La lirica dello Sturm-Kreis nella Grande Guerra tra ambigue reticenze in politicis, ‘futurologia bellica', fantasie escapiste e pacifismo

The article starts with a series of preliminary observations concerning the allegedly apolitical character of the German avant-garde magazine “Der Sturm” focussing on the sagaciously ambiguous nature of the argumentative techniques of the magazine’s founder and main editor Herwarth Walden (1878-1941). These techniques are used primarily in his articles dealing with political issues. The essay reconstructs the cultural and socio-political debate on war within the publication in the years immediately before the outbreak of World War I and particularly on the relationship between the technological developments applied to war - above all the possibility of using airplanes in warfare - and the subsequent attempts on the part of a considerable number of intellectuals to take shelter in literary escapism. Finally, the paper investigates the word-image relationship in the pacifist poems of two admirers and, to a certain extent, emulators of the German poet August Stramm (1874-1915), namely the journalist Franz Richard Behrens (1895-1977) and Wilhelm Runge (1894-1918), who had completed gymnasium in the spring of 1914 just before enlisting as a voluntary in the war in August.