August Stramm (1874-1915) e Wilhelm Runge (1894-1918). Apocalissi e arte verbale nella lirica bellica espressionista

The author analyses the poems Schlacht (Battle, 1914) and Des Him- mels schwerster Atem keucht aus Gräben (The Heaviest Breath of Heaven Pants from the Trenches, 1916) by two Expressionist writers, A. Stramm (1874-1915) and W. Runge (1894-1918). He illustrates how, through the process of “unveil- ing” (i.e., “apocalypse”) immanent in these texts, the image of “catastrophe” and the idea of “end” already imply and contain within themselves the notion of a “new beginning”. By situating these war poems within the broader context of European avant-garde experimentalism (notably T. Marinetti), the study seeks to highlight the aims pursued by the “play” that the Expressionist text – be- cause of the ambivalent nature of its constructions – establishes with its reader- interpreter whenever the latter attempts to “decipher” its meaning. The infinite variety of iconographic and interpretative possibilities that the exegesis of the poem opens up is thus related to the most recent findings of scenes-and-frames semantics concerning the processes of reading and decoding (comprehending) the source text. These are, in turn, connected to the notion that every act of inter- pretation involves a productive risk, an open-ended negotiation between text and reader (U. Eco). The investigation then focuses on the practical outcomes of the Expressionist theory of Wortkunst (“verbal art”): namely, the deconstruction of traditional grammatical and syntactic structures and the parallel construction of increasingly complex formal ones, within which the extreme concentration on the word and its simultaneous subjectivisation expand the degree of poetic abstraction ad libitum. Finally, the study discusses the motivations, peculiarities, and limits of the recent re-evaluation of Runge’s poetry – unjustly dismissed as that of a mere epigone of Stramm, who is still widely regarded as the foremost representative of Expressionist Wortkunst.