An Epigraph from Pope

Alexander Pope (1668-1745)

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

(from "An Essay on Criticism"
in The Major Works, Pat Rogers, ed.
Oxford University Press, 2008
p. 19)

Joseph Roth and Poland After World War I

"Boot und Transportfuhrwerk im winterlichen Galizien" (1914-1918)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

IN THE MID-1920s, in a Europe that was as battered as ever by the First World War, Joseph Roth (who later wrote The Radetzky March) was earning his bread as a foreign correspondent for German newspapers. One such periodical was the Frankfurter Zeitung, mouthpiece for leftist circles in the Weimar Republic that was later shut down by the Nazis, only to resurrect itself after the Second World War as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Roth himself was far to the left, inclined to socialism, and he took the pen name 'Red Joseph' for the purposes of his political journalism. Also, his views and position in Weimar Germany were determined by other elements: he was a Jewish native of Galicia, now Poland, who had served (after years of reluctance) in the imperial army on the German side, and who indulged in an odd allegiance to the abolished monarchy, which he celebrated in part of his work.

His newspaper assignment was to travel in Poland, in Ukraine, and in a Russia that had been living under a Leninist system since 1917. (Later he would travel to Albania, Yugoslavia, the Saar region of Germany that had rejoined the country by referendum, Poland, and Italy.) Vladimir Lenin himself had just died in 1924. And Joseph Roth's perspective was, of course, directed by his life experiences. He had no prejudices against the coexistence of the plethora of European minorities. These were intended, per the ideals of the League of Nations, to form their own states by virtue of the ideal of self-determination, but they lived too intertwined with each other for it to be simple to draw a border map humanely. In that respect there is no warning in his writings of the German nationalism that already existed at the time, and certainly not of the Nazism. His stance toward the Russian government was staunchly optimistic, at first, and he was looking forward to seeing Leninist solutions to widespread problems of undereducation, poverty, sickness, and lack of dignity for the poor in a classist society. He also tinges his reporting with his strong adherence to religion.

He took a long time to send dispatches back, because he kept gathering more and more material before he put his pen to paper. I believe that one can easily notice from the quality and nature of his writing when the well of inspiration was overflowing and when it ran almost dry.* He also had a magisterial way of writing — he never mentions specific interviewees or quotes anybody, it seems; everything is noted from an infinite upwelling of knowledge, except where it throws a tangent into his intermittent analysis. In the course of his travels, he was assailed not by his surprisingly complacent interlocutors (they did not seem to be holding onto the grievances of the war, although it was uncanny for him to revisit some places where he had once been the invader), but by pests like bedbugs. Aside from physical afflictions like these, there is a peculiar untouchability in his reporter's persona, as if he were a sleepwalker through Galicia and the Soviet Union.

But he ended his travels by thinking that his socialist ideas were not being realized in every respect, and his optimism crashes every now and then in the reports. He also found, everywhere, the detritus of the war.

***

Excerpts from his reporting in Poland:

"Lemberg, die Stadt."

Es ist eine große Vermessenheit, Städte beschreiben zu wollen. [. . .] Städte verbergen viel und offenbaren viel, jede ist eine Einheit, jede eine Vielheit, jede hat mehr Zeit, als ein Berichterstatter, als ein Mensch, als eine Gruppe, als eine Nation.

and

Nationale und sprachliche Einheitlichkeit kann eine Stärke sein, nationale und sprachliche Vielfältigkeit ist es immer.

(November 22, 1924)

***

"Die Krüppel."

In Lemberg wurde der berühmte polnische Invalide begraben, über dessen demonstrativen, heroischen Selbstmord alle Zeitungen der Welt berichtet hatten. Dieser Invalide sprach in einer Versammlung seiner Kameraden über die gemeinsame Not, schloß mit einem Hochruf auf die polnische Republik und schoß sich eine Kugel durch den Kopf.

