page_title: War poet
section_title: Germany
hierarchical_section_title: War poet / World War I / Germany
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Reinhard Johannes Sorge auf Heimaturlaub in Berlin
context_page_description: A war poet is a poet who participates in a war and writes about their experiences, or a non-combatant who writes poems about war. While the term is applied especially to those who served during World War I, the term can be applied to a poet of any nationality writing about any war, including Homer's Iliad, from around the 8th century BC, and the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which celebrated the actual Battle of Maldon in 991, as well as poetry of the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War and other wars.
context_section_description: Despite the last ditch efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II to avert the outbreak of the Great War through the Willy-Nicky Telegrams, the German people greeted the international crisis of August 1914 with patriotic euphoria. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Berlin, singing patriotic songs and loudly cheering the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, the Kaiser, and their elected representatives. So great was the popular enthusiasm, that both the Kaiser and politicians from every political party concluded that if they did not go to war, they would never survive politically. A few anti-war rallies were organized by elements of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but even that Party's far-left ultimately bowed to the popular will and agreed to support the war effort.
  Even though historians of World War I poetry have traditional focused on English poets, there were also many talented German war poets, such as Rudolf G. Binding and Heinrich Mann. 
  August Stramm, who is considered the first of the expressionists, has been called by Jeremy Adler one of, "the most innovative poets of the First World War." Stramm, Adler writes, treated, "language like a physical material" and, "honed down syntax to its bare essentials." Citing Stramm's fondness for "fashioning new words out of old," Adler has also written that, "what James Joyce did on a grand scale for English, Stramm achieved more modestly for German."
  Stramm's radically experimental verse and his major influence on all subsequent German poetry has also caused him to be compared to Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, and T.S. Eliot. 
  A reserve officer in the Imperial German Army, Stramm was called up to active service immediately upon the outbreak of World War I. Serving as a company commander on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, Stramm repeatedly distinguished himself by acts of courage under enemy fire and was highly decorated by both the German and Austro-Hungarian Governments.
  At the beginning of August 1915, Stramm was sent home to Berlin on what would be his final furlough. His daughter Inge, who adored her father, later recalled how Stramm made her ten-year-old brother promise, "never to let himself down," by being, "a Schweinhund before himself."
  His family would later learn that throughout his furlough, Stramm had carried a letter in his pocket which he needed only to countersign in order to be released from all future military service at his publisher's request. By this time, Stramm had come to detest the war and believed that his death in combat was imminent. His mind was also filled with projects that he longed to write down. In the end, however, Stramm was, according to Patrick Bridgwater, "unable to accept the alibi of a higher duty to literature," and left the letter unsigned.
  On September 1, 1915, mere weeks after returning to his unit, Captain August Stramm was shot in the head during brutal hand to hand combat against the Imperial Russian Army in the Rokitno Marshes during the Great Retreat of 1915. 
  According to Jeremy Adler, Stramm was about to be awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) at the time of his death.
  According to Patrick Bridgwater, "What is quite extraordinary is that he appears to have found in the hell-on-earth of total warfare around Brest-Litovsk in 1915 the sense of harmony he had sought for so long."
  A few weeks before his death, Stramm had written to Herwarth Walden, "Singularly, life and death are one... Both are one... Battle and the night and death and the nightingale are all one. One! And fighting and sleeping and dreaming and acting are all one! There is no separation! All goes together and swims and shimmers like sun and whirlpool. Only time goes forward, time this. So do fighting, hungering, singing, dying. All! Soldier and officer! Day and night! Sorrowing and bleeding! And a hand shines over me! I swim through everything. Am everything! I!".
  On September 2, 1915, Captain August Stramm was buried with full military honors in the German military cemetery at Gorodec, in the Kobryn District of modern Belar
caption: Reinhard Johannes Sorge on Furlough in Berlin, 1915
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:06:21 14:40:06", "Image ExifOffset": "172", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "310", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5071", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2318", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3193"}