...as Germans always do...
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.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1314767.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
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.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1314767.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.