*

Wir haben Massengräber gesehen, verschimmelte Hände, ragend aus zugeschütteten Gruben, Oberschenkel an Drahtverhauen und abgetrennte Schädeldecken neben Latrinen. Wer aber weiß, wie Ruinen aussehen, die sich bewegen[. . .]? Wer hat schon gehende Krankenhäuser gesehen, eine Völkerwanderung der Stümpfe, eine Prozession der Überreste?

So war dieser Leichenzug.

"Karl I. in Galizien während der Gegenoffensive, die von Mitte Juli 1917 bis Anfang August andauerte. Hier trifft er am 22. Juli in Busk ein. Gemeinsam mit dem Generalobersten Böhm Ermolli schreitet Karl das Ehrenspalier ab"
(~ King Karl I in Galicia during the counteroffensive, which lasted from mid-July 1917 to the beginning of August. Here he arrives on July 22nd in Busk. With Colonel-General Böhm Ermolli, he paces down the honour guard.)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

*

[. . .] und über dem Leichenzug, knapp vor dem Knaben im weißen Hemd, der das mattschimmernde Metallkreuz trug, segelte eine dunkelblaue Wolke, zackig, wuchtig und schwer, und streckte vorne einen Zipfel aus, wie einen zerfetzten Zeigefinger, um den Krüppeln den Weg nach dem Friedhof zu weisen.

(November 23, 1924)

***

St. Zitakapelle in Dobrowlany, Galizien (1917)
By the K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle - Wien
In the Austrian National Library
via Wikimedia Commons

***

Translations (amateurish, with help from Google Translate):
Lemberg [Lviv], the City
It is a great presumptuousness to want to portray a city. [. . .] Cities reveal much and conceal much, each is a unity, each is a plurality, each has more time than a reporter, than a human being, than a group, than a nation.
National and linguistic unity may be a strength; national and linguistic diversity is always one.

The Cripples
In Lemberg was buried the famous Polish invalid of whose demonstrative and heroic suicide all the newspapers in the world had reported. This invalid spoke in an assembly of his comrades about their common need, ended with a paean to the Polish republic, and shot a bullet through his brain.
We have seen mass graves, moldy hands, stretching out of filled-in pits, thighs on wire barriers and severed skulls beside latrines. But who knows what ruins look like that move? Who has seen walking hospitals before, a mass migration of stumps, a parade of remains?
This funeral procession was that.
And above the funeral procession, barely in advance of the lad in a white shirt who bore the dimly shining metal cross, sailed a dark blue cloud, ragged, massive and heavy, and stretched in front of itself a tip like a torn forefinger, to point the cripples along the way to the cemetery.

***

Sources:
Reisen in die Ukraine und nach Russland, by Joseph Roth. Jan Bürger, ed. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - English)
Frankfurter Zeitung (Wikipedia - English)
Joseph Roth (Wikipedia - German)

* After rereading Jan Bürger's afterword in the edition that I have, it strikes me that perhaps I am misinterpreting. Roth apparently rarely thought he was out of material or inspiration:

"1926 gestand er den Redakteuren der Frankfurter Zeitung fast zwei Monate nach Ankunft in der Sowjetunion, dass er bis dahin noch gar nichts habe schreiben können. Dies habe mit der Überfülle und Intensität der neuen Eindrücke zu tun."

Keats's Charactery

John Keats was notoriously young, twenty-five years old when he died of tuberculosis in Rome, and at that time he was not basking in the venerable twilight of an acknowledged poetic master. He was, to some contemporaries, an upstart, and his readers partly ridiculed him.

I think it makes sense that the work he did influenced him to foreboding and a preoccupation with death, because besides writing poetry he also worked as a surgeon. His poem "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" I remember from Grade 12 English Literature class as a time-overleaping twin to John Milton's earlier 17th-century sonnet "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"; and it is a prime example of the poet's foreboding strain.

