[In the following essay, White explicates four of Ball's Expressionist poems, observing the ways in which these works “offer a compendium of styles and mannerisms and reflect the diversity of Ball's work.”]

Ball's poetic gift was given new impetus by theories that gained prevalence during his Munich years. These theories were in turn influenced by his work in the theater: in Munich he became an expressionist poet. Ball was a spectacular expressionist, given to manic exaltation. His poetry, much like Gottfried Benn's Morgue und andere Gedichte (Morgue and Other Poems, 1912), is a “raw” mixture of lyricism and sexual transgression. Leybold characterized Ball's expressionist poetry as “exaltierte Phantastik” (exalted fantasy).¹ His first prose texts were aphorisms published in Jugend (Youth, March 1913). Art is intoxication, rapture, Ball writes, “Rausch”: “L'art pour l'art is an aesthetic monomania. The artist must have the idea of redeeming the world through ecstasy and fire, or he is witless.”² Ball was influenced by Nietzsche and accepted the notion that Greek tragedy was born of Dionysian ecstasy, and he was also influenced by Bakunin's idea that creativity is necessarily the art of destruction: “The urge to destroy is a creative urge” (Revolution, October 15, 1913). Leybold used the term “Phantastik” to refer to Ball's extremes of fantasy and his gift to create imagery that transforms human perception. Such electrifying stimuli, expressionists felt, would usher in a new and boundless life of ecstasy. In October 1913, during a visit to Eugen Richter's art gallery in Dresden, Ball experienced an epiphany. The futurist exhibit he saw yielded the kind of exuberant aesthetic emotions he sought to convey in his own work. Ball was thrilled by futurist color, line, and form, all imbued with anarchic vigor that streams out far afield from the canvas. His report of the Dresden exhibit, a clarion call for action, appeared in Revolution on November 15, 1913. Passionate, nearly out-of-control language captures the volcanic power of his experience, beckoning forward to a new state:

In Richter's art salon some futurists are showing their work: Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D. Carr[à], Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini … power lines howl, burn and whiz across the picture, assaulting one's brain and whipping the blood into falsetto tones. One cannot understand these paintings, thank goodness! We want to understand everything and then discard it. These pictures force absolute insanity into view. One screams in anguish and horror. These paintings are the most visceral, jolting, grandiose, and unfathomable that have been made in living memory. … In their radiating power-splendor, their mysterious electric vibrations, and their radioactivity—these pictures proclaim the revolution of subversion, of ecstatic disease. … (Schlichting, 12)

Every sentence rings out with extravagant emotional fervor. The poet exalts the vitality of the spectacle rather than its revealing of new meaning. A work of art must create untamed worlds beyond everyday concerns. While quoting René Schickele in a diary entry of 1916, Ball articulated his own expressionist experience: “He [Schickele] says, ‘I wanted to make a philosophy out of expressionism, a radicalism all along the line,’” and Ball adds: “I once wanted to do that too” (Flight, 89). Subversion (“Unterminierung”) and extraordinary upheaval in all aspects of life became Ball's expressionist credo. Ball's thinking was strengthened by the unconventional life and writing of Erich Mühsam (1878-1934), bohemian artist and anarchist, who provided the programmatic statement printed in the first number of Revolution.³ Mühsam advocated the uncensored life. Influenced by the psychoanalyst Otto Gross (1877-1920), whom he befriended in Ascona in 1905, Mühsam assumed a connection between social and sexual repression. Sexual freedom, Mühsam believed, ultimately entails freedom from political repression. Mühsam concluded his editorial with characteristic flourish: “Some synonyms for revolution: God, life, passion, ecstasy, chaos. Let us be chaotic” (Teubner, 100). In the second number of Revolution, November 1, 1913, Ball similarly celebrates his own climactic brand of lyricism. Poetry, he writes, is “Realismus des Ungehemmten” (“realism of the uninhibited”). The outcast, the experimental type, and the immaculate whore, these are the expressionist heroes. Like works of other expressionist writers, Ball's poems suffer from an excess of tension and pathos. Undaunted by questions of taste versus Kitsch, the source of his poetry resides in unretouched feeling. His expressionist poems include collaborative texts, written with Leybold and published under the pseudonym Ha Hu Baley, and poems written with Klabund (Alfred Henschke) and the artist's muse, Marietta di Monaco (Maria Kirndörfer), presented under the pseudonym Klarinetta Klaball. These and his eleven solo poems of 1913/14 deserve detailed analysis. For purposes of interpretation, four poems have been chosen: “Der Henker” (“The Executioner”), “Das Insekt” (“The Insect”), “Versuchung des heiligen Antonius” (“The Temptation of Saint Anthony”), and “Cimio.” The poems are presented here in order of publication, from October 1913 to July 1914. They offer a compendium of styles and mannerisms and reflect the diversity of Ball's work.⁴

“DER HENKER”

“Der Henker,” one of Ball's most hermetic poems, contains five stanzas of irregular length and almost accidental rhyme, expressing spiritual transcendence through raw emotions. Its formal appearance projects deliberate disregard for artistic polish. Religious indicators combine with erotic allusions.⁵ Sexual gestures evoke the Song of Solomon:

deine Augen sind kleine lüsterne Monde
dein Mund ist geborsten in Wollust und in der Jüdinnen Not
deine Hand eine Schnecke, die in den blutroten Gärten voll Weintrauben und Rosen wohnte.
(Your eyes are wanton little moons
Your mouth has burst into lewdness as in the Jewess's need
Your hand's a snail that dwelled in the blood-red gardens full of grapes and roses.)

