THE LONG GERMAN POEM IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

German Life and Letters 60:3 July 20070016–8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

THE LONG GERMAN POEM IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

Judith Ryan

ABSTRACT

The appearance in recent years of several book-length German poems raises im-portant questions. What accounts for this revival of interest in a form that seems anunlikely vehicle for contemporary writers? In what ways do these new long poems re-late to the verse epic tradition from classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century?How do they situate themselves with respect to the long, modernist poems of thetwentieth century, those of Eliot and Pound? To what extent are they part of a largerinternational renaissance of the long poem, represented by such works as DerekWalcott’s Omeros? This essay approaches these questions by considering long poemsfrom the early twentieth century to the present. Beginning with attempts by Rilkeand Benn to respond to their predecessors and contemporaries, the article movesto the postwar revival of the long poem from 1970 to 2006. Poets discussed inclu-de Enzensberger, Sebald, Grunbein, Krechel, and Falkner. The essay argues that thelong poem allows for a historically informed treatment of war, violence and destruct-ion, themes common to these texts. The reflective modality of the long poem alsopermits a sophisticated and more critical approach to the ‘nostalgic turn’.

‘Flaschenposten und kein Ende des Endes!’ exclaims the speaker of HansMagnus Enzensberger’s long poem, Der Untergang der Titanic (1978).1 Amessage in a bottle is usually sent by a person who has been shipwreckedand has been washed up on some desolate island. In Enzensberger’s poem,as we shall see, the ‘messages’ are not calls for help dispatched by a strandedsurvivor, but mementos from the sunken ship. In Paul Celan’s usage, whichEnzensberger would have known very well, any poem is a ‘Flaschenpost’,an appeal from the poet to an unknown reader. It is easy to imagine one ofCelan’s poems literally tucked inside a bottle and set afloat. But what kind ofbottle could contain the 20,000-line verse epic, Olympischer Fruhling (1900–1906), that won Carl Spitteler the Nobel Prize in 1919? Would modernreaders have the time and patience to engage with it if it washed up on theirshore, even if the bottle included a flyer describing some of the poem’s moreamusing episodes?2

The question of the long poem and its potential reader is not a newone: Edgar Allan Poe treated the problem at length in his lecture ‘ThePoetic Principle’ (1849), in which he declared that ‘a long poem does not

1 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der Untergang der Titanic: Eine Komodie, Frankfurt a.M. 1978 (reprinted1981), p. 98. Further references appear in the text.2 The curious reader might begin with Part Three, canto twelve, ‘Apoll der Held’, which depicts thebattle between Apollo and the Plattfußler, who try to expunge the sun by spraying water from theirmile-long air ship Gangrenopteros, powered by foul gases from swamps. But even this episode isunlikely to rescue the epic from its current neglect.

C© The author 2007. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 20079600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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exist’: it ‘is simply a flat contradiction in terms’.3 ‘The degree of excitementwhich would entitle a poem to be so called at all’, he continues, ‘cannot besustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse ofhalf an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – andthen the poem is, in effect, no longer such’ (ibid.). Poe argues that the longpoem is really just a collection of separate poems joined together; even theIliad, in his view, was probably ‘intended as a series of lyrics’ (ibid., p. 34).And ‘if, at any time, any very long poem really were popular in reality, whichI doubt, it is at least clear that no very long poem, will ever be popular again’(ibid.). Poe’s prediction was not accurate, as we now know; and in fact, itmay even have challenged nineteenth-century poets to try their hands at thegenre. Certainly the question was still alive in the twentieth century, whenEliot and Pound composed long poems that were to become models fortheir successors.

By ‘long poem’, Poe clearly meant a verse text of considerable length.Today, however, the term is also used to refer to any poem that is not a shortlyric. But poems under a few pages in length are not problematic by Poe’sstandards; for this reason, I shall focus here on poems of several hundredlines or more, preferably poems that have been published separately. Eliot’sThe Waste Land, at 434 lines plus endnotes, is on the shorter end of thegeneric spectrum: the German poems I shall consider here are longer.

In the German tradition, poems of the kind Poe found problematic wereusually termed ‘Versepen’. In recent years, the term ‘Langgedicht’ has creptinto use, though it appears to be employed mainly by reviewers and, in someinstances, by the poets themselves; it has still not entered the dictionary. Isuspect that this new term may have emerged in the context of a generalrevival of the long poem beyond the borders of the German language. Yetthe book-length poem in English that is most frequently cited in the Germandiscussion calls itself a verse epic rather than a ‘long poem’: Derek Walcott’sOmeros (1991; translated into German 1995). More recently, Les Murray’snovel in verse, Fredy Neptune (1998 translated 2004), made a big splash inGermany.4

Given the narrative character of both Walcott’s and Murray’s poems, itwould be tempting to claim that the poem with a story is the most populartype of ‘long poem’ today. Certainly, some recent book-length poems inGerman are narrative in mode. Nothing confirms a fad more than worksthat satirise it, and thus Thomas Kruger’s science fiction verse epic, Alarm aufPlanet M. (2004), is a telling phenomenon. In his foreword, Kruger expresseshis debt to numerous precursors in the narrative poem genre: ‘Ich bedanke

3 Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Robert L. Hough, Lincoln, NE 1965, p. 33. Further referencesappear in the text.4 On the reception of Thomas Eichhorn’s German translation of Fredy Neptune, Zurich 2004, see Irm-traud Petersson, ‘“Odysseus from the Outback”: Fredy Neptune in German and Its Critical Reception’,Australian Literary Studies, vol. 22 (2005), 1–28.

