Welt-Wehe / Ein Schwarzweisspiel in Marmorätzungen zu Einem Gedicht von August Stramm (World-Woe / A black & white play in marble etching for a poem by August Stramm), Hugo Meier-Thur

Exhibition Label:
"Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard
Meier-Thur initially trained as an engineer and electrician before beginning his art training in 1908. He focused primarily on drawing and graphic art, producing work for numerous German magazines as well as illustrating books. He joined the army in 1914, served in France for the duration of the War, and was injured by artillery fire in 1918. After the War, Meier-Thur returned to his family in Hamburg and resumed his artistic career. In 1921, he attended a professional class on releasing the creative energies of the unconscious in the design process, leading to an interest in the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing. He was also interested in the visual representation of sound, an interest that closely ties his 1922 compositions to Welt-Wehe, a work by August Stramm (1874-1915). Stramm's text reads like a sound poem that suggests periods of tedium that alternate with bursts of light and sound.

August Stramm is one of the best known German war poets. He served on both the Western and Eastern fronts before he was killed in action on the Eastern Front in September 1915. The majority of his poems were published posthumously by Herwarth Walden, the publisher of the Expressionist journal The Storm and a strong supporter of Stramm’s work. While Stramm had enjoyed his peacetime role as a reserve officer, he hated the actual war but felt it was his duty to serve. As a result, his poetry neither glorified the War nor overtly expressed anti-war sentiments. Instead, Stramm experimented with abstract word patterns and the extensive use of neologisms, or the coining of new words, in an attempt to convey his personal experience of war in all its immediacy and incoherence.