The End of the World (1910)
by Jakob van Hoddis
The businessman's hat flies off his pointy head,
Screams shatter the air, resounding from all places,
Roofers plummet from buildings, columns crack into two.
At the coast—or so one reads—the ocean is rising.
The storm arrives, great seas roil,
Surge onto the land. Dams burst asunder.
Most people have a nasty cold.
Trains derail, fly off bridges.
Even over a century after his greatest works appeared in print, the poetry of Jakob van Hoddis is not well known in the English-speaking world. This is in spite of the fact that the German-Jewish poet’s works played a vital role in galvanizing the Expressionist literary movement, and despite his poetry being cited by both the Dadaists and Surrealists as anticipating their ideas, too. Surrealist leader André Breton included Van Hoddis in a 1940 anthology, and Van Hoddis’ poetry appeared in DADA 3 in 1918 in Zurich, Switzerland. English translations of Van Hoddis’ “End of the World” never truly capture the startling aspect of its unexpected verbal juxtapositions.
The editor of the 1919 German Expressionist anthology Twilight of Humanity (Kurt Pinthus) saw fit to start the collection by placing Van Hoddis' apocalyptic "End of the World" ("Weltende") poem above on page 1. That is, it was poem No. 1 of the 278 poems appearing in the volume. It set the tone for the rest of the book.
"End of the World" was first published on January 11, 1911, though Van Hoddis probably wrote it a couple of years before, maybe as early as 1908. Its initial appearance was in Berlin's Der Demokrat magazine. The poem gained quick renown in literary circles despite—or perhaps because of—its short length and bizarre nature.
Van Hoddis’ reputation as an innovator would only grow. This only set the avant-garde literary world of Europe up for a profound shock of anger and despair when it was discovered the poet was murdered by the Nazis in the Sobibor extermination camp in 1942 as part of the Final Solution.
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