Doeblin’s Eulogy for Arno Holz
In his funeral oration for the poet Arno Holz (1863-1929), Doeblin reveals his admiration for a leading figure of the Naturalism movement in German literature of the 1890s, who refused to back down when that movement was crushed by the combined effects of bourgeois philistinism and aesthetic “art for art’s sake” elitism.
Döblin’s collected Essays on Literature contain three pieces on Arno Holz. Below we present his graveside eulogy to the poet. The other two pieces are a lecture Döblin gave under the auspices of the Academy of Arts, and his lengthy Introduction to a post-WW2 selection of Holz’s works.
Web searches reveal almost nothing in English about Holz. The only translations of his poems we have found are by a California musicologist, David Dodd (editor of an annotated collection of Grateful Dead lyrics), whose web page, last updated in 1999, gives five Holz translations: two from the first edition of the poem-cycle Phantasus (1898-9), and three from the much expanded later edition (1924-5). See http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/holz.html
Holz’s birthday is coming up on 26 April. We plan to commemorate it with the publication on this site of more of his poems.
IN CELEBRATION OF ARNO HOLZ
By Alfred Döblin
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
How
long already
since I… saw… the Moon!
In the
musty room,
hunched over books,
days,
weeks, months
on end,
I sat … and wrote!
Things that once tormented me, things
that once
moved me to joy,
things from a thousand years ago, things that never were,
things,
things, things,
things!
……
How… far all this now lies from me! … How
outlandishly distant!
Yes, it is … Autumn! Autumn … in me too!
Autumn!
Gone … the time when I still hoped to cheer! … Gone
the time, when yet
I could be
happy!
……
Only
one thing now, one!
The
musty
bare, narrow lonely
room,
the chair, the desk, the
yellow pool of light, … the … deathpale books
a
wasteland … paper
and
“things” … “things” … “things”,
“things!”
– Arno Holz
Thus did he speak, the man who lies here. Where there is an artist’s striving, there too, never far away, are grief, despair and loneliness. And when in Germany an artist dies, the complaints and accusations of being misunderstood go almost without saying. But around the man who lies here there is something special. The extent of the ignoring, the degree of the rejection of an indefatigably toiling artist, conscious to the highest level of his goal: even in Germany this is almost without parallel. He was a man of words, and that which filled him to bursting came across his lips, these complaints, accusations, threats, outbreaks of despair; he called himself more afflicted than Job, the most disowned of all the disowned, the most despised of all the despised, the most wretched of all wretches.
And thrust so into such terrible isolation and robbed of cordial interaction with a sympathetic public, how is it possible that the man who lies here could hold his head high for decades, cast down again and again, filled ever more with bitterness and yet never really despairing and only in odd moments of weakness bowing in resignation, he, more afflicted than Job, the most disowned of all the disowned, the most despised of all the despised, the last of all the last.
Yes, he was all of these, and at the same time was not. What held his head up is not only his robust East Prussian nature, his joy in life, his pleasure in this existence, even all this would have been shattered by such a cataract of misfortunes; neither is it the fanaticism of the obsessed, of someone driven by a single idea; no such fanatic could have withstood such decades of roadblocking No and No. Here, I believe, we can discern a secret of Arno Holz’s life course and fate, at least a corner of the sheet that lies over this life can be lifted.
When Arno Holz was twenty-two years old his first work appeared, the first expression that was a stirring of the true Arno Holz: the Book of Time. And if you flick through this book you stumble on a poem formed of unlucky thirteen lines, depicting the bitter fate of a poet dying in his attic room. His fate runs its course while at the same time imagination and dreams bloom ever more ecstatically and splendidly. This poem of unlucky thirteen lines bears the remarkable and astonishing title “Phantasus”; and look, what a truth, what remarkable prescience: it depicts the actual fate to come of Arno Holz! How can it be explained that at the start of his career, in these unlucky thirteen lines, he hit upon, was able to hit upon, what actually was to come, above all the binding of his life to a proliferating imagination, the painful isolation and the end?
Things of this kind can only be presaged when they are also … willed! Deep down, I like to suspect, this career was the one he wanted! There was a layer in his mind that required not just conflict but also isolation, perhaps also the bitterness, the rejections, something in him … guarded itself, despite all the pain; something very tender wrapped itself in such a dreadful cloak and a shell and found security. We cannot let much air in on the secret to which the young man’s poem with thirteen lines leads. But this strange prophecy, this knowledge, allows a peep behind the arras of this apparently rock-hard gnarly nature, and behind the secret of how it is possible that he could live, an artist of the first rank, with such a cruel fate, as the most disowned of all the disowned, the most despised of all the despised, the last of all the last. It is pleasant at least to suspect that he, the man now deceased, in a secretive way was armoured against his Fate.
