Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
was born in Salzburg in a rather wealthy family. His father was Protestant and his mother Catholic; he saw little of either of them as a child and seems to have transferred his affections to his older sister Margarete. There is no doubt that he was in love with her in a romantic and not at all platonic sense. He started writing very young, both poetry and theatre plays, and he discovered drugs soon after that. He dropped out of high school to enter a pharmacy apprenticeship instead, probably in order to gain free access to cocaine.
He was conscripted in 1914 as a "sanitary assistant", and as such witnessed the battle of Grodek before having to attend to a hundred severely wounded participants, several of whom killed themselves while under his watch. That triggered a burst of dementia in him, so he was promptly interned in a lunatic asylum in Cracow where he died of an overdose of cocaine. Given his profession and his experience with this substance, it probably wasn't an accident.
His most famous poem is probably
Im Herbst, but I like Grodek better.
Here is the original, and
here is a translation.
I don't have much in way of commentary - the good thing with expressionism is that it expresses itself very well on its own. I do believe this poem captures the unique mix of violence, guilt, and surreal drug-induced visions of the apocalypse that has flourished throughout the 20th century.
And tomorrow, a female!
(You will have noticed that we've departed from a strict chronological order these last few entries; it'll go on being a bit jumbled til the end I'm afraid. It seems to make more sense this way, somehow)