"Portrait of Keats, listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath"
Joseph Severn (ca. 1845)
via Wikimedia Commons

"When I have Fears" is from the year 1818; Keats likely had not developed tuberculosis yet, and he died years later in 1821. That said, Keats's brother had already been ill, offering reasonable grounds for Keats to feel a semi-medieval fascination with Death.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.-*

(I wonder what the last two-and-a-half-lines mean. Might they mean that death is so all-devouring that even we forget even the warmest desires in life, when its warning shadow overcasts our consciousness?)

* From: "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" on Wikipedia
further information from "John Keats" and "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"

A Toast To Winter, Part III: Coleridge

According to the vague information imparted by the high school English Literature course that I have mentioned many times before, and by scraps of independent reading since, Samuel Taylor Coleridge stood with William Wordsworth like the twin pillars of Gibraltar at the brink not of the Atlantic Ocean, but of the Romantic Movement. Returning their attention to the working man and his plight, their poems were expressed in simple language. They must have been unbearably shocking after the lofty vocabulary, the yoked heroic couplets, and the encyclopaedias' worth of classical allusions that peppered poems before this time.

***

Frost at Midnight

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[. . .]

On the St. Ann's River Below Quebec
Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872)
via Wikimedia Commons

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

*

Source: Frost at Midnight (Wikipedia)

Poem written February 1798.

Frost at Midnight (Wikisource)

A Toast To Winter: Part II, Shakespeare's Winter Sonnet

For years I have wanted to write about this poem, but it has come so freshly to mind every year and the different lines have had such different meanings — and have faded in and out of focus in relation to each other, some sometimes more distinct in my mind than others — that it seemed important to wait until the right moment. Or, perhaps, to write about it repeatedly from various perspectives.

First I encountered it in school; and in university when walking past the trees on campus when they had lost their leaf, looked blackened like the embers in the poem, and a wintry sun was sinking behind the buildings, I would think of it often. It also presented, retrospectively, a metaphor for the wasteland I felt I had passed through before I reached university.

But then it also had half a sacred aspect to me, with its choirs and the thought of eternity, and I pictured a ruined abbey or a church in the background of the scenery — even though I generally don't read Shakespeare for descriptions of scenery.

At any rate I felt that it is a poem that will likely reveal its meaning even more to me the older I am — even if the arc of Shakespeare's sonnets still seems to me to be a rather whiny paean to ego, adorned undeservedly with some beautiful verses, and more obsessed with (the narrator's own, and vicariously the narrator's through those of his love objects) youth and beauty, and by the grovelling fear of death, than ennobled by true love of another. That said, I am clearly forming a very harsh judgment and I haven't read any proper critics who have presented the sonnet cycle in a similar light.

***

'Ruins of the Oybin (Dreamer)'
Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1835
Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum
Via Wikimedia Commons

***

SONNET LXXIII
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
  This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

*******

Source:
Wikipedia: "Sonnet 73"

A Toast To Winter: Part I, Matthias Claudius

The days have become so short now, and as grey as if dredged up from the seabed on a hazy northern morning, and at -6°C so cold by the measure of early German winters, that one solution to the chill fog that invades the mind too might seem to be to dive into summer literature. But instead I will try the cure by 'hair of the dog,' and mention books and poems and plays that celebrate, or at least describe, winter.

FIRST, a poem. Matthias Claudius is a German poet whose subjects take him through the everyday of a time span that seems broader, because I think it is still so relatable, than the swathe of the 18th and 19th century (1740 to 1815) that he personally knew. Transformed into songs, like Der Mond ist aufgegangen and, in the realm of the classics, 'Death and the Maiden,' his verse made him familiar even in my Canadian-German household in the 1990s.

To illustrate the poem I have chosen here, a figure of Winter would be far more appropriate, gnarled and foreboding or gleefully hard as described. But instead I have chosen some rather more tame and cheerful pictures by Ludwig Richter.

