GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST POETRY: A Reader's Introduction to the Movement's Darkest Verse

Before Nosferatu climbed the staircase, before Caligari's walls began to lean, the poets of German Expressionism had already built the world those films would inhabit.

Between 1910 and 1925, a generation of young writers in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague produced the strangest and most violent verse in the German language. Georg Heym set an enormous, unholy god on a block of flats and let it loose on the street below. Gottfried Benn, an army pathologist, wrote poems from inside the autopsy room. Alfred Lichtenstein described a woman cut open on an operating table while a nurse ate her lunch behind the body. Gertrud Kolmar wrote herself as a monster nursing a child and a bat from the same father.

Then the century they had imagined arrived. Four of them were killed in the First World War. Their books were burned in 1933 by a fellow poet (Hanns Johst) who had once published alongside them. Jakob van Hoddis was murdered at Sobibor and Kolmar at Auschwitz; Walter Hasenclever and Alfred Wolfenstein killed themselves rather than wait.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST POETRY is a reader's introduction to the darkest corner of that movement. Twenty-two chapters cover the poets of Kurt Pinthus's landmark 1919 anthology Twilight of Humanity, from Heym and Trakl to Emmy Hennings and Albert Ehrenstein, along with Nietzsche, the anti-war journal Die Aktion, and two fellow travelers who stood just outside: Rainer Maria Rilke and Gertrud Kolmar. Every poem appears in English, most in the author's own translations. No German is required.

Written for readers who arrive by way of German Expressionism's horror films and stay for the poetry, this survey traces how the same movement produced both a communist head of state and an SS officer who ran literature for the Third Reich. It also argues that the movement that produced both had no rigid politics built into it at all.

The book also includes a chronology, a helpful glossary of German terms, a bibliography, and an index of poems.