“Like Fences in a Flat Land”: On Recent Returns to German Expressionist Lyric

ONCE UPON A TIME (in the late 1940s, to be precise), in the hills west of Los Angeles, there lived the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg and the German novelist Thomas Mann. Their houses sat across Sunset Boulevard from each other, less than a five-minute drive apart. Fellow wartime émigrés and neighbors they may have been, but chummy ones they certainly were not, not least due to their well-publicized and lengthy spat over the novel Mann had recently written, Doctor Faustus (1947), which drew heavily on Schoenberg’s theory of 12-tone music but which also, according to the composer, failed to credit him appropriately and mangled his “intellectual property.” Yet even before all this, they would have had a fair bit to disagree about back in Europe, too. A key bone of contention likely would have been nothing less than the telos — the purpose and endpoint — of art itself. Schoenberg got at this as early as 1910 when he wrote:

Art is the cry of distress of those who are living out the fate of humanity in themselves. […] Who do not look away in order to preserve themselves from emotion, but instead throw their eyes open wide to encounter what must be encountered; yet who also often close them in order to truly perceive (wahrzunehmen) what the senses do not convey. […] And within, in them, is the movement of the world; only an echo makes it through to the outside: the artwork. [1]

Mann had his share of opinions about the arts as well, and it would be an understatement to say that they diverged from Schoenberg’s. In 1918, he had fixed his crosshairs firmly on the movement of Expressionism — Schoenberg’s turf — describing it as

that artistic tendency which, in intense opposition to the passivity of Impressionism and its humbly receptive and reciprocal mode, most deeply despises the imitation of reality, which resolutely cancels every obligation to reality and sets in its place the sovereign, explosive, recklessly creative decree of the spirit.

His words signal a classical conviction that reality coincides with truth, and that good art recognizes and captures this process with as much accuracy as possible. Hence his grumpiness (which years later he would also direct at “the idiotic Schoenberg” across the boulevard [trans. Feuchtwanger and Schoenberg, 2018]) about Expressionism, with its vigorous disentanglement of truth from material reality and its privileging of feeling and creative liberty over coolheaded objectivity.

However abstract and hair-splitty these issues may seem, they are a large part of what makes a melancholic movement like German Expressionism pertinent to our current moment and mood. In seeking examples of this pertinence, we could find worse places to look than the poetry of Georg Trakl and Georg Heym, two fixtures of Expressionist writing whose biographies are notable for the interplay of their similarities and differences. Both were born in the same year (1887) but came of age in quite different settings: Trakl in the provincial tranquility of Salzburg, Austria, Heym within the cosmopolitan modernity of Berlin. Both had a younger sister with whom they were close, but Trakl is infamous for having had an incestuous infatuation (and quite possibly a relationship) with his. Both would die before reaching the age of 30, but while Trakl did so from a cocaine overdose at the beginning of the Great War (intentionally, by most accounts), Heym had met his end two years earlier in the wintry waters of the river Havel while trying to save his friend during an ice-skating accident. This heroic final act of Heym’s life so close to home throws into ironic relief his longstanding fantasy of becoming a soldier and experiencing glory on foreign battlefields, even as Trakl died far away on the eastern front as a member of the Austro-Hungarian army, but in solitude and by his own hand.

This sort of irony — equal parts tragic and explicable — permeates numerous works of Expressionist art and thought. A recent string of translations of Trakl’s and Heym’s poetry attests to this staying power, and each translator has chosen specific approaches for first noticing and then attempting to capture as many characteristic features of the original works as possible. Will Stone, in Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl (Pushkin Press, 2019), and James Reidel, in Georg Trakl: Collected Poems (Seagull Books, 2019), both decide against trying to maintain Trakl’s rhyme schemes, focusing instead on replicating mood and tone. In Hymns for the Earth & Humankind: Selected Poems on Love & Nature by Georg Heym (Cedar Springs Books, 2021), by contrast, William Ruleman remains steadfastly committed to the presence of rhyme in Heym’s poetry as a path to those very same ends. In most — but not all — instances, their choices come off well, offering anglophone readers a taste of the original texts’ particular atmosphere.

One facet of this atmosphere is a snug coexistence of surplus and spareness. On the one hand, Expressionism often foregrounds the “too muchness” of deeply rooted (or buried) truths struggling to get into the open air, along with those moments when the bounds of reality suddenly have to brace against the upsurge of this unexpected force from within. Hence the interest of artists like Kandinsky in what he called “the vibrations of the soul” having to be “called forth” into form in order to become perceptible (trans. Sadler, 1977), or of thinkers like Freud in the unconscious bursting the banks of subjectivity, or of composers like Schoenberg in dissonance fighting to free itself from the strictures of traditional harmony. On the other hand, these tense aesthetic and philosophical dramas are replete with absences, stillnesses, lacks, emptinesses, and the bare light that allows the many shadows to become visible in the first place. So too are the poems of Trakl and Heym full of figures, images, and tones that spill out into hitherto tranquil scenes and jostle for space. What’s more, speech suffuses these poems as much as speechlessness does: creatures and settings constantly call, cry, and sing out in numerous ways, all while the lyric voices of the poems repeatedly confront silence (sometimes welcome, sometimes not).

