Thoughts on war: Werner Bergengruen – The Lie (Published on 07/06/2024)
The Lie
Where is the people who would endure this without harm to their souls?
For years and years our daily food was lies.
Festively they raised, wreathed machines and plows,
spoke of freedom and bread, and everything, everything was a lie.
Borrowed from the heroic past the soaring flights of eagles,
boasted of themselves in fathers, and everything, everything was a lie.
The endless processions of flags marched through the streets,
bells rang out, and everything, everything was a lie.
They did not measure praise and rebuke according to dead law,
they called upon life, and everything, everything was a lie.
Arid things should blossom! They knew no satisfaction
in the promise of salvation, and everything, everything was a lie.
With blood still on their hands, they wreathed ashtrays around them,
sang the glory of the dead, and everything, everything was a lie.
We breathed lies. Right into the very heart
seeped, drop by drop, the poisonous fog of lies.
And we screamed to hell, choked, suffocated by the lie,
that in the ray of destruction the truth would beat down.
(from: Werner Bergengruen, Dies Irae – Eine Dichtung (1946), p. 7,
translated from German language without implementing the rhyme scheme))
Werner Bergengruen (born on 16/09/1892 in Riga/Latvia, died on 04/09/1964 in Baden-Baden) was a German-Baltic writer and one of the best-known and most popular authors both during the Nazi era and in the early Federal Republic of Germany.
Although he was a national conservative, he was distanced from National Socialism due to his Christian-humanist worldview, without openly rejecting it. Expelled from the “Reichsschriftumskammer” in 1937 – membership was a prerequisite for any professional activity in the field of writing – for allegedly lacking the aptitude to contribute to the “development of German culture” through literary publications, he was nevertheless allowed to publish based on a “permanent special permit”. Although his poetry collection “Der ewige Kaiser” [“The Eternal Emperor”] (1937) and the novel “Am Himmel wie auf Erden” [“In heaven as on earth”] were banned in 1940 and a broadcasting and lecturing ban was imposed on him, several of his other works were allowed to appear, not least due to his popularity as an author.
After his house in Munich-Solln was destroyed in 1942, he moved to Achenkirch in Austria and, after living in Switzerland and Italy, returned to Germany in 1958, where he lived until his death.
The poem quoted here is taken from his work “Dies Irae – Eine Dichtung”, which – written in the summer of 1944 – only appeared after the end of the war and deals poetically with the social conditions in Germany during the Nazi era through poetry. “Dies Irae” means “Day of Wrath”, presumably chosen in reference to a medieval hymn about the Day of Judgement, which was sung in the church liturgy at the time as part of the requiem mass and is probably symbolic of a reckoning with National Socialism.
(Head picture: Marguerites and grave crosses on the
Military Cemetery Wallendorf, May 2024)
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