C© The author 2007. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007

350 THE LONG GERMAN POEM IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

mich bei Lord Byron, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Busch, Loriot und DerekWalcott. Als Quintett sind sie unschlagbar, auch wenn sie selten gemeinsamauftreten.’5 He goes on to mention other writers of long poems, includingDante, Washington Irving, and T.S. Eliot, concluding his acknowledgementof precursors with apologies to Johann Heinrich Voß ‘fur den laxen Umgangmit Terzinen’ (ibid.). Kruger’s adoption of terza rima forges links not withVoß, but with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. By means ofingenious enjambments and frequent near-rhymes and eye-rhymes, Krugerkeeps the poetic form unobtrusive and enables his story to move morenaturally. Alarm auf Planet M. begins with the crash of the space ship ‘Spirit ofDivinus’ (a brilliant name), and ends with an even more drastic catastrophe.Like Walcott’s Omeros and Murray’s Fredy Neptune, Kruger’s Alarm auf PlanetM., though much wilder and wackier, is a book-length poem that a modernreader can actually read for the plot.

Despite what seems like a global revival of narrative poetry, the long med-itative, philosophic, or political poem has also enjoyed a renaissance inGermany. These poems look mainly to German precursors, as in the case ofWolf Biermann’s Deutschland: Ein Wintermarchen (1972), whose verse formand general subject matter is indebted to Heine’s 1844 poem of the sametitle. With this type of poem, the reader’s interest is maintained by the move-ment of a mind as it struggles to understand a situation or think a problemthrough. Goethe’s Romische Elegien (composed 1788–90) is an importanttouchstone for twentieth-century authors of long poems that focus on therelation between present and past. Schiller, whose philosophical poems arenot long enough to meet my test for the ‘long poem’ (‘Der Spaziergang’is 200 lines), is nonetheless an important, but generally unacknowledged,model for the long reflective poem of the twentieth century. So is Holderlin,whose ‘Brod und Wein’ (1800-01) comes in at 162 lines.

In contrast to the Anglophone world, where Eliot and Pound createda new form of long poem that incorporated modernist experimentation,German poets in the early twentieth century tended to confine formal in-novation to shorter texts. A notable exception was Rainer Maria Rilke, whoseDuineser Elegien (published in 1923) provides the only example of a long,modernist poem that still has currency today.6 Although Rilke completedhis elegies in the same year as Eliot published The Waste Land (1922), there

5 Thomas Kruger, Alarm auf Planet M., Bielefeld 2004, p. 5.6 Rilke’s long prose poem, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1906), a narrativeabout a young Austrian standard-bearer fighting in Hungary, was widely read in the first part of thetwentieth century, but, despite some innovative aspects, it is an aestheticist, not a modernist text.Unlike the Cornet, the Duineser Elegien do not tell a story, but instead present an unfolding meditativeargument. To be sure, the individual elegies do not create a smoothly flowing sequence – any morethan do the individual sections of Eliot’s Waste Land. In this sense, one might argue that Rilke’s elegiesare a set of ten poems rather than a single long poem. Nonetheless, Rilke did conceive the Elegien asa single text, although he took ten years to complete the sequence and even dropped whole sectionsand substituted other pieces for them along the way. Certainly, the Duineser Elegien are more like asingle long poem than are Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (1923).



was no intellectual connection between them. The Duineser Elegien was avery different type of poem, one that spoke to the alienation of the modernindividual from both the world of nature and the divine. In many ways, onecould think of Rilke’s elegies as an attempt to respond, from a twentieth-century perspective, to the kinds of questions treated in Klopstock’s DerMessias (1748–1773).7 Klopstock, writing in classical hexameters to indicatethat he would take up the challenge of vying with the ancients, began hisverse epic with a response to the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘arma virumquecano’:

Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sundigen Menschen Erlosung,Die der Messias auf Erden in seiner Menschheit vollendet [. . .]

Klopstock could feel confident that celebrating Christ’s life and sufferingwas the proper topic for a long poem. In the opening canto, Klopstockalso had no qualms about addressing God the creator, the origin of his owncreativity. Rilke, by contrast, opens the Duineser Elegien by asking whetherthe divine is even accessible to the poet. The speaker of Rilke’s elegies doesnot sing. He considers what might happen if he cried out to the angels, butbecause he believes that this will produce no response, he does not evendo that. Nonetheless, he does produce a series of elegies that reflect on theplace of mankind in the world and on the nature of artistic expression. Inverses loosely adapted from classical elegiacs, the speaker comes to recog-nise that the modern poet should concern himself more with the things ofthis earth than with questions about the transcendent. In the final (tenth)elegy, reflection gives way to narrative, as we follow the journey of a youth,led by a mythical figure called a ‘Klage’, who inducts him into the realm ofthe dead. By introducing this motif, Rilke replaces Christian religion or clas-sical mythology – the traditional underpinnings of the verse epic – with aninvented mythology that conflates elements from various sources. Althoughbased in part on Rilke’s studies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the fictivelandscape through which the youth and the Lament travel is dotted withruins of ancient monuments. There is nothing redemptive here, only lossand mourning. The youth must enter the realm of death alone, and neitherthe Lament nor the reader can accompany him there:

Einsam steigt er dahin, in die Berge des Ur-Leids.Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los.8

Whatever that realm may be like, we cannot know it, any more than wecan know the angels with whom the speaker of the Duineser Elegien had at

7 Rilke read Klopstock intensively during the period when he began the Duineser Elegien, but he mainlyconcerned himself with the odes.8 Rilke, Samtliche Werke, Frankfurt a.M. 1955, vol. I., p. 756.



first hoped to communicate. Though Rilke himself was religious, he under-stood that conventional forms of belief were out of place in the modern(post-Nietzschean) world. The scant hope he summons in the last eightlines, set off from the rest of the tenth elegy to create a kind of coda, sug-gests that poetry itself, in the form of metaphors drawn from nature, mightcompensate in a partial way for the loss of a larger and more coherentvision.