In much of Trakl’s work, voices either disrupt the stillness or slowly fade into it. Stillness itself rarely interrupts, though, constituting instead what Germans refer to as the Grundzustand (the foundational state of things). In the poem “Soul of Life,” silence is closely bound up with eschatology: on the one hand, there’s the earthly stillness of “decay, which softly beclouds the leaves” (Reidel) and whose “vast silence dwells in the forest.” This silence then gets juxtaposed with the unearthly “sister’s mouth [that] whispers in black branches” (Stone) and, crossing all the way into the heavenly sphere, with “the soul in angelic silence” (Reidel). This cluster of themes also pervades texts like “Elis,” where we read about “the blue stillness of the olive tree on bare walls, / an old man’s dark song fades away” (Reidel), or “Ghostly Twilight,” which gathers together the specific pairing of silence and vocality with many of Trakl’s other favorite images. Here is Reidel’s version:

Stillness meets at the edge of the woods
A dark deer;
On the hill the evening wind quietly ends,

The blackbird’s lament trails off,
And the soft pipes of autumn
Fall silent in the reeds. […]

The sister’s lunar voice forever echoes
Through the ghostly night.

The recurrent motifs of voices and calling have stood out to many readers of Trakl, including one of his most famous. The philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay “Language in the Poem” (1953) follows the steady drumbeat of a basic premise that every great poet’s various works all derive from “a single poem” that nevertheless and mysteriously remains silent, “unspoken.” Thus, Heidegger claims, somewhere behind or perhaps beneath each of Trakl’s poems there is a “site” in which all the “poetic saying” of his entire oeuvre gathers itself. Oddly, however, we’re told that, although this unspoken site can be gestured toward, its content — its full meaning — nevertheless remains hidden, coiled within language but never fully venturing out from its folds into the full light. Heidegger eventually goes on to define this site of Trakl’s works as Abgeschiedenheit — “apartness,” as Peter Hertz nicely translates it (1971) — which frequently takes the form of a wandering, solitary, spectral figure (der Abgeschiedene). Heidegger, awash in Trakl’s voice and mood, says that this “departed one” who steps quietly through so many of the texts at the edges of things (of forests, of evening and morning, of vision, of earshot) is what “calls” the poet. The poet’s own silent “saying” is a response to this call, which first generates and subsequently haunts the resulting poems, finally calling us, the readers, to join the procession.

Trakl’s “Helian” has all of this and more on full display when it tells how “the silence of the ruined garden” is “immense,” and yet there is “the rustle of the maple, / Where perhaps the thrush still sings” (Stone). The attention of another of Trakl’s more eminent readers, his fellow poet Rainer Maria Rilke, was caught by this poem in particular, as he recounted in 1915 that “what made it so gripping for me were its inner distances; it is, so to speak, built upon its pauses, a few enclosures around boundless wordlessness: that’s how the lines stand there. Like fences in a flat land; and beyond them, all that has been fenced in surges together continuously into a great, unclaimable plain.” Rilke’s image of an empty landscape punctuated by solitary fence posts is a nice spatial analogy for how stillness and significance work together in Expressionist poetry such as Trakl’s, where language and meaning are rarely codependent, and even more rarely limited to actual speech. His poems brim with animal and human voices that don’t speak, as well as with eerie rustlings in silent landscapes and deserted dwellings that nevertheless communicate a great deal. The late philosopher Michel Serres touches on something very close to what Trakl is up to when he says, in The Five Senses (trans. Sankey and Cowley, 2008), that “the collective believes that the world is given to us at the outer hull of language, or possibly at the water rippling around it,” but that “I learn — slowly — that the given comes upon you like a state of grace. Evanescent spirit, lightness scudding through the limpid air. […] The given approaches me quietly. I listen.”

Enter Georg Heym, whose engagement with voice and landscape tends to be less well recognized than that of his Austrian contemporary. In this respect, Ruleman’s collection is a welcome and overdue contribution, since his translations gather numerous poems, hitherto unavailable to English-speaking readers, that fill precisely this gap. Beyond this, though, they also offer an untypical view of Heym, who tends to be associated more with his dark, at times apocalyptic portrayals of fin-de-siècle urbanity. One especially interesting dimension that Ruleman’s volume brings to light is the delicate symbiosis of Heym’s well-known fixation on death and his lesser-known fascination with natural landscapes and classically bucolic tropes. Ruleman invites us to recognize a common source from which spring Heym’s more stereotypically Expressionist poems (those which convey “his horror of the modern city”) as well as those that “appear to glorify the life and power found in nature.”

