Cities and Trenches - Interpreting Expressionist Poetry
Many students find it extremely difficult to interpret poetry. This is problematic insofar as poetry interpretation is firmly anchored in most German curricula. What is not even clear to many is that with a few simple means you can get to the bottom of almost every poem. This becomes particularly clear in the example of expressionist poetry.
Marks of the expressionist era
Poetry is difficult to interpret at the precise moment where it is in a vacuum. In fact, she never does, she is always a child of her time: a result of the socio-cultural developments and political events with which the poets were confronted.
- Because you can only meaningfully interpret poetry if you have a certain basic knowledge of the related Epoch, your first step should always be to an encyclopedia that gives you this knowledge. It hardly matters whether it is Kindler's literary dictionary or Wikipedia. Take this step seriously. Even if you only spend five minutes on the subject, it will make a huge difference.
- If you are into Expressionism in the literature First and foremost, you will find that this current was a German phenomenon that started (mainly) in the 1910s. In terms of content, the main focus was on the loss of identity in urban areas. The mechanized, industrialized bourgeois society, which included the individual spatially as well as psychologically and emotionally. The expressionist movement saw itself as an attempt at liberation from this social corset.
- The First World War represented a decisive turning point within the epoch. Initially perceived as the redeeming upheaval, many of the still young Expressionists turned to the Trenches that it was by no means the longed-for new age, but a new summit of the Dehumanization. Now it was no longer just the cities that were a major theme of the movement, but also the atrocities of war. The processing of these trauma is particularly clear in Georg Trakl's last poems, which he wrote before his death in November 1914.
The interpretation of poetry begins with the author
- As essential as the time of writing is for access to poems, the authors themselves are just as important. Anyone who familiarizes themselves even a little with a poet's bioography will have a completely different view of his work. Poetry is in most cases a much more personal expression of a writer than is the case with prose. That is why the author's life is the best key to reading.
- An example is Gottfried Benn, whose expressionistic poems "Kleine Aster" and "Mann und Frau go durch die Krebsbarracke" are much easier to understand if you know that their author was a specialist in skin and venereal diseases and was an assistant in pathology around the time those poems were written. It is no coincidence that these works were created as part of the so-called Morgue cycle (Morgue = morgue). It is superfluous to note that the works are a processing of his experiences and feelings at that time. Here, too, the dehumanization typical of the epoch is a very central issue.
Most poems are written in the first person, but there are exceptions to this rule. …
In summary, it can be said that you can acquire incredibly practical tools for interpreting poems with just ten minutes of research. Of course, expressionist poetry could be even better with a solid basic knowledge of literary stylistic devices deciphering it, but even without knowing what an ellipse or an iambus is, a lot can be learned from a poem get out.