A different and even more negative approach to the question of man’splace in the cosmos can be found in Gottfried Benn’s oratorio, Das Un-aufhorliche (1931), written in close collaboration with the composer PaulHindemith, who set it brilliantly to music. The story behind this work isquite astonishing. Hindemith had been one of the organisers of the festival‘Neue Musik Berlin 1930’, for which a production of Brecht and Eisler’sdidactic play Die Maßnahme had been planned. When Hindemith began torealise that the play’s authors intended to use the occasion for political pro-paganda, he cancelled the production. Knowing that Brecht had attackedGottfried Benn, Hindemith began to negotiate a future collaboration withthe Expressionist poet. This led to the oratorio Das Unaufhorliche, the resultof over a year’s cooperation between the poet and the composer. Needless tosay, once Benn became a member of the Nazi party in 1933, Hindemith wasprofoundly shocked and cut off all relations with him. In 1937, the Nazi gov-ernment forbade performances of Das Unaufhorliche, and in the followingyear, Hindemith went into exile.

As Benn explains in a brief introduction he wrote for a radio performanceof selections from the work in 1932, Das Unaufhorliche is conceived as a‘modern oratorio’.9 Unlike the religious oratorio, Benn’s poem presentsan atheist vision of a world whose sole guiding force is that of perpetualchange. In many ways, his text is an answer of sorts to Theodor Daubler’smonumental verse epic, Das Nordlicht (1910), which developed a privatemythology according to which the division between the realm of the sunand the realm of the earth would ultimately be overcome.10 Benn’s textopens with an echo of the two-stress lines at the end of Goethe’s Faust, butredemption is not part of Benn’s scheme. The burden of his poem is thatthe powerful will ultimately fall, cultures will pass away, and even what weprize most in modern civilisation – science, art, technology – is certain tocollapse. The principle of the perpetual change is the only constant: ‘DasUnaufhorliche, / Großes Gesetz’ (Das Unaufhorliche, p. 28). This eternalprinciple is reiterated throughout the poem: it is a dark force that pervadeseverything and moves randomly as it determines both the natural world

9 This introduction, spoken by Benn, is included in the following recording: Paul Hindemith, DasUnaufhorliche: Oratorium in drei Teilen nach einem Text von Gottfried Benn fur Soli, gemischten Chor, Kna-benchor und Orchester , Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conductor Lothar Zagrosek, Mainz 1996.The poem is cited according to the accompanying booklet.10 At 30,000 lines in total (more than 1,000 printed pages), Daubler’s epic is even longer than Spittler’sOlympischer Fruhling . It is also more rapturous in tone and less imaginative.



and human history. From time to time, this gloomy message is countered bysuggestions that civilisation may have something more positive to show: yetall accomplishments are ultimately subject to the eternal principle of ‘dasUnaufhorliche’. Indeed, perpetual change is itself marked by antinomies,readable in optimistic as well as in pessimistic terms. Hindemith plays upthese internal contradictions by introducing greater variation in the scorethan there is in the text and assigning competing trains of thought todifferent soloists or even different choirs (he uses a boys’ choir as well asmale, female and mixed choirs). At times, we listen to dialogue or debatebetween men and women or men and boys, but at other times, the settingemphasises conflict, as when two soloists or two choirs present conflictingideas simultaneously. The final chorus picks up three principal themes fromearlier parts of the work and brings them together in ways that are at firstconflicting, but that finally resolve as the mixed choir gives way first to thesoprano and tenor, then to the boys’ choir:

Die Welten sinken und die Welten steigenaus einer Schopfung stumm und namenlos,die Gotter fugen sich, die Chore schweigen – :ewig im Wandel und im Wandel groß. (Das Unaufhorliche, p. 46)

While the audience at the first performance was enthusiastic, reviewersfound the libretto too nihilistic. Benn tried to counteract that impressi-on in his radio introduction, arguing that the oratorio left it open to thelistener to come to a final decision about how to understand the ‘perpetual’element that underlies the universe. Indeed, the final line does allow forsome ambiguity. Still, in making this claim, Benn was trying too hard torescue his work. It is doubtless significant that the text of Das Unaufhorlichehas had no successors, and Benn himself shied away from the long poemform in the postwar period.

Benn’s considerable influence in the first decades after the end of the war,his widely read essay ‘Probleme der Lyrik’ (1951), and his preference forshort, formalist poems explain in large measure the disappearance of longpoems until the 1970s. Rilke’s reputation suffered in this period, in partbecause his poetry was precisely the sort of thing that Benn was inveighingagainst in ‘Probleme der Lyrik’ (a text indebted to Pound’s ‘A Few Don’tsby an Imagiste’ [1913]), in part because his world view was anathema tothe student revolutionaries of 1968. When the long poem re-emerged inGermany, its revival was due to poets on the political left like Wolf Biermannand Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Unlike Biermann’s long poem, which is a reworking of Heine, En-zensberger’s Der Untergang der Titanic (1978) engages with Dante’s DivineComedy. Not only does the poem include several playful references toDante, but the connection is also made explicit through its subtitle,



Eine Komodie.11 And Dante, we are told, is one of a number of people, inclu-ding Gordon Pym, whom the speaker of the poem ‘fished up’ while writingthe first version of his poem during a visit to Havana (Titanic, p. 71). Thespeaker tells us that this version, wrapped in wax cloth, was lost in the mailwhen he sent it back to Europe on his departure from Havana.

Enzensberger’s use of Dante in Der Untergang der Titanic links his poemwith T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which alludes to Dante’s Inferno in itsfirst canto (ll. 63 and 64) and quotes from his Purgatorio in its fifth canto(ll. 428–29).12 We should not forget, furthermore, that the fourth section ofThe Waste Land, ‘Death by Water’, treats the theme of shipwreck. Like TheWaste Land, Enzensberger’s Titanic includes sudden shifts of time, place,speaker, and style. At one point, a group of people accuse Enzensbergerof writing a pastiche rather than a poem (Titanic, p. 54). The same couldbe said of Eliot’s Waste Land, with its imitation of Shakespeare’s Antony andCleopatra, its quotations from popular song and ballad, Wagner’s operas, andDante’s Divine Comedy. Similarly, in Der Untergang der Titanic Enzensbergerincorporates telegrams and statistics, lines from poems, hymns, and popu-lar songs, as well as a German reworking of an African-American story. Inthe final canto, Dante is seen (perhaps as an apparition) holding the lostmanuscript of Enzensberger’s first version of the poem (Titanic, p. 114).

