University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures: No. 38

In English with text in original German on facing pages.

Rudolf Hagelstange was acclaimed as a lyric and narrative poet during the first years after World War II and has been widely read as a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist since the 1960s. His poetry is often idealistic, advocating positive values in spite of the somber moods that life in his times often called forth. His novels and stories are fluent narratives, frequently unconventional and unexpected in their emphasis, reflecting their author's liberal approach to contemporary problems.

Hagelstange was born in Nordhausen on 14 January 1912 to Wilhelm Hagelstange, a merchant, and Helene Struchmann Hagelstange. He attended the Humanistisches Gymnasium at Nordhausen and studied German language and literature at the University of Berlin from 1931 to 1933. Hagelstange traveled in the Balkans after leaving the university and was on the staff of the Nordhäuser Zeitung from 1936 until he was called into the army in 1940. He married Karola Dittel in 1939; they had five children. During World War II he was an editor of army newspapers in France and Italy.

Some of the poems in Hagelstange's first collection, Es spannt sich der Bogen (The Bow is Drawn, 1943), assert a faith in the transcendence of mind and spirit. Other poems invoke nature, autumn, or scenes in Italy or France. The poet has here an easy fluency in regular rhythms and rhymes and turns from one setting to another without a sense of effort; there are parallels with some of Rainer Maria Rilke 's work.

In Venice in 1944 Hagelstange wrote the poems of Venezianisches Credo (Venetian Creed), which were circulated in secret. This cycle of thirty-five sonnets led to his being acclaimed as a poet with a voice of his own that pioneered a spirit of resistance to National Socialism when the volume was published in 1945. As Heinrich Hahne says in his edition of poetic cycles by Hagelstange, Gast der Elemente (Guest of the Elements, 1972): "These poems are deeply enmeshed in the living conditions of their time. They were also the only important literary work which took issue fundamentally with the political circumstances and were understood and acknowledged, after the great void, as a valid and sufficient answer." The sonnets are preceded by a quotation from Friedrich Schiller , an indication that the poet is taking Schiller's concepts of freedom and ethical idealism as criteria for the judgment of Germany's current situation. Passion and blind strength have no validity as guidelines, these sonnets say; the true law is that of "Geist" (mind or spirit). There must be faith that right will eventually triumph over wrong. To justify his existence, man must bring light out of darkness. Freedom is the breath of our life. Death has attacked so many; who will build a new world from this chaos, a world without hatred and violence?

At the end of the war Hagelstange was taken prisoner by the Americans. He returned to Nordhausen in September 1945, but left the Russian zone of occupation in 1946 and moved to West Germany--first to Westphalia, then near Lake Constance, and finally, in 1968, to Erbach in the Odenwald area of the state of Hessen.

The collection Strom der Zeit (The River of Time, 1948) contains a sequence of sixteen poems, "Der Fischzug" (The Haul of Fish), which mourns the loss of a town's thousand-year heritage in its overnight destruction and the shortage of food and goods after a past of plenty. The protagonist sees himself as a child of a merciless era, but he can still respond to the goodness of the land and the rivers. In spite of threatening forces, he believes that renewal is replacing destruction and that nothing can dishonor a free man.

Hagelstange's poetic explorations at this time led him to write longer poems in elegiac or ballad style. Meersburger Elegie (Meersburg Elegy, 1950) looks back with longing to a past of greater happiness and to a fulfillment that is associated with the heroes and gods of classical Greece as well as with myths of other cultures. It is autumn: the immediate past is one of ruin and destruction. Hagelstange conjures up a colorful panoramic vision of past and present, and a sensitive awareness of threats of destruction.

The extended narrative poem Ballade vom verschütteten Leben (1952; translated as Ballad of the Buried Life , 1962) made considerable impact when first published and combines a compelling story (it was written originally for radio) with lively and resonant free verse. The poem is based on a news report (which was later revealed to be a hoax) that Polish workers had found six German soldiers who had been trapped in a giant food storage bunker for the six years since the end of the war; only two had survived. Hagelstange shows how the initial pleasure at finding a vast store of food and drink soon turns to nightmare when the men realize that they cannot escape. A young man takes his own life, as does an older man who is oppressed by feelings of guilt for his actions as a guard in a concentration camp. A third man falls ill, but his religious convictions sustain him until his death, while a fourth dies without grace. Of the two who are alive when release comes, one collapses and dies at the great moment, while the survivor is only half alive. The imprisonment may be seen as a symbol of Germany's position after the war or of the fate of mankind...

Hagelstange traveled widely as a lecturer and reader of his own works. He received many awards, including the Südverlag Prize for Lyric Poetry in 1950, the Berlin Critics' Prize in 1952, an award from the Schiller Foundation in 1955, the Villa Massimo Prize in 1957, the Julius Campe Prize in 1958, and the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz (Grand Federal Service Cross) in 1959. During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s his major energies were devoted to prose...

Rudolf Hagelstange's contribution to the literature of his time was varied and considerable. He first made a name for himself as a poet, writing not only short lyric poems but also longer narrative poems and cycles. Prose took the place of poetry as his dominant mode of self-expression in the 1950s. His novels and short stories, inventively conceived and fluently written, have attracted many readers.
-- H. M. Waidson, Contemporary German Fiction Writers: First Series. Ed. Wolfgang Elfe and James N. Hardin. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 69. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. From Literature Resource Center.