«Poetare è abbreviare»: la poesia avanguardista di Franz Richard Behrens (1895 - 1977) tra forma lirica “riduzionista” e “costruttivismo” (1916 - 1925)

ANDREA BENEDETTI Poetare è abbreviare»: la poesia avanguardista di Franz Richard Behrens (1895 - 1977) tra forma lirica ‘riduzionista’ e ‘costruttivismo’ (1916 - 1925) Central to this article is the relationship between ‘reductionistic’ lyrical form and ‘constructivism’ in the avant-garde poetry of the Berlin poet Franz Richard Behrens (1895 - 1977), who was not only a trained journalist and volunteer soldier in World War I, but also the author of a number of film scripts after 1918. It takes into account the whole period of time from 1916 to 1925 through alternating biographical reconstructions, thorough examinations of the historic-cultural context and formal and thematic analyses of poetic texts. This is the period within which is set the beginning and the end of his collaboration with the Berlin Expressionistic review «Der Sturm», which was edited by the eclectic Herwarth Walden (1878 - 1941), from his first published poetry, Expressionist Artillerist, in February 1916 up to his last, Mein Haus ist ein Bethaus, in March 1925. A collaboration which, in the same period of time, concerns a number of other avant-garde reviews, among which one should mention the German reviews «Die schöne Rarität» (Kiel) and «Die Aktion» (Berlin) and the Croatian «Zenit» (Zagreb). This article is presented, to the best of the author’s knowledge, as the first organic, albeit concise critical contribution in Italian on this unjustly unrecognized German poet of the 20th century, by means of presenting at the same time an initial and short analytical overview of both the expert studies and the current philological research perspectives concerning the author. The article also seeks to emphasize how the ambiguities of this ideological author seem to be ascribed to and considered as integral to his linguistic formulations, so that these appear as if they were deliberately sought after so as to hinder single efforts aimed at an unequivocal interpretation with regard to this aspect. In particular, the essay which follows aims at making a summary of the evolution of Behrens’s lyrical technique by describing its passage from an initial so – called ‘phase of verbal art’ (‘Wortkunst’-Phase, 1914 - 1918), marked by a still strong influence of August Stramm’s (1874 - 1915) lyric forms, through a second, transitory period, which is characterized by the prevalent use of ‘mixed forms’ (‘Mischformen’, 1917 - 1921), and then to a third and conclusive ‘phase of objectivity’ (‘sachliche Phase’, 1921 - 1925), which closes with a ‘withdrawal’ of language into the depths of the soul and the falling into silence of his poetry. This last stage is characterized by a progressive transformation of the Expressionist poetic word into a ‘stock’ of materials that stand halfway between poetry and prose by making use of ‘montage’ procedures.