I have to ask, here where this artist and fighter lies, what was he fighting for and what was his capability. His role was, is and will be: to introduce into Germany a breach with a rotten and inauthentic tradition, and help to complete it. In this necessary battle and in his contribution to it he is a model, and a parallel phenomenon to those flag-bearers of the 18th century, of Lessing, the Enlightenment philosopher and guide. He initiated a breach with a hollow tradition and was the first and strongest in Germany to declare himself for the present day and the big city. He rose up against turbid imitation, second-hand things, against the hymnic, fake Orpheistic, against haughty esotericism, and although he had soon to be the most esoteric of all, he was at his strongest here and among us. He stepped forward in opposition to the artificial language of Geibel and George, and urged attention to the natural speech of the people and its melody. He had to be radical, for despite their hollowness those others remained strong in the face of every assault, because they were in league with Tradition and a bad moribund ideal of Education.
It is not true that he was borne in on a wave of Naturalism, a flood, and that when the ebb tide came, Arno Holz lay for the rest of his life on the beach. From the very start he was allied with the liveliest most progressive forces of the life of the mind, he said so and knew that every poetic technique is closely woven in with the conditions of life of the nation; but these change, and as they do so the technique is subsumed by the historical change in Things.
Others who learned from him swung, once the breakthrough movement abated, back to the old previously contested camp, but Holz remained standing on the contested ground whether any saw him or not, whether any named him or not, always in the first place; even the later breakthroughs defined as Expressionism came as no surprise to him, he had already long before grasped the vital fundamental laws of this movement, and they were his current practice.
I speak on behalf of the Section for Literature of the Academy of Arts, and since caring for and promoting the German language is one of our tasks, it is my duty to draw attention to Arno Holz, who was one of our members and is now departed. I have drawn attention to him, for he mastered this language splendidly, in the most splendid way, with the strictest sense of responsibility and immense capability. And what must be celebrated is not only the strength of this achievement, but also its uniqueness. For he mastered this language in a German, I should say the most German, manner.
Before us lies the work “Phantasus”, which he himself called “my Giant-Phantasus-Nonplusultra-Poem”. The dreadful awe that so horrified the man during his lifetime now lies over his Grand-Masterly baroque book. Here, be assured, a creator of language is at work. He who wrote this was no magister, no Gottsched, though people flung these words at him; he had a theorising trait such as many heads of true ingenuity share. That this actual work was not once read and celebrated by the “friends of literature”, that authors do not learn from it, that they orient their language unchanged according to clapped-out models and ancient meters, is no good indicator of the feeling for language in our time. He set out clearly the primal German formula for the lyric, which must eschew as its goal all music via words, and which must be carried entirely by the rhythm that emanates from the expression. Whatever your individual stance, they are fertile ground, the thoughts of Holz and this work Phantasus, for lyrical poetry and prose alike!
He lived shut up in his room like a Tibetan monk who will be buried in the earth and who speaks only with his demons, and there with them his ideas and speculations gradually expanded his work beyond all bounds, realism and surrealism melted into one another, this epic-lyric came to include the encyclopaedic, as well as monstrously comical images. The deeper the solitude, the more powerful the phantastical expansion. Now the pioneer lies still and at peace, in the same peace in which many of his opponents lie – in which we shall all lie. His torch burns on. The blade he bore aloft has not turned to rusty iron, it will flourish again in other hands.
Into the hot anonymity of fire you lay yourself now, you brave man, you Atlas-strong bearer of misfortune and bitterness. Receive our thanks for everything, brave man, proud dead brother.
NOTES
This poem reads: „ Ihm mit Staunen blickt’ ich nach; / Doch, wenn mir die Kraft gebrach, / Um ihm nachzuringen, / Dacht’ ich bang: genug! genug! / Brechen müſſen bei dem Flug / Endlich ſeine Schwingen. / Und es kam, wie ich gedacht; / Um ſein frühes Grab bei Nacht / Flattert die Phaläne; Wo ſo oft er bei mir ſaß, / Blieb ich einſam, und ins Glas / Rieſelt eine Thräne.“ (I looked back on him astonished. Truly, when my strength to wrestle back to him was gone, I thought in fear: enough, enough! As he flees, his jauntiness must break at last. And it happened as I had thought: a moth flutters around his early grave at night. Where he sat by me so often I remained alone, and into the glass a tear trickles.)
Emanuel Geibel (1815-84): popular writer and lyricist.
Stefan George (1868-1933): leading advocate of art for art’s sake; headed a clique of young male writers.
The final version of Phantasus, published in the mid-1920s, covered some 1300 pages.
Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66): Enlightenment writer, dramatist and theorist of language. His efforts to standardise literary German around the linguistic norms of Saxony aroused fierce opposition from other regions.
