Georg Trakl

born Feb. 3, 1887, Salzburg, Austria
died Nov. 3, 1914, Cracow, Galicia,
Austria-Hungary [now Kraków, Pol.]
Expressionist poet whose personal and
wartime torments made him Austria’s
foremost elegist of decay and death. He
influenced Germanic poets after both
world wars.
Trakl trained as a pharmacist at the
University of Vienna (1908–10). He led
an unhappy existence; he was moody and
withdrawn and had become addicted to
drugs as early as 1904. Moreover, he
felt an incestuous attraction to his
younger sister Margarete and was plagued
by restless wanderlust.
The patronage of a periodical
publisher and of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who secretly gave him part
of a patrimony, enabled Trakl to devote
himself to poetry; he brought out his
first volume, Gedichte (“Poems”), in
1913. The following year he became a
lieutenant in the army medical corps
and, in Galicia, was placed in charge of
90 serious casualties whose agonies he,
as a mere dispensing chemist, could
hardly relieve. One patient killed
himself while Trakl watched helplessly;
he also saw deserters being hanged. He
either attempted or threatened to shoot
himself in the aftermath of these
horrors and was sent to a military
hospital at Cracow for observation.
There he died of an overdose of cocaine,
perhaps taken inadvertently.
Trakl’s intense lyrics infuse
lamentation for the present with longing
for a pastoral past. Much of his work is
rife with negative, often disturbing
imagery. A volume of selected poems,
translated into English by Lucia Getsi
as Poems, was published in 1973.