Latrine is a poem by the German poet Günter Eich. It was published in the journal Der Ruf in 1946 and included in Eich's first post-war poetry collection, Remote Farmsteads, in 1948. The poem was written during or shortly after the Second World War, as a result of which Eich, a soldier in the , became a prisoner of war of the United States.

Eich depicts what happens in a makeshift latrine, contrasting the beautiful spiritual contemplation with the excrement. He quotes the poem Andenken (Remembrance) by Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who was particularly revered during the Nazi era, and contrasts it with a present marked by illness and death. The rhyming of "Hölderlin" with "urine" had a particularly shocking effect on contemporary reception. However, it was also seen as a break with outdated conventions and a signal for a new beginning in German literature after the Second World War. Latrine is considered a typical work of the genre called "clear-cutting literature" () and is one of Günter Eich's best-known poems.

Content The poem begins with the verses:

As the lyrical subject wanders into the distance, perceiving wooded shores, gardens, and a stranded boat, the sound of excrement is heard.

The clouds are reflected in the urine in the snow. The ego recalls verses from Hölderlin's poem Andenken: "But now go and greet / The beautiful Garonne".Friedrich Hölderlin: Andenken. In Projekt Gutenberg-DE. The view downwards shows:

Background and origin

The genesis of Latrine has often been attributed to Eich's time as an American prisoner of war, where he was interned as a former soldier of the German Armed Forces in the "Golden Mile" camp near Sinzig and Remagen from April to the summer of 1945. Some of the poems from this period, such as Inventur, Lazarett, or Camp 16, are summarized under the term "camp poems.For example, Christoph Perels: Nicht Schönheit, sondern Wahrheit. In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie Band 9. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1985, , p. 188. When Eich's Collected Works was published in 1991, however, Axel Vieregg suggested that Latrine might have been written during Eich's basic training as a recruit in France in 1940, a period to which Vieregg also ascribed the poems Training Ground and Puy de Dôme, which have similar motifs. Latrine was first published in the seventh issue of the young journal Der Ruf by Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter on November 15, 1946.Günter Eich: Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden. Revidierte Ausgabe. Band I, p. 438 and 442. In 1948, Eich included the poem in his poetry collection Remote Farmsteads, published by Georg Kurt Schauer with four woodcuts by Karl Rössing. It was not until 20 years after the first edition that Eich, who had become critical of many of his early poems, agreed to a new edition of this volume by Edition suhrkamp.Preliminary note in: Günter Eich: Abgelegene Gehöfte. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 2.

A surviving first version of the poem Latrine consists of only two stanzas, which roughly correspond to the first and third stanzas of the later published version. There, Hölderlin's fevered verses still rhyme: "In the reflection of the latrine / the whitest clouds drift."Cf. Günter Eich: Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden. Revidierte Ausgabe. Band I, p. 442, where the complete first version is also printed. Robert Savage identifies three key semantic differences in the later final version: the change of rhyme from Hölderlin to urine, Hölderlin's verses no longer sounding "in fever" but "crazy" and the added "purity" of the clouds. He attributes this development to Eich's changed perspective in the post-war period, in which he was no longer only concerned with the contrast between dirt and poetry, but also with their historical entanglement. For example, while the distortion of Hölderlin's verses in the first version was still due to the narrator's fever, the "crazy" of the final version allows for the expanded possibility of a general misdirection or aberration of Hölderlin's poetry under National Socialism.Robert Savage: Hölderlin after the catastrophe. Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht. Camden House, Rochester 2008, , p. 2–4.

The poem Andenken, which Eich quotes at the beginning of the last verse, is one of Friedrich Hölderlin's late poems. Most interpreters assume that it was written in 1803. Hölderlin had spent several months in Bordeaux the previous year before returning to Stuttgart, where he arrived in June 1802 in a confused state after a long walk. The subject of the poem is Hölderlin's recollection of his sensual experiences in the South of France and their transformation into poetry.Anja Ross: Sinnlichkeit und Gefährdung. „Andenken als tragischer Prozess“. In: Uwe Beyer (Ed.): Hölderlin. Lesarten seines Lebens, Dichtens und Denkens. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, , p. 77. The last verse of the hymn is particularly well-known and often parodied: "But what remains, the poets create."Gerhard Kaiser: Günter Eich: Inventur. Poetologie am Nullpunkt. In: Olaf Hildebrand (Ed.): Poetologische Lyrik. Gedichte und Interpretationen. Böhlau, Köln 2003, , p. 269–285, here p. 280. (Online as PDF) Kurt Binneberg suggests that Eich's reference to Hölderlin's poem may have resulted from a parallel life situation, the exodus to France, and its failure. Before he was drafted into the Second World War, Eich had memorized numerous poems as literary provisions, and the image of "Hölderlin in the knapsack" was also a symbol of the "spiritual strengthening" that was to be achieved among German soldiers.Kurt Binneberg: Interpretationshilfen. Deutsche Lyrik 1945–1989, p. 100–102. For example, the Hölderlin Society, founded under the patronage of Joseph Goebbels, saw it as its task to "give every German student a Hölderlin booklet to take with him into the field" using so-called field post editions.Susanne Mack: Bücher unter Waffen. Frontbuchausgaben aus zwei Weltkriegen. In Deutschlandradio Kultur from November 19, 2008. The Hölderlin Field Selection, co-published by the NSDAP Central Cultural Office, appeared in a print run of 100,000 copies and also included the poem Andenken.Hans Dieter Schäfer: Eichs Fall, p. 261 as well as footnote 26, p. 440.