The executioner theme of the beginning stanza fuses pain and passion:

Ich bin am Werk: blank wie ein Metzgermeister.
Tische und Bänke stehen wie blitzende Messer
Der Syphiliszwerg stochert in Töpfen voll Gallert und Kleister.
(I am at work, skillful as a butcher.
Tables and benches stand like blinking knives
The syphilitic dwarf is poking in pots full of jelly and goo.)

Sharp knives focus the imagination on a grim commitment. The horror associated with the executioner's task produces festering images of consummation and disease. Stanza two turns from the executioner to the sacrificial feminine figure. She is made of desire and the gaze of ardent moons, mirroring the memories of gardens and vineyards of early biblical narration. The religious motif is carried to the third stanza: “Hilf, heilige Maria! … sei gebenedeit!” (Help me, Holy Mary! … Be blessed!). This invocation to Mary leads to scornful repudiation of Christian values: “meine Finger zehn gierige Zimmermannsnägel / die schlage ich in der Christenheit Götzenplunder” (My fingers are ten greedy carpenter's nails / That I drive into Christianity's tattered idols). The parodic sexual summoning “Hilf, heilige Maria!” is projected amidst intensification, witnessed by heads aflame: “Mein Haar ein Sturm, mein Gehirn ein Zunder” (My hair's a storm, my brain a tinderbox). The terrifying lament of a woman calls forth a rush of exhilarating release:

da brach auch ein Goldprasseln durch die Himmelssparren nieder.
Eine gigantische Hostie gerann und blieb zwischen Rosabergen stehen
ein Hallelujah gurgelte durch Apostel- und Hirtenglieder.
(Even then a hail of gold rattled through the heavenly rafters.
A gigantic host curdled and stood motionless between rose-colored mountains.
A chant of hallelujah gurgled through apostle's and shepherd's bones).

Erotic release is signaled by audacious leaps into the past. The sense of infringement derives from the most privileged of sacred images, the Body of Christ, seen in sudden dissipation. The embrace recalls scatterings of gold in a scene reminiscent of children's tales, as stars rain down from heaven. Rapturous energy unleashes a bacchic dance: “Da tanzten nackichte Männer und Huren in verrückter Ekstase/Heiden, Türken, Kaffern und Muhammedaner zumal” (And then nude men and whores danced in deranged ecstasy / Heathens, Turks, Kafirs, and Mohammedans above all). Angry, fast-moving messengers of doom combine the power of biblical speech with incongruous propulsion: “Da stoben die Engel den Erdkreis hinunter / Und brachten auf feurigem Teller die Finsternis und die Qual” (And then the angels alighted on our globe / And brought with them on fiery plates darkness and suffering). Angelic heralds are also bringers of dreams: “Da war keine Mutterknospe, kein Auge mehr blutunterlaufen und ohne Hoffen” (There was then no mother bud, no bloodshot eye without hope). The eye healed of violence and a promise of unfolding love (“Mutterknospe”) unite in the last words of the poem: “Jede Seele stand für die Kindheit und für das Wunder offen” (Every soul stood open to childhood and miracles). Representing metamorphosis, the sexual act is endowed with the redemptive power of miracles. The climax of erotic activity opens onto a torrential flow of disparate and unusually rich images. Each new association is determined by a syntactical parallel introduced with enunciatory force. The cadence of prophecy fittingly expresses the widening circles of vision. “Der Henker” comes to a finale celebrating innocence and the soul ravished by hope. Even the most repulsive act of love suggests perfect consolation in a bleak world. The “muse” of “Der Henker” is lust, calling forth release of tension and guilt. The poem demonstrates how ordinary things become radiant when infused with desire. Like other expressionist poets a lover of street whores, Ball believed that there is purity in things that are extremely tainted. It is in this sense that, despite its overt profanity, “Der Henker” may count as a religious poem.

Ball was unknown to the expressionist avant-garde when he burst upon the scene with “Der Henker,” with its depiction of sexual intercourse. The poem appeared in the first number of Revolution on October 15, 1913. Police confiscated the magazine, and authorities received a letter written by concerned citizens: “Your excellency,” the letter reads, “I have enclosed a filthy magazine … that has caused a great deal of vexation owing to its smutty, blasphemous content.”⁶ Ball's collaboration in what was termed a “Sudelschrift” (a smutty magazine) seems like a well-planned crime. A note to his sister, dated November 4, proves that public scandal was precisely Ball's purpose: “Much more important is that we can grab attention among this heap of seedy people and bring ourselves into the spotlight” (Briefe, 23). “Der Henker” weighs reverence against lust, terror against grace. Its overt licentiousness, its repulsive hero, and its mystical ending contributed to the indignation felt by the members of a “Stammtisch” (regulars at a local tavern) that had led one of them to complain to authorities. When Ball was accused of obscenity, the Munich poet Michael George Conrad (1846-1927), a man of quite dissimilar poetic demeanor, came to the defense of his fellow poet.⁷ The naturalist Conrad insisted that Ball's text was “precise,” that the magazine was indeed justified in offering the poem to its readership, and that it was a true work of art: “It is a work of art beyond good and evil, a human document. Hail to the poet!”⁸ Ball was pleased: “Fabelhaft” (stupendous), he wrote to his sister Maria.

