WELTENDE

By: Jakob van Hoddis
February 22, 2025

A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.

The burgher’s hat flies away in a trice.
In all quarters resounds hullaballoo.
Roof tilers plummet down and break in
     two.
Along the coasts — one reads — the
     floodings rise.

The storm is here, wuthering seas are
     hopping
Ashore to crush dams as if they were
     midges.
Most people have a cold that is not
     stopping.
The railway waggons tumble down from
     bridges.

— “Weltende” is a 1911 poem. Perhaps the most famous expressionistic poem.

“Weltende” has been often translated into English, but most translations — one hears — don’t capture the rhyme scheme, rhythm, verse form, and spirit of the original. This adaption, which supposedly succeeds, is by Natias Neutert.

The poem was first published in 1911 in Der Demokrat, a free-thinking Berlin magazine. In 1919/1920 it was published as the first poem in the anthology of expressionist poetry Menschheitsdämmerung (translated as Dawn of Humanity). The book, many of whose contributors were Jewish, was an immediate bestseller in 1919. It was banned by the Nazis in 1933.

One reads various things about this poem:

• It was inspired by Halley’s Comet.
• It was a warning against the destruction of war, which was symbolized by the coming of a comet-like force sweeping over the earth.
• The title “Weltende” means “end of the world” or “end time,” but literally it refers to a massive natural catastrophe.
• The poem’s motif is the struggle between two opposing forces: the first nature and the so-called second nature, build up by mankind with the material of the first one.

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RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.