Randall Jarrell, for example, saw the war as a small part of his literary career, and was dismayed when the fame of his war poetry threatened to overshadow his much longer peacetime career.
Some of these authors had established themselves as poets prior to the war; others began serious writing during the war. For some, especially those who died in the war, the war was a large part, or even the entirety, of their careers; for others, the war was a brief period in their careers.
Ultimately, categories like “war poets” and “war poetry” are constructs, and like all constructs, tend to disintegrate under careful inspection. More reliable might be categories like “poets who wrote during a war” or “poets who wrote in a war” or “poets who wrote about a war” or some combination of these.
Likewise, it remains to be investigated which distinctions might exist between “war poetry,” “poetry about the war,” and “poetry written during the war.”
WW1 seems to have generated a larger amount of poetry than WW2 or other wars. There are several common hypotheses about the cause of this phenomenon. WW1 may have inspired more poetry because it was the first, or one of the first, mechanized and industrialized wars, with trench warfare, weapons capable of quick large-scale killing, and equipment produced in huge numbers. Both the poets and the readers needed to revise their mental concept of war, which was based on the slower and less lethal combat of the nineteenth century. The shock and horror of WW1 combat was new, and the war poets communicated this to their audiences.
There are a number of other hypotheses about why WW1 yielded more war poetry than WW2. The investigation of those hypotheses will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Among German-language poets who wrote about WW1 are Gerrit Engelke (died October 13, 1918), Ernst Stadler (died October 30, 1914), and George Trakl (died November 3, 1914). Of course, there were many more. These three, however, will serve as objects for the present discursion.
All three wrote in, during, and about the war. All three had established themselves as poets prior to the war, and are largely remembered for their pre-war works; they are only secondarily considered as war poets.
Unlike the bulk of the English-language war poets, these three developed new styles and genres of poetry, and thus formed turning points in the history of literature. Their educations varied: Stadler completed his doctorate and was a professor of philology when the war began; Trakl had a mediocre secondary-school career, studied pharmacology, and had a fragmented and unremarkable career in pharmacy; Engelke had little secondary education, worked as an apprentice to become a painter, and some of his works were purchased by museums during his lifetime.
Trakl’s vocabulary is distinctive. He mentions Herbst more times than he mentions Winter, Sommer, and Frühling put together. He writes frequently of Schweigen and Stille. The word Schatten occurs in his writings about twice as often as hell. He mentions schwarz, blau, and rot more than three times as often as he mentions gelb and grün.
Russell Brown, citing the work of Josef Leitgeb, writes that:
Trakl is “the” poet of the evening: as Leitgeb points out, “Abend” is the second most frequent noun in his poetry, surpassed only by the analogous “Schatten.” It is also featured prominently; for at least thirty lines some form of “Abend” (“Abends,” “am Abend,” “am Abendgarten”) is the first significant word, while twelve poems in the complete work, including the first and last of Die Dichtungen, begin with an adverbial mention of evening.
In addition to Abend, Trakl often sets his poems in the Nacht. By contrast, Morgen and Tag appear less frequently.
In one 768-word prose piece — titled “Offenbarung und Untergang” — he uses some form of the work blau nine times. Schwarz appears eight times. Grün is used twice. Braun, grau, and gelb do not appear at all. Rot is used once.
In all his works together, Schwester appears about three times as often as Bruder.
Trakl uses first-person pronouns infrequently in his poetry, but more frequently in his few prose pieces.
In some of his earliest poetry, e.g., “Morgenlied”, written and published in 1906 before he was 20 years old — and in his last poetry, written only days before his death in November 1914 — he wrestles with form, specifically, with rhyme and with syllable counts. “Morgenlied” was probably not the first poem he ever wrote, but it was the first one he got published, and in it, he refuses to conform to a strict metrical pattern or to a strict rhyme scheme. Later, he embraced a clear structure, both in terms of meter and in terms of rhyme, in poems like “Die Raben” and “Im Winter” which were published in 1913. The reader will be reminded that that date of publication is distinct from the date of composition.
Even when Trakl veers toward what seems to be free verse, there is sometimes a subtle or hidden metrical pattern. His poem “Untergang” merits special attention in this regard.
