Blog

August Stramm was born in the Westphalian town of Münster on July 29, 1874. His father had served in the Prussian Army… and had been decorated for bravery during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. According to Patrick Bridgwater, his military legacy caused the young August to go through life “with a sense of duty”.

August gave “a middling performance at school”. Later on, he had to gain his abitur through part-time study. Against the wishes of his mother (who wanted August to become a Roman Catholic priest), Stramm joined the German Post Office Ministry in 1893… and was rapidly promoted! Despite being near-sighted, Stramm served one year of compulsory military service in the Imperial German Army from 1896 to 1897.

Stramm then returned to working at the German Post Office Ministry. He was granted a coveted position as a postal worker on luxury ocean liners running from Bremen to New York City. This led to Stramm making several long stays in the United States.

After returning to Germany, Stramm married romance novelist Else Kraft in 1902. The couple had two children… and lived in Bremen until 1905, when they moved to Berlin.

THE FIRST EXPRESSIONIST

According to Patrick Bridgwater:

“His early work (romantic poetry, painting rather ordinary landscapes, still-lifes, a naturalistic play) was basically unoriginal and derivative.”

Stramm’s daughter Inge later wrote that:

“around the year 1912, literature overtook him like a sickness… A Demon awoke in him.”

Stramm began writing plays and poems “in a strange new style that could find no publisher.”

According to Jeremy Adler:

“Stramm’s plays, too, became concentrated and brief, distilling situations into a few characteristics and increasingly ambiguous words and gestures. Characters are types like ‘He’ and ‘She’, and the surroundings merge into action: sound, word, gesture, and decor blend into a symbolic whole.”

Two of the first mature plays written by Stramm were complementary opposites. In the Symbolistic Sancta Susanna (1912-13), a Roman Catholic nun violates her vow of chastity. But in the Naturalistic Rudimentär (1912-14), a Berlin semi-literate is awakened by the glimmerings of reason.

However, Stramm was soon, “driven to near despair by his lack of success as a writer”. By 1913, he was on the verge of destroying all his manuscripts when Else Stramm (whose novels had had no such troubles with publication) urged her husband to contact Herwarth Walden, the editor of the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm.

According to Jeremy Adler:

“Herwarth Walden stood at the forefront of the avant-garde movement in Berlin.”

Walden was receiving submissions from countless international artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Pablo Picasso, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky. He was also in contact with Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In Der Sturm, Walden had published German translations of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and Apollinaire’s Modern Painting.

According to Adler:

“For Walden, Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism were essentially the same, and he sought to unite them in his own all-embracing Sturm-Kunst.”

What Walden lacked was a German poet “whose work could stand comparison with the international elite who figured in Der Sturm”. That soon changed when he met August Stramm. A close friendship developed between the two men. Personally and artistically, they became indispensable to each other…

THE WAR POET

August Stramm was a reserve officer in the Prussian Army. By 1914, he had attained the rank of captain.

Upon the outbreak of the First World War in August of that year, Stramm was immediately called up and posted as a company commander to Landwehrregiment 110. His unit saw action on the Western Front in Alsace and the Vosges. According to Jeremy Adler:

“From the start, Stramm had few illusions and never joined in the so-called Hurrah-Patriotismus.”

In mid-January 1915, Stramm was reassigned to the newly formed Reserve Infantry Regiment 272, stationed at Oise near the Somme River in northern France. By the end of the month, company commander Stramm had been awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class for courage under fire.

In a letter on February 14, 1915, Stramm wrote:

“But there is horror in me, there is horror around me, bubbling, surging around, throttling, ensnaring. There’s no way out anymore.”

On February 23, 1915, he wrote:

“Germany needs brave soldiers. Nothing else will do. We have to go through with it, however much we condemn the war.”

According to Patrick Bridgwater:

“While Stramm is known to have enjoyed his peacetime role of reserve officer, he was too sensitive to have any illusions about the war, which he hated (for all the unholy fascination it held for him).”

On January 12, 1915, Stramm wrote to Walden from the Western Front:

“I stand like a cramp, unsteady, without a foundation, without a brace, anchored, and numb in the grimace of my will and stubbornness.”

