ABSTRACT
This chapter contains author's translations of relevant samples from other poets related to these pages: Friedrich Holderlin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke, Novalis, Nietzsche, Theodore Storm, and one non-German, Paul Verlaine, and Erich Kastner. Hugo von Hofmannsthal achieved for Austrian culture the same form-renewing and anti-naturalist function that Stefan George achieved for Germany. The older Benn evolved from realism into more ethereal rhythms and themes in a mood of lyric pessimism, such as the poem translated. There was a bitter aftermath following Hitler's triumph when Benn (temporarily) backed Nazism in the most shocking fashion whereas Lasker-Schuler left for exile in Jerusalem. One feels guilty at condescending to Kastner, as he had a courageous anti-Nazi record and supported the Weimar Republic by morally admirable satires on militarism and nationalism. Hofmannsthal became, alas, more popular for his middle period of operas for Richard Strauss than for his early great lyrics and his late great prose.
