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Reviewed by Artun Ak

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“In the beginning and in the end, language is Blabla,” says German writer Christian Morgenstern’s programmatic poem, “The Big Lalulā” (“Das grosse Lalulā”) — which opens the recent New York Review Books reissue of Max Knight’s downright marvelous translation of (some of) The Gallows Songs / Die Galgenlieder (1905) — and the last line of which goes: “Lalu lalu lalu lalu la” (13). In any case, that’s how media historian Friedrich Kittler reads it in his seminal work, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, where it functions as a metonymy for a larger literary culture that is outdone in its representational capacities by modern media technologies and thus can no longer make grand claims to “inwardness, creative imagination, high idiom, Poetry” (Kittler 214; the “Blabla” line is from Kittler 213). As the trio of gramophone, film and typewriter reorient the human subject away from the soul and toward the body and its physiology, literature too returns to its material basis, namely, the linguistic signifiers themselves, which now refer only to themselves and can be arranged in any way whatsoever — into “Fish’s Night Song” (“Fisches Nachtgesang”), for example, which is not to be read or understood, but simply to be looked at and admired (to the right is Knight’s snarky “translation” of this “poem”):

This is the limit case of a writing practice that resists Sense and Interpretation, an intention that is also evident in Morgenstern’s occasional jabs at those who read too carefully (one of which I will quote below). This does not mean, however, that what we get is sheer gibberish. As Knight explains in his translator’s introduction, Morgenstern vehemently opposed such descriptions, opting instead for “folly” or “craziness,” or better, as he wrote in a 1921 work of self-criticism, “a phonetic rhapsody” that mirrors “a highly personal, youthful Übermut [cheekiness, cockiness], which enjoys combinations that are very common among children, but are regarded as bizarre when encountered among adults” (cited in Knight 5). 

One way to understand this project, then, is a childlike, though not childish, attack on an ossified adult language with its boredom and sterility (“call it infantile vendetta [Kinder-Rache] on life’s deeply serious aim,” to quote the titular poem [44]). By following puns to their ends or dead ends, letting rhymes and rhythms take language wherever it may go, Morgenstern injects an originary vitality into linguistic structures that have forgotten those other paths they could have taken. 

There is nothing new in what I have written so far, especially in terms of the affect or mood in which Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs are to be received. A symptom of a media-historical paradigm shift or a vaguely Romantic assault on unoriginal and uninspired speech, these are texts that are associated with a certain joy or enthusiasm. No one reads them and cries. And yet, after the “Lalulā,” after “The Picket Fence” with its stolen “space to gaze” (Zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun), and after “The Aesthetic Weasel” who does it all “just for the rhyme,” we bump into the following as the collection’s fourth entry:

Each sublation of death — here by a cute universalism of sustenance that culminates in a bout of scholar-skewerie — attests to its nearness. Knight is meticulous in recreating the sounds of the original couplets, but there is some semantic covering-up earlier in the poem, with the deletion, first, of the dramatic-flirtatious “cher,” and then, more importantly, of that “nach meinem Sturz” (“after my fall”). The latter refers not only to this sugar-monument that is meant to melt away, as the translation would have it (“It will melt”), but also to the lyrical I, whose upcoming if not imminent demise occasions this ask for a monument. The fall of the sugar-monument is to echo the fall of the poetic subject, and indeed, as a more faithful translation of the second couplet makes clear, the lyrical I identifies directly with the monument that is to be built for them: 

A sweet-water lake, just briefly, 

after my fall I will be. 

This identification is motivated by a desire to survive death and rejoin the circle of life (“eure Kreise”). Knight misconstrues this as a desire to rejoin “the chain of humanity,” whereas this sweet-water is to go through both fish and man, and if the monument had been of “stone or steel,” it would have been violated by both man and bird. Whatever salvation is to come through this monument, it is not one of humanism, and certainly not of the Republic of Scholars with their books and dissertations, filled with that “discharged,” discharge-like “wit.” But it is one of poetry, of small-p poetry: the monument that is desired in “Desire for a Monument” is simply the poem called “Desire for a Monument,” this text that is — go look at it! — a vertical monument in the midst of its dissolvement, a text riddled with spaces into which it will disappear, sugar into water.

Poetry, then, not as meaning or revelation (so much for Romanticism), but as more-than-human sound-bites through which both the listener and the artist live on. But what is this death that the poet is trying to overcome? Having lost his mother to tuberculosis when ten and diagnosed with the same in his early twenties, Morgenstern spent his short life of forty-three years (1871-1914) battling with flare-ups and shuttling between mountain sanatoria. That is the kind of experience that could necessitate the poetic logic explicated above. 

What I find more interesting, however, is the question of war. As Samuel Titan (of the University of Sāo Paulo) writes in the introduction to this new edition, Morgenstern’s “grim, grotesque humor found wide resonance among soldiers and artists during the gory Götterdämmerung of World War I. The gallows poems were read in German trenches; Hellmuth von Zastrow, a fighter pilot, produced a series of parodies of Morgenstern, entitled Palmström the Pilot, that were printed in 1917 by the German air force” (Titan xvi). But at times, the alignment went beyond one of temperament, as if Morgenstern foresaw the terrors-to-come:

Without any context or background, as is the case in the first stanza, it is possible to conceive of a globetrotting knee as a fun, little curiosity. The comparison to a tree and a tent, however, makes one pause — are these random objects, or do they have reasons to appear here? — and the change in punctuation (left out by Knight) between the otherwise identical lines two and four, from an exclamation mark to a period, initiates the poem’s more somber turn. 

The knee, it turns out, used to belong to a soldier who got shot to pieces, the verb choice (E-rscho-SS-en) recoding the thrice-repeated Es’s as whizzing bullets, with one hit per u (U-m U-nd U-m). And it is of course a lie that this knee got away “unhurt,” as it, as a Heiligt-UM, carries those wounds in its title. This is also the case with the first stanza that reappears as the third, almost unhurt, with its traumatic difference marked by the continued absence of exclamation marks and, more directly, the beginning with a “since then.” The “that’s all” that emphasizes the loneliness of the knee now thus also points out that the rest of this body has been obliterated — this body that, prior to its obliteration, could have rested in a tent or hidden behind a tree.¹ Pardon the academicism, but: it might just be this knee that shows up in Alexander Kluge’s The Patriot (1979) as a truly curious character (in both senses of the word).

This, I believe, could be a fruitful direction for a new generation of Morgenstern readers, of Galgengeschwister, to take: what are the horrors in the face of which these poems laugh uproariously, what darknesses are they trying to dispel? 

Morgenstern, Christina. The Gallows Songs. Translated by Max Knight. New York Review Books, 2025.

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Artun Ak is a PhD candidate in German Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His dissertation is on the “returns of nature” in Weimar film culture, as seen in works by Reinert, Murnau, Brecht/Dudow, and others. Forthcoming is an article on Béla Balázs’s theory of theory in Studies in European Cinema.

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Works Cited

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford University Press, 1990.

Knight, Max. “Translator’s Introduction” (1963) in Christian Morgenstern. The Gallows Songs, New York Review Books, 2025.

Titan, Samuel. “Introduction: Dancing Round the Gallows” in Christian Morgenstern. The Gallows Songs, New York Review Books, 2025.