Der Untergang der Titanic is shaped not by sequential narrative,13 but bya complex movement among four different temporal levels: the sinking ofthe Titanic in 1912, the student revolution in West Berlin in 1968, Enzens-berger’s stay in Havana in 1969, and the moment when he wrote the finalversion of the poem in Berlin, 1977. The poem includes multiple shipwrecks,historical and metaphorical:14 the collapse of the revolution of 1968, whichcomes to seem like a pale reflection of the Russian revolution of 1917; thediscovery by Enzensberger and the other visitors to Havana that Cuba isnot a utopia and that they themselves are more tourists than participantsin its society; the loss of the original version of Enzensberger’s poem aboutthe Titanic; and the recognition that history is created in large measure bystories circulated in the media:

‘In Wirklichkeit ist nichts geschehen.’Der Untergang der Titanic hat nicht stattgefundenes war nur ein Film, ein Omen, eine Halluzination. (Titanic, p. 91)

11 Der Untergang der Titanic has been produced several times as a stage play, notably by George Tabori,with the Berliner Ensemble, in 2002. The term ‘comedy’ in the subtitle primarily alludes, however,to Dante’s Divine Comedy.12 The fourteenth and fifteenth of Ezra Pound’s Cantos also allude to Dante.13 I do not agree with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s view that the poem’s unity is essentially lyrical (‘Eisbergund Spiegelkunst: Notizen zu Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Lust am Untergang der Titanic’, in HansMagnus Enzensberger , ed. Reinhold Grimm, Frankfurt a.M. 1984, p. 316).14 On the position of Enzensberger’s Untergang der Titanic in contemporary German literature, seeHinrich Seeba, ‘Der Untergang der Utopie: Ein Schiffbruch in der Gegenwartsliteratur’, GermanStudies Review, 2/2 (May, 1981), 281–98.



This view of history as construct is a central element of the poem.Questions about the relation of art to reality are also posed in four re-

markable interpolations that take the form of imaginary ekphrases: poeticdescriptions of fictitious works of art.15 Within the narrative, these paintingsare part of the ship’s decor, and although they are presented as works fromearlier periods, they finally turn out to be forgeries created by one Salo-mon Pollock, a fashionable artist travelling on the ship during its disastrousvoyage. A drunken Pollock, standing before a painting labelled Der Raub desSuleika. Niederlandisch, Ende 19. Jahrhundert (Titanic, p. 81), recounts the storyof his career from a supposed ‘restorer’ of older art works to a decorativepainter in his own right (Titanic, p. 84). The painting of Suleika is one of hisforgeries. Shortly before this revelation, there is an amusing scene in whichthe figures from one of Pollock’s ‘own’ artworks – a picture of nomads thathangs in the ‘Palm Room’ – have escaped their frame and set up tents onthe promenade deck (Titanic, p. 79). By the time we come to the last of thefour supposed pieces by unknown masters, Die Ruhe auf der Flucht. Flamisch,1521 (Titanic, pp. 100–101), we recognise that this is nothing more thananother of Pollock’s fake masterpieces.16 The sequence of ekphrases addsnew depth to questions about authenticity and originality, as well as aboutthe relation of art to the life of the artist.

Paradoxes and contradictions are at the heart of Der Untergang der Titanicand its exploration of revolution and dialectics.17 Michael Hamburger cor-rectly defines the poem as ‘not an epic but a clustering of diverse, almostdisparate, fragments around a thematic core’.18 Yet this structure is an ex-tension of Eliot’s ‘fragments / shored upon our ruins’, and thus thoroughlyappropriate for a long poem about a shipwreck. In Enzensberger’s Titanic,the fragments are not so much ‘shored’ as still floating, still continuing tosurface sixty-five years after the sinking of the ship. This flotsam consistsmainly of ephemeral objects: menus, postcards, fragments of deckchairs,pieces of carpet yarn, bits of cork from a lifejacket, and other memorabiliafrom the wreck. These souvenirs are kept in constant circulation, as the spea-ker of the poem points out, by a monthly magazine, the Titanic Commutator ,

15 John Hollander calls poems that describe imagined rather than actual artworks ‘notional ecphra-ses’. See The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, Chicago 1995, p. 116 et passim.16 In an early article on Der Untergang der Titanic, Reinhold Grimm points out that the identity of theUmbrian painter in the first of the ekphrastic interpolations (Titanic, pp. 12–13) is not relevant; hedoes not seem to have recognised, however, that this is one of Pollock’s fake restorations (‘Eiszeitund Untergang: Zu einem Motivkomplex in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur’, Monatshefte, 73/2(1981), 163. Tae-Ho Kang gives only a partial reading of the poems about paintings when he interpretsthem as a demonstration of ‘die Veranderung oder der Fortschritt des Kunstverstandnisses seit derRenaissance’ (Poesie als Kritik und Selbstkritik: Hans Magnus Enzensbergers negative Poetik, Diss. Wuppertal2002, p. 166). He does show convincingly, though, how the ekphrastic poems relate to the centraltheme of technology and progress (pp. 166–74).17 Tae-Ho Kang gives a particularly astute account of this point, showing the poem’s debts to Adorno’sconcept of ‘negative dialectics’ (see Poesie als Kritik und Selbstkritik, esp. pp. 133–60).18 Michael Hamburger, ‘The Usefulness of Poets’, The Nation, 3 May, 1980, 529.



produced by the Titanic Historic Society.19 In keeping with the reflectionson art and reality that run through Der Untergang der Titanic, fragments fromthe wreck surface not only in the Titanic Commutator but also, metaphorical-ly, in Enzensberger’s poem. In the final canto, the poem’s speaker is at oncewet from a downpour that takes place in present reality and drowning in thewater near the wreck of an ocean liner. The shipwreck is at once a personalevent and the ‘Untergang’ of mankind as a whole (Titanic, p. 114).

