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the history in the book. We learn poetry from the animal in the woods. Gazelles are famous historians.”
    Ernst Herbeck, who spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital, hardly knew the contemporary history of Austria and Germany at first hand, but he remembered Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor, the enthusiasm with which Vienna received him, and other festive occasions of the past. A Christmas poem not only mentions the inevitable snow and lighted candles, but contains references to banners, warfare, and downfall.
    Wartime Christmas as Goebbels envisaged it, and as recalledto memory by Kluge and Reitz, flares up again in Herbeck’s poetry. A poem entitled “Ins Stammbuch” (“Taken to Heart”) and beginning with the lines
“der Tag ist auf die gut Deutsche
/
Eiche Tot der vergangen Heid”
(“the day is risen the good German / oak Dead the departed heathen”) gives us more to think about than does the professional disposal of our burden of guilt and the past. It seems to me actually uncanny that Herbeck wrote the following poem in that historic year 1989. I wish all my countrymen would take it to heart.
    Das Schwert ist eine seriöse deutsche

Waffe und wird von den Gothen und

wird von den ausserstehenden Germanen

verwendet; bis auf den

heutigen Tag. Dies im gesamtdeutschen

Raum (Germanien)
.
(The sword is a serious German
weapon used by the Goths
and used by the Germanic
peoples farther afield; up to the
present day. And this in the whole
German area [Germania].)
     
    However, I do not mean to write on Ernst Herbeck’s concept of national history here, but on his attempts to record the history of his own family and descent in complexmythological terms. In her book
Die Ver-rückung der Sprache
(“The Dis-placement of Language”), Gisela Steinlechner has shown that the work of Herbeck is full of anthropomorphic portraits of animals. One reason for this is that the poet’s psychiatrist often gave him titles such as “The Zebra,” “The Giraffe” as exercises, so that the patient could write about them. Since Herbeck in general kept closely to the subjects he was offered, he produced a whole bestiary—a child’s primer confirming, if ironically, the general validity of the taxonomic order we have devised. “The raven leads the devout,” “The owl loves children,” “The zebra runs through broad fields,” and “The kangaroo leans on its support”—none of this is very disturbing. Yet Herbeck also writes of unknown species not listed in zoological encyclopedias, making us suspect that the animals are not so very different from each other, or we ultimately as different from them as we would like to think. We come upon a being that is half lamb, half cat in Herbeck, as we do in the synagogue mentioned by Franz Kafka.
    Much more mysterious than these strange creatures, however, is the symbolic hare in Herbeck’s work, a creature that the author related to the question of his own origin. He gives only the most cursory and singular facts about his early history. Everything to do with the family and relations is a mystery to him. “One question, please!” he writes. “Are the son-in-law’s children father-in-law to their siblings? I can’t work it out! Please tell me, and thank you.” In fact to Herbeck, doomed to lifelong celibacy, the most inscrutablefeature of these relationships was the idea of married life, on which he makes only a few vague and extremely innocent comments.
    Die Ehe ist vorbildlich f. Mann und Frau

in jeder Hinsicht. Sie wird meistens ein

gegangen und geschlossen. Nach der Verlobung

und. Je länger sie dauert desto

kürzer und länger das Dasein. Eines Hasen

oder so
.
(Marriage is the model for man and wife
in every respect. You usually enter into
it, you celebrate it. After the engagement
and. The longer it lasts the
shorter and longer the existence.
Of a hare or suchlike.)
     
    What happens after that “and” and the full stop is something the writer cannot or