Language and Silence:
Heidegger’s Dialogue with Georg Trakl

Karsten Harries

I

Heidegger’s interpretations of poetry have met with curiously mixed responses. This is particularly true of his Trakl essay, “Die Sprache im Gedicht” (“Language in the Poem”).¹ Praised by some as offering profound insights into the work of the Austrian poet,² others have condemned it as a misinterpretation which presses fragments torn out of context into the service of Heidegger’s own thought.³ The task of deciding between such conflicting evaluations is made doubly difficult by the hermetic character of Trakl’s poetry, which has invited and to some extent supported an extraordinary variety of often incompatible interpretations,⁴ and by the circularity of Heidegger’s hermeneutic approach, which may well lead one to wonder whether what is presented as a “thinking dialogue” between philosopher and poet is not rather a monologue in which Heidegger draws from Trakl’s poetry only what he himself has placed there.

The mere fact that this poetry has invited so many different interpretations suggests at least that Trakl does not speak with just one voice. Even single poems are often too ambiguous to rule out different, even antithetical interpretations. Is such ambiguity only superficial, to be penetrated by more searching interpretation? Can we assume that a particular poem possesses one determinate meaning? Heidegger seems to deny this: to do justice to this poetry we have to do justice to its ambiguity (74). And yet, he himself tends to reduce the different voices of the poet to just one voice when he insists that the multiple meanings of what is said in different poems are gathered together by a deeper meaning which remains unspoken. Such single-mindedness, he asserts, provides a measure of the greatness of a poet: “Every great poet creates his poetry from one single poem” (37). It is this insight, or perhaps prejudice, which guides Heidegger’s discussion and makes it an Erörterung in his sense, that is to say, an attempt “to consider (erörtern) the place (Ort) which gathers the poetic saying of Georg Trakl together into his poem, the place of his poem” (37).

If it is not to be arbitrary, such consideration must base itself on a careful listening to and interpreting of particular poems. But if Heidegger is right, such interpretation presupposes some consideration of the place of the poet’s one poem. How is the interpreter to enter this circle? Must he not approach a particular poem with his own, perhaps inappropriate preconception, thus threatening to do violence to what the poem itself has to say? The question seems familiar. Is Heidegger’s insistence on the “reciprocity between interpretation (Erläuterung) and consideration of the poem’s place (Erörterung) ” (38) more than a somewhat cryptically stated version of the by now familiar hermeneutic circle? Consider E. D. Hirsch’s much clearer statement:

The meaning of a text (or anything else) is a complex of submeanings or parts which hang together. . . . Thus the nature of a partial meaning is dependent on the nature of the whole meaning to which it belongs. From the standpoint of knowledge, therefore, we cannot perceive the meaning of a part until after we have grasped the meaning of the whole, since only then can we understand the function of the part within the whole. . . . Dilthey called this apparent paradox the hermeneutic circle and observed that it was not vicious because a genuine dialectic always occurs between our idea of the whole and our perception of the parts that constitute it. Once the dialectic has begun, neither side is totally determined by the other.⁵

The similarity between what Heidegger and Hirsch have to say is obvious enough: where Heidegger speaks of the reciprocity between the consideration of the place of the poet’s one poem and the interpretation of particular poems, Hirsch speaks of the dialectic which “occurs between our idea of the whole and our perception of the parts that constitute it.” There are, however, important differences. While Hirsch’s statement of the hermeneutic circle is very general, Heidegger gives it a specific content and it is precisely this content which renders it questionable. By subordinating the unity of particular poems to the larger unity of the poet’s one poem, Heidegger seems to challenge the traditional emphasis on the unity of the work of art. Should we approach the different poems of a poet as fragments demanding to be understood as parts of a larger whole? What lets us encounter a given manifold as a whole are expectations guided by established conventions. Thus a collection of sentences is read as a poem because of expectations guided by our idea of what a poem is. But what leads Heidegger to assume that to interpret a particular poem we must point beyond it to the place of the poet’s one poem? Is this a hypothesis, to be verified by the poems themselves?

