich Pillen […], die man nach dem Essen und vorm Einschlafen auf dem Kanapee zu sich nehmen kann’.49 He looks forward to an era when not only most of what people read, but most of what they do will have changed radically enough for them to understand what Trakl has communicated in ‘Helian’: ‘Helian hat Zeit, bis dahin und noch länger.’50 Nonsense in the present but meaning in or for a possible future is also what Josef Anton Steuer heard when he attended the reading that Trakl performed of ‘Helian’ and other poems in Innsbruck in December 1913. The review he published in the Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger on 13 December 1913 is worth quoting at some length, even though it is readily accessible in the HistorischKritische Ausgabe of Trakl’s poems (HKA, II: 718–20), because it offers a view of Trakl by a contemporary who is outside the Brenner circle yet is sceptically sympathetic. Moreover, Ficker took up and re-wrote excerpts from the review for publication in Der Brenner, an editorial intervention which allows us to see clearly the issues with which Trakl’s poetry was connected in the 1910s. Steuer’s review starts by noting that it wasn’t very easy to hear Trakl as he sat at a table in the big space of the Musikvereinsaal: Der Dichter las leider zu schwach, wie von Verborgenheiten heraus, aus Vergangenheiten oder Zukünften, und erst später konnte man in dem monotonen gebethaften Zwischensprachen dieses schon äuÞerlich ganz eigenartigen Menschen Worte und Sätze, dann Bilder und Rythmen [sic] erkennen, die seine futuristische Dichtung bilden. Alles wird Bild und Gleichnis in ihm, tauscht sich in seiner Seele zu andern Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten um, die dann den Menschen von heute nicht liegen, aber doch so überzeugend gebracht werden, daÞ man ihre Möglichkeit glaubt. (HKA, II: 720)51 Like Karl Borromäus Heinrich, Steuer hears in Trakl’s poetry an emphatically articulated and genuine experience formulated in a way that is not accessible to the present, that is to say to ‘die Menschen von heute’. At the same time, Steuer also talks about Trakl’s poetic method. Trakl’s approach apparently transforms everyday language, achieving what we could call a form of total indirection where nothing seems to mean what we expect it to mean: ‘Alles wird Bild und Gleichnis in ihm’. For Steuer, this makes Trakl a Futurist. But positioning Trakl in the literary landscape in this way and so exercising a degree of control over the otherwise uncontrollable poetic utterance is an aspect of Steuer’s review that 48 Karl Borromäus Heinrich, ‘Brief aus der Abgeschiedenheit II: Die Erscheinung Georg Trakls’, Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 508–16. 49 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 509. 50 Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 514. 51 The HKA corrects spelling in the review. I am quoting from the unrevised text as it is reprinted in Sauermann, ‘Trakls Lesung in Innsbruck im Jahre 1913’, p. 192. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 15 Ficker chooses to cut when he reprints excerpts in Der Brenner.52 Indeed, Ficker suggests that it is too early to offer an interpretation of Trakl’s poetry. It is better to let the poems themselves, as they appear in the pages of Der Brenner reflect ‘das, was dunkel und was licht in ihnen erscheint’.53 We are now in a position to connect my first sketch of Trakl’s poetic techniques with the view of his poetry which has emerged on putting his writing back in the context of Der Brenner from which it first emerged. When we first looked at Trakl’s poetry, we observed a shift of perspective which could take the poem either closer to a sense of redemption or irrevocably remove it. In either case ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bild’ could change abruptly. This technique now appears analogous to those that Trakl uses in his aphorism on Kraus, since this poem similarly deprives the reader of a framework with which to make sense of the intense experience with which they have nevertheless become involved. Reading Trakl’s poetry, we participate in a shift of perspective of which we cannot say whether it is redemptive or not: we can say only that our perspective alters radically. For Trakl’s contemporaries, this shift of perspective and the associated experience of meaninglessness was felt to be both uplifting and significant. It moved the reader beyond stale patterns of understanding. At the same time, readers needed some way of coping with the sense of vertigo the poetry engendered. To put the strategy they developed in a wider context, I want to consider the cultural legacy of Trakl’s poetic techniques as it can be seen in the