The long poem ‘Weltwehe’ was written by August Stramm (1874-1915), one of the most original and intense poets of German Expressionism.  For most of his adult life an official in the German Post Office, Stramm experimented with writing drama and poetry alongside his regular work. In 1913 he began contributing to the Expressionist periodical Der Sturm,  developing a close friendship with its editor Herwarth Walden and beginning a productive period of writing during which he refined his highly individual poetic voice, but which was tragically cut short by his death in action in 1915.

August Stramm, ca. 1911. Reproduced in August Stramm, Das Werk, herausgegeben von René Radrizzani (Wiesbaden, 1963)  X.909/12637.

Stramm’s poetry, influenced by Italian futurist experiments,  condenses and intensifies language, playing with syntax and blurring the boundaries between different parts of speech. The resulting works are powerful and evocative,  if not always easy to understand.  The title of ‘Weltwehe’ is an example. ‘Wehe’ can mean labour pains, pain or woe generally, or the blowing of a wind. Is Stramm referring to a world being born, a world in pain or a world though which a wind blows – or which is itself waving in a wind? (The title may also be a deliberate echo of Jakob van Hoddis’s ‘Weltende’, a seminal work of German Expressionism although in a very different style to Stramm’s poetry.)

In 1922 the artist Hugo Meier-Thur (1881-1943) produced an illustrated limited edition of ‘Weltwehe’ (hyphenating the title into Welt-Wehe) as a joint commission for a Hamburg bibliophile society and the Sturm publishing house.

Title-page from Hugo Meier-Thur, Welt-Wehe: ein Schwarzweissspiel in Marmorätzungen zu einem Gedicht von August Stramm (Berlin, 1922) Cup.408.rrr.22

The entire work – covers, titlepage, poem and colophon – is composed of Meier-Thur’s white-on-black marble etchings, an unusual form which produces an almost ghostly effect, simultaneously magical and disturbing. Meier-Thur gave the book the subtitle ‘ein Schwarzweisspiel’ – a game (or play) in black and white.

The book opens with a series of fantastical images – landscapes, cityscapes, inscapes? – followed by the poem itself, engraved over seven leavess against similar backgrounds.

The poem begins with the words ‘Nichts nichts nichts’ (‘Nothing nothing nothing’) and rolls through associations of rhyme, alliteration and meaning, before ending with the same repeated words as it began.

The opening (above) and closing (below) pages of Welt-Wehe

Meier-Thur’s illustrations both enhance Stramm’s poem and deepen its mystery and many ambiguities. For example the page shown below could be seen as depicting a sun and stars with a dreamlike crystalline palace on the left-hand side, yet also as the explosions of shells in battle with the structure on the left fragmenting and falling before the forces of destruction. The poem was written in the last year of Stramm’s life when he had experienced the reality of the First World War, and Meier-Thur had also fought in the conflict.

Meier-Thur lived to see  another World War engulf Europe. He was an opponent of Nazism and, as a teacher at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts, bravely refused to condemn modernism in favour of state-approved art. In 1937 copies of Welt-Wehe were removed from some libraries and destroyed as examples of ‘degenerate art’. The war brought worse tragedies: the deaths of his son in battle and his wife in a street accident, and the destruction of a large part of his original work when his house was bombed. Shortly after this last blow, in July 1943, Meier-Thur was arrested by the Gestapo; he died in December of that year as a result of torture. 

  Hugo Meier-Thur, reproduced in Maike Bruhns, Kunst in der Krise . Bd. 2 Künstlerlexikon Hamburg (Hamburg, 2001) YA.2002.b.1607

Although Meier-Thur remains little known as an artist, not least because of the loss of so much of his work, he is now commemorated with plaques outside his former home and workplace in Hamburg as part of the ‘Stolpersteine’ project, and a biographical dictionary of artists from the city persecuted under the Nazi regime has a long evaluative entry on him and his work. Decades after his murder, he has been brought out of the shadows. Yet the mysteries of Welt-Wehe - both words and images - continue to intrigue.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections