Reading Georg Trakl & Those Who Read Georg Trakl

In Belle Ombre, John Knowles writes "The Afterlives of Georg Trakl," an essay that reads Trakl through the reading of others, including Heidegger, Hölderlin, and German poet Lutz Seiler, whose novel Kruso "enters in its own way into the atmosphere of Trakl’s poems, the sense of the poems as landscape." More:

Using much of Seiler’s own formative experience as a writer, the novel is set in the last years of the East German Democratic Republic. It follows the experience of a young man, Ed, as he abandons the academic study of Trakl’s poems after the traumatic death of his girlfriend and makes for the island of Hiddensee, just off the north German coast, his mind held captive by a “memory hoard” of German lyric poetry – that of Trakl and others. On Hiddensee, an unaccounted for individual, without the necessary papers, he finds work in a hotel kitchen and meets the central character, Kruso. Something of the island has already appeared as he recites Trakl’s poems to himself. “The sound of each word became associated with the image of a vast, cool landscape that completely captivated Ed; white, brown, blue, an utter mystery”.

In the hotel on Hiddensee, Ed discovers a counter-cultural world of people who can no longer live the ordinary lives demanded of them in East Germany. They seek deliverance, Kruso explains “from a job. From a husband. From a state. From the past.” In Kruso’s vision the island is a place of refuge and he wants to create a community, finding places to stay for the many who have drifted towards the island. In this refuge, recited words have a particular strength, not just for Ed, but for Kruso also. Poetry becomes a kind of resistance and the sound of recited words merges with the noises of the island in Kruso’s explanation, “every noise is a cavern, a language … you live amidst noise. And that’s the only reason you ask what it means: you have to say it all one hundred times to yourself. You can forget what the words mean … You just keep on talking softly to yourself, with your own voice, you knock at the words’ door with your voice”. Kruso and Ed need to find a way to speak their own words, but Kruso is also describing the obsessive, repeated words of Trakl’s poetry – the way it enters its own particular, idiosyncratic language, as Trakl continues, in Kruso’s words, to “knock at the words’ door” with his voice.

Read it all at Belle Ombre.