responses of Adorno and Heidegger to the poetry. This will prepare the way for understanding the relation between Trakl’s difficult modernist poetry and what I called at the very start of the argument ‘common sense realism’. V MODERNIST TRAKL AND BEYOND The reading articulated by Heinrich and Steuer (Trakl’s poetry articulating a meaning which is beyond meaning, but not the undermining of meaning tout court) is an early version of what could be called the strong Modernist account of Trakl which is clearly set out in the analyses by Adorno and Heidegger. For Adorno, Trakl’s poetry is an example of an aesthetic logic beyond logic, rigorously combining elements without subjecting them to standard patterns of communication, a form of everyday speech stylized beyond itself, and yet neither clearly distinguishable from the speech patterns the poet hopes to overcome nor protected from an oneiric collapse of all forms of communication.54 Similarly for Heidegger, turning to Trakl to help him gloss his own thought in the seminar he gave to explicate his lecture ‘Zeit und Sein’ in 1962, poetry written by a generation of poets which includes Trakl but also Rilke and Benn, articulates a form of purpose 52 Ficker drops the epithet ‘Futurist’ as well as softening the critique of Trakl’s style of declamation: ‘Der Dichter las leider etwas zu schwach, wie von Verborgenheiten heraus, aus Vergangenheiten oder Zukünften, und erst später konnte man in dem monotonen gebethaften Insichsprechen dieses schon äuÞerlich ganz eigenartigen Menschen Worte und Sätze, dann Bilder und Rhythmen erkennen, die das Gefüge seiner Dichtung bilden.’ ‘Vorlesungen von Robert Michel und Georg Trakl’, Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), 336–38 (p. 338). 53 Der Brenner, 4 (1913/14), p. 338. .. 54 For a discussion of Trakl and aesthetic logic, from A sthetische Theorie, see Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970-), VII, pp. 431–42. For a discussion of Trakl and free verse, from Minima Moralia, see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, IV, pp. 250–51. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 16 BEN MORGAN beyond human purpose. Heidegger makes this point by engaging with a specific formulation used by Trakl which it is worth looking at in detail since it illustrates very clearly what is at stake in the modernist reading of his poetry. Heidegger picks up a recurring linguistic pattern that Trakl uses in two poems he wrote under the influence of Karl Klammer’s translations of Rimbaud, which translated the il y a of Rimbaud’s prose poem Enfance as ‘Es ist’: ‘Es ist eine Uhr, die nicht schlägt, | Es ist ein Schneeloch mit einem Nest von weiÞen Tieren. | Es ist eine Kathedrale, die versinkt, und ein See, der überschwillt.’55 In his ‘Psalm’, which he dedicated to Kraus, and in ‘De profundis’, both written in 1912, Trakl took up and radicalized the formulation he found in Klammer’s Rimbaud, using it to open each of the poems by sketching situations that are at once striking and disturbed.56 ‘De profundis’ starts with a series of declarations in which the epithets (black, brown, lonely, empty) highlight the inadequacy of the information being communicated rather than filling in the blanks, only to unexpectedly reveal that the scene is being described by someone affected by its sadness: ‘Es ist ein Stoppelfeld, in das ein schwarzer Regen fällt. | Es ist ein brauner Baum, der einsam dasteht. | Es ist ein Zischelwind, der leere Hütten umkreist. | Wie traurig dieser Abend’ (HKA, I: 46). Similarly, ‘Psalm’ begins with an inexplicably devastated scene: ‘Es ist ein Licht, das der Wind ausgelöscht hat./[…] Es ist ein Weinberg, verbrannt und Schwarz mit Löchern voll Spinnen.’ This is contrasted with a South Sea idyll at once cultic, sensual and violent, and then, once again, we hear the voice of a speaker to whom the contrast between devastation and a lost world matters deeply emerging from the apparently neutral declarations: ‘O unser verlorenes Paradies’ (HKA, I: 55). Heidegger is interested in Trakl’s use of the Es ist, which he contrasts with the more usual Es gibt. The latter phrase, as it is used in everyday language, articulates human purposes. We might, for instance, use it to let someone know there is a good trout stream in the vicinity. To speak in this way, and relate the world to the sorts of things human beings do in it, is preferable, for Heidegger, to adopting an attitude of false neutrality otherwise associated with the verb ‘to be’. Yet even more revealing is Trakl’s Es ist. Like the phrase Es gibt, it is addressed to and includes human beings, and so acknowledges the way we are addressed by the world, and involved in it. At the same time, it presents us with a world that speaks to us but without being reducible to human purposes, an address to the listener 55 Arthur Rimbaud, Leben und Dichtung, trans. by K. L. Ammer [5 Karl Klammer] (Leipzig: Insel, 1921) p. 231. 