For and Against the Times: The Poetry of Josef Weinheber
The name of the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber (1892-1945) is one that is greeted with a degree of reserve. This is scarcely to be wondered at, seeing that he was a card-carrying member of the National-Socialist Party and, in effect, the Laureate of the Third Reich. Yet, while a hundred other names projected into prominence by the patronage of the Nazis have since fallen back into an oblivion below the reach of obloquy, Weinheber, who was not puffed into eminence, remains the subject of continued controversy, with his defenders and detractors and the critics who aspire to a judicious severity. The discussion necessarily focuses on personal, moral, and political issues; but, whenever literary value is also regarded as a relevant consideration, his stature as poet usually receives its due tribute of acknowledgement – at least implicitly. To enter the lists of controversy within the limits of what is essentially an introductory note would be inappropriate. Suffice it to say that his poetic voice is a strongly individual one, expressing the distinctive vision and sensibility of a writer incapable of making himself the organ of a political movement, even if he might have flirted with the idea. The English reader requiring reassurance may find it in the knowledge that W. H. Auden found the poet a congenial spirit and admired and defended him. In a long-ish poem addressed to Weinheber's shade, he expressed his regret for an opportunity that had never arisen:
we might
have become good friends,
sharing a common ambit
and love of the Word,
over a golden Kremser
had many a long
language on syntax, commas,
versification;
ending the poem thus:
I would respect you also,
Neighbor and Colleague,
for even my English ear
gets in your German
the workmanship and the note
of one who was graced
to hear the viols playing
on the impaled green,
committed thereafter den
Abgrund zu nennen.
At that abyss which Weinheber pointed out and expatiated on (the substance of the German allusion), we shall arrive in due course. The main problem for a modern reader, meanwhile, is that he encounters in Weinheber a poet of major pretensions who, coming after Apollinaire and Eliot and the poetry of modernism, reverts to classic (indeed, classical ) form, high seriousness and the elaborate assumption of the singing robe. He was, of course, capable of tremendous variety. The poet had a resounding success with a volume of popular poems in the dialect of his native Vienna; he achieved the simplicity of doggerel in a popular and “edifying almanac for townsfolk and country folk”; he wrote lyric of exquisite fluency, accommodating the idiom and syntax of speech to the singing voice. Yet in all this he remained traditional; and the major volumes of his oeuvre : Adel und Untergang [Nobility and Decline], with which he made his breakthrough in 1934; Späte Krone [Late Laurel], 1936; Zwischen Göttern und Dämonen [Between Gods and Demons], 1938: exhibit a poet: grand, austere, or tender, moving with impressive ease in difficult and even arcane metres. He mixes glyconics and pherecratics; and, besides using the more usual sapphic and alcaic stanza, employs also the hipponactic, and all five varieties of the asclepiadic stanza. Using commoner poetic forms such as the sonnet, he dazzles with sonnet garlands: sequences of fifteen sonnets in which the last line of the first sonnet becomes the first line of the second and so right up to the fourteenth which, in its final line, also recurs to the first line of the initial sonnet, the linking lines being always characterised by a shift of meaning. The fifteenth sonnet is composed of the first lines of the preceding fourteen in sequence. And, as if this were not difficult enough, in two of these sequences the freedom of the basic sonnet is additionally restricted by its being a faithful translation of a sonnet of Michael Angelo. Such virtuosity is, of course, the despair of the translator; and the reader must be warned at the outset not to expect to encounter the formal artistry and musical distinction of the original poems in the selection of renderings here offered. I have kept to the original metres and stanza forms; for the rest, the substance and suggestion of the poetry is, as Tennyson might have said, given in outline and no more.
The rich musicality of the verse with its corresponding complexity of significance frees the writer from the reproach of arid formalism, the production of academic exercises merely. Besides, Weinheber's interest in the mechanics of expression is live, proceeding from a profoundly serious apprehension of the nature and function of poetry and of language which is its native element. He rejected the freedoms of modernism, as he expressed it, “with passion”: “its loosening up of the matter of poetry to the point of charlatanism, its tendency to macabre forms of expression, the licentiousness of its linguistic combinations.” It is evident that he approaches here the Nazi rejection of degenerate art but he speaks as one who has earned the right to his rejection through years of rigorous dedication to a difficult craft and has a genuine alternative to offer. He has also, it should be remembered, a more respectable affiliation: the great critic of culture and defender of the purity and precision of words, Karl Kraus, to whom we owe the dictum: Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaid.