Whenever Expressionism’s foreboding tonalities enter natural spaces, they often do so through imagery linked to voices. In Heym’s 1906 poem “The Chill Winds Blew from the Silent Gardens,” for instance, we are shown a “river, dark and slender / Which the sunken tree trunks often stemmed / Where murky waters foamed, their moaning tender.” These lines cannot help but foreshadow Heym’s own death six years later, but in an innocuous, unobtrusive way that has an even more chilling effect. The formerly vertical trees have “sunk,” sideways to the ground rather than down into water (umgesunken), yet the river collides with them, foaming and moaning, thereby adding visual as well as aural ambiguity as to the exact nature of their sunkenness. Things get even spookier and more direct in “The Old Churchyard,” where the voices of the dead speak through the crowns of trees “with a wordless yet a stately tongue,” thus situating the environment as a site of actual communication with ghosts (Trakl no doubt would have approved of this one).

Heym is at his best, however, in a text like “Last Watch,” where the reader is brought in from the landscape and into an intimate domestic space. Most interesting for us is how Heym plays with the themes of voice, silence, and death that we’ve seen so often in Trakl:

How shaded now, your brow;
How heavy now, your hands.
Can you even hear me now,
Or are you in far-off lands?

Despite the physical presence of the addressee, the space in which the poem is being spoken seems to have been emptied of the other’s persona, to have taken on a distance that cannot be bridged by the voice. The situation becomes gradually clearer in the next stanza, which begins with the speaker observing how “Beneath the flickering light, / You look so sad and old.” In the second couplet, though, Ruleman’s dedication to maintaining rhyme leads him (and the reader) astray: “Your lips fill me with fright: / So rigid, pinched, and old.” This is quite far from what the speaker actually says, which would be closer to something like “And your lips are gruesomely / Rent in eternal rigor” (Und deine Lippen sind grausam / In ewiger Starre gekrallt). The implication of these lines, which Ruleman elides, is that the speaker is regarding a human form that, even if not dead, certainly looks it. The image is one of lips that can no longer reciprocate speech or sound, and that is precisely what the last strophe leaves us with:

But the nights will grow
Emptier, year by year,
Here where your head lay so
Composed, your breath so clear.

Here, Ruleman’s rendering of the last two lines again misleads us in a simple but significant way. The German conveys something closer to “Here where your head lay, and where / Your breath was always so quiet” (not “clear”) (Hier wo dein Haupt lag, und leise / Immer dein Atem war). As if spurred by the pervasive silence that confronts it in both the present and the future, the lyric voice delves into the remembered quiescence of restful breathing, which is now contrasted with breathless — even lifeless — repose.

As in countless other elegies across the centuries, Heym’s speaker addresses a loved one along with the silence occasioned by their distance (however permanent), which the voice fails to traverse. Like the many spectral voices that echo through Trakl’s landscapes, the one in “Last Watch” remains ever on a threshold — at its end but not ending, near rest but not yet resting — for as long as it continues to be “called forth” onto the page before us (as Kandinsky might say). Roland Barthes picks up on the specific pathos of such a scenario in his late text A Lover’s Discourse (1977) when he makes this enigmatic statement: “Nothing more lacerating than a voice at once beloved and exhausted […] such a voice is about to vanish, as the exhausted being is about to die: fatigue is infinity: what never manages to end” (trans. Howard, 2010).

So, what exactly is it about these words and voices that might make them stand out to a contemporary reader like “fences in a flat land,” as Rilke put it? One thing we could say is that all the inward-directed obsession of Expressionist writing and art with madness, dreams, meaninglessness, etc. is always refracted through environments. In many cases we are dealing with urban environments, but in the work of writers such as Trakl and Heym, they are often natural ones as well. Thomas Harrison opines in his 1996 study of Expressionism 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance that “if what strikes us most today is precisely the nihilism of the prewar period — the gruesomeness of so much of its painting, music, and writing — it is because in it we perceive an alarm reaching beyond every local concern.” When Trakl and Heym bring an Expressionist aesthetics to bear on the natural landscapes that they knew inside and out, our attention gets called to the ways in which our environment and our interior can become joined in experiences of pain and dread. Maybe such points of jointure are what can make these images “flash up” for us in our own “moment of danger,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s description of how the past must be “held tight” by the historian’s vision. Such instants become openings through which Expressionism can call out to us here and now, inside our own kaleidoscope of catastrophes, ecological and otherwise. Surely that possibility makes its calls worthy not just of being heard but of being responded to as well.

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[1] Throughout this essay, the translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

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Alexander Sorenson will be teaching German and comparative literature at Binghamton University beginning in autumn 2022.

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Featured image: Westfälisches Dorf im Sommer (1912) by Peter August Böckstiegel.