The New Verse

Formally considered neo-Hellenism (pp. 123, 278) finds its most determined expression in the odes and elegies of JOSEF WEINHEBER (1892-1945). Born in Vienna as the son of a horse-butcher and innkeeper, he was, after the early death of his parents, brought up in an orphanage; as a gifted pupil he had the privilege of attending the Freies Lyzeum. The privations of his boyhood and youth are the key to the almost savage anti-social elements in his work. His first books of verse – Der einsame Mensch (1920), Von beiden Ufern (1923), Boot in der Bucht (1923) – written while he was a post-office clerk in Vienna (1911-32), fell flat, possibly because they had, together with Baudelairean nouveaux frissons, a fleshly admixture; or, to put it brutally, there was more Tier than Geist in the poet’s handling of his basic motifs – the conflict of brute instincts and mental striving, of good and evil, his neurotic hatred of those more favoured by fortune than the poet doomed to loneliness by his nobler nature. After the publication in 1934 of Adel und Untergang he was the poet of the day; here his solution for the conflict of contrasts is self-effacement at the call of duty; this was interpreted as being in accord with the ideals of the racial resurgence and therefore he was claimed as theirs by the Nazis. He wrote birthday poems for the Führer, but there is nothing specifically Nazi in Adel und Untergang; his much quoted lines ‘Uns zjemt | zu fallen;jedwedem auf seinem Schilde’ is and ever was good British sentiment too. But it is rather form than themes which gives Adel und Untergang its permanent place in the history of lyric verse. In his Gedanken zu meiner Disziplin (in the volume Über die Dichtkunst) Weinheber says that it was not because of a longing for Hellas, not because of humanistic feeling, that he turned to Greek forms, but because he had come to realize that in rhymed verse the thought ends with the line (Endstil), whereas in the verse measures of the Greek ode the sense can be carried over naturally (Strophenverschlingung) and without enjambment (Hakenstil); in other words the rhythm rolls along with the sentence. What results is that in Adel und Untergang and in the volume of verse which pairs with it, Späte Krone (1936), the antique measures of which Hölderlin is the great master are revitalized. We know that Weinheber found his way to Hölderlin too late for direct influence on his style to be possible; what influence there was is likely to have been that of Georg Trakl. It is a relief to turn from the architectural symmetry of Adel und Untergang to the gay garrulity of Wien wörtlich (1935). This is for the most part in the Viennese dialect, so real and redolent that it must be fascinating to the student of language difformation; here we have Wienerdeutsch as it is heard. O Mensch, gib acht (1937) is a species of calendar, dia-lectically coloured; the months with their appropriate poems, the legends of the zodiac and of the saints. Zwischen Göttern und Dämonen (1938) with its rhymeless verse and skilful Hakenstil forms a kind of trinity with Adel und Untergang and Späte Krone. The root meaning is veiled, but the brunt of the argument is that the demonic powers in one’s breast must be tamed and tied down; in the conditions of 1938-39 this was interpreted to mean self-effacement for duty that calls; but basically it is just another phase of that conflict between flesh and mind which runs through all Weinheber’s work, as it does through his (on the whole) ignoble life. In Kammermusik (1939) we have ‘musical poems’ adapted to the note of the instrument required for playing them; it is just another experiment in the reproduction of sound by words, the best examples of which are Intarsia aus Vokalen and Ode an die Buchstaben in Adel und Untergang; Weinheber was obsessed by ‘phonetic’ (his word) illusions, such as that the o in hoch and hohl represents the hole while R in Rad denotes whirring rotation. We may class Wien wörtlich, O Mensch, gib acht, and Kammermusik, since by contrast with the three ‘classical’ books they are popular and local in tone, as another trinity; all Weinheber’s verse sounds Von beiden Ufern. Into Hier ist das Wort (1947), a posthumously published work, Weinheber’s doctrine of prosody is inwoven; he sets forth his modus operandi for form and fashioning of the raw matter of language. There is the pith of his verse in the three books of selections Vereinsamtes Herz (1935), Selbstbildnis (1937), and Dokumente des Herzens (1944). Of Weinheber’s essays, Im Namen der Kunst (1936) attempts an enunciation of the function and philosophy of poetry, while Über die Dichtkunst (1949) deals with his own development as man and poet. Of his novels he himself spoke contemptuously as ‘korrumpierte Romandichtung’ They are indeed poor as fiction; but they have autobiographical interest. Das Waisenhaus (1925) is just the story of a poor boy’s education at an orphanage and of his trend to agnosticism and poetry and painting (the verse Aquarelle of his maturity have their canvas counterparts). Nachwuchs (1927) records the poet’s struggle for a life fit for him. The title of Gold ausser Kurs (written 1933; first published 1953 in Sämtliche Werke) is a symbol for poetry; here we have a poet who has a volume of verse on his desk which publisher after publisher refuses; Adel und Untergang is meant. The final verdict will probably be that Weinheber was far from being a poet of the first rank. Generally speaking his intellect was coldly and architecturally constructive; his poetry was, as he himself said, by way of mathematical approximation. That is, as his biographer Josef Nadler neatly puts it: ‘Fleissdichtung, nicht Inspirationsdichtung’.