ABSTRACT
Written a half-year before he drowned and three years before World War I, this powerful fragment should be closely compared with George's "The Cleansing Doom" and with "World's End", a poem by Heym's influential "proto-expressionist" friend Jakob van Hoddis. Already then schizophrenic, Hoddis was to live on from 1914 to 1942 in an insane asylum, thereby apparently overlooked by the Nazi pogroms, only ironically to succumb to the second Nazi genocide, the one against the incurably sick. Neither George nor Heym saw each other's similar war-invoking poems when they were writing their separate versions; Heym was dead before George's book of 1913 appeared, and George could not have seen a Heym poem that lay around unpublished till the war was over. On the other hand, Heym certainly knew well Hoddis's "World's End". Heym's handwritten versions of "Prayer", one of them here reproduced from his papers in the archives, show crossings out and altered stanza patterns.