W.G. Sebald’s Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (1988) is also aboutdecline. In certain respects, it situates itself in the tradition of the longpoem on the relation between man and nature. In imitation of the medie-val altarpiece with which the poem begins, it is structured as a triptych inwhich each part has a different focus; yet, as the subtitle makes clear, thethree parts are part of a single whole. The free verse in which it is composedis unpretentious and very readable. We have the sense of accompanying thespeaker on a leisurely and informative stroll through time and space. Thefirst section focuses largely on the art and life of Matthias Grunewald, the se-cond part on the eighteenth-century naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, andthe third section on the life of Sebald himself. Gradually, a set of resemblan-ces emerges among the three figures,20 and by the end of the poem, self andother, past and present have moved closer together, in spite of the dispari-ties and discontinuities among the three sections of the text. This tensionbetween coherence and incoherence characterises the speaker’s strugglethroughout the poem with the conditions and origins of modernity. In thisrespect, though by very different means, Sebald continues themes that Ril-ke had treated in the cityscape passages of his Duineser Elegien. Indeed, asRichard Sheppard rightly observes, Sebald is more a modernist than a post-modernist, and ‘like so many modernists, [he] was at heart an embattledrealist who had been thrown into confusion by modernity’.21

In epigraphs that preface each of its three sections, Nach der Natur marksits place in literary tradition with respect to three predecessors in the tra-dition of the long poem: Dante, Klopstock, and Virgil.22 The motto fromDante is taken from the early part of The Divine Comedy, where Dante asksVirgil to guide him on his trip through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Thesecond motto is from Klopstock’s poem, ‘Die Welten’ (1746). The finalmotto is drawn from Virgil’s first Eclogue. These choices hint at the ways inwhich a modern poem will need to diverge from canonical models. First, the

19 The magazine really exists, and an associated website has now been developed that purveys newinformation about the Titanic and makes items, or facsimiles of items, from the ship available forpurchase (http://www.titanic1.org/membership/commutator.asp).20 In his later novel, Austerlitz (2001), Sebald was to speak of ‘Familienahnlichkeiten’, a term derivedfrom Wittgenstein.21 Richard Sheppard, ‘Dexter – sinister: Some observations on decrypting the morse code in the workof W.G. Sebald’, Journal of European Studies, 35/4 (2005), 420.22 W.G. Sebald, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht, Frankfurt a.M. 1995, pp. 6, 36, 70. Further refe-rences appear in the text.



tripartite division of Nach der Natur does not contain the redemptive aspect ofDante’s Divine Comedy: Sebald’s poem depicts a declining trajectory in whichman and nature will come to a disastrous end. Similarly, the fact that Sebaldselects not Klopstock’s Messias, but rather, a poem about a shipwreck, sug-gests the overwhelming power that nature holds over human beings. Finally,Virgil is represented not by the Aeneid, but by one of his bucolic poems. Thequotation, which speaks of smoke rising from homesteads and mountainson which shadows fall, describes the ideal pastoral landscape. Yet within thecontext of Virgil’s first Eclogue, these lines are part of a dialogue between aperson who is secure in his possession of land and another whose estate hasbeen handed over to Octavian’s army. The passage Sebald cites expressesonly the view of the former. Thus lines that might have reminded Sebaldof his childhood home on the southern border of Germany or of scenesfrom Stifter (whom Sebald greatly admired), are isolated from an originalcontext that included the opposite of idyllic content: war, loss and displace-ment. This negative theme finds its parallel in the nuclear power station inSizewell mentioned in part three, section 6 (Nach der Natur , p. 94), as wellas in an entire series of other disturbing elements throughout the poem.Through the mismanagement of human beings, Nach der Natur suggests,nature might eventually return to its elements.23 As an ‘Elementargedicht’,Nach der Natur thus presents itself as a reversal of Lucretius’ De rerum natura,a long poem about the physical composition of nature from manifold tinyparticles.

Nach der Natur opens and closes with important ekphrastic passages:descriptions of Matthias Grunewald’s Vierzehn Notheefer Altarpiece inLindenhardt (1503) at the beginning and of Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht(1529) at the end.24 The central part of the Lindenhardt altarpiece is adepiction of the crucified Christ; the two wings portray groups of saintsdominated, on the left wing, by Saint George, and on the right wing, by SaintDenis. By giving Saint George his own face and Saint Denis that of his fellowartist, Riemenschneider, Grunewald suggests a continuation of the Biblicalstory into the present. Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht illustrates even morestrikingly the kind of temporal conflation that continued to interest Sebaldin his subsequent writing.25 As Reinhardt Kosellek points out in his com-mentary on Die Alexanderschlacht, Altdorfer has transformed the Greeksand Persians who actually fought in this battle into medieval knights andTurks, thus linking the historical topic of the painting with a contemporary

23 On the ecological theme in Nach der Natur , see Colin Riordan, ‘Ecocentrism in Sebald’s AfterNature’, in W.G. Sebald – A Critical Companion, ed. J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, Seattle, WA 2004,pp. 45–57.24 For more on the ekphrastic passages in Nach der Natur , see Doris McGonagill, ‘Warburg, Sebald,Richter: Toward a Visual Memory Archive’, Diss., Harvard 2006.25 Perhaps the most striking example of temporal layering is the depiction of the new French NationalLibrary, situated on a site near Austerlitz station that had been used by the Nazis to collect thebelongings of Jews who were being transported to concentration camps in eastern Europe.



