Georg Trakl: a Romantic in wartime

Abstract

This paper seeks to indicate that the presence of the First World War in the poetry of Georg Trakl is inextricably entangled with his dark worldview, in which man is seen as an unavoidably misfortunate being. If on the one hand a romantic longing for purity, beauty, and goodness remains in this poetry, on the other hand such longing is continually refuted by menacing images of the evil inherent in the world - among which the images of the Great War impose themselves perhaps as the most terrifying. In order to show the mentioned connection, we shall first explore the experience of the prevalence of evil in the poem "De Profundis" (De Profundis), written before the outbreak of the War, and secondly we shall analyze that experience in the poems "Grodek" (Grodek) and "Lament" (Klage), in which it is directly related to the War.