Letter hom from Jandl while he was in the the the army, and latter after he was captured.


Ernst Jandl, born in Vienna in 1925, caused a furore when he recited an anti-war poem at his graduation from a Wehrmacht officers‚ academy in 1944. He escaped punishment, joined a communications unit and served on the eastern front. He survived American captivity and later became a famous wit and concrete poet.


After taking his school leaving certificate, he was called up in August 1943 and defected to the Americans on the Western Front in 1945. s a prisoner of war, Ernst Jandl worked as an interpreter for the American occupying army;


Ernst Jandl, born in 1925, studied German and English, taught high school, and became famous for his "Lautgedichte" [sound poems], in which he creates onomatopoeic relationships by means of reductions and repetitions to express, for instance, the rattling of machine guns. As much as the sound (oral) character is emphasized, it is always tied to a meaning, usually expressing self-irony or even bitterness


He called these poems SPRECHGEDICTHE (POEMS TO BE SPOKEN). Schtzngrmm", made from intensifications of most of the sounds in the German word for "trench" ("schützengraben"), has probably not been surpassed as a war poem, especially as it is read by the poet.




Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) was one of the most original poets to write in German after 1945. His poems can be found in innumerable school books, anthologies, German language textbooks, calendars, almanacs and even in preaching guides for priests.Ernst Jandl began writing in the 1940s as a way of coming to terms with his Catholic family background, National Socialism and the conservative restoration of Austrian culture after the Second World War. He modelled his verse on the interrupted traditions of avant-garde literature, Gertrude Stein and Kurt Schwitters, but also on the poetry of Bertolt Brecht