It is known that the First World Warit was an event considered so catastrophic that it was called “apocalyptic” by his contemporaries. Compared with the military conflicts before it, the First War proved to be the most violent and the most modernly deadly, as it managed to mobilize an entire sophisticated industry to its around. There were several literary reports produced by combatants who experienced this war and its atmosphere of terror, which was constituted through the use of toxic gasesin battles, in incessant bombing and in the daily life inside the trenches.
Among the most notorious writers who experienced World War I are: J. R.R. Tolkien, Erich Maria Remarke and Ernst Jünger. Added to these the Austrian poet georgTrakl, considered one of the most important expressionist poets in the German language, despite having died at just 27 years of age.
Georg Trakl was born in the Austrian city of Salzburg, in 1887, into a Protestant family. He completed his studies in Vienna, where he also obtained a Master's degree in Pharmacy. This profession gave him, at the same time, financial perspectives and the cultivation of addiction. Trakl became addicted to veronal, chloroform, opium and cocaine. When world conflict broke out, which exposed the German war machine to the world, Trakl served as the official fighter and pharmacist of an Austrian battalion.
Before entering the war, however, Trakl had already started his literary career, above all in poetic writing, to which he devoted himself with the utmost zeal. His poems, until the year 1913, already had a melancholy tone and a somber atmosphere filled with dreamlike images. Sleep, dream and reality transfigured into images of terror and dismay were Trakl's main themes. In addition, in his poems, the figure of one of his sisters often appeared.
Beginning in 1914, when Trakl began to experience war, some of his poems explicitly reflected the horror situations he witnessed. The strong influence of French Symbolist poetry contributed to Trakl being able to capture such situations. After BattleinGrodek, in Poland, for example, Trakl had to care for more than 90 wounded soldiers alone. Such soldiers found themselves in a barn with wounds that rotted on their eyes. Outside the barn, several bodies of peasants were also rotting, having been murdered by Austrian troops on charges of collaborating with the Russians.
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The situation was disheartening and gave Trakl the poem “Grodek”, from 1914, of which the following lines can be read:
In the afternoon the autumnal forests sound / Of deadly weapons, the golden plains. / And blue lakes, above the sun / Darker rolls; the night envelops/ Warriors in agony, the wild lament/ From their torn mouths./ […] “All roads lead to black putrefaction.”[1]
The “black putrefaction” became the main landscape of Trakl's days in Grodek. In another poem, entitled “Sorry”, also from 1914, it is possible to feel the anguish of its author in the midst of the carnage of war:
“Sleep and death, the tenebrous eagles/ Surround that head into the night:/ The golden image of Man/ Swallowed by the cold wave/ Of eternity. […] In ghastly reefs./ The purple body shatters/ And the dark voice laments/ Over the sea./ Sister of stormy melancholy/ See, an afflicted boat sinks/ Under stars,/ Under the silent face in the night.” [2]
Trakl foresaw, in this poem, the end of an era (“the golden image of Man”), which was broken by the catastrophe of total war, and foreshadowed another, terrible, with the image of the "purple body" shatters. Georg Trakl committed suicide on November 3, 1914 with an overdose of cocaine. While still alive, he was highly regarded by the philosophers Martim Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein and by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
GRADES:
[1] TRAKL, Georg. From profundis and other poems. Trans. Claudia Cavalcanti. São Paulo: Illuminations, 2010. P. 79.
[2] Idem. P. 77.
*Image credits: Shutterstock and rook76.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
