...as Germans always do...

[selenak]

It's odd how we put artists mentally in certain eras and only there when their lifetime more often than not lasts far longer than that. (My favourite example of this is Shaw, contemporary and fellow Irishman-in-England to Oscar Wilde, usually put just a bit later with the pre WWI Edwardians, but alive (and producing plays) well into the 1950s.) Recently I said to ryda_wong that the German literature most associated with WWI is prose (Erich Maria Remarque's All quiet on the Western Front, of course, and it was a Remarque quote which was read last weekend at the WWI anniversary; but also, on the sinister side, Ernst Jünger's In Stahlgewittern, in which the author raves on in high aesthetic style about what a masculinity affirming thing war is; hardly read anymore today, but back then it was a bestseller), not poetry, unlike the British. I spoke too soon. There is at least one quite well known poem written in late 1917/early 1918 by a globablly known German poet. The problem is that he's usually so firmly associated with the Weimar Republic (and after) that one forgets he spent his chldhood and teenage years in Wilhelmian Germany and became an adult during the last years of the war. He didn't end up at the Western Front for two reasons: first, he could plead health reasons (without lying; he'd had his first heart attack at age 13), and later, when that wouldn't have mattered anymore, after, in 1917 he'd made his Notabitur (the graduation young male students in Germany went through) he chose to study medicine, hoping to buy some more time. Which it did (also, his father owned a paper factory and used all his influence to keep his older son from the front lines, when the younger had already been drafted), but he did have to serve as a medic in the hospitals his hometown put their returning soldiers into. (His stint as a medic there ended in January 1919; he didn't keep medicine as a subject much longer.)

Contrary to his later image as an unsentimental cynic, our young poet had started the war buying into the nationalistic rethoric wholesale, writing patriotic poetry praising the justness of the war and the emperor which made it into his hometown paper, his first published poetry; as a 15, then 16 years old teenager, he had a better excuse for this than many of his older colleagues, of course. As more and more of his classmates became cannon fodder, and his best friend returned for a home visit in a terrible state, he became rapidly disillusioned. He caused quite a scandal in his (remaining) class when the teacher had them talk about Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; without knowing Wilfried Owen existed, teenage future poet of world renown delibered a rant ending with the declaration that people most prone to preach that sentiment threw their shields away when it came to actual battle "like the Emperor's fat jester who coined that phrase". (He did like Horace otherwise and would repeatedly quote him throughout his life.) The main reason why he wasn't kicked out of school for that one was because another teacher, who liked him, said the boy was obviously having a nervous breakdown.

He wasn't having a nervous breakdown later when helping to patch up soldiers as a medic led to this ballad, called Legend of the Dead Soldier (and published both with his second play and in his first poetry collection), translated by John Willet:

And when the war reached its final spring
With no hint of a pause for breath
The soldier did the logical thing
And died a hero’s death.

The war however was far from over,
And the Kaiser thought it a crime
That his soldier should be dead and gone
Before the proper time.

The summer spread over the makeshift graves
And the soldier lay ignored.
Until one night there came an official army medical board.

The board went out to the cemetery
With consecrated spade
And dug up what was left of him
For next day’s sick parade.

Their doctor inspected what they’d found
Or as much as he thought would serve
And gave his report: ‘He’s medically sound
He’s merely lost his nerve.’

Straightway they took the soldier off.
The night was soft and warm.
If you hadn’t a helmet you could see
The stars you saw at home.

They filled him up with a fiery schnapps
To spark his sluggish heart
And shoved two nurses into his arms
And a half-naked tart.

He’s stinking so strongly of decay
That a priest limbs on before
Swinging a censer on his way
That he may stink no more.

In front the band with oompah-pah
Intones a rousing march.
The soldier does like the manual says
And flicks his legs from his arse.

Their arms about him, keeping pace
Two kind first-aid men go
Or else he might fall in the shit on his face
And that would never do.

They daubed his shroud with the black-white-red
Of the old imperial flag
Whose garish colours obscured the mud
On that blood-bespattered rag.
Up front a gent in a morning suit
And stuffed-out shirt marched too:
A German determined to do his duty as Germans always do.