Weinheber saw himself as living in a period of cultural decline, of which the fashionable “licentiousness” in the use of language and the breakdown of poetic forms were an aspect. His response was to reaffirm the cultural tradition. “I have always”, he said, “felt myself to be only a conserver and a precursor: to the greater glory of the German language”. As the second epithet suggests, Weinheber saw his conservatism as a solution, pointing the way to a future beyond the present crisis and rescued from disintegration. Hence the creation of a substantial oeuvre embodying anew the qualitative standards of the endangered tradition, the insistence on formal definition being felt in the circumstances as a resource against dissolution. Weinheber does use free verse, but accommodating it to the tradition, using Hölderlin's hymns: and, possibly, also Rilke's elegies: as model and justification. His Hymns, of which an example is here offered, illustrate a disciplined departure from strict metrical patterns and strophes for the purpose of achieving energy and dynamic thrust. Predominantly dactylic in rhythm, they additionally preserve formality by observing the decorum of the grand style in their diction. They could be called Pindaric in the eighteenth-century sense of 'irregular', though the Greek odes are: as Congreve demonstrates: regular in the extreme.
Classic form and classic precedent notwithstanding, Weinheber is himself not classic. Indeed, writing in a period of dissolution and, if you will, new departures, he cannot be. He thought in classic metaphors and strove for classic balance, rejecting extremes. He saw man as the being of a middle condition placed between the supernal and the infernal, required to resist equally the temptations of hybris and the seductions of debasement and decadence, to fear the gods and withstand the demons. Thus, although one may well suspect a Nietzschean influence in his critique of cultural decay, the Nietzschean superman, the transvaluation of values and the dethronement of deity, are alien to him. His rejection of these in his hymn “To the Coming Man” is categorical. Indeed, he presents there the superman in terms which look curiously like an anticipation of the character and programme of the pseudo-superman, Hitler. Examining his own relations to the powers of the Reich Weinheber, if I might be tempted to a brief but not irrelevant digression, wrote: “Geehrt hat mich die Macht doch nicht gefragt ”, an ambiguous formulation which suggests that the powers honoured him but did not ask him what he thought or what as oracle he might have counselled them. Certainly, one asks oneself how the Nazis if they had read the poem could possibly have wished to honour such a man? Did they read his poetry at all? And what comfort or confirmation could they have derived from it?
The ambience of Weinheber's poetry is as far removed from the brave new world of the Nazi movement as it is from the serenity of the classical world-view. The mood and atmosphere are those of cultural pessimism; a reigning presence in it, that of Schopenhauer from whom Weinheber derives the epigraph for one of his poetic sequences, the “Heroic Trilogy”: “A happy life is impossible. The most that a man can hope for is an heroic one.” To this, and independent of Weinheber, one might add Brecht's famous assertion: “Unhappy is the land that has need of heroes.” Weinheber's conviction of the importance of heroism grows from his sense of the general ill hap; it has little to do, if anything, with military self-assertion or triumphalism. Rather, with him, it mutates into stoicism; his true heroes are in fact men of mind: the poets and thinkers who must preserve and assert the integrity of their vision against the corruptions of the time. Yet he knows that the man of mind is as likely to err as any other: to err even in his good intentions from the misdirection of feeling; that he is liable to cowardice, and can be seduced by the allurements of renown. The supernal and the infernal lay different traps for him.
That Weinheber saw the poet as hero had for consequence the laying upon himself of a heavy responsibility; it was a responsibility sanctioned by the classic, vatic view of the poet. The egotism involved, sanctioned though it might be by tradition, is expressed somewhat too superbly in a letter to a German academic, Sturm, who wrote to him in 1941 to express regret for having attempted to cross swords with him some seven years before. Weinheber wrote back:
I believe I did not at the time answer your letter. What after all could I have said to you or tried to explain? … Even at that period I already had the regal consciousness that after the death of [Stefan] George (1933) I was the first poet of the nation. It was this proud consciousness that made it impossible for me to reply …
George, it is pertinent to remark, had worn the prophet's mantle before Weinheber He had dreamt of a new Germany and himself assumed the task of training its élite. His two last volumes, Der Stern des Bundes [The Star of the League], 1913, and Das Neue Reich [The New Kingdom], 1928, had been the breviary of a young discipleship; but George, with a sovereign contempt for the Nazi rabble trying to appropriate his authority, had treated their overtures with implacable disdain and, disillusioned by reality's cheap caricature of his patrician vision, withdrawn into silence even before he withdrew to his death in Switzerland. That Weinheber allowed himself to be taken in by a sham or that he consented to take the sham as something halfway to his truth illustrates the weak foundation of his classic aspiration and his aristocratic stance. Behind the formal gesture was also a profound lack of assurance the reasons for which may be found in part in his biography. The family plunged into poverty by the early death of his father, he was put into an orphanage, separated from his brother and sister and later unable to pursue his studies. Then came the years of comparative neglect as writer which a proud spirit and the consciousness of high gifts made doubly difficult to bear.
These things formed the human weakness of the poet-as-hero. And Weinheber was well aware of the weakness. Hence the obsession with failure and defeat, hence too the self-castigation for his own capacity for cowardice and self-deception, which together are a recurrent note in a number of poems written over the years about himself – for he inclined to self-portraiture with the regularity of Rembrandt. Far from the harmony and balance which he aspired to and admired, he knew he was no classic. To Sturm, whom he had come to regard as a friend, he wrote in June 1941:
[My] work is strongly characterised by polarity; it is not unambivalent. Like life, like the created object, it; comprehends the yes-and-no. What is true today is false tomorrow … When my work is praised for its formal; finish that is of course, in sum, a nonsense. For, formal finish simply has to be there. Behind it is always the man who suffers, with hisfor and against, looking for a way out, cost what it may, a road that offers passage … The;upward man progresses, the more questionably dual the world becomes to him. For the primitive man; the world is simple. The brutal man has no idea of a triple nature. But this is the redemptive result of the; questioning dubiety.
The poetry of Weinheber is a poetry of contradictions, of doubt and divisions, reflecting a contradictory reality and presenting to us the poet himself “caught”, as Henry James said of Hedda Gabler, “in the fact of life”. He had one great reality before him paired with one great delusion: the grandeur of the German language and its literature and the corresponding greatness of an ideal German man. The first inspired and bore him to his own greatness: as German poet and purifier of the dialect of the tribe. The second, abetted by a compensatory egotism, led to the error and spiritual embarrassment of his involvement with the Nazis. He was forced to see too clearly that the times remained irredeemable by art and that German man was no more capable than any other of embodying or ushering in a higher civilisation: that, indeed, under his present delusions he was sunk into deeper barbarity. Weinheber had always pointed towards the abyss; in the moral debasement of the Third Reich he was forced to traverse it – till, robbed of all hopes and illusions, on 8 April 1945, with the sound of the Russian guns in his ears, he took his own life. The frightening loneliness of his existence in the Reich is poignantly recorded in the last of his birthday self-portraits, three years before his death, in 1942: the sequence entitled “Aged Fifty” and intended for publication in the (posthumously published) volume Hier ist das Wort [Here is the Word / This is My Word], 1947. The critic who wishes to judge the man behind the poems or to extract a consistent and definitive position from it might well say that they show us a guilty man unable to face his guilt. Such would be the verdict also of judge and jury. For another position it might help to invoke Chesterton. He said of Browning's The Ring and the Book that it was “the expression of the belief, it might almost be said of the discovery, that no man … ever lived who had not a little more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely to say for him.” Weinheber had more to say for himself than a reductive criticism will permit. He knew that he had morally compromised himself and failed to live up to his poetic office as he conceived it, but he also looked outward at circumstances and inward into his own heart. Thus it is not a simple beating of the breast that he gives us in the poems: he both excoriates and exculpates; he makes his admissions, backtracks, sidetracks, moves passionately to the counterattack. Weinheber's view of himself and his moral predicament comprehends, in fact, the contradictions: it does not cancel them out; nor does it move to a desiderated judgement. The man who suffers suffers in these poems in the mode of verbal music; the yes-and-no, the multifariousness of his soul and its experience is here: nothing annulled or reconciled but everything held in taut suspense in the loom of form.
Page(s) 79-85
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