Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl was the most considerable Austrian poet to see active service in 1914-18. The war, when it finally came, must have seemed a mere extension of his inner world, for he lived in a haunting and at times terrifying world of Spenglerian visions, a ‘proving-ground for world-destruction’ (Karl Kraus) if ever there was one. He raged not against the dying of the light, but against its relentlessness, praying in vain to be able to forget his visions. In his poetry the ‘infernal chaos of rhythms and images’ of his life is transmuted into a series of visionary pictures of the chaos of the degenerate modern world. His poetic world is stigmatised by a loss of essence and substantiality; his deepest and most traumatic experience was that of things falling apart. ¹ What he called his ‘criminal melancholy’ derives from his vision of a world (of which the Habsburg monarchy was the outward sign) that lacks the spiritual strength to ensure its own survival; modern materialism filled him with as much loathing as it did Kafka; he would have approved Kafka’s definition of materiality as the evil in the spiritual world. Kafka and Trakl alike sought to affirm their belief in a spiritual order of things; too many critics have seen their work as negative because they, the critics in question, have been unable to see beyond the material order which both writers negate. When Trakl wrote to Erhard Buschbeck in autumn 1911 that he aimed to give to truth what belongs to truth, he could have been speaking for Kafka as well; with both writers the poetic purity of their work stems from an obsession with truth. Trakl’s definition of his poetry as an imperfect atonement shows that he shared, too, Kafka’s view of the writer as the scapegoat of mankind. When Kafka told Janouch in 1921 that the terrible thing about war was that the animal in man runs riot and stifles everything spiritual, he was expressing a view which Trakl would have shared; indeed, Trakl saw the destruction of man as a spiritual being as characteristic of his time in general. Kafka saw the war as unleashing evil (to Janouch he described war as a flood of evil which had burst open the flood-gates of chaos), while Trakl saw it as a consequence of evil; in effect both saw the war as the bursting of a festering sore not just on the body politic, but on the ‘crimson body of man’. Trakl’s poetry no less than Kafka’s prose-poetry is a form of prayer; but his war poems are prayer-like in a different sense from most front-line poetry in that he prays not that he may himself be spared, but that mankind may not be destroyed.