DAS GROSSE LALULA

This poem was published in the collection "Galgenlieder" (Grotesque Poems or Songs of the Gallows) (Bruno Cossirer, Monaco, 1905). other collections followed: "Palmstroem" 1910, "Palma: Kunkel" 1916, published posthumously. "Der Gingganz" 1919, now combined in a single volume "Alle Galgenlieder" (Leipzig, 1940). Maxime Alexandre in his "Encyclopédie de la Pléade" writes that "Morgenstern created humorous poetry" and Eugen Gottlob, with reference to Morgenstern's "tricks", affirms that "where the language was concerned they were something extremely serious". Also exemplary is the text "Fisches Nachigesang" (Nocturnal song of the fish): Morgenstern substitutes for the verses the metrical correspondent of their prosodic quantity, short and long caesuras, impenetrable as "tempi" of space. Fishes are dumb and their song cannot be expressed except by dumb signs", said Morgenstern, who described the poem as "the Most profound German poem". Many of the "galgenlieder" provide suggestive examples of total phonovisuality "almost pen drawings of risky humour but in which only the idea is grotesque, while the figurations into which it is translated form an organic whole." (letter of the author, 5th October 1910).

Christian Wolfgang Morgenstern was born in 1871 at Munich. His father was a painter; his mother, a talented pianist, died of consumption in 1881. He attended high-school at Breslau and Sorau and went on to university to study law but never graduated. He enjoyed the publishing profession, both as an editor of magazines, his own and those of others, and as an esteemed consultant to publishing houses. He travelled much, even abroad, in Italy and Norway, where he stayed for a long time with Ibsen, several of whose works he translated. To cure the disease he had inherited from his mother, he stayed in man health resorts, above all at Merano, where he died on the 3 Ist March 1914. Other works: "Epigramme und Sprüche" (Munich, 1920), "Stufen" (Munich, 192-2), "Das aufgeklärte Mondschaf' (Wiesbaden, 1955), "Ein Leben in Briefen" (Wiesbaden, 1962).