Des Häschens Kind, der kleine Has (The Little Hare, Child of the Hare): On the Poet Ernst Herbeck’s Totem Animal
Most of the recent literature we persist in reading seems inane only a few years later. Or at least, and so far as I am concerned, very little of it has stood the test of time as well as the poems written by Ernst Herbeck from around 1960 onward in his mental hospital in Gugging.
I first came upon Herbeck’s eccentric figures of speech in 1966. I remember sitting in the Rylands Library in Manchester reading a work on the calamitous Carl Sternheim, and every now and then, as if to refresh my mind, picking up a little volume published by dtv, Schizophrenie und Sprache (“Schizophrenia and Language”) and finding myself amazed by the brilliance of the riddling verbal images conjured up, evidently at random, by this most unfortunate of poets. Today, such sequences of words as Firn der Schnee das Eis gefriert (“Firn the snow the ice freezes”) or Blau. Die Rote Farbe. Die Gelbe Farbe. Die Dunkelgrüne. Der Himmel ELLENO (“Blue. The Red Color. The Yellow Color. The Dark Green. The sky ELLENO”) still seem to me to verge on the frontiers of a breathless other world.
Again and again passages of slight distortion and gentle resignation remind one of the way in which Matthias Claudius sometimes manages, with a single semitone or pause, to induce a momentary feeling of levitation in the reader. Ernst Herbeck writes: “Bright we read in the misty sky / How stout the winter days. Are.” There is probably no greater sense of both distance and closeness anywhere in literature. Herbeck’s poems show us the world in reverse perspective. Everything is contained in a tiny circular image.
It is astonishing that over and beyond his own poems Herbeck also gave us a theory of poetics in a few statements of principle. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an oral way of shaping history in slow motion.… Poetry is also antipathetic to reality, and weighs more heavily. Poetry transfers authority to the pupil. The pupil learns poetry; and that is the history in the book. We learn poetry from the animal in the woods. Gazelles are famous historians.”
Ernst Herbeck, who spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital, hardly knew the contemporary history of Austria and Germany at first hand, but he remembered Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the enthusiasm with which Vienna received him, and other festive occasions of the past. A Christmas poem not only mentions the inevitable snow and lighted candles, but contains references to banners, warfare, and downfall.
Wartime Christmas as Goebbels envisaged it, and as recalled to memory by Kluge and Reitz, flares up again in Herbeck’s poetry. A poem entitled “Ins Stammbuch” (“Taken to Heart”) and beginning with the lines “der Tag ist auf die gut Deutsche / Eiche Tot der vergangen Heid” (“the day is risen the good German / oak Dead the departed heathen”) gives us more to think about than does the professional disposal of our burden of guilt and the past. It seems to me actually uncanny that Herbeck wrote the following poem in that historic year 1989. I wish all my countrymen would take it to heart.
Das Schwert ist eine seriöse deutsche
Waffe und wird von den Gothen und
wird von den ausserstehenden Germanen
verwendet; bis auf den
heutigen Tag. Dies im gesamtdeutschen
Raum (Germanien).
(The sword is a serious German
weapon used by the Goths
and used by the Germanic
peoples farther afield; up to the
present day. And this in the whole
German area [Germania].)
However, I do not mean to write on Ernst Herbeck’s concept of national history here, but on his attempts to record the history of his own family and descent in complex mythological terms. In her book Die Ver-rückung der Sprache (“The Dis-placement of Language”), Gisela Steinlechner has shown that the work of Herbeck is full of anthropomorphic portraits of animals. One reason for this is that the poet’s psychiatrist often gave him titles such as “The Zebra,” “The Giraffe” as exercises, so that the patient could write about them. Since Herbeck in general kept closely to the subjects he was offered, he produced a whole bestiary — a child’s primer confirming, if ironically, the general validity of the taxonomic order we have devised. “The raven leads the devout,” “The owl loves children,” “The zebra runs through broad fields,” and “The kangaroo leans on its support”—none of this is very disturbing. Yet Herbeck also writes of unknown species not listed in zoological encyclopedias, making us suspect that the animals are not so very different from each other, or we ultimately as different from them as we would like to think. We come upon a being that is half lamb, half cat in Herbeck, as we do in the synagogue mentioned by Franz Kafka.
Much more mysterious than these strange creatures, however, is the symbolic hare in Herbeck’s work, a creature that the author related to the question of his own origin. He gives only the most cursory and singular facts about his early history. Everything to do with the family and relations is a mystery to him. “One question, please!” he writes. “Are the son-in-law’s children father-in-law to their siblings? I can’t work it out! Please tell me, and thank you.” In fact to Herbeck, doomed to lifelong celibacy, the most inscrutable feature of these relationships was the idea of married life, on which he makes only a few vague and extremely innocent comments.
Die Ehe ist vorbildlich f. Mann und Frau
in jeder Hinsicht. Sie wird meistens ein
gegangen und geschlossen. Nach der Verlobung
und. Je länger sie dauert desto
kürzer und länger das Dasein. Eines Hasen
oder so.
(Marriage is the model for man and wife
in every respect. You usually enter into
it, you celebrate it. After the engagement
and. The longer it lasts the
shorter and longer the existence.
Of a hare or suchlike.)
What happens after that “and” and the full stop is something the writer cannot or will not envisage. On the other hand, he knows that conjugal life may eventually produce a hare. It is not so easy to describe how the act of procreation works. Perhaps it is not so much a sexual act as a kind of spontaneous reproduction, even magic.
Der Zauberer zaubert Sachen:
Kleine Hasen. Tücher. Eier.
Er zaubert wiederholt.
Er steckt das Tuch in den Zylinder
und zieht es wieder heraus
es ist ein zahmer Hase dabei.
(The conjuror conjures things up:
little hares. Scarves. Eggs.
He keeps on doing magic.