Georg Trakl

THE PROPHETIC POETRY OF GEORG TRAKL
by Carolyn Forche

Georg Trakl, arguably the first poet of German Expressionism, began writing poetry in 1904 at the age of seventeen, and after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to write plays, devoted himself to poetry and poetic prose, publishing early in Neue Wiener Journal. In 1913, his book Gedichte, appeared. His second volume was published posthumously. It wasn't until 1939 that another volume was published and it would be another twenty years before his work began to attract serious critical attention.

In the twilight of the thousand-year Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trakl was born in Salzburg on February 3, 1887, the son of Tobias Trakl, a successful businessman, and his wife, Maria, whose passions were music and her collections of furniture, glass, and porcelain with which she filled a spacious house overlooking a town square. The fourth of six children, Georg was educated in French and the lively arts by an Alsatian governess. The entitlements of empire might have bequeathed to the poet a sense of security and serenity not since surpassed, but for certain fissures in the edifice. Both parents were aloof, and remote from their children. As Maria's possessions accumulated, the house was given over to their display, and the children restricted to smaller quarters. The poet's mother was also addicted to drugs, as by the end were four of her children. It was Grete, the younger sister, with whom Georg formed his most intimate attachment, yet despite their affinity, the poet claimed to remember of childhood only images of water. It is said that he behaved oddly: throwing himself in front of a spirited horse and a moving train, walking into a pond until only his hat remained visible to guide his rescuers. He attended gymnasium but failed by the seventh class, whereupon he left school. He sniffed chloroform from a flask and dipped his cigarettes in opium. Later, as a poete maudit, emulating Charles Baudelaire, he took morphine, Veronal, and cocaine, dressed as a flaneur, drank prodigiously, and otherwise transported himself, but always seemed to his friends "more awake" than others.

Given his dependence on opiates, his lack of financial independence, and his poetic vocation, he chose somewhat practically to become a dispensing chemist, completing an apprenticeship and enrolling in pharmaceutical studies in Vienna, where to his joy he was joined in the year 1909-1910 by his sister Grete, there to study music. He spent the following year in the military, but in 1910 his father died, leaving him in urgent need of remunerative work. After brief employment as a pharmacist in his native Salzburg, he sought reinstatement in the military, worked intermittently as a civil servant, sold his library, began a fruitful association with the circle of those associated with the literary magazine Der Brenner, and befriended luminaries of the German Expressionist movement. Most importantly he found friendship in Ludwig von Ficker, who remained his friend and champion until the end. After his return from Venice, he move to Innsbruck in 1913 and remained there until his departure for the front. Through von Ficker's offices, he was given 20,000 crowns by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made a similar bequest to Rainer Maria Rilke in an effort to distribute his fortune among significant Austrian artists. Trakl was unable to make use ofWittgenstein's largesse, as he experienced an anxiety attack during his only attempt to withdraw funds for his benefit. He couldn't enter the bank, any more than he could bear the gaze of other railway passengers, forcing himself to stand rather than face them. Prior to the active service on the front Trakl's final crisis was precipitated by his dear sister, Grete, who had married an older man, endured a miscarriage and later shot herself.

It was during the last two months of his life that Trakl endured the impress of extremity that was to mark his last poems. He was attached to Field Hospital 7/14 as a lieutenant-pharmacist, stationed at Rudki in Galicia where he witnessed the battle of Grodek/RawnRuska, September sixth through eleventh, 1914. At Grodek, the poet was responsible for ninety critically wounded soldiers, housed in a barn without an attending physician or adequate drugs to relieve their pain. One of the afflicted shot himself in Trakl's presence, where upon the poet fled the barn, only to encounter a row of hanged partisans, the last having tied the rope around his own neck. Later, Trakl announced at dinner that he could no longer bear to live, and fled to shoot himself, but was captured and disarmed.