“Der Henker” bears little resemblance to the poems of the Pfälzerwald cycle. The delicate pace and subtle reverberations of the early poems give way to expressionist action words and the spiked tension of contrast. The refined ring of sentiment and tidy artistry in the earlier poems are far from the ellipsis and exploding metaphor of the 1913 text. Yet the oblique, lofty qualities of the Pfälzerwald poems may be discerned in “Der Henker.” Although this poem is inspired by lust, it calls forth religious awe. Like the poet of 1908 who flings himself into setting suns, the poet of 1913 proceeds from the phenomenal world to universal reverie: “Every soul stood open to childhood and miracles.” The remoteness and “otherness” of the Pfälzerwald poems foreshadow the disconnected phrases, the expressionist temporal and precipitous spatial dislocations. “Der Henker” not only exhibits qualities found in the 1905-8 poem cycle, but anticipates Dada consciousness. The poem provokes and scorns public attention, displaying Dada's motif of quirky religious metaphor: “ein Hallelujah gurgelte durch Apostel- und Hirtenglieder … Da stoben die Engel den Erdkreis hinunter …” (A chant of hallelujah gurgled through apostle's and shepherd's bones … And then the angels alighted on our globe …). This last image calls to mind the angry seraphic hordes nesting in high towers found in Ball's Dada novel Tenderenda the Fantast. The creative rage of “Der Henker” violates societal norms and exposes strategies of deception or “Götzenplunder” (tattered idols), pointing forward to the radical political stance of “Totentanz 1916.”

“Der Henker” closely reflects the goal of the periodical in which it first appeared. Revolution was edited by Leybold and published by Heinrich F. S. Bachmair. Further collaborators of the magazine, besides Ball and Mühsam, were Becher, Klabund, Hülsenbeck, Max Brod, Blei, Hennings, and Else Lasker-Schüler. Ball described its founding in his eulogy for Leybold: “We found a small publisher in Munich. His name was Bachmair, H. F. S. X. Y. Bachmair—a fact which gave us quite a chuckle. Leybold said, ‘Let's have a magazine.’ We called it Revolution” (Schlichting, 25). Revolution, a bimonthly, was conceived, Ball wrote, “for an excessively modern and polemical taste” (Briefe, 22). Although taken by surprise when the first number of Revolution was picked up by police, the poet was otherwise undaunted by the turn of events: “Ugh! Well, I don't have much time to think about it,” he wrote Maria (Briefe, 23). Contributors to Revolution first assumed that the offending piece was a prose text by Leonhard Frank, provocatively entitled “Der Erotomane und diese Jungfrau” (The Erotic Fiend and This Virgin). The story relates the indiscriminate adventures of an unassuming citizen driven to sexual paroxysm at the sight of all women. Although Ball's poem seemed sexually explicit at first glance, the prosecution was hard pressed to articulate serious objections. After lengthy proceedings, including revision of the charges by the prosecutor's office, all charges were dismissed on the curious grounds that what the ordinary citizen doesn't understand cannot offend him. Readers, the judge decided, were likely to experience disgust not because of any moral impropriety but because of the abstruse nature of the text.⁹ For the offense of non-sense, however, the penal code lacked jurisdiction. Forced to concede defeat, the officer in charge found satisfaction in the early demise of the publication. Revolution ceased to exist on December 20, 1913. Its failure was due to insolvency. The publicity generated by the case actually provided a temporary commercial boost, since the editors were able to raise the price of the first and now “rare” copy from 10 to 50 pfennigs.

Initial hesitation by the prosecution in deciding on the exact target and the ensuing internal judicial debate indicate that the authorities were not simply alarmed by what they saw as a crude poem: they took offense at the overall tenor of the little magazine. Eckhard Faul, who has documented the “Henker” proceedings, writes that although they left a slightly crazed impression with the court, the poets took the ideas in their poems very seriously.¹⁰ Being able to state just what these ideas were might have strengthened the censor's argument.

The graphics on the cover of Revolution may be assumed to convey what the editors wanted most to express. The title of the periodical is cast in vivid red. Disjointed, flaming letters are splashed across the page, supported by a broad band of color. The letters are brush painted, as if applied to a wall. As Hülsenbeck recalled, drops of blood are visible above the text,¹¹ a violent message that is further illustrated by a woodcut by Richard Seewald, also entitled “Revolution.”¹² In addition, there is a table of contents and a list of real and imaginary contributors. The illustration itself occupies roughly one-fourth of the available space. Firing squads and mounted police encircle demonstrators carrying a freedom banner. Stones, smoking guns, and unfurled banners depict repression and death. Twisted, anonymous façades of high-rise buildings augment feelings of entrapment. Gaping windows portray fragmentation and anonymity. Contrary to the protesters, massed in spontaneous formation, the charging horses and firing lines express calculation and certainty. Oddly out of place, hovering prominently above the scene, is a giant advertisement. Projected onto the wall of the tallest edifice, as on a movie screen, the words “Amol/Odol/Manoli” refer to a popular brand of mouthwash (Odol).¹³ The presence of publicity, Faul believes, offers convicing proof that Revolution was unconcerned with politics:

The call for freedom is equated with the call for a new mouthwash: the revolution is brought back to everyday life by means of advertisements; in this way does its pathos seem grotesque.

