ABSTRACT
In 1987 occurred the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Georg Heym. His early poems are mostly worthless and imitative juvenilia. The poems written during the few months before his early death are among the most original in the twentieth century and today surprisingly "modern". A word on the Heym poems that follow: "With the Ships of Passage" was written in some versions, appearing here in Gerrman. The poem "Final Vigil" was also found among Heym's unpublished papers. Gottfried Benn called it one of the greatest love poems of all time. Of all Heym's poems, "War" was the hardest to translate. Among many other things the great poem is a string of cliches about death. In the 1920s, poems could appeal to fascist-style militarists, who deemed them a Dionysian release, and to Marxists, who deemed them a denunciation of bourgeois rottenness.
