Latrine (poem)

He quotes the poem Andenken (Remembrance) by Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who was particularly revered during the Nazi era, and contrasts it with a present marked by illness and death.

Latrine is considered a typical work of the genre called "clear-cutting literature" (German: Kahlschlagliteratur) and is one of Günter Eich's best-known poems.

The poem begins with the verses: „Über stinkendem Graben, Papier voll Blut und Urin, umschwirrt von funkelnden Fliegen, hocke ich in den Knien“.

"[2] The genesis of Latrine has often been attributed to Eich's time as an American prisoner of war, where he was interned as a former soldier of the German Armed Forces in the "Golden Mile" camp near Sinzig and Remagen from April to the summer of 1945.

[4] In 1948, Eich included the poem in his poetry collection Remote Farmsteads, published by Georg Kurt Schauer with four woodcuts by Karl Rössing [de].

"[1][9] Kurt Binneberg suggests that Eich's reference to Hölderlin's poem may have resulted from a parallel life situation, the exodus to France, and its failure.

Before he was drafted into the Second World War, Eich had memorized numerous poems as literary provisions, and the image of "Hölderlin in the knapsack" was also a symbol of the "spiritual strengthening" that was to be achieved among German soldiers.

[11] The Hölderlin Field Selection, co-published by the NSDAP Central Cultural Office, appeared in a print run of 100,000 copies and also included the poem Andenken.

There is a similar development from discordant to melodious sound in the accumulations and alliterations of consonants: The cacophony "claps [...] feces" at the beginning turns into the euphony "swaying [...] the clouds float" at the end.

[9] According to Kurt Binneberg, the poem's formal devices illustrate the radical contrast between latrine reality and imagined poetry, between beauty and ugliness.

The first half of the poem presents an "aesthetics of ugliness," whose images of disgust are heightened in the eighth stanza to an acoustic effect - the excrement "claps.

According to Binneberg, the fusion of opposites in the two contrasting halves of the poem is illustrated by the rhyme and sound connections as well as the semantic references, which suggest a parallelism between the first and third as well as the second and fourth stanzas.

In the embryonic posture of the squatting man, thrown back on mere metabolism, only the gaze roaming through nature remains free, but even this is trapped in a stranded boat.

[19] Peter Horst Neumann sees the stranded boat as a parody of Hölderlin's "Good Voyage" and at the same time as a symbol of failure, both for the individual and the German nation as a whole.

[15] Hans Dieter Schäfer refers to the conditions in prisoner-of-war camps, where tree trunks were used as latrines over trenches in the barbed wire fence.

On the other hand, Hölderlin and his poem Andenken represent the world of poetry, serenity, humanity, and beauty, which seems so alien in the presence of the prisoner that it is only possible as a quotation.

By demonstrating the power of poetry to inspire hope in the face of the abyss, Latrine's poem confirms the last verse of Hölderlin's quoted Andenken: "But what remains is created by the poets.

In his translation of Hölderlin's verses into the present and their simultaneous alienation, Eich's poem should therefore also be understood as a "poetic reparation" to the author, who was ideologically exploited during the National Socialist era and thus became almost unreadable in 1945.

While Martin Heidegger, for example, in 1943 drew from Hölderlin's Andenken the interpretation of the "remaining in one's own" of the German essence, the same poem in Eich's work proves its transience and becomes the measure of a historically conditioned alienation.

[28] Hans Dieter Schäfer refers to Eich's friend Martin Raschke [de], a writer who also wrote Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich.

He introduced his collection Deutscher Gesang, published in 1940, which included Hölderlin's hymn Andenken with the words: "Not written so that you forget yours when you read it, but so that you use it like a weapon."

And in a front-line report two years later, he built a bridge from soldiers reading poetry by torchlight and a quote from Hölderlin's Andenken to the question: "Wasn't the war [...] also fought for the global position of our language?"

By quoting Hölderlin's hymn, he contrasts "a piece of misused cultural heritage" with the truth forced upon us by defeat, thus dismantling the intention of war propaganda to "authenticate the murder of the German classics.

[30] Gerhard Kaiser, on the other hand, emphasizes that the clouds do not simply float away, but that they also carry with them the movement of the river, the Garonne, and thus the desires and hopes of those who remain physically trapped.

This is not only about general cultural criticism but also about Günter Eich's biography, who himself had written system-supporting radio plays with echoes of the blood-and-soil ideology of National Socialism during the Third Reich.

[37] As late as 1972, Ludwig Büttner found the soldier's reality "decidedly distorted" and criticized it: "What we dislike is the disgusting scene and the tasteless rhyme, which are presented in an artistic form to cause a stir and astonishment.