Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 107

Georg Trakl and L’ame Immortelle
103
In front of poorly praying people with rigid hearts,
In a soulless play with bread and wine.
The bell is ringing! The lights are flickering gloomier—
And paler, how covered the head lull of wounds!
The organ roars! In dead hearts
Memories arise! A bleeding face of pain
Conceals itself in darkness, and despair
Out of many eyes stares after it into the void.
And one voice that sounded like all
Sobs—while the horror in the room grew
The horror of death grew: Have mercy on us—
Lord!] (Trakl 97, translation by author)
Like “Nachtlied” and “Ballade,” “Die tote Kirche” is one of Trakl’s
“jugenddichtungen” (poetry written as a youth) about which very little criticism
has been written. Different from Trakl’s other early poems, “Die tote Kirche”
does not employ a poetic ego; however, there is still a strong relation to the
“reale empirische Wahmehmungswelt” (real empirical world of perception)
(Eykman 55) that in Trakl’s later poetry will disappear. Different from other
Gothic bands, L’ame Immortelle in most of its songs is very specific in its
criticism of today’s society ruled by market and media. Instead of accumulating
conceptual key words, poetic ciphers and metaphors in their lyrics, they usually
speak about concrete experiences—as Trakl does in his early poetry—and then
(haw a nihilistic conclusion.3 Trakl’s poem “Die tote Kirche” probably attracted
the band because Gothic vocabulary like “tote Herzen” (dead hearts), “Grauen”
(horror), or even “Todesgrauen” (horror of death) is integrated in the concrete
description of a church ceremony that reminds the musical artists of their own
experiences with church ceremonies that were empty of spiritual value.
It has been shown that in Trakl’s early poetry there is also still an
unbroken relationship “zu einer geglaubten iiberirdischen gottlichen Ordnung,”
(to a believed heavenly order) (53) which will be absent in his later texts.
Eykman writes:
Wer es untemimmt, ein unvoreingenommenes Bild von Trakls
Verhaltnis zur Religion zu zeichnen, muB widerspruchliche
und unvereinbare Ziige nebeneinanderstellen. Auf der einen
Seite lebendiger christlicher Glaube, auf der anderen
suchendes Ringen, Abkehr von der Kirche, Leugnen der
Transzendenz. [Whoever tries to draw an unprejudiced picture
of Trakl’s relation to religion must put contradictory and
incompatible characteristics next to each other. On the one
hand, there is a lively Christian belief, on the other a searching