Within two weeks, under the pretext of a transfer to work as a pharmacist, he was sent to Garrison Hospital 15 in Cracow, where, on October seventh, he was placed under psychiatric observation, sharing his room with a lieutenant suffering from delirium tremens. The windows were barred, and he was made to wear hospital pajamas resembling a prison uniform. When von Ficker visited, his impression was that Trakl was being held without cause and against his will; von Ficker described the brutality of the hospital and its screaming patients, and attempted unsuccessfully to have him released. When von Ficker asked Trakl if he had drugs with him, the poet is said to have replied, "Would I be alive otherwise?"

In the course of censoring patient mail, one of the doctors may have become interested in Trakl's case, as a species of "genius and madness," detaining him further. That Trakl wrote poetry in civilian life, rather than practicing as a pharmacist, was seen as evidence of his "abnormality," as was the fact that he had apparently pressed several times toe be sent to the front, prior to Grodek.

According to a physician's report, "From time to time since childhood he has had visual hallucinations. It seems to him that a man with a drawn knife stands behind his back. From twelve to twenty-four years of age, he saw no such apparitions. For three years now he has again been suffering from these optical illusions and, moreover, he often hears bells ringing. He did not believe that his father was his own, but rather imagined, that he descends from a [Roman Catholic] cardinal and that in the future, he will become a great man." [ 1 ] Trakl was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox, the psychoanalytic precursor of schizophrenia.

By early October he was writing again, but on the third of November he died from a self-administered overdose of cocaine, thus becoming, prophetically, the "stranger [who] loses his way among

the black ruins of November." While the military reported the death as a suicide it is unclear whether he intended to end his life. In his last weeks, he had revised his poems "Klage" and "Grodek" and produced the third version of "Menschliches Elend." The lucidity of these poetic responses to war experience calls into question the accuracy of his diagnosis, although it is widely regarded as likely that Trakl suffered some form of mental illness, and his poems can be read in part as transcriptions of psychic extremity.

Another poem joins the final war triptych: the premonitory poem of 1912, "Mankind," which begins: "Mankind placed before fiery craters / Rolling drums, dark foreheads of warriors. / Footsteps in a fog of blood, the ringing of black steel." War preceded war in Trakl's opus. This is remarkably true of his poem "In the East" [Im Osten] as well, which von Ficker claimed was written at Innsbruck, prior to Trakl's departure for the front. If this is so, the poem is hauntingly prophetic "With broken eyebrows and silver arms, / The night beckons to dying soldiers. / Ghosts of those killed sigh / In the shade of the autumn ash tree."

"Every great poet," wrote Martin Heidegger of Georg Trakl, "creates his poetry out of one single poetic statement only" keeping "his poetic Saying wholly within it. . . . All that Georg Trakl's poetry says remains gathered and focused on the wandering stranger. He is, and is called, 'he who is apart.'" [ 2 ]

In the decades since the poet's death in 1914; his principal critics have vouchsafed psychoanalytical and textual readings of Trakl's work, dwelling upon the vicissitudes of the poet's troubled life, including his intimate and possibly incestuous relationship with his sister, Grete, his drug addiction, alleged madness, and finally his experience of extremity at Grodek during the first year of the Great War. But it is Heidegger's Erorterung on Trakl's apartness which most clarifies the poet's attempt to "feel the thing itself anew. . . to rediscover in it the magic relationship with the world---this is the poetry of the soul, ein Fremdes [a stranger] on earth." [ 3 ] According to Heidegger, "Apartness is the gathering through which human nature is sheltered once again in its stiller childhood, and that childhood in turn is sheltered in the earliness of another beginning. . . . the whole being of the singing soul is one single concentrated gaze ahead into the blue of night. . . . The poet's work means: to say after---to say again the music of the spirit of apartness that has been spoken to the poet. . . the poet's work is only a listening. Apartness first gathers the listening into its music, so that this music may ring through the spoken saying in which it will resound." [ 4 ]