Any attempt at verification is discouraged by Heidegger’s insistence that the poet’s one poem remains unspoken. Heidegger’s Erörterung claims to point towards what cannot finally be said and is yet the hidden meaning of the poet’s work. There is nothing in Hirsch’s formulation of the hermeneutic circle which suggests Heidegger’s emphasis on the unspoken. Criticizing the “New Hermeneutic” of Heidegger and Gadamer, Hirsch insists that a literary text possesses a definite meaning which can be understood and expressed. Without this, interpretation could have no norms; criticism would turn itself into a kind of poetry. This is not to deny that our preliminary perception of what kind of a whole something is or what genre it belongs to will be vague and inarticulated.⁶But like a hypothesis in science, it can and should be made definite enough to be tested.

Heidegger would be the first not only to admit but to insist on the questionable character of his approach. His understanding of Erörterung is itself in need of interpretation and critical consideration. What justifies the assumption that a poem’s true meaning remains unspoken? Must such an assumption not invite uncontrollable speculation and render interpretation without criteria and thus arbitrary? And what sense can we make of what Heidegger terms the place of the poet’s one poem?

II

To answer the first question we have to consider, at least briefly, Heidegger’s analysis of interpretation and language. In Being and Time Heidegger criticizes traditional ontology and its emphasis on the present, insisting instead on the importance of the future. Man, in his view, is essentially on the way, looking ahead and always engaged in some project or other. Similarly understanding is first of all not a detached noting of what is the case, but inseparably tied to what man is up to. Thus I understand the meaning of something when I know the different uses to which it can be put, when I can place it in the context of what Heidegger terms “the totality of such involvements.” Every interpretation of what something is rests on an anticipation of such a context, where usually this context will be so intimately tied to our way of life that it is left unspoken and does not enter our explicit awareness. Unaware of the presuppositions guiding him, the interpreter may claim that he is simply exhibiting “what is there.” But what is there “in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpreting.”⁷

The circularity of interpretation cannot be avoided. It has its foundation in man’s being, which is an anticipating being towards what he is to be. But even though we cannot step outside the hermeneutic circle, Heidegger denies that this circularity shuts us off from any real understanding of what is as it is.

In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.⁸

This last demand is difficult to meet, given the necessity of bringing to what is understood a preconception of the relevant context. There is a constant danger that our preconception will hide rather than reveal what is to be interpreted. Only as long as this preconception remains questionable and as such invites revision does the interpreter remain free to respond to what he is interpreting, does the interpretation remain a dialogue. Adequate interpretation must preserve the tension between what the interpreter brings to the interpretation and what is to be interpreted.

It is precisely in the preservation of this tension that authentic interpretation, indeed all authentic discourse, differs from our usual ways of interpreting. Usually language and being are so intimately tied together that the thought that language might be the prison rather than the house of being is not even entertained.

In the language which is spoken when one expresses oneself, there lies an average intelligibility; and in accordance with this intelligibility the discourse which is communicated can be understood to a considerable extent, even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of Being towards what the discourse is about as to have a primordial understanding of it. We do not so much understand the entities which are talked about; we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such. What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially. We have the same thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.⁹

If Heidegger is right, language is first of all and most of the time Gerede, “idle talk.” The term is somewhat unfortunate in that it suggests a particular misuse of language. Consider how often we speak, not because there is something to be said, but because we are expected to say something; so we speak of this and that, of the weather, of friends, of the marital problems of Mr. and Mrs. X — what we are talking about matters little. Thus when Wittgenstein likens the way philosophers use language to “an engine idling,” he thinks of language which no longer functions as part of a language-game, where “language-game” is understood as “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven.”¹⁰ Heidegger is thinking of a much more fundamental phenomenon. “Idle talk” refers to language which does function as part of a language-game which in its entirety is taken for granted. We do what one does, say what one says. The language of the everyday is “idle talk.”

But what then is authentic discourse? Must we not speak as one speaks if we are to speak at all? It is difficult to find an answer in Being and Time. Heidegger does discuss the call of conscience as a mode of authentic discourse. Here the silent caller is the individual himself who calls himself back to his own essence. Should we say then that authentic discourse takes place in silence and is monological? Or can authentic discourse be understood in other ways? In Being and Time we find no more than a few hints which point towards the possibility of authentic dialogue.¹¹ What language would such dialogue use other than the inauthentic language of the everyday? Or does it use that language, placing it against the background of the unsaid so that language continuously suffers shipwreck? Think of the conversation of two people in love: it may seem difficult to imagine anything sillier and more superficial. Yet perhaps this is itself a superficial view which mistakes the verbal surface for the whole. The real meaning of such discourse remains unspoken.