The revolution is not taken seriously in Seewald's woodcut, at least not in its political dimensions. What matters, in the end, is the uprising as such; the banner might almost read “Manoli.”¹⁴

Rather than trivialize the grim events at the street level below, as suggested by Faul, the monstrous letters and self-proliferating syllables Amol/Odol/Manoli relate commercial products to the repression below. This reading is supported by the identical typeface of the word Freiheit (liberty) inscribed on the center banner and the words in the slogan. The drama takes place on the ideological level, a fact that did not escape the censor. Like the title of the magazine, Seewald's single-stroke message links the forces of repression to the discourse of capitalism. Despite Ball's contention that Seewald's intent was less political than stylistic, neither the advertisement nor the butchery below were accidental.¹⁵ Far from being a contradiction, the image provides a graphic link between capitalism and the principle of expediency. The message of Revolution includes, but is not limited to, a call for the emancipation of the masses and for the overthrow of authority. Revolution embraces all aspects of life. When Leybold asked Brodnitz for contributions to the magazine, he instructed her that she should be “revolutionary in some way or other.”¹⁶ Revolution is a continuum, unlimited by ideology. Mühsam carefully listed a series of revolutionary activities, beginning with two political means: “Tyrannicide, overthrow of a sovereign power, establishment of a religion, breaking of old tablets (with respect to convention and art), creation of a work of art, coition.”¹⁷ He endorses political assassination, it seems, as carried out by avowed anarchists. These acts are disowned by Ball in his diaries. Nevertheless, Ball, like Mühsam, yokes imagination to eroticism. Like the Mühsam article, structured to intensify into pure abstraction, “Der Henker” moves from a concrete and “revolting” event to inner vision, from realism to soulscape, concluding in an apotheosis of infinite creativity. Elsewhere, Mühsam described the experience of the bohemian artist in a character portrait of his lover Johannes Nohl (1882-1963), whom he had met in Berlin in 1903:

If my explanation is sound, and a bohemian is a person who, out of despair from never being able to sympathize with the majority of his fellows—and this desperation is the true sorrow of the artist—throws himself into life, experiments with chance, plays catch with the moment, and associates himself with the ever-present eternity;—then, I say, J. N. is the most typical bohemian who lives.¹⁸

Artists, Mühsam believed, submit to a process of risk-taking, gaining depth by experimenting with chance and all unorthodox forms of life. These are the principles that would form the very heart of Dada. “Der Henker” must be viewed within a context of utopian enthusiasm to liquidate bourgeois values, flourishing at the time in Ascona and Berlin-Schlachtensee, ideas that were carried to Munich by Mühsam and other free spirits intent on resisting societal norms. “Der Henker” springs from a unique form of lyricism, boldly celebrating in its vocal outbursts how creativity and sexual energy may coincide. Art originates from the entire body, a concept that expressionists deemed a privilege of the modern spirit.

“DAS INSEKT”

“Das Insekt” was published in Die Neue Kunst in December 1913. Like the rest of Ball's expressionist poems, “Das Insekt” maintains itself between horror and delight. It ends in a crescendo of wings afire. The subject of the poem is the mystery of insects and their ecstatic rites of self-immolation: “dem Furor der Besessnen und Todgeweihten” (the fury of the possessed and doomed). Although they are insects, they exhibit human physical features: “Ganz kleine Hände” (very small hands); and metaphysical longings: “Sie fliehen die Erde und deren Plumpheit” (They shun the world and its coarseness).

The first line, in praise of insect worship—“Lasst uns den Gottesdienst des Insekts aufrichten!” (Let us declare insect worship!)—recalls the upright position of the praying mantis (“aufrichten”). The new god boasts eyes made of “living” stone: “der Augen hat, die wie Rubine stechen! … Ihre Augen sind lebende Edelsteine” (with eyes that prick like rubies! … Their eyes are living gemstones). Its crimson body and folded, trembling wings are medieval church windows: “Der Flügel hat, voll hieratisch zuckender Aufregungen frühgotischer Fenster” (The god of wings filled with the hierarchically convulsive agitation of early Gothic windows). Grown to gigantic proportions, the divine insect turns into a ship's body, its spread legs cast as ominous sounding ropes: “Seine Beine sind lang wie die Lotfäden, die von den Schiffen herunterhängen / In die finsteren Meere” (His legs are long, like the hawsers hanging down from ships / Into the sinister seas). The initial vision of the insect-ship suspended above the abyss resonates in the climactic ending.

Insect, insectum, according to its etymology, means to cut and divide. Made of incisions, the insect body possesses the provocative flexibility of “Seiltänzer, Akrobaten und Kabarettistinnen …” (tightrope dancers, acrobats, and female cabaret artists …). They are lewd, “begatten sich wütend” (copulate fiercely); “Wenn ihn Wollust verkrampft, / Vermag er den eigenen Stachel zu lecken” (When lust contorts him, / He is able to lick his own stinger). Visions of a magnified insect-god recede into miniature: “Ganz kleine Hände haben die Stammesgenossen” (His tribal folk have very small hands). Insect populations belong to priestly sects and are given to displays of apathy. Others wage war against imaginary targets: “Sie unternehmen viel donquichotische Feldzüge gegen den Himmel” (These clans undertake many quixotic campaigns against the sky). These are “modern” insects, and their struggles are punctuated by the quaint hum of their flying machines. The imagery of war and adventure inspires the beauty of spun spider tents covering the forest ground with delicate dwellings: “Tagsüber sind sie verborgen in den Wäldern, die von den Zeltlagern der Spinnen/Und weissen Traghimmeln wundersam überdeckt sind” (During the day they hide in the woods covered by the tent camps of spiders / And their wondrous white canopies).

