ABSTRACT
How odd, and what a lesson to “realists,” that the most truly realistic description of World War II—say, of the destruction of Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden—was written not at the time but back in 1911. The slow caesura’d rhythm of Heym’s embodied “War,” lumbering along as if it were not a human but a Frankenstein robot walking, is suited perfectly to its macabre subject, namely to the impersonality of the mass-killing Heym foresaw, just as George—also during 1911–1913—foresaw it, in his “Cleansing Doom” poem; in both cases, with the same hypnotized fascination.