event (in 1529, Turkish troops had already stationed themselves outsideVienna).26

A similar effect is created in the final canto of Nach der Natur , wherethe speaker, on his way by plane from England to Munich, conflates thelandscape below with the backdrop of Altdorfer’s painting. The destruc-tion wrought on nature by modern industry reminds him of the hundredthousand deaths recorded on the banner that hovers high above Altdorfer’sdepiction of the battle. The final canto of Nach der Natur opens with a quota-tion from Werner Herzog’s film about Kaspar Hauser, Jeder fur sich und Gottgegen alle (1974).27 This quotation, ‘Herr mir hat es getraumt’ (Nach der Na-tur , p. 96), introduces a scene in which Kaspar Hauser tries unsuccessfully torecount a dream he has had about nomads crossing the Caucasus. How doesthat fit with Sebald’s main theme? Toward the end of Nach der Natur , we hearabout a school chaplain who used Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht to support hisnegative opinions about immigrants from the East. In the chaplain’s view,the history of salvation can only be completed if such people are annihilated(Nach der Natur , p. 98). Allusions to different kinds of violence give shape tothe final canto: the reference to Kaspar Hauser, traumatised by neglect, thedepiction of Alexander’s battle against the Persians, the sixteenth-centurystruggle between the Austrians and the Turks, and the reference to anti-foreigner sentiment in present-day Germany. To this list we must also addthe final reference to Africa, still unexplored when Altdorfer painted theAlexanderschlacht, where its northern coast is visible in the background (geo-graphically, the Nile delta is opposite the battleground at Issus). The readeris aware, of course, that Africa was to become a place of exploitation andviolence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The glanceback at an old master from the outgoing Middle Ages thus also becomesa reflection on a series of historical disasters from which the poem cannotclose itself off.

The middle section of Sebald’s poetic triptych includes more narrati-ve than the outer ‘panels’. Focusing on the eighteenth-century naturalistGeorg Wilhelm Steller, it treats more directly the struggle between man andnature that lies at the heart of the poem. Through the figure of Steller, thepoem follows a Russian expedition that joins Vitus Bering in his search forthe sea route to America. The group endures tremendous hardships, inclu-ding shipwreck and fatal illnesses. Steller recognises not only that familiarsystems of classification do not work in this uncharted territory, but alsothat nature is too powerful for man to tame. In an amusing flash forward toAdelbert Chamisso’s expedition to the same region in 1816–17,28 we read

26 See Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, Frankfurt a.M. 1979, pp. 17–37 and 349–75.27 Richard Sheppard confirms that Sebald was impressed by this film, as well as by Herzog’s film oncolonial exploitation, Fitzcarraldo (1982). See ‘Dexter – sinister’, p. 443.28 Recounted in his Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1815–1818. The relevant passage is dated September6, 1816 (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/chamisso/weltreis/weltr072.htm).



of his notion that whales might eventually be tamed and used as beasts ofburden on the seas. To be sure, Chamisso observes, they would have to betrained to forget diving! On Bering’s expedition, such reflections wouldhave been out of place. Only after extreme hardships did the membersof his group eventually return to Russia (though Bering himself had diedmonths earlier). Nach der Natur shows Steller travelling on alone into aremote part of the peninsula of Kamchatka, collecting botanical samplesand teaching native children. In the end, however, he also dies on his wayback to civilisation. Human beings are no match for the superior power ofnature.

One of the most ambitious long philosophical poems in recent Germanliterature is Durs Grunbein’s Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deutschland (2003),a forty-two canto poem written in German alexandrines. This metre, a fa-vourite of the German Baroque, is appropriate for a text whose narratedevents take place primarily during the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed, it is signif-icant that Grunbein deliberately avoids the metres from classical antiquityused by Goethe in his Romische Elegien (1795) and recalled by Rilke in hisDuineser Elegien. Grunbein’s poem is at once narrative and meditative. Thefirst thirty-one cantos focus on Descartes, snowed in for twelve weeks whileon a visit to Neuberg, near Ulm. The last ten cantos shift to Descartes’s stayin Stockholm, where he taught philosophy to Queen Christina, ultimatelydying of a chill caught on his way to conduct her lessons in the early hoursof the morning. Grunbein livens up the story by inventing a servant, Gillot,who likes to remind Descartes that real life exists just outside his door, inthe form of a buxom servant-girl, on the one hand, and the vicissitudes ofwar, on the other. Parts of the poem consist of dialogue, often humorous,between Descartes and Gillot.

In Germany, Descartes has two important experiences: first, he conceiveshis famous first principle, ‘cogito, ergo sum’, and second, he has a seriesof puzzling dreams. These dreams are not Grunbein’s invention, but arepart of Descartes’s real life story. Descartes wrote up the dreams in a smallnotebook on which he wrote the title Olympica, and although this book hassince disappeared, Descartes’ first biographer gives a detailed account ofthe dreams.29 The symbolism of the dreams is arcane, and it is perhapsnot surprising that Descartes had trouble interpreting them. In Grunbein’spoem, however, the dreams indicate an alternative to rationalism: throughtheir use of symbols, they open up another way to knowledge than that oflogic and mathematics. In one of the dreams, Descartes feels that he seeseverything at once in a flash of light,30 a mode of understanding quite theopposite of the method he embraced in his Discours. By ignoring his dream-

29 On Descartes’ dreams, see John R. Cole, The Olympian Dreams and Youthful Rebellion of Rene Des-cartes, Urbana and Chicago 1992, pp. 59–60.30 Durs Grunbein, Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deutschland, Frankfurt a.M. 2003, p. 23. Furtherreferences appear in the text.



visions Descartes loses the alternative possibility offered by poetic modes ofthought. In Sweden, at the end of his life, death is another experience thatcannot be enclosed in ‘Logik und Kalkul’ (Vom Schnee, p. 137). During hisfinal agony, Descartes senses the limits of the logical systems in which hehad always found security.