Heidegger knows that man cannot rid himself of inauthenticity. Authenticity is only a way of taking up the inauthenticity which is constitutive of man as a being with others.¹² Similarly, authentic speech must base itself on established language, but in such a way that this establishment becomes questionable and its inadequacy is revealed. Interpretation remains authentic only as long as it preserves the tension between an inevitably public language and what that language leaves unsaid. Such interpretation cannot pretend to adequacy, but must render itself questionable, and thus open itself to what the text to be interpreted has to say. Rendering itself questionable, interpretation becomes dialogue.¹³ It is for this reason that Heidegger reminds his readers in the beginning of “Language in the Poem” that the most that his discussion of Trakl’s poetry can accomplish is that it will make our listening to the poet “questionable,” that is, open to the possibility that the preconceptions with which we approach this poetry may have to be abandoned. Thus our listening may become “more thoughtful” (39).

But if interpretation must preserve its own questionable character, it must also recognize that “because the understanding which develops in interpretation has the structure of a projection” it cannot but do violence to what is to be interpreted. But violence must also be turned against “the claims of everyday interpretation” and shake “its tranquillized obviousness.”¹⁴ Since the tendency to cover things up is inseparable from everyday understanding, an interpretation which seeks to penetrate the veil which such understanding casts over things must risk doing violence to what is usually taken for granted.

If the interpreter must preserve the tension between the spoken and the unspoken, this is even more true of the poet. Heidegger’s insistence that to understand what is really said in the poem we have to listen beyond what our usual understanding would take to have been said and into the unspoken, follows from his view of poetry as authentic discourse. Caught up in idle talk, man is shut up in a prison which he himself has fashioned and from which there seems to be no exit. We can escape only if we open ourselves to the violence which language must do to what is, and thus pass beyond it. Heidegger understands poetry as discourse which, by preserving the silence in which the unspoken communicates itself, reveals the essential violence and thus the inadequacy of language.

III

All these considerations have done little to justify what is perhaps most questionable about Heidegger’s Trakl interpretation: his presupposition that what remains unspoken in Trakl’s different poems is the poet’s one poem. Later I shall consider briefly the question whether this presupposition does indeed receive support from Trakl’s poetry. But whether it does or not cannot finally establish or shake Heidegger’s claim that the different poems of any great poet are gathered into one unspoken poem. What leads Heidegger to make this claim? In the present essay we are given neither justification nor explanation. Hints of an answer are, however, provided by the analysis of meaning offered in Being and Time.

As already pointed out, to understand the meaning of something I must be able to locate it in its proper context; I must know where it belongs, its place. E.g., to understand the point of a particular sequence of moves in a chess game I must not only know the rules of the game, but also anticipate what the players are up to. Only such anticipation allows me to gather what first presents itself as an opaque manifold into a meaningful whole. And yet, the meaning of this whole will itself remain obscure as long as I do not understand the point of playing chess. Such understanding demands that what is to be understood be placed in a wider context. I can push my search for meaning further and further until I arrive at a final context which cannot be surpassed: the way the individual exists in the world and pursues his own being. Man’s being, pursued as a task, is the one unspoken meaning which gathers what would otherwise be a collection of fragments into one life. In Heidegger’s view, man exists authentically when, in resolute anticipation of his death, he rescues himself from the tendency of the everyday to scatter him into different roles and activities, seizes himself in his entirety, and thus exists as a whole. There is thus a sense in which the different things the authentic person says and does have one meaning.

If poetry is a form of authentic discourse, the different poems of a poet are joined together by a common meaning. This is not to say that they should be considered parts of a whole in the sense in which sentences could be said to be parts of a poem. What Heidegger calls the poet’s one poem is not a thing which could ever be. Yet if his interpretation of poetry as authentic discourse is right, the poet’s different poems do belong together. Their interpretation must therefore base itself on a consideration of the place which is the hidden origin of this togetherness.

