The Lyrical Subject in the Poetry of Peter Huchel.

Abstract

Peter Huchel's poetry has been ignored in the DDR and overshadowed in the West by interest in other East German poets. Although his poems have been dealt with in a number of shorter articles, there are few extensive studies of his work, and none analyzing the perspective of the lyrical subject, none also pursuing his poetic development through his most recent collection, Die neunte Stunde (1979). This study defines the lyrical subject, in differentiation from the empirical poet, as an aesthetic creation of the poet which structures a human perspective receiving and transforming the impressions of itself and the object world. The development of this perspective is followed within the framework of three major periods: (1) the experience of childhood, (2) the twelve years of Nazi rule referred to as Die Zwolf Nachte, and (3) the late poems after Huchel's aborted experiment with socialist realism in the early fifties. Aspects of the perspective of the lyrical subject are first demonstrated in depth through intensive interpretations of representative poems. The results gathered from these intensive analyses are then developed extensively with reference to other poems from a given period. Although the I-form is usually the linguistic form of the subject, this study does not restrict itself to observations about the functions of I-speech alone, but also pays attention to other manifestations of the lyrical subject (e.g., in the lyrical voices du, wir) as well as to seemingly more objective instances of the subjective perspective where such speech indicators may be altogether absent. In Huchel's early poems, revolving around the experience of childhood, it was observed that although the subjective perspective is often structured to parallel the experience of a child, the basic posture of the subject is sentimentalisch and not idyllic. Separation from the past childhood idyll spawns an attempt to recreate aesthetically the unity with nature that was experienced as a part of that idyll. Some aspects of the childlike structure of experience revealed in the study are the sensuous perception of the peasant nature scene, and the preoccupation with warmth and security represented by the womb. A tendency toward a diffuse omniscient perspective, not anchored in a concrete experience of the object world, was witnessed in the discussion of the Zwolf Nachte poems. This proclivity was overcome in other poems where generalizing distance or pronouncement upon the objects experienced is closely correlated to and circumscribed by the immediate experiential domain of the lyrical subject. In the late Zwolf Nachte poems, the presence of a lyrical subject becomes ever more inconspicuous. Often the functions normally performed by the experiencing subject are transferred to the l and scape by means of personification. The horrors of war, even when directly experienced by the poet, are objectified through concealment of the presence of a subject or are transferred to the experiential sphere of a dramatic person clearly differentiated from the poet. In the final section, the projection into the object world of aspects of the lyrical subject is further explored in the late poems. An intensive interpretation of the poem "Hinter den wei(beta)en Netzen des Mittags" demonstrates the lyrical subject's relative insecurity and lability in the object world and hence his attentiveness to signs of orientation. The multi-faceted perspective of the w and erer is then shown to proffer a stereoscopic vision of change, of what could or should be. The ultimate perspective of the lyrical subject here examined is that of the sensitive, alienated, and suffering prophet, admonishing to accept responsibility and , given the fact of irresponsibility, anticipating the inevitable holocaust of retribution.