The mystery ofTrakl's work is that it has remained contemporaneous, haunting the present as if it had been written toward us, in the exilic voice of one left behind after the soul has departed, having sojourned on earth filled with salvific hope. Her "contemporary lyric takes the form. . . of language ,on humanity's historical condition (Geschichte, not Historie). . . . Trakl's lyrics would be the place for a reversal of Western metaphysics. . .that could create the void in us for hearing the gentle song of the revived'." [ 5 ] He is "the one who is alone," "the one watching," "the stranger," "the one observing this," "the one dreaming," "the one who has no home --- his murderer seeks him, and it is himself." Trakl's lyrics suggest the destiny of the form, not a "thinking of decline and ruin" but "the plane in which the road through a radical poverty of experience intersects thinking on the eternal return. This interpretation unhinges the traditional 'pessimistic' visions of contemporary lyric and captures the epochal meaning of its 'hermetic' spirituality." [ 6 ]

Trakl's work has been interpreted as Christian, and somewhat converseley as an Orphic vision of aesthetic mastery without any cohesive order or logical context. The fluid imagery, mutable figures, and ambiguous vision resist orderly explication. Trakl has been historically regarded as inhabiting a closed world, bereft of coherence, enigmatically disclosing he utterances of an inexorably deteriorating mind. His poetry has thus often been read as an insoluble riddle, a series of abstract and empty language constructs. Heidegger's Erorterung has been dismissed as "a philosopher's unwarranted encroachment on literary criticism." [ 7 ] Attempts have been made to fuse these critical approaches and also to read Trakl in light of "the emancipation of dissonance," realized in German Expressionism. [ 8 ]

Of a skeptical age, Trakl shared the sensibility of fellow Expressionists Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele in their estrangement from the administered order of industrial civilization. Language had ceased to suffice. The self was experienced as fragmented, and human subjectivity ruptured by the force of incommensurable inner and outer worlds. His earliest first-person lyrics gave way to deliberate effacement of the explicit "I." Influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Trakl's formal, metered verse shifted to free-verse form, and from the evidence of his work, he acknowledged Rimbaud's call for "a rational derangement of all the senses."

Trakl longed for unmediated relation, an experience of "pre-existence," [ 9 ] Heidegger's Abendland: the earth in its redeemed state, which one seeks by passing through a realm of strangeness, an earth that "'consents to be lived in, ' to which the soul calls, to which madness holds us. . .It is an older Western world, 'which is to say, earlier and therefore more promising than the Platonic-Christian land, or indeed than a land conceived in terms of the European West." [ 10 ] The prelapsarian world is reached by a falling toward humankind's unborn innocence, its "mournful childhood," in its "patience and stillness."

Perhaps a certain hypervigilance prompted the poet to suppose that a man stood behind him holding a knife; his work is replete with suggestions that he was aware of an enveloping consciousness in congress with his own, a presence of what French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas calls the il y a --- there is --- a certain murmur "as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that 'there is' is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation---there is." [ 11 ] His sensorial engagement was acute, and his world filled with animate presences with which he felt a high degree of reciprocity: "The stars were dancing madly against their blue background," "A cold radiance flutters over the streets," "There is a hissing wind that encircles the empty shacks." Death is no barrier to this porosity of conscious awareness, for the dead remain present, "wander[ing] quietly in the hall of stars," "paint[ing] a sneering silence on the walls / With their white hands." He is a poet capable of fusing the macro- and micro-cosmic worlds: "Glance into an opal: a village wreathed in barren vines." "He looked silently and for a long time into the star-filled eyes of a toad." "

Eyes may be "terrified" in Trakl's poetry, or "softly lowered," "filled with sheer night." God's eyes are often closed, or just "open[ing] over the place of skulls." While a deity who might respond to its supplicants, restoring justice and mitigating the affliction of human life, is not to be conjured, God remains present, "an angry God. . . a cold moon"; a demented prophet's voice can be"'twisted by God's wind" and "God's vultures" might "tear at your cold heart." Trakl's is more frequently, however, a vision of deus absconditus, conceived as a deafening silence, as palpable as the ineffability of language itself: an absence not inconsistent with the Kabbalist idea of God's withdrawal of presence so as to open a space for Creation. "God uttered a gentle flame into his heart: / O man!"