IV

Heidegger determines the place of Trakl’s poetry as die Abgeschiedenheit, “apartness.”

All saying of the poems of Georg Trakl remains oriented towards the wandering stranger. He is and is called “he who has parted” (der Abgeschiedene). Through and around him the poetic saying is tuned to a single song. Because the poems of this poet are gathered in the song of “him who has parted,” we call the place of his poetry “apartness” (die Abgeschiedenheit). (52)

Who is der Abgeschiedene? What is this Abgeschiedenheit of which Trakl and Heidegger speak? A first answer to these questions is provided by fragments taken from Trakl’s poetry. Interpreting them, Heidegger understands the Abgeschiedene as one who has taken leave from the community. He is no longer with us but stands alone and apart, a stranger. Interpreting Trakl, Heidegger calls what the Abgeschiedene has left behind der bisherige Mensch, “man as he has been up to now.” “Man as he has been up to now falls apart (verfällt), in so far as he loses his essence (Wesen), i.e., decays (verwest) ” (46). The term verfällt recalls Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time that, being with others, man is essentially falling (verfallend). The way we usually speak is witness to this fall. As pointed out above, to become the property of several, language “must make itself common,” must become idle talk.¹⁵ Losing himself to the common, man loses his essence, decays.

The Abgeschiedene listens to a silence which calls him from beyond the world of the everyday back to himself. Obedient to its call, he loses touch with the common sense of the established and accepted. Measured by this sense, what he thinks is nonsense. Thus he is called a madman.

The madman thinks (sinnt), and he even thinks with an intensity shared by no one else. But he remains without the sense (Sinn) of the others. He is of another mind (Sinn). “Sinnan” means originally: to travel, to strive for . . . , to take a certain direction; the Indogermanic root sent and set means “way.” “He who has parted” is also the madman, because he is on his way to quite another place. (53)

Where is the stranger going? His going is said to be a going under, a going unto death (46). Yet going under is not tied here to disintegration or destruction.

Losing himself, he disappears in (in der), but in no way into (in die) the destruction wrought by November. He glides through it, away into the spiritual twilight of the blue, “to vesper,” i.e., towards evening. (51)

Throughout this essay many of the words Heidegger uses are borrowed from Trakl while at the same time the way they are used and even the words themselves lead us back to Heidegger’s own earlier works. This results in a certain ambiguity: who is speaking? The poet or the philosopher? There is no clear answer; the reader is left disoriented. As so often when reading the later Heidegger, we wish for a more precise statement or a translation. But although I will try to provide what may at times seem like such a translation, a warning is in order: what does it mean to offer a translation? To do so we have to use words which have their place in some familiar language, words whose meanings we already know. This poses the danger that the unspoken which is the soul of genuine dialogue and interpretation will be concealed by the familiarity of what has been said. The deliberate ambiguity of Heidegger’s language helps to guard against this. While it appears to force the language of poetry and philosophy into an illegitimate fusion, it preserves their tension. This tension prevents the reader from resting content with what he is given. He is forced to struggle and only as long as this struggle is preserved is reading also genuine thinking. This discussion would serve Heidegger ill if it were to be read as an adequate translation of what has been said into a more readily understood idiom.

The wandering stranger is said to disappear in, but in no way into the destruction wrought by November. November is a time when what has been established by the preceding seasons is being torn away. It is the time of the year’s approaching end. And yet, by his readiness to take leave from that world, the stranger appears to escape destruction. He moves through it, towards evening. “Evening” recalls November, but it suggests something more gentle; it also suggests more strongly the thought of repetition — an evening is one of many. Night, which follows evening, is not only the end of day, but also a period of rest which prepares for a new beginning.

Following Trakl, Heidegger speaks of die geistliche Nacht, “the spiritual night.” Spiritual is related to spirit (Geist), spirit to flame. “The flaming is that which, being outside itself (Ausser-sich), opens and lights up the dark, but also can continue to attack and devour everything, leaving only the white of ashes” (60). Again the language suggests Being and Time as much as Trakl. In Being and Time temporality is called “the primodial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself.”¹⁶ Ahead of himself anticipating the future, behind himself remembering the past, beyond himself putting himself in the place of others, man is essentially outside and at a distance from himself. Spirit is thus a name for the ecstatic essence of man. As ecstatic existence, man lights the world and lets it be seen. Thus he is the clearing of Being.