So see them now as, oompah-pah,
Along the roads they go
And the soldier goes whirling along with them
Like a flake in the driving snow.

The dogs cry out and the horses prance
The rats squeal on the land:
They’re damned if they’re going to belong to France
It’s more than flesh can stand.

And when they pass through a village all
The women are moved to tears.
The trees bow low, the moon shines full
And the whole lot gives three cheers.

With oompah-pah and cheerio
And tart and dog and priest
And right in the middle the soldier himself
Like some poor drunken beast.

And when they pass through a village perhaps
It happens he disappears
For such a crowd’s come to join the chaps
With oompah and three cheers.

In all that dancing, yelling crowd
He disappeared from view.
You could only see him from overhead
Which only stars can do.

The stars won’t always be up there
The dawn is turning red.
But the soldier goes off to a hero’s death
Just like the manual said.


Faithful readers: Bert Brecht, WWI poet.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

I come across this sort of thing a lot— there was a moment in my late childhood when I realized that there had still been a number of American Civil War vets around in the 1930s, and when I discussed this with my father, he claimed there had still been a handful living when he was a child in the 1950s.

Then, a fair number of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist were still alive and painting into the early 20th century; like, there’s film footage of Claude Monet at work: https://youtu.be/BJE4QUNgaeg


ETA — and I tend to think of calypso as 1950s or later, but someone just posted this one from the mid 1930s, about the abdication of Edward VIII: https://youtu.be/o-x1vRJ91AY

[selenak]

*listens* Good lord. :) Thanks for the link. Incidentally, I'd have made the same assumption about Calypso.

[kore]

Oh those are great clips.

There definitely is a rage to order in fitting artists or historical figures into Procrustean type historical periods, when in fact a lot of the time they overlap, or even come before or after the periods they're associated with. Thomas Wolfe frex is rarely grouped with the 1920s writers, except chronologically, because the edited posthumous novels came out in the early forties. And Adrienne Rich is forever always a sixties (or maybe seventies) poet altho she kept on writing right into the eighties, nineties, 00s, 10s....

[moon_custafer]

A while ago I linked to a 1930s newsreel of interviews with people then aged 80-100, and noted that for fifty years after, the North-American pop-culture image of what old people look like seemed to have been based on that particular generation — even when I was a kid, the visual shorthand for “old lady” was a woman with her hair in a high bun, a frilled, high-necked dress or blouse, and the vocal and behavioural mannerisms of someone who’d come of age in the 1860s. (Knitters, myself included, usually also have tales of explaining to people that they’re not “too young” to knit, as though it’s an ability that automatically appears when one turns sixty-five but not before.)

Another example, which I took a while to cite because I’m nervous about annoying people with my special interests— I’ve recently become fond of actor Walter Slezak (lurking behind a book in my icon), who’s currently remembered, if at all, for stuff like appearing as a guest villain on Batman in the late ‘sixties, or for being the father of actress Erika Slezak on One Life to Live, but whose memoirs include a story about how when he was a toddler he wandered away from his parents during some formal ceremony they had to attend, tried to get a closer look at the old man who was reading a speech, and had to be restrained by a cardinal before he could bother the Emperor Franz Joseph.

[trobadora]

It's odd how we put artists mentally in certain eras and only there

That's so true. This poem is justly famous, and yet when I think of Brecht it's just not what comes to mind.

[selenak]

I slapped my hand to my forehead because of course I knew it, knew that he'd written it, and yet. It's as if he sprang into existence complete with cigar and leathery outfit in his Weimar stage. Meanwhile, who is this young fellow in Augsburg? Stud. med Bertold Brecht:

[the_rck]

Thanks for posting this! I hadn't seen it before.

My first impressions of Brecht's work were based not on his words or ideas but on the intellectual snobbery around his ideas in my undergraduate theater program. I'm not convinced that the students who were trying to simultaneously signal intellectual rebellion and elitist insularity actually understood Brecht's ideal sort of performance.

It took me years afterward to untangle my irritation at those students from my reaction to Brecht's theories and works and realize that those students profoundly misunderstood him. I think he'd have been appalled to see his plays used as tools to make the hoi polloi understand how unworthy they were of Real Art and how not appreciating it meant they were always going to be lesser beings.

