PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 189
Walter Flex
THE ACADEMIC WARRIOR
Walter Flex was born in the Thuringian town of Eisenach on July 6, 1887. The second of four sons, his father Rudolf was a secondary school teacher and fervent admirer of Otto von Bismarck. All his boys were subsequently brought up to revere the Iron Chancellor.
Young Walter had a happy childhood… and showed no interest in world events until the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1898. He soon became sympathetic for “the underdog”. Like many other Germans of his time, Flex sympathized with the Boers in their battle against the British Empire.
For college, Flex studied German at the University of Erlangen, thanks primarily to the award of a bursary. According to Tim Cross:
“Walter Flex’s first attempt at drama was the tragedy Demetrius, about the Tsarist Pretender. In his following works for the stage, social problems form the core, as in Lothar, Die Bauernführer, Das Heilige Blut, and Der Kanzler Klaus von Bismarck. These revolve around the premise that society is necessary. Each individual is like a thread, insignificant, disposable, and only makes sense if he is a thread woven into the fabric of the carpet. Interesting as these plays are in the context in which they were written, it cannot be claimed that Flex was an original writers a dramatist, he laboured much under the influence of Hebbel. His poetry is the least distinguished of his output, and appears more as an exercise towards the prose works such as Wallenstein and Der Wanderer.”
Flex became a successful academic. Like his father, he became a teacher. His first appointment was as a private tutor to the family of former Chancellor von Bismarck. A later appointment was to the family of Baron von Leesen, but this was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914.
Despite weak ligaments in his right hand, Flex volunteered for the Imperial German Army in his mother’s birthplace of Rawitsch (now Rawicz, Poland) and was assigned to the 50th Infantry. By September 1914, Flex first saw combat on the Western Front in Lorraine and in the Argonne Forest.
According to Tim Cross:
“His poetic outpourings on the war were prolific. Two collections, Sonne und Schild and Im Felde Zwischen Tag und Nacht were produced in the first months of the war. His body, soul, and literary talent were placed wholly at the disposal of the war-effort. The Christmas Fable for the 50th Regiment earned him the Order of the Red Eagle with Crown.”
In early 1915 at the officer’s training camp in Biedrusko (just north of Posen), Flex met and befriended theology student Ernst Wurche, who was also a fellow member of the Wandervogel youth movement. Wurche lived by the motto, “To stay pure is to mature.” In addition, he always carried three books in his backpack: the New Testament, the poems of Goethe, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Flex viewed Wurche as the epitome of the new German. He made his friend the subject of the 1916 novella Der Wanderer Zwischen Beiden Weltem (A Wanderer between Two Worlds). Both Flex (now a lieutenant) and Wurche were sent further east to fight the Cossacks at Augustów (in Russian Poland). Sadly, the twenty-one-year-old Wurche was killed in battle at Simnas (near Alytus in modern-day Lithuania) in the summer of 1915.
But Walter Flex fought on! He faced the Russians at Vilnius in September 1915 when the great Austro-German offensive was coming to an end. He also participated in the Lake Naroch Offensive (a failed push by the Russians) in March 1916. Later that year, Flex was ordered to Berlin to document the offensive for an official series of monographs. They were printed in 1919 under the title Die Russische Frühjahrsoffensive 1916 (The Russian Spring Offensive 1916).
DEATH
Having been drafted to the Baltic Sea in the autumn of 1917, Walter Flex participated in the amphibious Operation Albion and the conquest of Saaremaa Island. Trees, swamps, lakes, villages and cottages dominated the Baltic island just offshore from Russian-held Estonia.
Flex and his division landed on Saaremaa Island in October 1917. After a three-day struggle near Pöide, the Russians surrendered their arms… except for one defiant soldier. The remaining man refused to yield and shot down Flex! The bullet tore off his right forefinger, entered his body, and became lodged near his stomach.
The wounded Flex was taken to Oti Manor. He wrote a last line:
“Dear parents! I dictate this postcard as I’m slightly wounded at the forefinger of my right hand. Besides this, I am well off. There’s no room for worry whatsoever. Love, Walter.”
But his injuries were indeed mortal!
Walter Flex died on October 16, 1917 at the age of thirty. He was buried in the Pöide Parish cemetery. His epitaph was a quote from his 1915 work, Preußischer Fahneneid (Prussian Military Oath):
“Wer je auf Preußens Fahne schwört,
Hat nichts mehr, was ihm selbst gehört.”
(“He who on Prussia’s banner swears
has nothing left that belongs to himself.”)
LEGACY
Der Wanderer Zwischen Beiden Weltem (A Wanderer between Two Worlds) was published in 1916 by Verlag C. H. Beck. Flex’s work was well received… so much so that it has never been out of print since its first publication! By 1917, over 700,000 copies had been printed in Germany. It was a testament to Flex’s extreme popularity with the wartime public. Tim Cross compared Flex’s long-lasting posthumous fame and the idealization of his wartime death with the similar cultus surrounding English war poet Rupert Brooke.
But in his heyday, Walter Flex said that:
“… it was not national patriotism I represent, but demands for the moral good. When I wrote about the perpetuity of the German race and about the deliverence of the world by the Germanic, it had nothing to do with national egotism; rather it is a moral conviction which can be realized as much in the defeat or in the heroic sacrifice of a nation.”
In 1940, Flex’s body was moved from Estonia to a new military cemetery before the Sackheimer Tor (Sackheim Gate) at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). But by then, the Second World War was raging. Flex’s grave (along with the rest of the East Prussian capital) was destroyed in Allied air raids as well as the three-month Red Army siege in early 1945.
As a song, Flex’s poem “Wildgänse Rauschen Durch die Nacht” (“Wild Geese Rush Through the Night”) gained popularity with the Wandervogel youth. It was well known and sung in Germany until the 1970s.