As Heidegger insists, this being open has to be understood not statically, as the metaphor of the clearing suggests,¹⁷ but dynamically as care. Caring for himself and what he is to be, man is first of all ahead of himself. Ahead of himself he anticipates his own death. Spirit and death are thus linked: as spirit, man journeys unto death, even when in dread of this goal he hides the nature of this journey and thus his own essence from himself. And yet, the anticipation of death is not so much an anticipation of decay and destruction, as it is a leave-taking from the “decayed shape of man” (46). By revealing how inescapably man’s life is his own, the anticipation of death prevents man from losing himself to the familiar world and to what one says and does. Man’s dread of death creates a distance from things which lets him stand in their midst with more open eyes, while at the same time it recalls him to himself. Only by affirming himself in his being unto death can man exist as a whole.¹⁸

In the Trakl essay the blue night plays the part which in Being and Time is given to death: to heal man by calling him out of the world to which he has lost himself and back to his essence, i.e., spirit. In this sense night is called spiritual. But compared with death, night also has another and more positive meaning. Night not only means what puts an end to day; it means the limit of day which not only follows but precedes it. Thus it circumscribes day, making it visible in its entirety. Night is the origin and end of all establishment.¹⁹

Evening lets us anticipate the coming of night. Teaching us that things cannot go on as they have, it lets us see things differently. It creates a distance from established ways of life and speech and reveals them to have their ground in the night, although perhaps we should not speak here of “ground”; in that it withdraws whenever an attempt is made to grasp it, this ground is unlike what traditional philosophy sought when it asked for a ground, a firmly established foundation for further construction. If ground is understood in this way, the night is not Grund, but Abgrund, abyss.

The journey of the parted stranger has led him beyond the established and taken for granted towards what precedes and follows establishment. Since for man to be is to be with others, joined to them by a common established order, the wandering stranger cannot be. Thus he is called both, dead and unborn.

It should have become clear that when Heidegger, interpreting Trakl, is speaking of the Abgeschiedene or the wandering stranger he is not speaking of an individual who could ever exist. Perhaps we come closer to what he has in mind when we take the Abgeschiedene to express the ideal of an existence fully obedient to the call of the blue night. Certainly the Abgeschiedene is not the poet. The poet only follows his call.

The poet becomes poet only in so far as he follows that “madman” who died away into the time of the beginning (die Frühe) and out of the apartness (Abgeschiedenheit) calls with melodious steps the brother following him. (73)

Poetry communicates the poet’s journey away from the established community into the night. The language of poetry has its place in-between idle talk and silence.²⁰ It is a recovery of silence in the midst of idle talk. As this recovery, poetry presupposes more familiar language. Thus we may seem to know what the words of the poet mean, yet familiar words no longer function as they usually do; we know and don’t know what is being said. In poetry, language reveals its essential ambiguity. The poem places what it names before a background of silence, yet not to hide that background, as would idle talk, but to return us to it. Thus its life resides in the tension between what has been said and what has remained unspoken.

The poem is like a vesper bell which breaks the silence of evening and yet in breaking it lets it be heard; or like the steps of one disappearing into the night.

V

Again and again Heidegger speaks simply of “poetry” and “the poet.” Is this to say that his determination of the place of Trakl’s poetry is at the same time a determination of the place of poetry? This is at least suggested when Heidegger speaks in the plural of those who carry the silent music of the stranger into spoken language and thus become poets (70). But elsewhere Heidegger speaks of Abgeschiedenheit as the place of just one poem, of that poem which finds expression in Trakl’s poetry. The reader is left with the ambiguity which announces itself already in the tension between the essay’s title and subtitle: “Language in the Poem: A Discussion of Georg Trakl’s Poem.” Is Heidegger’s determination of the essence of Trakl’s poetry, a determination of the essence of poetry?