Like humans, insects organize themselves into nations and celebrate a fraternity of secret rites or philosophic callings. They encircle the hellish metropolis in great numbers: “Andere steuern vorbei an Kirchtürmen, Fabrikschloten und Dämmerungen / Über die höllischen Städte und Brückenbögen und Eiffeltürme / Über die drohenden Dampfkräne der Hafenstädte, die Wolkenkratzer Newyorks / Nach unratbaren Zielen der Schwermut” (Others steer past church towers, factory chimneys, and twilights / Above the infernal cities and bridge arches and Eiffel towers / High above the threatening steam-hoists of harbor towns, the skyscrapers of New York / Seeking melancholy's unimaginable destinations). Their capacity for madness comes from excess of feeling: “Wahnsinnig sind sie vor zuviel Empfindlichkeit.” While the obsessions of the insects vary and are often violent, their intentions and commitments remain illogical. Their need for discovery and inner dream, their noblest purpose, are the stuff of tragicomedy: “Sie … kennen die Tragikkomödien der Kühnheit” (They … know the tragicomedies of courage). They will themselves toward the immaterial: “Manche auch … suchen die Gloriolen der Sonne auf” (Some … seek out the halos of the sun), a fascination contradicted by their insignificant brains: “Die kleinen … Strahlenvorhöfe des Kopfgestirns” (The small … starry antechambers of cerebral hemispheres). Their highest aspirations manifest but a dementia imposed by the organic nature of their brains.

Quivering, fluttering, and swarming insects perform a dance of death. Yearning for plenitude, they seek the void and the oneness of fire: “Stürzen sie sich in die Magie dieses Feuermeers. …” (They hurl themselves into the magic of this sea of fire …). Ball's last Pfälzerwald poem, “Sonnenuntergang,” lifts the entranced poet into the evening sun. The same experience is portrayed here as nothing more than cruel deception of the mind. Insects congregate in public places and are stirred by the isolated light of the scholar: “Wo in verschollner Gelehrtenstube eines Gebirgsdorfes / Eine weitsichtbare Lampe brennt. …” (Where in a solitary scholar's chamber in a mountain village / A flickering lamp is visible from afar …). Unable to resist its lure, they seek annihilation in a sea of fire: “hochtrabend und gierig” (bombastic and greedy). A dazzling nautical metaphor records the tremulous vibrations of their violent dream of death: “Bis sie vom Funken erfasst aufknistern und prasseln und Schiffbruch leiden / Wie Segelschiffe mit brennendem Takelwerk” (Until they are caught by the spark, and crackle and crepitate and suffer shipwreck / Like sailing vessels with rigs aflame). As it bursts into flame, the crazed creature soars briefly. Magnified to the dimensions it assumes in its delusion, the insect plunges into death. Fire transmutes the radiant beating of wings into the flailing of ships’ sails. Engulfed by the flash of light, now pared to its skeletal silhouette, the insect is almost substanceless. A minute event acquires quasimetaphysical proportions by means of the optically enlarged and intensified catastrophe. Coerced by the flame and attempting to plumb the abyss, human and insect merge in the final image of self-immolation. The sudden, violent theater of fire is depicted by three words describing the burning: “Aufknistern/prasseln/brennendem.” “F” in the initial noun position, “Furor/Feuermeers/Funken,” distills sensations of frightening physical aggression. Prolonged hissing sounds, as produced by paper or straw, convey a sensation of flight and consumption by fire. The final soaring connotes scintillation (“Funken”) and failure (“Schiffbruch”), the instant of arousal and its savage suppression. The ending combines feelings of splendor and fatal unease that carry throughout the text. The poem expands toward oneiric dimensions. The ravished insect-light is an image of human shipwreck and an incendiary metaphor for the expressionist poet.

“VERSUCHUNG DES HEILIGEN ANTONIUS”

“Versuchung des heiligen Antonius”—published January 17, 1914, in Die Aktion—is Ball's terrifying expressionist self-portrait. Like “Der Henker,” it explores extreme states of mind, chronicling madness and temptation. Saint Anthony was besieged by the banished spirits, attempting to unlock the inner depths of the soul: “The banished spirits besiege him and try to break the seal” (Flight, 211).

Ball refers to the wilderness of Saint Anthony as a place of terrible loneliness, a hyperbole for a yawning solitude (Flight, 197). This void defines the situation of the modern spirit, condemned to live in an age that ranks ahead of all others in demonic impulse. Ball's diary shows that he was himself subject to deep anguish and delirium. The poet took intense interest in altered states, tracking closely the acute perceptions of shock and hallucination. These euphoric states were perhaps drug induced, although Ball assured his cousin that he took morphine only once and that he can't even drink wine. “I suffer from a continuous drunkenness of the soul,” he wrote (Briefe, 58). His knowledge of drugs and their effects was enough, though, to leave an imprint on his writing. A cry of startling visual motifs, this poem intends to impart directly, without mediation of intellect, the turmoil of the soul. Heightened by conflict of angle, color, and sound, the poem creates successive stages of threatening mental and physical discomfort. Bursts of sirens combine with scenes of regression and barbarism. On its surface, the text reads like the script of an early expressionist film, with its hard-edged shapes and sudden thrust of action. The disintegration of self is linked to nightmarish sensitivity. Events register in the “primitive” way they first strike the eye and ear. The shrinking sensations of the poem may be compared to perceptions the poet Gottfried Benn attributed to “Flimmerhaare,” microscopic nerve follicles that are the physical source of the streaming landscape of the senses. Fierce and transcendent, gripped by unimaginable sensations, “Saint Anthony” embodies physical and metaphysical temptation—what might be called Ball's song of the bone marrow.

