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Ehrentraut Helmberg-Lanner:
Flüchtlinge
Sie gehn, in jämmerlicher Weise
hinwankend an den Häuserreihn:
die Kinder mit dem Schritt der Greise,
die Alten taumeln hinterdrein.
Sie sind zu müde schon zum Klagen
vom Schrecknis, das sie jäh erfasst,
ihr ganzes Tun ist nur Ertragen,
ihr ganzes Sein ist nichts als Last.
Es gräbt dies Bild von Kümmernissen
so tief sich in die Seele ein,
daß selbst am Weg die Steine müssen
des Nachts davon zum Himmel schrein.
PS: Aber nach einiger Zeit werden sie müde und schweigen wie zuvor. Denn immer wieder wird der Krieg geboren.
Wie wär's, wenn Sie sich auch andere Gedichte in dieser Sammlung ansähen, die, direkt oder indirekt, mit dem Krieg zu tun haben? Zum Beispiel Hardys The Man He Killed, Heyms Der Krieg, Owens Anthem for Doomed Youth und Yeats's The Second Coming?
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Ehrentraut Helmberg-Lanner:
Refugees
They walk, in miserable fashion,
and stagger by the stones and walls:
Aged children leading the procession,
the old ones follow, someone falls...
They're tired way beyond complaining
about the dread that war has wrought,
their whole behavior naught but straining,
their whole existence naught but fraught.
An image of such sadness burrows
so deeply in the wounded mind
that even stones must scream their sorrows
at nighttime to the Heavens blind.
Re: Refugees
This poem must have been written around the end of the Second World War. At that time, millions of refugees poured into an Austria that, drained of all its resources, could do little to help them (unlike later, for instance during the Hungarian revolution or the aftermath of the Prague Spring). In fact, many Austrians - my family among them - became refugees in their own country.
Although it had almost no food to offer, the town of Waidhofen a/d Ybbs in the Lower Austrian countryside - where Helmberg-Lanner lived - offered a certain (though severely limited) sort of relief. Only occasional bombing took place there during the War; and the Red Army, being close to the border of the territory they occupied, exerted less terror there than, say, in Vienna. Like all the other little towns and villages in Austria, Waidhofen received an allotment of refugees - which, somehow, they accommodated.
Re: War Poems
This site hosts further war poems: Thomas Hardy's The Man He Killed, Georg Heym's Der Krieg, and Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth. What brings war poems to a site for fall poetry? Leaves fall, soldiers fall, humanity falls - and the Heavens turn blind...
And, if we are to believe W.B. Yeats, the Second Coming is at hand...
I stand corrected, by no less than the daughter of the author. Thanks, Mui! Turns out that the date at which the poem was written is unkown. Helmberg-Lanner wrote on intuition, hardly ever correcting what she had written, never archiving. Yet, for whatever reason, this particular poem carries the initials "E.L.", i.e., those of the author's maiden name. If so, the refugees she is referring to must have been of an earlier time.
When could this time have been? Mui says, her mother surely had seen refugees of the First World War, then perhaps South Tyroleans fleeing Italy's fascists, then most certainly refugees of the Second World War, either in Waidhofen or in Innsbruck. Dr. Ehrentraut Helmberg-Lanner lived in South Tyrol, in North Tyrol, in Germany, in Vienna, in Waidhofen. Too many places, too many refugees...
But, as Mui said, it does not really matter. And she is right. Refugees are refugees, no matter when, no matter where, no matter of what country or persuasion...
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