Heidegger’s own earlier attempts to exhibit the essence of poetry suggest a negative answer. In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger defines poetry as “the inaugural naming of Being and of the essence of all things — not just any speech, but that particular kind which for the first time brings into the open all that which we then discuss and deal with in everyday language.”²¹ From this definition it follows that “poetry never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible.”²² Far from being a late luxury, parasitic on other language, our usual ways of speaking are said to have their foundation in poetry. And since man’s dwelling in the world is also a dwelling in language, poetry can be said to reveal to man his world.

Heidegger has spelled out the revelatory power of poetry and art in a number of places, most completely perhaps in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this essay Heidegger is speaking first of all of the visual arts, but all art is taken by him to be poetry in a wider sense, i.e., work revealing Being; furthermore all other work depends on poetry understood as the work of language. The latter follows if we agree with Heidegger that “language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time.”²³

Poetry in its wider sense is the establishment of Being in a work of art. Heidegger offers the example of a Greek temple. Establishing Being, such work establishes a world. “World” may not be understood here to mean the totality of facts. We come closer to what Heidegger has in mind if we think of a space of intelligibility: world is the context which assigns to man, to the gods, and to things their proper places. It is “the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.”²⁴

As Heidegger emphasizes, only one side of the poetic establishment of Being is grasped when we understand it as an establishment of a world. Equally important is its other side: establishing a world, the work must also present the earth. What is meant here by earth? Perhaps more traditional formulations can help to point towards what Heidegger has in mind. To know what something is, is to know its place in some logical or linguistic space. This place is never so fully determined that it could not also be occupied by some other, very similar thing. The linguistic measures which we bring to reality, for instance when we call something a “tree,” cannot capture what we see before us in its concrete individuality, but only in certain respects which make it comparable to other objects. This limitation is not a shortcoming of language, but its very point. In language, revelation and concealment must go together. Together they disclose the rift which separates language and reality. Just as the material presence of the object prevents language from fully penetrating and subjecting it so that some opacity will always remain, so by forcing what is to be known into our linguistic molds we prevent what is from showing itself to us as it is. Heidegger’s term “earth” points towards the irreducible opacity which attends like a shadow all our knowledge of the real.

Poetry, according to Heidegger, is the instigation of a struggle between earth and world. He speaks of a struggle rather than of a resting together, because earth and world are unavoidably in tension. In so far as the establishment of a world is a making overt, it must also conceal the dimension of the hidden. Such concealment easily leads to a total forgetting of the earth, as it does, for instance, when science, misunderstanding its own essence, tries to grasp what is without loss.²⁵ Indeed all language poses a threat to the earth. Caught up in already established and taken for granted ways of speaking, we overhear the silent call of the other dimension. Having become a common and unquestioned possession, language tends to obscure the world’s struggle with the earth. But this struggle must be preserved if man is to exist authentically, open to his own being and to the being of what is. Such preservation requires poetry.

How does Heidegger’s determination of the place of Trakl’s poetry agree with this twofold determination of the essence of poetry as establishment of a world and presentation of the earth? At least the latter is suggested by Heidegger’s characterization of the poet as journeying towards the night. Night and earth point in the same direction. This relationship is made explicit by Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s words: Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden.

The poet calls the soul “something strange on earth.” The earth is precisely the place to which the soul in her wandering so far has not been able to get. The soul only seeks the earth, it does not flee from it. It wanders and thus seeks the earth so that it may build and dwell poetically on the earth and only thus save the earth as the earth: this fulfills the soul’s essence. (41)

Since man has permitted himself to become absorbed in the established and accepted, poetry, if it is to save the earth, has to bid us take leave from our familiar ways of speaking. The poet must tear such language if he is to let us hear the silence in which the earth communicates itself to us.

But can Trakl’s poetry also be said to establish a world? The answer would appear to be negative. “World” is used only once in the essay to indicate the fallen world of modern man from which the poet bids us to take leave (80). Take leave for what? Does Trakl offer us a new world to take the place of that world which we are to leave behind? Heidegger’s characterization of Trakl as the poet of the still hidden occident (Abendland) offers only an ambiguous answer.

VI

The going under of the stranger who has parted from the familiar and accepted is a journeying towards the night. The land of his wandering belongs thus to evening. “The location of the place which gathers Trakl’s poem into itself is the hidden essence of apartness and is called ‘occident’ (Abendland)” (77). Once again Heidegger takes a critical term from Trakl, who calls one of his poems “Abendland,” a second “Abendländisches Lied.” Playing with the title of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, while opposing the pessimism expressed in that work, Heidegger once more links the themes of ending and beginning, of going under and crossing over.

