ABSTRACT
The collected works of Georg Heym have been appearing at intervals during the last decade, ably edited by Karl Ludwig Schneider and published by Heinrich Ellermann Verlag, Hamburg and Munich. After World War II in Germany, his apocalyptic poems of war and doom did make Heym famous. That was because, as earlier with Stefan George, German readers often allow a poet's dubious prophetic role to overshadow his genuine lyric craftsmanship. Heym's reputation as an atomic-age prophet is in reality based on distortion and accident, despite the much-cited fact that his prophecies of war and the burning of big cities turned out to be correct. The single poem that most influenced Heym was Rimbaud's "Bâteau Ivre" though otherwise his favorite poet was Baudelaire. Heym records his doomed parades not through direct observation but through a shimmer of sinister "Fun House" reflections.