A few months later, Stramm wrote to his wife from Galicia. He told her how everything was so unspeakably dreadful. Thus, while Stramm was always absolutely sure where his duty lay, he did not write a single chauvinistic war poem… even at the time when nearly everybody else in Germany was seemingly doing so.

In addition, Stramm did not write overtly anti-war poems, which his conscience would not have allowed him to do. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that the poem Feuertaufe (“Baptism by Fire”) should have caused a scandal in the German press in 1915… for its only conceivable fault is its utter honesty. Its attempt to convey the feeling of coming under enemy fire for the first time, as well as its implicit refusal to pretend that the feeling in question was one of heroic excitement.

According to Jeremy Adler:

“Although the letters testify to profound inner turmoil, Stramm was a popular officer and a brave soldier.”

At the end of April 1915, Stramm’s regiment was transferred to the Eastern Front. His men were placed under the command of General August von Mackensen. Stramm and his troops participated in the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive against the Russians in the Austro-Hungarian Crownland of Galicia.

According to Patrick Bridgwater:

“Stramm distinguished himself and was at one point acting Battalion Commander, in which role he was involved in the attack on the Russian positions at Ostrow. It was here that he won the Austrian Kriegsverdienstkreuz and was recommended for the Iron Cross, First Class.”

After recapturing the fortresses of Przemysl and Lemberg, Stramm and his regiment continued to pursue the Tsarist Russian Army during the Great Retreat of 1915. By July, Stramm’s regiment had reached the Bug River.

At the beginning of August 1915, Stramm was sent home on what was his final furlough. His daughter Inge later recalled how her father made her ten-year-old brother promise:

“…never to let himself down by being a Schweinhund before himself.”

His family later learned that throughout his furlough, Stramm had carried a letter in his pocket which he needed only to countersign in order to be released from all future military service at his publisher’s request. By this time, Stramm had come to detest the war and believed that his death in combat was imminent. His mind was also filled with projects that he longed to write down. In the end, however, Stramm was, according to Patrick Bridgwater:

“…unable to accept the alibi of a higher duty to literature.”

After returning to his company, Stramm found that it had been reduced to only twenty-five men! It was at the time of a Russian counteroffensive led by General Alexei Brusilov. Stramm (with the remnants of his company) took part in “the giant battle for Brest-Litovsk”… which fell to the Germans on August 25, 1915.

DEATH

On September 1, 1915, August Stramm led an attack against the Tsarist Russian Army in the Rokitno Marshes. The attack soon broke down into brutal hand-to-hand combat. Sadly, Stramm was shot in the head; he was the last member of his company to fall during the fight. According to Jeremy Adler, Stramm was about to be awarded the Iron Cross, First Class at the time of his death.

According to Patrick Bridgwater;

“What is quite extraordinary is that he appears to have found in the hell-on-earth of total warfare around Brest-Litovsk in 1915 the sense of harmony he had sought for so long.”

A few weeks before his death, Stramm had written to Herwarth Walden:

“Singularly, life and death are one… Both are one… Battle and the night and death and the nightingale are all one. One! And fighting and sleeping and dreaming and acting are all one! There is no separation! All goes together and swims and shimmers like sun and whirlpool. Only time goes forward, time this. So do fighting, hungering, singing, dying. All! Soldier and officer! Day and night! Sorrowing and bleeding! And a hand shines over me! I swim through everything. Am everything! I!”

A blood-stained copy of the 1904 German translation of the book “In Tune with the Infinite” (In Harmonie mit dem Unendlichen), by American New Thought philosopher Ralph Waldo Trine, was found in Stramm’s pocket after his death. His enthusiasm for Trine is believed to have been rooted during his stay in the United States.

August Stramm’s body was buried with full military honors at Gorodets, in the Kobryn District of modern Belarus, on October 2, 1915. He was forty-one years old.

Stramm’s radically experimental verse and his major influence on all subsequent German poetry has caused him to be compared to Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. Jeremy Adler has called August Stramm one of “the most innovative poets of the First World War”.