The occident (Abendland) hidden in apartness is not going under, but remains, waiting for its inhabitants as the land of the going under into the spiritual night. The land of the going under is the crossing over into the beginning of the dawn which lies hidden in it. (77)

Abendland no longer means here the Western world, but the land of evening in Heidegger’s sense. As such, it is the land of the transition from day to night, where night has to be understood as end and as beginning. Thus Heidegger calls apartness “the beginning of a rising world year, not the abyss of decay” (77). This determines Trakl’s place as a place in-between: between the platonic Christian world and a world which remains to be established and whose shape and essence are still hidden. The poet lacks the strength to establish this world. He only prepares us for such establishment by calling us out of our decayed world back to the earth and to its silence. Measured by Heidegger’s own determination of art as the establishment of a world and the presentation of the earth, Trakl’s work must be found lacking. But if Heidegger is right, this lack is not one the poet could have overcome. It has its foundation in his age, an age shaped by the triumph of metaphysics. What is metaphysics and what does it have to do with poetry? An adequate answer cannot be developed within the limits of this essay, but an answer must at least be sketched if we are to understand why Heidegger sees modern poetry and art tending towards silence.

Metaphysics is an attempt to grasp and to secure Being. The attack on the hidden, on what Heidegger terms the earth, is thus part of its essence. The metaphysical tendency reaches its final stage, decisive for the shape of our world, with Descartes. Man’s reason is made the measure of reality: only what can be known clearly and distinctly can be said to be and what can be known in this manner can also be manipulated. Metaphysics triumphs over the earth, and thus over Being, in technology. Losing the earth, man loses his own essence to his domineering spirit and decays. “Today a man without uniform already makes the impression of the uncanny, which no longer belongs.”²⁶

If there is to be art in the full sense of the word, there must first be an openness to the earth. Having banished mystery and opacity from reality, we no longer live in a world which allows for such openness. Our world cannot offer a dimension which would allow the silent call of the earth to be heard. This makes the recovery of this other dimension a task which forces the artist to take leave from the world. Trakl’s poetry communicates such a leave-taking.

If this analysis is accepted, it becomes difficult to consider the place which gathers Trakl’s poems into one poem as the poet’s own. It belongs as much to Heidegger’s Hölderlin, and indeed to all who attempt to save the earth and man’s essence in this age of need and thus form “one generation” (E in Geschlecht) (78), joined by their willingness to follow the one who has parted and thus belonging to the land of evening.²⁷Heidegger, too, belongs to this community. H’rs own attempt to step beyond the history of metaphysics and to take leave from the “wasteland of the devastated earth”²⁸ makes him, too, a follower of the wandering stranger. The place of Trakl’s poetry appears thus to be that of Heidegger’s own thinking.

VII

By insisting on the violence of all interpretation, but also on the necessity of keeping ourselves open to “the things themselves,” Heidegger invites us to question this conclusion. Are the place of poet and thinker really the same and is it this which makes their dialogue possible? Or has Heidegger done violence to Trakl’s poetry? Is what is presented as a dialogue in fact a monologue?

Only a careful consideration of Trakl’s work could do justice to these questions. But even a cursory look at particular poems suggests that Trakl is not of one mind and does not speak with one voice. Besides that in the end hopeful voice which Heidegger hears, there are others, often dark and despairing, linking decay to incest and a very personal guilt and suffering which no longer hopes for redemption. Heidegger does not hear this despair, perhaps because he is too ready to listen beyond the poet’s words to his unspoken meaning. This leads us back to what is most questionable about Heidegger’s interpretation. Not only in this essay do we meet with a tendency to sacrifice the multiplicity and tensions of what is to be interpreted to a higher unspoken unity which must remain abstract and empty.

