Ernst Jandl | tttt / tttt!

"schtzngrmm / schtzngrmm / tttt / tttt" are the opening lines of a poem from 1957. Along with "otto's pug," of course, it is probably one of the more well-known works of the Austrian writer and poet Ernst Jandl. For a change, the poem didn't address war in a warning, accusatory, or glorifying way, as had been the norm up to that point in literature, but rather rendered acoustically, in a language that was partly broken, but partly newly invented, and freed from all bombast. Thus, the poem, which appears to consist of written sounds of battle and in which words are distorted into the noise of war, points to what war ultimately is: a battle of materials, a place of mechanical killing and being killed.

The anti-militarist Jandl, who belonged to a vanishingly small minority in post-Nazi Austria, had learned to distrust the words and sentences that had once helped to bring about war. He countered the language of Nazi propaganda, kitsch, and unctuous proclamations, as well as the language of instruction and edification, with subversive language play, linguistic reduction, and the dismantling of language into its component parts, thus proceeding in the tradition of those Dadaists who had already practiced their form of linguistic destruction 40 to 50 years earlier. Indeed, Jandl saw himself as standing in the tradition of sound experimenters like Velimir Chlebnikov, Expressionists like August Stramm, and Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters, which he understood as a tradition of normative deviation.

This, of course, caused irritation and outrage among the conservative literary watchdogs of the postwar German-Austrian period. The poet Jandl, who had developed a very idiosyncratic language and form for himself, was a "poet without his own language," as judged in the 1960s by Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld, whose publishing career was not exactly short of misjudgments.

In addition to his poems, Jandl also wrote essays, prose, plays, and radio plays. When asked about once writing that he wanted to "remove the comedic element from poetry," he replied in a 1986 interview: "Our lives largely follow existing norms. And therefore, the non-normative, that which defies the norm, that which cannot be standardized, or that which has moved away from the norm, that is what is exciting, that is what is interesting, that is what can make you tremble."

That the man was not only a representative of post-war experimental poetry, but also a great humorist, is perhaps demonstrated by this poem from 1954: "Summer song // we are the people in the meadows / soon we will be people under the meadows / and will become meadows, and will become forest / this will be a cheerful country retreat." Anyone who finds this funny and would like to keep laughing should consider the world's best radio play. It was created in 1976 and is called "The Humanists. A Conversation Piece in One Act." Radio play author and producer Hermann Bohlen offers the following assessment: "It is gripping, radical, unsparing, and short. Moreover, you understand it the first time. It inspires, encourages, uplifts, and enthuses. But it does so with very simple means: three human voices and a machine gun." Please listen to it. Do it in honor of Ernst Jandl, who was born 100 years ago today.