56 The topic of Rimbaud’s influence on Trakl has often been discussed in the secondary literature. Two essays in particular are relevant to the arguments I am developing in this essay. Herbert Lindenberger, writing in 1958, succinctly summarized possible parallels between the projects of the two poets, noting their success ‘in breaking the logical junctures of the conventional poetic language and their consequent ability to define a type of visionary experience that had never before found a place in poetry’, Herbert Lindenberger, ‘Georg Trakl and Rimbaud: A Study in Influence and Development’, Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 21–35 (p. 34). Rémy Colombat argues that Trakl draws on the Rimbaud-esque figure of the magician in his characterization of Karl Kraus. Rémy Colombat, ‘Existenzkrise und ‘‘Illumination’’’, in Kemper (ed.) Gedichte von Georg Trakl, pp. 62–79 (pp. 75–77). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 17 over and beyond what is familiar and at our disposal, or, in Heidegger’s words: ‘ein Unverfügbares, das Angehende als ein Unheimliches, das Dämonische’.57 As we have seen, the early responses to Trakl hear in the poetry the articulation of an emphatic meaning beyond everyday communication. This reading establishes the pattern for later modernist readings of the poet. At the same time, there is another facet of the early responses which it is worth drawing attention to because it changes how we should read the repeated invocations of an emphatic, but meaningful experience beyond the limits of familiar communication and allows us to see the modernist project as in fact a version of common sense realism. Steuer’s review of Trakl’s performance commented on his weak declamation and on the difficulty of the poetry but finally suggested everything was held together by the figure of the poet as poet: ‘Denn ein Dichter ist dieser stille, alles in sich umtauschende Mensch gewiÞ, davon überzeugt jedes seiner Gedichte, die Offenbarungen gleich wirken’ (HKA, II: 720). A similar move can be found in Heinrich’s comments on ‘Die Erscheinung Georg Trakls’. Here, too, the untimely message that Trakl has to communicate is underwritten by his status as visionary poet: ‘[ich fühlte] von vornherein das Bedeutungsvolle des in sich gekehrten Menschen.’58 Indeed, the same double movement is observable in Wittgenstein’s comments. The poetry may not be intelligible but it is ‘genial’, that is to say guaranteed by the figure of the brilliant poet behind the writing. As we have already seen, Trakl is not the only writer whose importance, for the Brenner circle, is underwritten by an emphatic experience. Kraus’s moral authority was thought to be derived from his character, and from the experience that underpinned it. The same structure can be found in the approach to other authors praised in the pages of the journal. For instance, whilst Dallago disapproves of Otto Weininger’s theoretical position because it seems to submit the messy, desiring lives of real men and women to an abstract idea, he nevertheless thinks Weininger’s thought is worthy of comment and discussion because of the uprightness of the man himself: ‘Solche Rechtschaffenheit verleiht einem Werke Leben und Dauer.’59 Similarly, Dallago’s enthusiasm for Walt Whitman’s poetry was expressed as an enthusiasm for the type of life and the attitudes that Whitman the poet embodied: ‘Er war der gröÞte Sänger einer ganz Schöpfungswillen gewordenen Menschennatur.’60 Similarly in another essay, Dallago insists, as he lists his role models (Whitman, Nietzsche, Segantini – a late nineteenth-century painter of Alpine landscapes – and Jesus of Nazareth) that what they have in common is the quality of being, emphatically, ‘meine Menschen’.61 When, therefore, the emphatic vision of Trakl’s barely intelligible poetry is understood by his contemporaries to be grounded in and guaranteed by Trakl the poet and by the combination of experience and authority that that implies, his readers are following a pattern frequently deployed in the 1910s and beyond. It is a pattern that strongly shapes the way Trakl is read after his death. The commemorative volume edited by Ficker in 1926, Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, 57 58 59 60 61 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 4th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), p. 43. Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), p. 512. Carl Dallago, ‘Otto Weininger und sein Werk’, Der Brenner, 3 (1912/13), 1–17 (p. 1). Carl Dallago, ‘Walt Whitmann’ [sic], Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 145–147 (p. 147). Carl Dallago, ‘Pans Erwachen’, Der Brenner, 1 (1910/11), 663–69 (p. 666). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 18 BEN MORGAN reprinting Karl Borromäus Heinrich’s essay and recollections of encounters with Trakl by Hans Limbach and Ficker himself, continues this trend, which, indeed, is made programmatic in the title of a further contribution: ‘Der Mensch und Dichter Georg Trakl’.62 The trend continues in a study of Trakl’s poetry published in Der Brenner in 1934 under the title ‘Das Bild des Menschen bei Georg Trakl’ by Werner Meyknecht. What Trakl’s poetry communicates, for Meyknecht, is a version of being human that is grounded, as we have now come to expect for readers of Trakl, in the experience of the poet himself: ‘Denn dieses Bild des Menschen ist es, das im Geist dem Dichter vorschwebte, da er es in seinem Herzen trug und sich in ihm erkannte.’63 Heidegger’s account of Trakl in the two essays he published on the poet in the 1950s can be understood as directed precisely against this sort of reading. Heidegger suggests that the poetry must be separated from the poet, and hopes to avoid a sociological, psychoanalytic, biographical or historical reading because he does not want to read either poetry or language in terms of something beyond them.64 Heidegger’s defence of a certain autonomy of the poetry from the poet might seem like good critical practice. But as a reading of Trakl it is open to challenge. Indeed, Heidegger’s strategy itself seems on closer inspection to be a version of the model of reading he purports to reject. In the second of his essays, ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’, Heidegger focuses in particular on a line from the poem ‘Frühling der Seele’ (HKA I, 141–42) first published in Der Brenner on 15 March 1914. The line that Heidegger singles out is ‘Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden’. In Heidegger’s reading, this should not be read as a Platonic withdrawal from bodily life, as the lament of a soul imprisoned in a body. Rather, it articulates a leaving behind of the familiar, a being called away from oneself to discover oneself. The figure of the stranger in Trakl’s poetry calls us to go beyond ourselves, to revise our view of the childhood from which we have emerged, both individually and culturally, and so prepare the way for a different version of humanity, one which, in Heidegger’s reading, will lead us to re-interpret our lives so thoroughly that even our notion of gender will be reconsidered. Heidegger concludes in a tone which echoes the concerns of Kraus from forty years earlier: Verträumte Romantik abseits der technisch-wirtschaftlichen Welt des modernen Massendaseins? Oder – das klare Wissen des ‘‘Wahnsinnigen’’, der Anderes sieht und sinnt als die Berichterstatter des Aktuellen, die sich in der Historie des Gegenwärtigen erschöpfen, dessen vorgerechnete Zukunft je nur die Verlängerung des Aktuellen ist, eine Zukunft, die ohne Ankunft eines Geschickes bleibt, das den Menschen erst im Anbeginn seines Wesens angeht.65 Heidegger’s reading of Trakl very closely follows the structure to be found in the responses of the poet’s contemporaries. The poetry articulates a vision of something which breaks with alienated habits of communication (the merely 62 Erwin Wahrhold, ‘Der Mensch und Dichter Georg Trakl’, in Ficker (ed.), Erinnerung an Georg Trakl, pp. 21–82. 63 Werner Meyknecht, ‘Das Bild des Menschen bei Georg Trakl’, Der Brenner, 15 (1934), 48–85 (p. 48). 64 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, pp. 18, 37. 65 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 80. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 19 topical, ‘das Aktuelle’), to present instead a vision of something different, something still to come. More over, this alternative vision is to be found articulated by a figure who is in part a construction of the poetry (the ‘Fremdling’ on whom Heidegger’s reading focuses), but in part, also, the poet himself, whose emphatic experience returns in Heidegger’s text, albeit in scare quotes, in the form of ‘das klare Wissen des ‘Wahnsinnigen’, der Anderes sieht’. To sum up the story so far: some recent accounts of Trakl have rationalized his haunting images, piecing the fragments together to form a coherent critique of other cultural positions in the 1910s; alternatively, critics have emphasized the fragmentariness, and insisted on the resulting meaninglessness as the point of the poetry. My account has returned to the responses of Trakl’s contemporaries to show how readers in the 1910s cut a path between these two extremes and saw the