The Final Months: Departures, Hopes, Catastrophes

FOLLOWING THE PEAK of the preceding autumn and winter, the intensity of Trakl's production lessened in the spring and summer of 1914. By this time he had complete versions of all the poems under consideration for his planned revision of Sebastian im Traum, so his reduced output was almost certainly a consequence of redirecting his energy towards revising, rearranging, and correcting his new collection, the final proofs for which he returned to Kurt Wolff Verlag only at the end of July (HkA, 1/540– 41). Some signs also point to Trakl's need to find his creative bearings again after finally exhausting the possibilities opened up by the breakthrough into his phase-three poetics of late 1912, which had set the course for his rapid lyric production of the next year and a half, resulting in the completion and compilation of two major collections. Many of the works dated to the months between April and July 1914 in the Innsbrucker Ausgabe are just fragments or sketches that were soon abandoned, some crossed out, while in the earlier half of the same period he also worked extensively in genres other than the lyric. Trakl composed the longest of his prose poems, “Offenbarung und Untergang,” between April and May (IA, 4.1/49), and in the second of those months he also began—or resumed—sketching the opening scenes for a play. The latter work remained incomplete and title-less, but on the basis of the lexis and motifs in the surviving drafts, Sauermann and Zwerschina presume that it was a reworking of a manuscript from around 1910 that has been lost (IA, 4.2/156).

Any doubts Trakl might have felt about his continuing commitment to the lyric as his genre of choice—and the post-Sebastian tenor of his expression—had dissipated by June, as evidenced by the five new poems published in the two July issues of Der Brenner. The issue of July 15, 1914, was the last to appear before the outbreak of war; the next, published only in spring of the following year under the title Brenner-Jahrbuch 1915, included a further eight previously unpublished works: not only “Offenbarung und Untergang” but also five further poems Trakl had composed between June and August 1914, as well as the only two he is known to have written following his departure for Galicia on August 24.