Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection "Gloria!" (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s... more
Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection "Gloria!" (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s "Aktion". Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.
07-05-2018, Conference of the "Gesellschaft der Germanisten Rumäniens", Oradea, Romania --- War literature often employs rather schematic spatial setups, and the development of such setups is closely related to the development of modern... more
07-05-2018, Conference of the "Gesellschaft der Germanisten Rumäniens", Oradea, Romania --- War literature often employs rather schematic spatial setups, and the development of such setups is closely related to the development of modern warfare. After a brief overview of different types of spatial representation in poems from World War I, the article interprets two poems by Wilhelm Klemm who seem to use a spatial model that differs from more conventional works of the same time. The theory of semiotic subjects developed by Jurij M. Lotman is used to make sense of this idiosyncratic spatial model.