Vom Schnee is at once a narrative about the life and thought of Descartesand a reflection on the antinomies of enlightenment. Reaching back to thebeginning of the modern period, the poem asks its readers to reconsider thequestion of new beginnings, and urges us to reflect on what we lose whenwe choose one path rather than another. Descartes’ dreams took place onthe night of 10 November 1619, a date that would recall, for most Germanreaders, the night of 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Tobe sure, Vom Schnee refrains from overt reference to recent German history.Still, on the basis of Grunbein’s earlier volume Nach den Satiren (1999) wemay quite reasonably speculate that Grunbein believes something was lostwhen East Germany was integrated into the Federal Republic after the fallof the Wall.

Grunbein’s Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (2005) also presentsitself as a long poem, but it is more a collection of short poems that explorea single topic from multiple angles. In forty-nine ten-line poems aboutDresden (Grunbein’s birthplace), Porzellan contrasts the delicacy of Dres-den china with the Allies’ area bombing of the city during World War II.The poems are arranged in different positions on the page as if to suggestscattered pieces of broken porcelain. Thematically, Grunbein contributesto, and to some extent also complicates, the discussion about the destruct-ion of German cities that arose in response to Sebald’s provocative essayLuftkrieg und Literatur (1999). Grunbein speaks as a member of a later gen-eration who sees no point in nostalgia for a city that has been destroyed andwho rejects the idea that those who experienced the destruction firsthandmay lay claim to the status of victims. From his point of view, the Nazi per-secution of the Jews had already desecrated the city. ‘Unschuld, sagt ihr?Lag die Stadt nicht langst geschandet?’ he asks, invoking ‘Kristallnacht’ asa destruction that had preceded the Allies’ bombing campaign.31

A more profound exploration of violence and destruction is developed byUrsula Krechel in her long poem Stimmen aus dem harten Kern (2005). Writ-ten mainly in a flexible version of classical hexameters, the poem consistsof twelve sections, each containing twelve twelve-lined poems. A collectivefirst-person plural voice moves freely across the centuries, presenting fami-liar excuses for war, age-old ways of shifting blame and dealing with guilt.Beginning with references to the Trojan and Peloponnesian Wars, the poemhighlights the fact that these struggles now exist only in the form of texts,

31 Durs Grunbein, Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt, Frankfurt a.M. 2005, p. 4.



as the ‘Beschreibung eines Schildes’32 and, more generally, as battalionsof words moving rightwards across the page (ibid.). As modern termino-logy (‘Waffensysteme’, ‘Truppentransporter’, ‘Motorengerausche’) beginsto penetrate the speakers’ account of ancient battles, the ‘harter Kern’ ofattitudes to war gradually reveals itself. Even in sections where the focus ison a particular historical figure, like the brilliant cantos on Byron and Phi-loctetes (III and XI respectively), the present continually breaks throughto the surface. In Krechel’s presentation, the ‘harter Kern’ goes beyondwar itself to include genocide, oppression and economic exploitation. Asa counterpoint to this depiction of violence, she allows a woman’s voice tospeak in a single canto (VII), where the line lengths shorten and ‘Blankvers’becomes for a while the dominant form. But even this female voice is notunproblematic, since it speaks not only of sexual ecstasy, but also of loss ofidentity, feelings of failure, and problems of personal expression.33

Embedded in Krechel’s poem are numerous quotations, some of themacknowledged in the notes at the back of the book, others unidentified.The sources of the identified quotations, like the collective speaker of longstretches of the poem, are all male. They include writers of war journalsand correspondence as well as poets of war and its aftermath: Mussolini,Rimbaud, Toller, Trakl and others. Yet Stimmen aus dem harten Kern doesnot read like a collage. Rather, its use of multiple voices in an extendedmeditation on violence allows us to grasp in greater complexity the historyof war and violence.

With Gerhard Falkner’s long, experimental poem Gegensprechstadt –ground zero (2005), we return to a distinctively postmodern mode. The poemconsists of a sequence of texts that focus mainly on present-day Berlin. (Falk-ner explains that while the subtitle ‘ground zero’ refers to the attack on NewYork on 11 September 2001, he also uses it in its more fundamental sense ofthe centre of a catastrophe or the place of a new beginning.)34 The speakerof Gegensprechstadt wanders through Berlin, making observations, noting hisresponses, recalling the recent history of these locations and constantly see-king fresh points of orientation. When Falkner first began to work on thepoem in 1995, Berlin was indeed ‘ground zero’, a place where the Wall hadfallen, reunification had taken place and new construction was visibly un-derway. Gegensprechstadt is a record of a modern Berliner’s attempt to cometo terms with this new reality by mapping it onto a larger history. Three datesstructure the poem’s chronology: 11 September, the Al Quaeda attacks onAmerica; 3 October, the ‘Tag der Deutschen Einheit’ since 1990; and 15thMarch, Brutus’s assassination of Julius Caesar, a date that is also Gerhard

32 Ursula Krechel, Stimmen aus dem harten Kern, Salzburg 2005, p. 7. Further references appear in thetext.33 Michael Braun gives a more positive reading of this canto in his review, ‘Eroberer und Erschopfte:Ursula Krechels Langgedicht’, Stuttgarter Zeitung , 14 October 2005, Literatur, 32.34 Gerhardt Falkner, Gegensprechstadt – ground zero, Idstein 2005, p. 79.



Falkner’s birthday. The speaker of the poem says they were all Tuesdays,and notes that the very word ‘Tuesday’, derived from the Latin ‘dies martis’,means a day of war (Gegensprechstadt, p. 11).

