Writing to friends from his front-line position with the
German army, August Stramm wrote,
There is so much death in me death
and death. Inside me, there is crying, and outside I am hard and rough… Words
fail me because of terror… I no longer compose poems, everything around me is
poetry. Miserable cowardly sinister
horror and the air giggles tauntingly and gargles thunderingly down the
mountains….*
Before the war, Stramm had been an inspector of postal
services and an aspiring dramatist. He is now best remembered for his war poems
that communicate the chaos and fear of battle in halting, broken rhythms.
Baptism of Fire
His body shrinks its loosely-fitting tunic.
His head creeps down into his boots.
Fear
Throttles his gun.
Fears
Rattle,
Rattle shrill,
German soldiers on the Eastern Front |
Rattle swathe,
Rattle stumble,
Rattle,
Trigger off
Shouting
Anger.
His eye
Narrows.
A shot.
Hands grip schnapps.
Defiance loads.
Determination aims
And
A steely look
Quickly
Bags
Another’s fate.
—August
Stramm, trans. Patrick Bridgwater
Thrown into combat, the soldier shrinks into himself until
he is more uniform than man, trying to present as small a target as he possibly
can. The first two lines are the longest in the poem, and then in the third
line, the word “Fear” stands alone, a visual reminder of the way in which it halts
and interrupts all of reality. And then the word is repeated—it returns in its
plural form. Fears and shrill noise push everything else aside.
Stramm's poem communicates the din and confusion of battle by
repeating the word Rattle five times –
this is the sound made when something is loose, unmoored, and unsteady.
Everything that happens seems disconnected and random, and the constantly changing
conditions of the fighting are mirrored in the short, staccato lines. Spying an enemy soldier, the man depicted in
the poem seems to stand outside himself as he watches abstract emotions kill Another:
Defiance loads the gun and Determination aims.
The entire encounter is summed up as if this is merely a hunter bagging
game.
Many found it necessary to distance themselves from their
emotions if they were to remain sane. In
the winter of 1915, Stramm wrote to his friends Herwarth and Nell Walden about
the conditions he was experiencing at the front:
German dead at Guillemont, 1916 |
Have you ever seen a butcher’s shop
where slaughtered people are laid out for sale, with machines making a terrific
racket as they slaughter more and more people with their ingenious mechanism?
And you lie there mute, thank God you are mute, at once the butcher and the
beast. And then suddenly black devils are everywhere as they make their way up
from the depths—the butchers, the grenades… bustle about…. Yesterday one of
those butchers smashed the person next to me into pieces with one blow and
mockingly covered me with blood and flesh and guts.**
Stramm was aware that the war
had dramatically changed everything – language, relationships, emotions—as well
as himself. In another letter home he
had written, “War. Everything is behind me.
Hope friendship and love. I love
you but you are behind me far far do not be angry but another knew you another
not I.”*** August Stramm was killed in hand-to-hand combat on the Eastern Front on September 1, 1915.
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* August Stramm letter to Herwarth and Nell Warden, quoted
in Martin Löschnigg’s “Expressionist-Artillerist: ‘Poet’ and ‘Soldier’ as
Conflicting Role Models in German Avant-Garde Poetry from the First World War,”
in Bearing Witness: Perspectives on War
and Peace from the Arts and Humanities, edited by Sherrill Grace, Patrick
Imbert, and Tiffany Johnstone, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012, p. 85.
** August Stramm letter to Herwarth and Nell Warden, quoted
in Maria Tatar’s Lustmord: Sexual Murder
in Weimar Germany, Princeton UP, 1997, p. 119.
***August Stramm letter, quoted in Geert Buelens’ Everything to Nothing, Verso Books,
2016, p. 76.
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