poetry as leaving behind familiar patterns of communication to articulate a meaning as yet barely intelligible but waiting for a future reader who has left behind the alienated habits of today. For contemporaries, the significance of the puzzling vision articulated in the poems was guaranteed by the figure of the poet himself and his emphatic way of experiencing the world. Trakl was not the only figure to be read this way: Rimbaud, Whitman, Nietzsche were all figures who guaranteed their challenging message with their person. Heidegger’s reading exactly reproduces this structure even as it purports to break with it. But that is perhaps not surprising, given that Heidegger was himself a contemporary of Trakl who could recall, when writing to Hannah Arendt in the 1950s, the vivid effect of first encountering his poems in issues of Der Brenner in 1912.66 Trakl’s poetry thus presents us with an interesting cultural conundrum. On the one hand, with his abrupt but dislocated shifts and his strategically disruptive deployment of epithets he writes poems which push beyond the boundaries of the familiar. At the same time, it seems that the disruption is never taken in an unqualified form by readers. It is always tempered by the guarantee supplied by the figure of the poet himself, following a widespread pattern of the 1910s by which cultural experiment is underwritten by the probity of the experimenter and the reader is given an ethical role-model to identify with as they face the challenge of cultural innovation. The combination of the challenge to meaning and the familiar pattern of identification with a cultural hero might seem problematic. Certainly, Heidegger hopes to move beyond readings which create Trakl as a hero because he is worried that this familiar discursive pattern will inhibit the very process of cultural change to which he thinks Trakl is contributing. But, as we have seen, Heidegger’s own argument reproduces a version of the same pattern. On the one hand, he invokes the vision of the individual considered ‘mad’ by the surrounding culture, on the other, he supplies alternative agents as a guarantee that the uncanny experience to which the reader submits is genuine: language, or being itself are personified again and again by Heidegger’s prose style.67 Adorno similarly uses the trope of personification, although in his case it is aspects of the work of art (Bildelemente) rather than language or being that perform actions more normally 66 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925–1975, ed. by Ursula Ludz, 3rd edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2002), p. 137 [MH to AH, 15 December 1952]. 67 For instance, the famous assertion: ‘Die Sprache spricht.’ Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 13. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) 20 BEN MORGAN attributed to human beings.68 Aesthetic experiment needs to be accompanied by the sense of an agent we can trust. This agent may not be named as a human being, but readers, and indeed the critics themselves, will relate to it as a human being. The human element is inescapable, even for critics as austere as Adorno or Heidegger – or indeed Derrida.69 Is this humanizing or anthropomorphic reaction to the disruptive rigour of Trakl’s texts something we should try to avoid or overcome? Maybe, but maybe not. So far, I have explained the dual impulse observable in readings of Trakl with reference to the cultural habits of the 1910s and the need to legitimate moral or aesthetic experiments by an appeal to character. Yet the structure has a much longer history. It is the rhetorical figure analysed by Aristotle under the name of e-thos or moral character: ‘The orator persuades by moral character when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute.’70 For Aristotle, we relate to ideas and arguments as things which are of necessity delivered by a person of a particular character, and which are persuading us towards some good or away from some evil. We move in a world of human action and human aims. Looking at the cultural discourses of the 1910s, this habit seems to be very hard to shake, and perhaps it does not need shaking. If, for contemporary readers, Trakl’s poems were guaranteed by the genuineness of the poet, the texts themselves were often also populated by characters valued for a sort of genuineness, as we have seen in the Kraus poem, but as is also evident in the poems featuring Dostoevsky’s Sonja, Elis and Helian. As we have seen with the Kraus poem, the sense of moral authority is conveyed even though the figure that underpins it never quite comes into focus. The same could be said of the other Trakl characters, and once again, a final comparison to