The poem starts with images of bare nerve endings, seen as fields of barbed wire and burrs from the flowering sticker bush. The first stanza conjures both heightened states of alarm and the imagery of warfare: “Meine Nerven im Körper stellen sich auf wie Stachelfelder” (The nerves in my body stand up like fields of thorns). Harsh consonants stress gagging sensations: “Körper/Kletten/Knoten.” These nouns attract attention to the physical nature of the metaphor. A source of sharp wounding arises from the inner shaft of life: “Im Rohr meines Rückenmarks” (In the shaft of my spinal cord). The image is yoked to the eerie quality of the religious chant of castrati: “Mein Rückenmark singt eine rote Messe von knäbischen Fisteltönen” (My spinal cord sings a red mass of boyish falsetto sounds). The trenchant sound and rich color exalt the piercing delight expressed by the falsetto melodies of boyish voices. The inner vibrations and swelling of blood cause the sudden, “heady” loss of balance. Observed frontally, a suspended skull gives focus to strands of hair, “grünes Gewürm” (green worms), suggesting nerve endings, now painfully pushed beyond bodily confines.

The second stanza passes from inner torment to outer calamity. Precariously leaning façades defy the laws of gravity: “Wände schief, Häuser schief” (Slanting walls, slanting houses). Syntactical fragmentation expresses the disarticulation of reality. The iridescent flight of flies denotes terror and disarray. Forcing the tongue, words are mere phonetic elements, reflecting the furious rush of swarming insects: “Stechfliegenschwärme sausen und funkeln durchs Zimmer” (Swarming horseflies rush and scintillate throughout the room). The stage is set for the ghastly spectacle of the medieval plague, “Pestphantom mit der Klapper” (phantom pestilence, rattle in hand). Rattling noise accompanies the appearance of the imaginary death figure. Physicians dressed in pointed hats engage in fruitless medical succor, covering disease with band-aids. Plague attacks not only humans but objects: “Wände haben die Blattern bekommen und bröckeln ab” (Walls have caught pestilence and crumble). Its murderous grip translates into raving delusion: “Ich hole zum Schlag aus. Hilfe! Es weicht nicht. Eine gelbe Wolke. / Zeter und Mordio. Irrsinn. Irrsinn!” (I cock my arm to strike. Help! It does not retreat. A yellow cloud. / Cry of murder. Mania! Mania!)

While stanza 2 evokes distant time, stanza 3 presents a world cut from its moorings: “Fliegende Scharlachstädte. Grüne Oasen. Leuchtfäden. Schwarz ratternde Sonnen” (Flying scarlet cities. Green oases. Filaments of light. Black, rattling suns). Disintegration flows from the very heart of nature. Air, light, and stars are tainted and have turned against their natural order. There is illness throughout. Pustules spew fumes; stars have lost their course: “Luft eitert. Licht zerplatzt. Fixsterne in Kasernen verirrt” (Festering air. Bursting light. Fixed stars lost in barracks). The individual, condemned to inaction and overwhelmed by extremes of tension, endures the physical assault of a reptilian race: “flüchten und schnellen / Nackt … mit zuckender Schlangenbewegung. …” (run and flee / Naked and charged by the convulsive movement of a snake …).

The last stanza, a reflection of hell, “wie aus dem Höllenkessel” (as if arising from hell's cauldron), bestows a renewed sense of time and place: “Meine Hände … an eine Säule des Tempels geklammert” (My hands cling to a temple column). Reference to the temple introduces the image of multiple gods seated on lotus chairs. Clutching a temple column, Saint Anthony stands accused of obscenity: “Jemand hohnschreit: Obszönität!” (Someone jeers: obscenity!). The stanza reveals pure abstraction of line and color. Hissing, assaultive sounds, color contrast, and feverish expression of duration (“Und immer die Polterstösse … Und immer … das Zickzackgetöse. …” [And always the rumbling blows … And always … the zigzag din …]) give depth to the joltings of irrational fear. Amidst suicide and trembling earth, the eye moves upward to divinity, “Buddhapriester” (priests of Buddha). From their height, the gods, bursting with gleeful laughter, observe human misery. Stung by the response of the gods to universal suffering, the holy man is led into final temptation. Vulgar and fat-bellied, gods, not of enlightenment but of sluggishness, “Grossväter des Stumpfsinns” (grandfathers of stupidity), suffer from lack of compassion: “Lächeln und fächeln … / Und platzen vor faltenreissender Schadenfreude” (Smile and fan … / And burst with rip-roaring Schadenfreude).

The poem re-creates the torment of the early Christian monk, but the ordeal is lived in the present. The reference to obscenity charges hints at Ball's recent indictment in the “Der Henker” case. The poet had a long-standing interest in Saint Anthony and planned a chapter on the saint in Byzantinisches Christentum. His affinity for the hermit is also recorded in a series of entries in Flight out of Time. The saint's trial in the desert exemplifies Ball's own confrontation with guilt, terror, and human frailty. The poet lends voice to the modern artist's vocation, one that involves the endurance of solitude and the disintegration of the creative self. Ball's poem represents a vision of an entire artistic generation formed by obsessive self-examination, morbid eroticism, and the anticipation of a war that would annihilate many.

