'SCHRIFT ZAGT BLASSES UNBEKANNT': THE POETRY OF AUGUST STRAMM (1874–1915). (April 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kramer, Andreas
• Is Part Of: Oxford German studies. Volume 42:Number 1(2013)
• Page Start: 38
• Page End: 56
• Publication Date: 2013-04
• Subjects: August Stramm -- experimentation -- First World War -- sexuality -- violence -- the individual; German literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; German philology -- Periodicals; 830.9
• DOI: 10.1179/0078719113Z.00000000025
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0078-7191

Abstract

Abstract : This essay examines the radical innovations in language and form on display in Stramm's poems, from the early nature poems and 'Du. Liebesgedichte' to the late war poems. It focuses in particular on the radical forms of experience and subjectivity that such innovations convey. The essay is organized around various tropes of movement and mobility, offering in-depth readings of key poems to discuss how Stramm's spare yet formalized language points to mobile, shifting and traumatic subjectivities, all the way to the final war poems in which the twin poles of Expressionism – modernist alienation and redemptive articulation – seem to coincide.