[selenak]

No kidding. I mean, Brecht had his faults - both he as a person and he as a thinker - but that kind of snobbery was never one of them.

I always loved the story from Elisabeth Bergner's memoirs about how when Brecht directed her in a production of The Duchess of Malfi he was aghast that she sat down at the same spot where she'd risen not five minutes earlier and said: "But Bergner, didn't you learn anything from Max? This is strictly against his rules?" It took her a moment to realize he meant Max Rheinhardt, whom you'd think he'd have considered as the epitome of commercial theatre etc., and she said "YOU are quoting MAX to me?" Brecht, deadpan: "Well, of course."

[moon_custafer]

I’m probably lucky that I did not encounter Brecht snobs, but instead encountered a rather fun parody of his plays that was probably the work of Sean Cullen. North American ideas of German culture are still a bit influenced by the Weimar and nazi eras, or more likely by pop-culture portrayals of those eras, and as a result I’ve seen two separate comedy sketches with the premise “German kids’ tv shows must be traumatizingly weird.” This was one of them.

[muccamukk]

Wow. That is brutally macabre. I never knew he was a poet that early

[selenak]

He was one gifted kid, always in love with language, and growing up during this particular war certainly did its part. The first of the two hospitals he served in got heavily wounded soldiers from Alsace by the wagons (the train station was just behind the hospital, a converted school).

[kore]

AAAAAAAAAAAH BEST PUNCHLINE EVER //wishes to embrace tiny!Brecht

[selenak]

:) Then have another:

[monanotlisa]

Ah, nicely done!

[selenak]

Ernst Busch still delivers the most chilling recitation/singing, here.

[sovay]

Faithful readers: Bert Brecht, WWI poet.

And liked Kipling even then. I looked up the original to make sure the translator wasn't adding all the barrack-room echoes, but I don't think he was. I like that.

(I had read this poem before—reading it now was like half-remembering a nightmare—but decades ago, when mostly what it did was scare me. Thanks for, appropriately, resurrecting it.)

[selenak]

No, you're right, he did fall in love with Kipling's poetry in the middle of WWI (perfect timing or what?), and it shows. Even the renaming of himself from Eugen to Bert (he was Eugen Bertolt Brecht, but called Eugen throughout his childhood and early teens, still used "Eugen Bertolt" as a pseudonym for those first few teenage poems and then settled on Bert for good late in the war) was due to Kipling, I think, because it sounded English and like a name one of Kipling's soldier characters might have.

When my guy Feuchtwanger, who fell in love with Kipling a bit later, had his big breakthrough in the English speaking world and was interviewed by the Observer during his first visit to Britain in the mid-twenties, he was asked who his favourite English writer was, and caused much consternation when replying "Rudyard Kipling". By then, of course, Kipling was regarded as the poet of imperialism modern writing left behind in Britain. But to a great many German writers of the era, he was still a revelation.

[kore]

I'm now on a jag here

Kipling at 26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rudyard_Kipling_three_quarter_length_portrait.jpg

Kipling, older (EYEBROWS)
https://media.poetryfoundation.org/m/image/15908/rudyard-kipling-hires-cropped.jpg

[moon_custafer]

This topic was reminding me of an essay I read years ago, and the internet provides: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/archive/stephen_jay_gould/gould_darwinian-gentleman.html

[oracne]

That is AWESOME. Thank you.

[selenak]

You're very welcome!

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

I really love the WWI posts you've done lately, and this is a worthy addition.

My classic example of how we ascribe writers to eras without regard for the larger logic and complexities of human lives is that in the Anglophone world Boccaccio is a preeminent Renaissance writer, and Chaucer a high medieval one, but that of course the former lived before the latter, who read and rewrote quite a bit of Boccaccio.

[selenak]

Well, in fairness, the Italians did the Renaissance first, and contrary to its self image, England was often a bit behind continental cultural developments, but I know what you mean. :) That's another good one.

[bunnyboo]

Thank you for sharing this poem with me.

[selenak]

You're welcome.