Alfred Lichtenstein (1889–1914)

Alfred Lichtenstein probably wouldn't have cared to be seen forever mostly in uniform, but that's the image that survived the tumult of the century into which he had barely stepped before getting killed in 1914, at Somme. He was then 25, a Jewish middle-class son, with a fresh law diploma and a bunch of poems already published and esteemed.

The collection I read is presumably of all still extant--the last poems he had sent from the front to several friends; a good deal of what survived the show more WWI would get lost in the WWII.

Lichtenstein started out with many voices-- the uncertain beginner, now chirping now clowning--and found his home in an expressionist mode that produced visions of Trakl-like gloom and a pre-surrealist black humour. He had a literary alter-ego he had named Kuno Kohn, not a pseudonym but a heteronym, like Pessoa's, except that he didn't use him only to double his utterances, but as a scapegoat, an object of (personal) derision as well as pity.

Reading Lichtenstein's description of the grotesque Kohn--he is ugly, hunchbacked, has a beardless furrowed face and old eyes ringed with shadows--I had to think about Bruno Schulz's graphic representations of himself as a hunchbacked dwarf with a similarly stricken and anguished expression.

Both men projected an abject image of themselves that can't have been other than what the world reflected to them... as Jews.

If Lichtenstein appears less self-lacerating, maybe it's simply that he died at half the Schulz's age...

Another curiosity is the cycle of "soldier" poems Lichtenstein wrote in 1912-13, when he was just a recruit going through the obligatory military service. Time and again I had to remind myself that these predated war--so strong is his sense of imminent calamity and death.

I have to quote a little, just to give a taste of his music and (dominant) style, particularly where it so originally (IMO) mixes tragedy and black humour. E.g.:

Angst (11. April 1913)

Wald und Flur liegt tot in Schutt und Scherben.
Himmel klebt an Städten wie ein Gas.
Alle Menschen müssen sterben.
Glück und Glas, wie bald bricht das.

Stunden rinnen matt wie trübe Flüsse
Durch der Stuben parfümierten Sumpf.
Spürst du die Pistolenschüsse--
Ist der Kopf noch auf dem Rumpf.

(Forest and fields lie dead in rubble and shards.
The sky sticks to towns like a gas.
Everybody must die.
Joy and glass, they break so fast.

Hours flow dull like muddy rivers
Through the barracks' perfumed bog.
Do you feel the gunfire--
Is the head still on top.)

(I couldn't resist playing the poet a bit, trying to keep some rhyme. :))

From one of Kuno's poems:

Mein Sterben ist stumm
Und ohne Bilder...

Ohne Erlösung ---

My dying is mute and without pictures... without deliverance. show less