7 - Between Kahlschlag and New Sensibilities: Notes toward a Poetics of Thought after Gottfried Benn

Summary

One main poetic, philological, and, in parts, philosophical project after 1945 was the “purification” of the ideologically corrupted German language. From Victor Klemperer's Lingua tertii imperii to Karl Jaspers and Dolf Sternberger's periodical Die Wandlung (1945–49; The Transformation) to the latter's Aus dem Wörterbuch eines Unmenschen (1957; From the Dictionary of an Inhuman Person), the common aim was to enable German to regain its linguistic credibility. Their aim was not only to rid German of its Nazi jargon but also to shed light on the language's darker zones from which this jargon had emerged. The question that troubled these intellectuals was whether the ideological vocabulary of National Socialist ideology was inherent to German or just a temporary aberration. The poetic equivalent to those attempts at a forensic analysis of the German language was the so-called Kahlschlag-Dichtung (clear cutting poetry), of which Günter Eich is perhaps the best-known proponent. At the same time, Paul Celan began to develop an alternative poetic register in German, hitherto unheard of in its uncompromising approach to overturning linguistic convention.

One common denominator of these linguistic and poetic endeavors to work with and through a highly compromised language was the underlying, or implicit, assumption that a linguistically conscious form of cultural discourse — be it in literary criticism, philosophy, philology, or indeed poetry — can have a moral message, if not an ethical imperative. Or to modify Rilke: Du mußt deine Sprache ändern (you have to change your language), suggesting that it was possible to change one's intellectual and social behavior by changing one's language use.