“CIMIO”

“Cimio” appeared in Die Aktion, July 4, 1914. The poem celebrates a woman lover from the city of Constantsa, Romania, located on the Black Sea.¹⁹ Like her unfamiliar name, suffused with the ring of faraway places, Cimio's presence conveys drama and cosmopolitan flair. The poem continues as we witness the transmutation of her physical features. The young woman becomes flower, music, horse, painting, dream, and song. Enticing and childlike, Cimio represents mildness, “sanftsüchtig” (gently yearning), but also daring and sudden violence: “… Finger stechen wie Dolche. …” (Your fingers stab like daggers …). Fragments of memory, gesture, and the resonance of Eastern European speech—“Tanzende Hände hast du, Töchterchen” (You have dancing hands, darling daughter)—blend with Cimio's physical attributes. She is at once center of sight and reflection of innumerable dark eyes. Her entire body is made of heightened sensual awareness: “Dein Körper ist über und über voll schwarzer Augen” (Your body is dotted with black eyes). Lovers' hands meet in the fashion of large oriental fans: “Wir legen die Hände gegeneinander, wie grosse Fächer, wenn wir uns lieben” (We hold our palms against each other like big fans whenever we make love). Such artful love is sustained by streaks of color found in the initial verse sequence. Intense hues of red and black produce a rich contrast in a disquieting, fauvist vision of the female body, yellow with appendicitis: “Dein Blinddarm ist krank, davon bist du sehr gelb” (Your appendix is sick, making you very yellow).

The second stanza pictures the young woman much like the subject of a Matisse painting. The perfumed and pleasing disorder of her hair suggests the flowering lilac bush, with patterns of locks recalling the symmetries of gleaming panicles: “Fliedersträusse wachsen aus deinen Ohren. / Dein ganzer Kopf ist voll Flieder” (Bouquets of lilacs grow from your ears. / Your entire head is covered with lilac). The decorative profusion of untamed syringa introduces the image of a bridled horse bedecked with flowers: “Aufgezäumt bist du mit Flieder” (You are bridled with lilac). Cimio is compared to the butterfly (“Deine Augenwimpern … gleich Schmetterlingsflügeln” [Your eyelids … like butterfly wings]), a musical instrument (“Deine Nase ist einer Klaviertaste sehr ähnlich” [Your nose much resembles a piano key]), and a fluttering flag, avid for caresses (“sanftsüchtig gegen den Wind” [Gently yearning toward the wind]). Fingers pierce the air, creating musical sensations: “Deine Finger stechen wie Dolche klirrende Glissandos. …” (Your fingers stab like daggers, clinking glissandos …). Juxtaposition of doubled letters and a predominance of high-pitched vowel sounds throughout stress musical qualities. The epithet “klirrende” (clinking) alludes to winter cold, shattering glass, and a dizziness of self-awareness. Cimio represents both danger and sensuality. Her tongue, likened to that of the snake, is temptation, a burning wick of light: “Deine Zunge ist roter Kopf einer Schlange, brennender Docht einer Lampe” (Your tongue is a red-headed snake, the burning wick of a lamp). Like Ball's poem “Die Weisse Qualle” (The White Medusa), the woman lover of “Cimio” is a creature of the sea: “… the sea roared in your ears” (“… heulte das Meer deinen Ohren”). The association is strengthened by the pivotal image of the text: “Auf deinem Schatten, Cimio, purzeln die kleinen Teufel / Wie schnalzende Fische, die man vom Bottich aufs Trockene schüttet” (On your shadow, Cimio, small devils tumble / Like clicking fish emptied from a bucket onto dry land). The lovers—plunging into another realm—and the exhilaration of bodies evoke glistening fish. Sexual climax is rendered as the precipitous downward tumble of fish, emptied from a vat onto dry land. Paralleling the spent energy of lovers, the fall of fish from aquatic life is marked by the imitative clicking of tongues. A poem of the senses, “Cimio” reveals a spectacle of music, color, and dancelike gestures, linked by means of varying classes of imagery. Like the other expressionist poems, “Cimio” is a constructed work of art, leading to the unity of a final metaphor, which relates the rapture of intimacy and erotic tension to the sense of exile that characterizes the real and imaginary voyage of “Cimio,” serving an instant of perfect dénouement.

TOWARD A NEW OBJECTIVITY

From his earliest Pfälzerwald poems, Ball's poetry embraces border zones between waking and sleeping, realism and hallucination, thought and song. The poet brings to expressionist art his mastery of the sudden act of language, when sound, the cadence of massed nouns, and metaphoric stress briefly converge, hurtling a text into a counterfeit dream. Like the futurist paintings he admired in Dresden, Ball's poems use pure color, bathing his images in a naked light. Embracing madness and dream, Ball's poems exorcise personal obsessions. The lasting impression of these poems, despite their assault on sensibility, is one of purity, a result arrived at by the calculated sweep of extremes of emotion. Ball's poems convey a hallucinatory disordering of reality. They are sumptuous, seeking to capture the swerving lines of a lethal dance: “ganz wirr und taumelnd im blühenden Gifte …” (bewildered and reeling in blossoming poison …), the poet writes in “Der Verzückte” (The Enraptured), a poem first published in Die Neue Kunst in December 1913. Ball's expressionist poetry was clearly a response to the Italian futurist paintings he saw in Dresden. The rarefied image of blood whipped into falsetto tones, for example, is found in the review of Italian futurist art that appeared in Revolution on November 15, 1913, and in the poem “Versuchung des heiligen Antonius.” Ball concludes his report on futurist painting by prophesying that the violence unleashed in the paintings he was discussing would soon become reality: “things to take away your breath, howling things that will come to pass, come to pass” (Schlichting, 13). War began only a few months later. When the phantasmic became an everyday event, Ball honed bitter intensity into stark verses. His wartime poems leave behind elaborate staging in favor of simple persuasion. Color, which had appeared in profusion in the expressionist poems, becomes rare:

Grau war der Apfel und grau das Brot.
Die Schnitter waren zerfallen mit Gott.
(Gray was the apple and gray the bread.
The harvesters had fallen away from God.)

