Stefanos Geroulanos; Todd Meyers. The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War. xii + 419 pp., notes, index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. $35 (paper). ISBN 9780226556598.

Isis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-436
Author(s):  
Rob Boddice
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Great War ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The Great War ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

Stimmungen, Spannungen, Visionen

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Max Graff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Military Surgeon ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Poetic Visions

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

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