A Primeira Guerra Mundial na lírica expressionista

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze expressionist poems whose authors offer lyrical accounts of their experiences as soldiers on the battlefront. Even before the First World War outbreak, it already prefigured as some social catastrophe that was subsequently unveiled in all its virulence. Young people who experienced the “empire of the flames” and the “fiery labyrinths of battle” (Ernst Jünger) found in poetry an appropriate way to verbalize their sensory perceptions under precarious conditions and constant death threat on the battlefront. The euphoria that prevailed at the war outbreak among the expressionists, and signaled the possibility of social transformation was soon dispelled, as the so-called “material battle” was revealed in all its bitterness and horror. War, hatred, misery, chaos, destruction, madness, horror, violence, and death could be represented profoundly by means of the expressionist aesthetics.