This poem has nine lines. When a high school teacher asks his students to count the syllables in each line, the results seem to be random: There is no clear pattern of meter. Upon closer examination, however, a clever mathematical pattern emerges: the poem is divided into three stanzas of three lines each. While the number of syllables in each line seems random, and no pattern is discernable on a line-by-line level, the total number of syllables per stanza forms a clear pattern. Each of the three stanzas has the same number of syllables.
Far from yielding to the style of free verse, which some literary historians paint as the inevitable destiny of poetry, Trakl has built in “Untergang” a structure of mathematical determination. Once the reader has scanned the first two stanzas, the third stanza is predicted.
Although Trakl’s approach to meter and rhyme varied over the course of his career, the content of his poetry remained less diverse. From beginning to end, his verses discuss, on the one hand, decay, demise, and passing away, and on the other hand, a transcendental victory over those endings in a spiritual vision, sometimes including the Schwester as a saving force. Trakl’s spirituality is seen, e.g., in “Ein Winterabend” in the final two lines:
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.
In an earlier draft of this poem, Trakl even included heilig to describe the table and the objects on it: an unmistakable allusion to the sacrament. Trakl’s life circumstances perhaps nudged him to meditate on spiritual matters; he was a Lutheran, and in the Austrian society in which he lived, Lutherans constituted a microscopic percentage of the largely Roman Catholic population.
Ernst Stadler uses first-person pronouns in his poetry more frequently than Trakl does. His lines contain, on average, more syllables than Trakl’s lines. Stadler’s preferred time of day also differs from Trakl’s, as Russell Brown notes:
Three of Stadler’s fifty-four poems have “Morgen” or “Frühe” in the title. Fifteen, or twenty-eight percent, mention “Morgen.”
Brown is referring to the fifty-four poems included in Stadler’s book Der Aufbruch. Stadler’s total production is significantly greater than fifty-four in total.
Stadler’s style developed over time: His later work tends toward larger numbers of syllables per line, and toward the more frequent use of Morgen.
Although baptized as a Protestant, Stadler’s extended family contained a significant number of Roman Catholics, so he, like Trakl, had cause to ponder spiritual matters. Stadler’s religious allusions bear comparison to Trakl’s. They are perhaps more experiential and less soteriological. Describing a romance in terms of the sacrament, Stadler writes:
Ich fühl, im Bette liegend, hostiengleich mir
zugewendet dein Gesicht.
He also uses the word Gebet in its direct literal sense, e.g., in the poem “Die Befreiung”:
Meine Seele war die kleine Glocke, die im Dorfkirchhimmel der Gebete hieng.
and in the poem “Simplicius wird Einsiedler im Schwarzwald und schreibt seine Lebensgeschichte”
Früher hab ich meinem Gott gedient mit Hieb und Narben so wie heute mit Gebeten,
Ich brauche nicht zu zittern, wenn er einst mich ruft, vor seinen Stuhl zu treten.
In the last line of “Fahrt über die Kölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht” includes the words Einkehr, Kommunion, and Gebet. Throughout the poems included in Der Aufbruch, the word Gott appears twelve times, and at least ten of those occurrences seem to be straightforward references to the Deity.
In her analysis of “Gegen Morgen” Verena Halbe correctly catalogues references to angels, cathedrals, litanies, and churches. She offers an extended analysis of Stadler’s religiosity.
Stadler’s vocabulary includes frequent use of Blut throughout Der Aufbruch. He also refers frequently to water: Flut, Fluß, and Wasser. Various forms of Licht also appear frequently.
While Wasser, Blut, and Licht are certainly central in Biblical and Christian imagery, in Stadler’s writing they are sometimes spiritual and at other times simply pointing to their obvious physical referents.
Verena Halbe notes that Stadler’s language uses colors as simply colors, describing physical objects, without any additional meaning beyond the literal. She reports that Stadler frequently uses nouns not preceded by articles, long lists of nouns in paratactic asyndetic enumeration, and the present participles of verbs.
The chief document of Gerrit Engelke’s poetry is the posthumously-published Rhythmus des neuen Europa, which includes both pre-war and wartime poems. There are other texts by Engelke which were not included in this anthology, and are found scattered about in various anthologies and academic journals.
