Germany's poetic euphoria

By Ray Furlong
BBC correspondent in Berlin

The euphoria of 1914 was dispelled by the horrors of World War I

Deep in the bowels of the State Library in Berlin, the yellowing pages of German newspapers tell the forgotten story of a mass poetic enthusiasm unseen before or since.

The 90-year-old pages crackle as they turn from headlines proclaiming mobilisation and predicting swift victory, to thousands of poems.

"Leave fear behind! Wherever we must fight, our shots will strike! And our cannons are loaded with live fire," reads one.

It is typical of the euphoric war poetry that swamped the German press after war was declared in the first days of August 1914.

"It was a massive phenomenon," said Nicolas Beaupre, a French historian who has studied the subject.

"The Berliner Tageszeitung, for example, one of the main papers in Berlin, received 500 poems a day,"

Patriotic

The poems were written by people in all walks of life - bank managers, teachers, factory workers.

Most of them faded into insignificance, but some became famous - like Heinrich Lersch, a boiler-maker from Moenchengladbach.

Let me go, let me kiss you my last goodbye. Germany must live, even if we must die! Heinrich Lersch

"Let me go mother, let me go! What use are tears for us men, for we are going to defend our fatherland!" he wrote.

"Let me go, let me kiss you my last goodbye. Germany must live, even if we must die!"

As the war went on, Lersch also wrote about the sufferings of the ordinary private in the trenches, but his patriotic tone remained.

"He always remained resolute to fight for his country. It wasn't like English war poetry, which was overwhelmingly pacifist," said Mr Beaupre.

"There were pacifist war poets too - but they remained a minority. In general this poetry was not very original. It was mostly ballads and elegiac epics, or war songs."

The style of the poems was inspired by the poetry of the Napoleonic wars, he said. They had been widely celebrated in Germany in 1913 - marking the 100th anniversary of victory at the battle of Leipzig.

Naive enthusiasm

Grainy pictures from 1914 show the general mood: hats tossed in the air by cheering crowds who had no inkling of what was to come.

This wider euphoria was similar to that in other belligerent countries Gundula Bavendamm Museum researcher

And an exhibition currently on at the German Historical Museum shows other forms of popular nationalist sentiment.

There is a dictionary with German words to replace foreign expressions that are widely used in German, and visitors can listen to the specially-composed new melody to the Prussian national anthem - the old one was the same as that of the UK's God Save The Queen.

"This wider euphoria was similar to that in other belligerent countries," said museum researcher Gundula Bavendamm.

"It was connected with the belief that the war would be quick and victorious. The mood changed when it became apparent there would be lots of loss and suffering."

Nor was the enthusiasm universal. While crowds celebrated in the big cities, people in the countryside felt fear and foreboding.

"New research shows the 'August euphoria' found no significant echo in small towns and villages," wrote historian Gerd Krumeich recently, in one of many articles that have appeared in German papers marking the 90th anniversary of the war's outbreak.

"The people there were more worried about the fate of their sons, and that of the harvest yet to be gathered."

And so it was that the poems - their numbers reckoned in the hundreds of thousands - sank into oblivion.

Back in the State Library, there is a rather musty anthology of patriotic war poetry published in 1920. It proved to be a complete flop, as did a Nazi attempt to regenerate poetic enthusiasm in 1939.

The poems, hidden away in the archives, remain a silent witness to a naive enthusiasm that was never to be repeated.