ABSTRACT
Written a half-year before he drowned and three years before World War I, this powerful fragment should be closely compared with George’s “The Cleansing Doom” (about “sacred war”), page 109, and with “World’s End” (Weltende, translated—along with Heym—by Boris Pasternak), a poem by Heym’ s influential “proto-expressionist” friend Jakob van Hoddis (born Hans Davidsohn). Already then schizophrenic, Hoddis was to live on from 1914 to 1942 in an insane asylum, thereby apparently overlooked by the Nazi pogroms, only—ironically—to succumb to the second Nazi genocide, the one against the incurably sick.