What two major motion pictures did with images, Engelke does with words. Walter Ruttmann’s 1924 film Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt uses images to create a visual rhythm: the industrial cadence of machinery in factories and transportation. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis had individual scenes which did what Ruttmann’s film did throughout.
Engelke relays the pulsing mechanical tempo of modernity, and while critical of certain aspects of industrialization, manifests an upbeat sense of hope about the future. While attuned to the grinding life of the factory worker, he avoids embracing a political view of the advantages and disadvantages of large-scale manufacturing labor.
Although occasionally mentioning nature and countryside, he always takes the reader quickly again into the city. Using relatively strict patterns of rhyme in most of his poems, Engelke paints a word-picture of urban mechanized life:
Im Fahrstuhlschacht, im Bau am Kran,
Treppauf und ab, durch Straßen über Plätze,
Auf Wagen, Rad und Straßenbahn:
Da schäumt des Menschenstrudels wirre Hetze.
Words like Fahrstuhlschaft are relatively rare in poetry.
While Engelke occasionally names Takt and Rhythmus explicitly, he more often shows rhythm and motion with words like walzen and Wirbel. In the poem “Buch des Krieges” Engelke movingly mourns the death of a friend, the grief of the friend’s family, and the loss of the friend’s future. But even in this personal lament, he cites the sound and industrialized efficiency of the modern form of war:
Verfinsternd qualmendes Schicksalgewitter
Und mächtiges Mähen des Todes
and
Marschierten doch Tausend und Tausende rhythmischen Schrittes
After Engelke’s death, after the end of the war, and after the 1921 printing of Rhythmus des neuen Europa, some of his letters, private diary entries, and other texts were published, giving a fuller sampling of his writing about the war. Among these posthumous publications were both prose pieces and never-before-published poems.
In his later poems about the war, he captures rhythmic mechanical motion, and depicts soldiers as moving masses of force in which the individual disappears. In his letters show his more personal experiences: monotony and exhaustion, psychological strain, and a growing ambivalence about patriotism.
These three poets — Trakl, Stadler, and Engelke — had established styles and careers before the war. The last few texts by all three were written during, in, and about the war.
The war seems to have had little effect on their styles. The technical features of their war poetry differ little from those of their pre-war poetry. This observation undermines the construct of “war poetry” as an independent genre.
Not only did their forms remain largely unchanged, but even in terms of content there is a continuity with their pre-war works. It was hardly a new thing for Trakl to write about death.
Stadler is often read as part of the Expressionist school, and a common element among many Expressionists is a distaste for the modern mechanization of life. WW1 was mechanized industrial warfare on a scale previously unimaginable. Writing about how Stadler might have perceived the war, Detlev Schumann turns Expressionism’s anti-mechanization in an unexpected direction:
Stadler sees in war not this last step in the development of a soul-forsaken mechanized world, but “Aufbruch,” arousing and delivering from the fetters of mechanization, romantic escape into the irrational.
In any case, the war was simply a new, if reality-shattering, case of the struggle against mechanization — a struggle which literary historians tend to attribute to the Expressionists.
Given that Engelke’s pre-war style included both the rhythmic motion of industrialized civilization and the human cost of such mechanization, the war presented a massive amplification of these two themes. Combat was increasingly shaped by technological developments, and given that Engelke lived to the end of the war, he would have experienced tanks, machine guns, poison gas, artillery mounted on railroad cars, and the newer generations of airplanes, among other industrial elements of war. If the cost of pre-war factory life was the experience of living in a Wirbel, then the war was a Wirbel many times larger; if the factory was at time an inhuman Moloch, then the war was a legion of even larger Molochs.
The war presented a vision of mechanized mass movement and the experience of being swept into historical forces; Engelke used metallic and mechanical imagery to report speed and industrial soundscapes.
Scholars have long noticed that certain writers seemed to have a premonition of massive destruction in the near future: a prescience about the World War. Detlev Schumann writes:
There was in those days, among those gifted with sight, a vision of what was approaching.
These poets, “the threatening World War is a Divine Judgment on the Hybris of Western Civilization.” A “gruesome imagination stresses especially the element of fiendish destruction, of demonic, crushing fate.” The result is “a war poem before the war, of which” there is more than one example.
Perhaps this is one reason why the war didn’t change core elements of their writing styles: they had already been writing about it; the war was not new information for them.