(Gesammelte Gedichte, 19)

The direction taken by Ball points to ever-greater formal simplicity. After the flamboyant 1913/14 poems, the sobriety of his early war poems leads to his exquisite lament of the lack of all meaning, when words no longer transcribe the fleeting world but break into symmetries and palpitations of pure sound.

Notes

1. Eckhard Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär: Hugo Balls ‘Henker’ in der frühexpressionistischen Zeitschrift Revolution,” Hugo-Ball-Almanach 11 (1987): 76.

2. Hugo Ball, “Aphorismen,” in Jugend [Munich] 1, no. 13 (1913): 363.

3. Erich Mühsam was arrested after the Reichstag burning and assassinated at the Oranienburg concentration camp. Mühsam's program reads like a pre-Dadaist manifesto. See Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär,” 13.

4. Two studies of Ball's expressionist poetry are of particular interest: Susanne Backa, “Frühe Lyrik Balls,” Hugo-Ball-Almanach 13 (1989): 1-62, and Eckhard Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär: Hugo Balls ‘Henker’ in der frühexpressionistischen Zeitschrift Revolution.”

5. The influence of Ball's poetry on modern rock singers has not been studied. His poem “gadji beri bimba” provides the lyrics for “I Zimbra,” the lead song on the album Fear of Music by Talking Heads with music by David Byrne and Brian Eno. His poems also inspired John Tchicai and Pierre Dørge's Ball at Louisiana (1983). Ball writes in his poem “Der Henker”: “Sei gebenedeit! Mir rinnt geiler Brand an den Beinen herunter” (Be blessed! But a fiery sap snakes down my legs). In the early seventies, male ejaculatory fantasies identical to “Der Henker's” spermbath are found in a song performed by Led Zeppelin's lead singer Robert Plant: “Squeeze me, baby, til the juice runs down my leg, the way you squeeze my lemon, I'm going to fall right out of bed, bed, bed” (“The Lemon Song,” Led Zeppelin II, CD, Atlantic, 19127-2). While the first use of this image can be traced to Ball's poem, its influence on Plant can only be suggested. For a discussion of Plant's lyrics see Thomas Miessgang, “Fruchtig, saftig, leichenstarr,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), 6 May 1994, 22, overseas edition. “Lemon Song” was released in 1969. The use of an image that caused Ball's trouble with authorities has since entered popular culture.

6. Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär,” 43. Confiscation of Revolution only strengthened Ball's interest in the controversial topic of censorship. Together with Klabund, the poet planned an anthology of confiscated texts: “The book is called The Confiscated and will anthologize roughly thirty writers whose works have either been confiscated or banned. This is a protest. Among the writers are Wedekind, Blei, Thoma, Schmidtbonn, Eulenberg. In short order, included is all of literature with some life to it” (Briefe, 29). A lack of morals, Ball believed, does not preclude artistic seriousness. One of his early aphorisms defines his thought on the matter: “Only form, not morality, is important in art. You can have a truly depraved art without cutting the tie with morality. As long as there is form, that is, as long as boundaries are imposed, there is morality” (Zeit im Bild [Munich], September 3, 1913, 2437.)

7. Michael Georg Conrad, naturalist and acquaintance of Émile Zola, had a reputation for his stand against repression, in particular the Lex Heinze (1900), a law conceived to limit artistic freedom. See Peter Jelavich, “Die Elf Scharfrichter: The Political and Sociocultural Dimensions of Cabaret in Wilhelmine Germany,” in The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art 1890-1915, edited by Gerald Chapple and Hans Schulte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), and Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985), 26-44.

8. Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär,” 64.

9. Ibid., 67. This victory over official culture links provocatively incomprehensible texts to freedom from legal prosecution. It was a crucial experience for Ball, pointing forward to Dada strategies.

10. Ibid., 58.

11. Although Hülsenbeck is quite unreliable, I disagree with Faul on the description of graphic elements that make up the title of the magazine. The drawn-out smudge and three far-flung drops spanning the third and forth letters do seem to represent blood, although Faul disputes this. Hülsenbeck is wrong only in locating the drops of blood adjacent to the last letters of the title. For a full-page color reproduction, see Teubner, 95.

12. Seewald is listed also as set designer for the production of Franz Blei's Die Welle at the Münchener Kammerspiele, 10 December 1913 (Teubner, 77).

13. On “Odol” as an important cultural icon, invented by Karl August Ligner in 1893, see Ulrich Holbein, “Odol,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), 17 December 1993, 16, overseas edition. This particular product attracted the Italian futurists. Carlo Carrà prominently displays Odol in his “free-word” painting of 1914, collection Gianni Mattioli, Milan. A gigantic bottle of Odol was used as a galactic prop in Frank Castorf's 1996 staging of Carl Zuckmayer's Des Teufels General (The Devil's General, 1942) at the Volksbühne, Berlin.

14. Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär,” 21.

15. Ball wrote in his diary notation about Die Revolution: “The title of the last one was printed unmistakably on newsprint in red letters; below it there was a small woodcut by Seewald, of rickety wind-swept houses. The periodical's aims were stylistic rather than political” (Flight, 6).

16. Hansjörg Viesel, ed., Litanei zum Heiligen Hugo (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1985), 43.

17. Faul, “In irgend einer Art Revolutionär,” 13.

18. Ulrich Linse, “Der Rebell und die ‘Mutter Erde’: Asconas ‘Heiliger Berg’ in der Deutung des anarchistischen Bohémien Erich Mühsam,” in Monte Verità: Berg der Wahrheit, edited by Harald Szeemann (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1978), 28.

19. Ball pays homage in this song of exile to the Roman poet Ovid. Constantsa was the site of Ovid's banishment.