the treatment of characters by another contributor to Der Brenner is instructive. Carl Dallago wrote an article in 1911 celebrating in particular the figures of Marmeladov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment. Contrasting Dostoevsky’s novel with more recent texts celebrated by the press which are not underpinned by experience, and in which characters are simply arranged (‘gruppiert’) to form a plot, the article consists largely in a quotation from the alcoholic Marmeladov’s account of how he starts drinking again, and of how Sonja, nagged by her stepmother Katerina Ivanovna, goes out to become a prostitute to earn money for 68 Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, VI, p. 431. Derrida summarizes Heidegger’s argument that Trakl’s poetry articulates a spirituality beyond or before Christianity which transcends cultural habits. He then criticizes the attempt to distinguish Trakl from Christianity, seeing the going beyond itself as part of the Christian tradition. Having presented this view of a poetry which takes us behind or beneath the habits of metaphysics and onto-theology, Derrida then finishes the article by letting an imaginary Heidegger speak in his defence. Once again, an austere modernist reading finishes with a variety of personification or prosopopeia. Human figures are apparently inescapable. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, pp. 108–09. 70 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by J. H. Freese (London: Heinemann, 1926), 1356a. 69 Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT 21 her father, her consumptive stepmother and three young step-siblings. Dallago comments: ‘Ein Mensch in der lasterhaftesten Hülle ist immer noch mehr, als geputzte und gedrillte Anstandstiere, in denen das eigentlich Menschliche völlig getilgt ist.’71 Dallago is uncritical in the way he treats Marmeladov as a human being rather than a fiction: as the record of an authentic experience. Trakl is more circumspect in the way he takes up or creates figures, and it might seem as though the poems, in their refusal to focus, offer us a model of how we should read his own character, as he paradoxically proves his own moral worth by calling into question its very possibility: e-thos made all the more convincing by the way it calls itself into question. But the result is a version of e-thos nevertheless. However much he tries to withdraw and call character into question at all levels, this can and will always be read as an example of Trakl’s own austere ethics. In that sense, Trakl’s poetry fits perfectly neatly alongside a Dostoevsky novel: it remains a version of realism, a troubled version no doubt, but realism nonetheless, as we are offered figures, including that of the poet, of more or less good character with whom to identify as we confront the suspension of familiar meanings. Trakl’s is a version of realism which can find its way to shared concerns or a shared model of humanity only negatively: by questioning its own tools, and images. The comparison with Wittgenstein reminds us that it is only one version among the many possible, and it can be very precisely described using Wittgenstein’s formulation. It is the realism of an individual, or of a group, that cannot yet, as could the later Wittgenstein, invent new images or ‘neue Gleichnisse’, but must content itself with staging the inadequacy of the old, and filling the vacuum with the figure of a luminous humanity. < NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR Ben Morgan is Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College Oxford. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2012), and editor, with Carolin Duttlinger and Antony Phelan of Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012). Correspondence to: Email: Ben.morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk 71 Carl Dallago, ‘In Gesellschaft von Büchern’, Der Brenner, 2 (1911/12), 407–19 (p. 419). Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:45 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006) < 22 BEN MORGAN Authors Queries Journal: Oxford German Studies Paper: 18 Title: GEORG TRAKL (1887–1914) IN CONTEXT: POETRY AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CULTURAL DEBATES OF THE BRENNER CIRCLE Dear Author During the preparation of your manuscript for publication, the questions listed below have arisen. Please attend to these matters and return this form with your proof. Many thanks for your assistance Query Reference Query Remarks 1 Please provide 4-6 keywords. 2 Please provide postal address. Oxford German Studies ogs18.3d 7/9/12 16:57:46 The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 - Rev 9.0.225/W Unicode (Oct 13 2006)