Perhaps Heidegger’s demand that the interpretation of particular poems be informed by a discussion of the place of the poet’s one unspoken poem should be carried to this interpretation of Heidegger’s essay. What is the place of Heidegger’s own thought towards which all of his works point? I have suggested that the place which Heidegger assigns to Trakl is in fact his own. This is not to say that Heidegger is simply reading into Trakl’s poetry his own subjective prejudice. The place of Heidegger’s thinking can only be understood when it is linked to the place of his and Trakl’s generation. As Karl Löwith points out, the power of Heidegger’s analyses and interpretations is at least in part due to the fact that they always carry “the signature of our age.”²⁹ The best interpretation of the place of Heidegger’s thought is furnished by Heidegger himself. To the extent that our world is, as Heidegger describes it, a one-dimensional prison which shuts man off from the earth and thus from his own essence, man must take leave from that world if he is to save himself. And if this world is the world for us, this leave-taking must be a journey towards silence. The fascination with silence in modern music, art, and poetry suggests that this description of our world is not too far off the mark. Still, it is too one-sided to do justice to the different ways in which we are claimed and moved, often in incompatible directions. The metaphysical technological world which Heidegger sketches is not the world in which we live, although it is perhaps the leading theme of our world and often the power of this theme is so great that it becomes difficult to hear other voices. Heidegger’s dialogue with Georg Trakl is witness to this difficulty.

Yale University

NOTES

1 Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959), pp. 37-82. Trans. Peter D. Hertz, “Language in the Poem. A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work,” On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 159-198. Page references in the text are to the German edition. The translations are my own.

2 See Alfred Focke, Georg Trakl. Liebe und Tod (Wien und München: Herold, 1955), and Eduard Lachmann, Kreuz und Abend. Eine Interpretation der Dichtungen Georg Trakts (Salzburg: O. Müller, 1954).

3 See Walter Muschg, “Zerschwatzte Dichtung,” Die Zerstörung der deutschen Literatur (München: List, n.d.), pp. 172-184, and W. H. Rey, “Heidegger — Trakl: Einstimmiges Zwiegespräch,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 30 (1956), 89-136.

4 Helga Cierpka, “Interpretationstypen der Trakl-Literatur,” Diss. Berlin, 1963.

5 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 259.

6 Validity in Interpretation, p. 259.

7 Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer Verlags 1953), p. 150. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962).

8 Sein und Zeit, p. 153.

9 Sein und Zeit, p. 168.

10 Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pars. 132 and 7.

11 See the suggestion that the resolute person can become the conscience of others (p. 298) and especially the claim that authentic existence requires communication and struggle to let the power of its destiny become free (pp. 384-5). Unfortunately, Heidegger has nothing to say about the nature of such communication.

12 Sein und Zeit, p. 179.

13 See Was heisst Denken? (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1961), p. 110. “But authentic dialogue is never mere conversation. In mere conversation one glides along what has been said and does not get involved with the unspoken. Most interpretations of texts . . . remain in the realm of mere conversation, which is often many-sided and informative. In many cases this is sufficient.”

14 Sein und Zeit, p. 311.

15 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1951), pp. 34-35.

16 Sein und Zeit, p. 329.

17 This metaphor shows particularly well the nature of Heidegger’s own use of language. Traditionally, discussions of understanding and consciousness have always used a vocabulary of distance and of light, without making explicit its metaphorical character. Heidegger joins these two themes in one metaphor and thereby forces us to consider what it is that they point to.

18 See Sein und Zeit, pp. 301-333.

19 See Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, p. 104.

20 Hugo Friedrich’s analysis of the function of silence in modern poetry, especially in the poetry of Mallarmé, suggests that what Heidegger finds in Trakl’s poetry is characteristic of much poetry in our time. See Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956).

21 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, p. 40. Trans. Douglas Scott, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), p. 283.

22 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, p. 40, trans, p. 283.

23 Holzwege (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1950), p. 60. Tr. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 73.

24 Holzwege, p. 33, trans, p. 44.

25 See Holzwege, p. 36, tr. p. 47. “Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery nevertheless remains an impotence of will. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up.”

26 Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954), p. 26

27 See W. H. Rey’s very critical discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s Abendländisches Lied, an interpretation which places all the emphasis on just two words: Ein Geschlecht. “Heidegger — Trakl: Einstimmiges Zwiegespräch,” p. 131.

28 Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 97.

29 Heidegger, Denker in dürftiger Zeit, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), p. 110.