Form and text analysis Latrine consists of four stanzas of four verses each, which form a heterogeneous cross rhyme. For Bruno Hillebrand, this fixed structure "could formally be understood as a parody.Bruno Hillebrand: Gesang und Abgesang deutscher Lyrik von Goethe bis Celan. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2010, , p. 494–495. And Dieter Breuer also describes "the smooth, conventional versification is reduced to absurdity by the completely non-standard statement".Dieter Breuer: Deutsche Metrik und Versgeschichte. Fink, Munich 1991, , p. 376. For Herbert Heckmann, the language remains limited to the essential, sober, and laconic. Eich does not interpret, he merely registers, without any rhetorical or aesthetic commitment. The verses are strung together as if in shorthand, with only the rhyme connecting the unrelated observations through a common rhythm.Herbert Heckmann: Günter Eich: „Latrine“, p. 129. In the rhyme pattern as well as in the metrical structure, Werner Weber sees an alternation of stability and instability, order and disorder: every other verse ends without rhyme or unison: "ditch", "flies", "shore", "decay". In between are fixed, non-oscillating rhymes.Werner Weber: Die Moral des Stoffs heißt Form. In: Die Zeit from November 17, 1967.

For Gerhard Kaiser, the metrics of the poem are derived entirely from Hölderlin's quoted verse, "But now go and greet" whose three liftings determine the entire poem. This, together with the meaningful rhymes, seems like a rigid grid compared to Hölderlin's free rhythms. Only Hölderlin's second stanza, "the beautiful Garonne," stands out for its bi-locularity. Sound-wise, the beginning of the poem is dominated by an I-vowel, which carries the defensive sound of disgust, before the sound mood changes to euphony with the Ö-sound in Hölderlin and the Ü-rhyme. There is a similar development from discordant to melodious sound in the accumulations and alliterations of consonants: The cacophony "claps [...] feces" at the beginning turns into the euphony "swaying [...] the clouds float" at the end.Gerhard Kaiser: Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik von Heine bis zur Gegenwart, p. 692–694. For Kaiser, the "glittering flies" also convey a "beauty of the disgusting.

According to Kurt Binneberg, the poem's formal devices illustrate the radical contrast between latrine reality and imagined poetry, between beauty and ugliness. The first half of the poem presents an "aesthetics of ugliness," whose images of disgust are heightened in the eighth stanza to an acoustic effect - the excrement "claps. At the beginning of the third verse, a second acoustic effect responds: Hölderlin's verses, quoted in the second half of the poem, "resound." In the middle of the poem, two completely different spheres collide: excrement and poetry. According to Binneberg, the fusion of opposites in the two contrasting halves of the poem is illustrated by the rhyme and sound connections as well as the semantic references, which suggest a parallelism between the first and third as well as the second and fourth stanzas. For example, the verses " digging" and "echoing" as well as "flies" and "reflecting" form an assonance, semantically the visual impression of the " glittering" flies is repeated in the reflecting clouds and the "paper full of blood and urine" corresponds with the verses recorded on paper. In the contrast between feces and poetry, the double rhyming word "urine" has a special meaning, which is set against "Hölderlin" the second time, which Binneberg calls "a shocking rhyme".Kurt Binneberg: Interpretationshilfen. Deutsche Lyrik 1945–1989, p. 98–101.

Interpretation

Initial situation

According to Gerhard Kaiser, the abrupt beginning must first reveal the initial situation of a prisoner of war caught between hardship, agony, and humiliation. From the fossilized excrement of constipation to the blood of an intestinal infection, to the "mud of decay," all signs point to illness and death. In the embryonic posture of the squatting man, thrown back on mere metabolism, only the gaze roaming through nature remains free, but even this is trapped in a stranded boat.Gerhard Kaiser: Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik von Heine bis zur Gegenwart, p. 691–692. Peter Horst Neumann sees the stranded boat as a parody of Hölderlin's "Good Voyage" and at the same time as a symbol of failure, both for the individual and the German nation as a whole. The beauties of nature remain inaccessible to the ego, behind bars. His gaze is directed downward, where he can only perceive the purity of the clouds through the mirror of urine.Peter Horst Neumann: Die Rettung der Poesie im Unsinn. Der Anarchist Günter Eich, p. 53–54.