The prefix ‘gegen’ in the poem’s title captures the encounter betweenthe city and the speaker who experiences it, as well as that between pastand present, language and world.35 But it also alludes to the ways in whichGegensprechstadt answers the ‘long poem’ tradition. In his afterword, Falknerwrites of the many poetic predecessors to whom he is indebted: ‘Dabei istmir Heinrich Heine, etwa mit dem “Wintermarchen”, gerade auch wegender Verbindung von beißendem Spott und preisendem Ton, oft naher undneuer gewesen als zeitlich nahere und neuere Dichter.’36 The endnotes –clearly a nod to T.S. Eliot – also mention Pound and Homer, while simulta-neously declaring that they will not be ‘plastered’ with the names of writersto whose long poems his text alludes (Gegensprechstadt, p. 82).

Eliot is a crucial reference point for Falkner’s Gegensprechstadt. A passageearly in the poem rewrites the famous opening lines of The Waste Land interms of Falkner’s observation about Tuesdays: ‘der Dienstag ist der grau-samste unter den Tagen’ (Gegensprechstadt, p. 11). Similarly, a section about11 September draws on a vision of catastrophe from the last part of The WasteLand that condenses the destruction or collapse of famous cities in varioushistorical periods into a single unpunctuated phrase:

Falling towersJerusalem Athens AlexandriaVienna London (Waste Land, ll. 374–376)

Falkner’s contrafacture is less brilliant because more explicit, but theconnection with Eliot is apparent:

hier fallen die Mauern, da sturzen die Turmedort sterben die Juden, hier endet das Reichdie Quersumme der Gewaltgibt keine Auskunft uber ihre VektorenTaliban Tower Afghanistan Bin Laden Bush (Gegensprechstadt, p. 44)

Here Berlin and New York ‘speak back’, as it were, to the famous cities of thepast. Similarly, at the end of the poem, Falkner (mis)quotes a line from EzraPound’s Pisan Cantos: ‘if we weren’t so dumb we wouldn’t be here’ (Cantos,l. 12624). In the Cantos, the phrase is spoken by a fellow prisoner at theAmerican detention centre near Pisa; Falkner’s re-appropriation of the linerefers to our situation in the world more generally.

35 Tobias Doring, ‘Schlaflos in Berlin. Herausfordernd: Gerhard Falkners vielstimmige Großstadt-dichtung’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , 24 October 2005, 36.36 Falkner, Gegensprechstadt, pp. 74–5.



Faced by the need to begin anew after the fall of the Berlin Wall, thespeaker of Gegensprechstadt gathers together cultural fragments from variousperiods and traditions. Just as The Waste Land combines quotations from highculture with snatches of popular songs and ballads, so Falkner creates inGegensprechstadt a web of references to Verlaine, Whitman, Rilke and others,mixed with imitation rap lyrics, a ‘concrete poem’, names from popularculture and brand names from the consumer world. The effect is at oncefragmentary and synoptic.

In an interview of 2002, Falkner described his earlier poems as ‘ideen-gestutze Klangkorper’.37 Gegensprechstadt explores with brio the auditory di-mension of language. In a brilliant parody of the traditional ‘ubi sunt’, forexample, Falkner plays with the German version of this nostalgic formula:

– alles wegwo sind die Wodiedie, sind die wo Sinddiedie

sind die wo Sinddiewo?Sinddiesinddiedieweg? (Gegensprechstadt, p. 65)

One can understand why David Moss felt drawn to compose a musical accom-paniment. The published version of Gegensprechstadt includes a recordingof this piece. Minimalist melody and less definable acoustic sound-scapes38

create a backdrop for Falkner’s stunning reading, underscoring what hasbeen called his ‘sensuous materialism of perception’.39 The composition,though it never becomes anything like a song, reminds us that the earliest‘long poems’ were sung performances. The current popularity of poetryreadings, especially in Berlin, has revived the notion of the poet-performer,giving new credibility to the genealogy that links Gegensprechstadt to ancientepics.

It is remarkable how many of these recent long poems have some kind ofdisaster or catastrophe at their centre. If the long poem of the early twen-tieth century was a renunciation of redemptive eschatology, its counterpartin the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is an expression of pro-found fears about the future of human beings and their environment. Vio-lence, destruction, and the collapse of civilisation are the principal themesof these poems. Many recall Dante’s Inferno, but cannot envisage a modernequivalent of the Paradiso. Two of them portray a shipwreck: most obviously,Der Untergang der Titanic, but also (in its central section) Nach der Natur .40 If

37 ‘ “. . .wie eine Pionierpflanze”: ein Gesprach zwischen Gerhard Falkner und Michael Eskin’, GR,77/1 (2002), 69.38 Similarly, A.J. Weigoni’s long poem, Senora Nada: ein lyrisches Monodram, Weilerswist 1995, a textthat alludes to Eliot’s Waste Land, was set to music by Tom Tager, using minimalist techniques andsound effects like the rustle of paper.39 Neil Donahue uses this phrase to describe Falkner’s poetry of the 1980s in his ‘The Poetry ofGerhard Falkner and the Lyrical Redemption of Language in the Eighties’, GR, 67/2 (1992), 74.40 Weigoni’s Senora Nada also invokes the shipwreck theme through the motif of ‘Treibgut’ (l. 4).



any of these poems is a message in a bottle, it is not one that assumes thathelp might actually be coming. In our heart of hearts, most of us probablystill side with Poe’s preference for short lyrics. But when we need to thrashthrough a complicated train of thought or come to terms with difficult newideas, the long poem does have certain advantages. Doubtless poets still wishto vie with the ancients, but the evidence of their recent productions suggeststhat they have questions to explore that cannot be adequately approachedin any other genre.

Uwe Tellkamp, winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for 2004, has been writing a long poem, DerNautilus, on the theme of sea voyages. (See Michael Braun’s interview with Tellkamp, ‘So eine Spiralewillst du auch einmal schreiben’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 July 2004, Feuilleton, 16.)


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THE LONG GERMAN POEM IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY