Kriegskritik als Nachkriegsvision - Stefan Georges Dichtung Der Krieg (1917)

Abstract

Stefan George’s The War is an anti-war poem and uses World War I in order to critically address the present time. The criticism of the war gains prophetic character thanks to the poetological Dante motto, the narrator and the metadiegetic role speech of a »seer«, who interferes with the poet Stefan George. Biblical allusions to the Books of the Prophets, the change from punitive preaching to a salvation sermon and an anachronistic, at times even hermetic imagery ensure the transtemporal depresentification of the war and support the credibility of the poet-seer and his prophecy. George’s The War is based on a triadic model of history. The rejection of war serves the purpose of glorifying the future, that George associates with youth, in a visionary way. While Horace in the Epode XVI., a further pretext of The War, seeks to escape the present of the civil war through the imaginary flight of the elite in a promised land, George temporalizes the utopia by picturing the post-war period as a golden age and by establishing a new covenant with the youth and the future.