Born in 1887, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl is a member of the generation that ran from the belle epoque into the horrors of the First World War, with which the "beautiful epoch" disappeared without return.
His mother oversaw the education of her children (she had seven), but left the tenderness to the governess. The most similar were Georg and his younger sister Greta. There was also talk of incest, but there is no written evidence, perhaps because the family destroyed their correspondence.
Georg Trakl was intelligent and gifted, but he preferred Nietzsche to school reading. He started writing at thirteen, getting drunk and enjoying opium at fifteen... He wrote brilliantly and lived viciously.
He went to Vienna to obtain the academic title of pharmacist - the only one that did not require a diploma. For a while he worked as an apothecary in Innsbruck and Salzburg, but he did not find a cure for himself. He writes to his friend that he is "lost in darkness and intoxication", that he has no strength or will to change anything, he only wishes that the storm will wipe out everything, including him.
In Vienna, he met the avant-garde architect Adolf Los and the writer Karl Kraus, a Jew who was "saved from the camp by death on the street": he was hit and fatally injured by a drunken cyclist.
He visited Oskar Kokoška every day while the portrait of the Fiancee of the Wind, the "artist of seduction" by Alma Mahler, was being created. In the book about his life, Kokoška reveals that it was Trakl who gave the name to this painting.
At the beginning of the war, he was sent to Galicia as a medical lieutenant. The town of Grodek, now in Ukraine (where there is war again!), was the scene of a merciless battle with the Russian army. After the defeat of Austria-Hungary, Trakl took care of about a hundred seriously wounded - in a stable, without drugs or anesthetics. Completely broken, he tried to kill himself. The first time was unsuccessful - he was saved by his war comrades, but the second time he succeeded: he died in a military hospital in Krakow, from an overdose of cocaine.
He was 27 years old. He managed to publish only one book, but he is still considered one of the best poets of the German language. Readers, translators, critics, poets (including Rilke) agree that it is not easy to find the key to Trakl's hermetic verses. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein admitted that they delight him even though he doesn't understand them - because he feels "the tone of true genius" in them.
And our Dušan Vasiljev was walking in blood up to his knees, but he still wanted "another handful of air and a little white, morning dew". It seemed to Trakl that "all roads lead to black rot", that humanity is threatened by "walking in the middle of bloody smoke"..., "despair and night" - just like in Grodek, his last poem. (By the way: in May 2014 in Belgrade, at the commemorative ceremony on the occasion of the centenary of the Great War, the then ambassador of Austria, Johann Eigner, sang this song.)
In several places in and around Trakl's native Salzburg, commemorative plaques with his poems have been placed. Divan grad is carved into the bronze plaque on his birthplace - a view from the poet's window of "old places, sunny and quiet". From there, he could see the monument to Mozart, the house where Mozart's Constance died, and his father's hardware store... He doesn't mention any of that in the poem, he recognizes "pure shadows of death" in the scenes he observes.
Three of his poems can be seen at the Cemetery of St. Petra, which in Salzburg, perhaps rightly, claim to be the most beautiful in the world. He came there as a child, "led by his mother's cold hand". His verses welcome walkers on Menchsberg hill, where he ran away from his family and school, "in the shade of the autumn elm, to the sleeping shepherds". He also liked to walk by the river Salcah, so one song was found at the pedestrian bridge that has been named after him since 1991. For the facade of the "Kod belog anđela" pharmacy, where he worked for three years, the song U tami was chosen, and Winter's Eve for the Evangelist church, where he was baptized.
In Three Lakes in Helbrun, Trakl describes the water games in Helbrun Castle that once entertained the Salzburg lords, and today confuses and somewhat angers tourists if they step on a "mine", activate the water slide and are forced to continue the tour wet. In Aniff near Salzburg, where Herbert von Karajan settled and died, at the entrance to the library is another poem by Trakl, dedicated to this village.
In the ivy-framed alcove of the Mirabel garden, Music in Mirabel was tucked away. And while the fountain sings in Trakl's verses and the sounds of a sonata come from somewhere, at the time of our visit - some other music, the sounds of accordions and "Today, mother, marry your son..." Many couples get married here, so why not ours, arrived from the Balkans side!
In the same garden, at the entrance to the open-air theater from the 18th century, in 2017, another, so far the last, plate with Trakl's poem, about that theater, was discovered.
In November, it will be 110 years since Trakl's death. I don't know when the citizens of Salzburg started to appreciate him, but I doubt that the "tiny bird on a bare branch" (the one from the poem Sebastian in a dream) awakened in them the desire to embrace and protect it - rather, his work was in the shadows his character.
The Trakl Museum was opened in 1973, and the first poem on the memorial plaque was discovered in 1985.