"With the coming of autumn he walked like a prophet through the brown fields." Quite apart from his premonitions of war, Trakl can be read as a poet of the prophetic, atemporally aware of the future within the present, opening a perception of doubleness: within fecundity, decomposition; within innocence, inexorable guilt; within absence, presence; within the finality of death, the province of the unborn. This mode transcends the atomization of Platonic thought, which perceives time in discrete moments, spatially assigning the past behind the future before us. Prophetic perception is diachronous: what has been and what is becoming are of the same age. This is why it might be mistaken to read certain of Trakl's transformations metaphorically: they are not figurative substitutions, but rather coterminal realities. The poet's sense of self does not escape this perceptual gift: he sees himself "walking through deserted rooms." Past and present selves have been read as severed in Trakl's work, and their coexistence within him interpreted pathologically, but in the prophetic mode, past selves become figures of visitation; they are revenents who remain with the self of the present as companions the passage of time cannot separate. "Yet always, there is the self, black and near." "The child I have long been apart from / Comes once again through the gray of evening."

Black is the color of decay, sleep, and decomposition in Trakl's poems but it is also color of footsteps and frost, of rain, tears, waters, and wind; as frequently as it might modify branches, wings, or "the ruins of November," it serves to alter our perceptions of transparency and purity. Blue most expectedly appears as cloud, flower, ice, and lakes while dissolving our expectation when Trakl turns slime and animal blue. A river is green, as is "the shadow of an olive tree," but green as well are the "flecks of decomposition," darkness, and "pockets filled with decay," and "The lonely man's temples turn softly green ." There is the "silver voice of the wind in the hallway," "silver blossoming poppies," fish, and fruit. But while silver is most often reserved to suggest, in silver hands, arms, and "the head of the unborn," the spiritualized body, it is also the color of leprosy.

Regarded by earlier cultures as messengers of the unconscious an bearers of omens, birds flock, alight, and migrate through these poems in abundance. Trakl is awake to "the soft sounds of birds in flight," "a blackbird's soft lament," "the sorig of the lark," "the frantic shrieks of vultures," and he understands their presence as communicative, even augural: "Elis, when the blackbird calls out in the dark forest, / That is your doom." "The black flight of birds always / Touches the one." When wild game (usually translated as deer) emerge "trembling" from the thickets, it is the meaningfulness of their appearance which the poet apprehends: when "shepherds sing at night, and deer step / Into the circle of their fire." And "Wherever you go, you bring autumn and evening. / Blue deer snuffle beneath trees." "A blue deer / Keeps watch under the twilit trees."

In Trakl's poetry, death is not to be understood as "the conclusion of earthly life," but rather the "'going down' to which 'something strange' is being called. . . . When mortals follow after the 'something strange,' that is to say, after the stranger who is called to go under; they themselves enter strangeness." [ 12 ] The dead and the living become one another in the vision of "a blue moment [which] is even more spirit. The dead are sentient, "rest[ing] beneath the elder bushes, / Watching the gray gulls." Their bones "climb up from the gray and crumbling family vault." They begin "emerging from empty rooms," and "the resurrected meet on rocky paths." "A man and his wife, both dead, walk / In cool rooms to prepare their bed." "By your feet, / The graves of the dead open." "A dead soldier calls out to his prayers." "A white magician plays with snakes in his grave." To this poet, "The dance of the living appears unreal" and "Behind him stands his dead brother." "People seem beautiful, apparitions in the darkness."

So profound is Trakl's diachronic awareness that materiality itself is held in suspension: "Along the way a small tavern appears to the traveler" as if it could just as well be an apparition. He admits to his enveloping cosmos the continuing presence of the departed: "The sister appears in autumn and black decay / As a radiant youth" and "the delicate corpse appears / At the pond of Triton." The courage of this vision does not diminish at the prospect of his own spectral future: "Walking along dark paths in the evening, / Our pale shapes appear before us."

Trakl's writing is a "going-toward, a seeking," and his "tragic aporia" is that the song isn't that of the soul or the stranger, but that of "the soul's brother, of its friend. The soul takes its leave. . . but it creates silence in this leave-taking, The music that, is heard is the song of those who are left behind. The brother and friend of the stranger are left behind. . .the poem. . .is not the word of the departed. . . that saves the earth. . .what is sought cannot be intuited through song. Poetry will never be in its presence, because poetry flows from the friend who remains behind, not from the stranger who tends-toward. The poet hears and re-states 'the spirit's euphqria in departure'." [ l3 ] "Someone left you at the crossroads, and for a long time you continue looking back." In his major poem "Helian," he writes: "Let the song remember the boy, / His madness, white eyebrows, and his death. / The one mouldering, bluishly opening his eyes. / How sad this reunion is." In the end, "The soul's anxious and lonely string-music dies down." Despite his prophetic apprehension, he is unable to follow the one who has gone beyond, and so becomes "the abandoned one" in radical solitude, a sojourner on an unredeemed earth, who must accept the silence of the ineffable. "He 'translates' the stranger's steps, he does not create them. . . . We have 'translations' only. Never direct intuitions, unconcealment of Being---never again will poetry be poesis." [ 14 ]

It was this silence which Trakl assailed with his poetic Saying, "the silence of God," the "silence [that] lives in ,empty windows," that "inhabits the blue spaces," "the silence [that] in the stone grows enormous" and in a "devastated garden is immense," "the silence of fallen crosses on the hill." It is a "black cave," it is "the silence of winter." Against this, perhaps a new language might further utterance of the ineffable, but Trakl writes: "It is so unsayable, 0 God, that you fall to your knees."

"And space becomes a grave, / And this earthly journey a dream."

ENDNOTES

1. Johann Adam Stupp, "Neues uber Georg Trakls Lazarettaufenthalte und Tod in Galizien," Sudostdeutsche Semesterblatter, 19 (1967), 32-29. Reprinted in the historical-critical edition: II, 728-730 as quoted by Francis Michael Sharp in The Poet's Madness: A Reading of Georg Trakl" (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 35.

2. Martin Heidegger, "Language in the Poem," On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), p. 160.

3. Massimo Cacciari,"Abendland," Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, translated by Rodger Friedman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 103.

4. Heidgger 1971, p. 188.
5. Cacciari 1996, p. 105.
6. Ibid.

7. Richard Detsch, Georg Trakl's Poetry: Toward a Union of Opposites, (University Park and London: The Pennsylyania State University Press, 1983), p. 4.

8. Eduard Lachmann, Walther Killey, Richard Detsch and Thomas Harrison, respectively. JjFm

9. Hugo von Hoffmanstahl.

10. Cacciari 1996, pp. 104-105.

11. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethique et infini, (Paris: Librarie Artheme Fayard et Radio France, 1982), pp. 37-38.

12. Heidgger 1971, pp. 169-170.

13. Cacciari 1996, p. 106.

14. Ibid. pp. 106-107.

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Four Poems Translated by Robert Bly and James Wright:

The Mood of Depression

You dark mouth inside me,
You are strong, shape
Composed of autumn cloud,
And golden evening stillness;
In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures.
Now the black horses rear
In the foggy pasture.
I think of soldiers!
Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,
The laughing blood plunges,
Speechless
Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression
Of an army; a blazing steel helmet
Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.
The autumn night comes down so coolly.
With her white habit glittering like the stars
Over the broken human bodies
The convent nurse is silent.

My Heart at Evening

Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats. Two black horses bound in the pasture, The red maple rustles, The walker along the road sees ahead the small tavern. Nuts and young wine taste delicious, Delicious: to stagger drunk into the darkening woods. Village bells, painful to hear, echo through the black fir branches, Dew forms on the face.

De Profundis

It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.
It is a brown tree, that stands alone.
It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.
How melancholy the evening is.
A while later,
The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn.
Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight
And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.
On the way home
The shepherd found the sweet body
Decayed in a bush of thorns.
I am a shadow far from darkening villages.
I drank the silence of God
Out of the stream in the trees.
Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.
At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

Grodek

At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun Rolls down; night gathers in Dying recruits, the animal cries Of their burst mouths. Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god, The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms; All the roads spread out into the black mold. Under the gold branches of the night and stars The sister’s shadow falters through the diminishing grove, To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads; And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of autumn rises. O prouder grief! you bronze altars, The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more monstrous pain, The unborn grandchildren.