***


Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen

Der Winter ist ein rechter Mann,
    Kernfest und auf die Dauer;
Sein Fleisch fühlt sich wie Eisen an,
    Und scheut nicht süß noch sauer.
War je ein Mann gesund, ist er's;
    Er krankt und kränkelt nimmer,
Weiß nichts von Nachtschweiß noch Vapeurs,
    Und schläft im kalten Zimmer.
Er zieht sein Hemd im Freien an,
    Und läßt's vorher nicht wärmen;
Und spottet über Fluß im Zahn
    Und Kolik in Gedärmen.
Aus Blumen und aus Vogelsang
    Weiß er sich nichts zu machen,
Haßt warmen Drang und warmen Klang
    Und alle warme Sachen.
Doch wenn die Füchse bellen sehr,
    Wenn's Holz im Ofen knittert,
Und um den Ofen Knecht und Herr
    Die Hände reibt und zittert;
Wenn Stein und Bein vor Frost zerbricht
    Und Teich' und Seen krachen;
Das klingt ihm gut, das haßt er nicht,
    Denn will er sich tot lachen. –
Sein Schloß von Eis liegt ganz hinaus
    Beim Nordpol an dem Strande;
Doch hat er auch ein Sommerhaus
    Im lieben Schweizerlande.
Da ist er denn bald dort bald hier,
    Gut Regiment zu führen.
Und wenn er durchzieht, stehen wir
    Und sehn ihn an und frieren.

*

A spur-of-the-moment translation by me. (The last verse is pure guesswork.)

A Song
to be sung behind the stove

Winter is an honest man,
Sound as a nut and long enduring;
His flesh feels firm as iron
And fears not sweet nor sour.

If ever a man was well, he is;
He falls sick or sickens never,
Night sweats or vapors knows he not,
And sleeps in a chilly chamber.

He pulls his shirt on in the open
And lets it not be warmed before;
And jeers at seepages of teeth
And colic of the bowels.

For flowers and the song of birds
He has no use whatever,
Hates warm throngs and hates warm tones
And hates warm things altogether.

Yet when the foxes bark in force,
The logs in the stove are crackling
And around the stove the man and master
Rub their hands and shiver;

When stone and bone crack in the frost
And ponds and lakes do shatter;
It pleases his ear, he hates it not,
For he wants to die of laughing.

His ice palace lies far away
At the North Pole near the shore;
And yet he has a summer house
In dear old Switzerland.

There he is — now there, now here —
To mount his regime well.
And when he passes through, we stand
And look at him and freeze.

***

Sources:
Wikipedia: "Matthias Claudius" (English language)
Spiegel Online: Project Gutenberg: "Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote - Kapitel 164" (German language)

The poem was written in 1782 — "Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen" (September 18, 2013) on the blog "Gedichtauswahl begründet"

Illustration of Der alte Turmhahn by Eduard Mörike
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1855
Via Wikimedia Commons

Auszug der Sennen
Adrian Ludwig Richter, 1827
Oil on canvas
Via Wikimedia Commons

Matthias Claudius: Der Wandsbecker Bote
Lead pencil sketch by Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), Winter landscape with snowman and sleigh
via Wikimedia Commons

To the Now-Arrived, Cold Wintertide

A poem by Johannes Rist (with translations interlarded):

Auf die nunmehr angekommene kalte Winterszeit

Der Winter hat sich angefangen,
Der Schnee bedeckt das ganze Land,
Der Sommer ist hinweggegangen,
Der Wald hat sich in Reif verwandt.

Winter has itself begun, the snow bedecks the land entire; the summer has traversed away, the woods turned over into rime.

Die Wiesen sind von Frost versehret
Die Felder glänzen wie Metall,
Die Blumen sind in Eis verkehret,
Die Flüsse stehn wie harter Stahl.

The pastures are by frost consumed, the fields are glistening as if metal; the flow'rs into ice apostate, the rivers stand like hardy