author
Georg Trakl
1887–1914
A haunting voice of early modern poetry, his work turns twilight, silence, and ruin into something strangely beautiful. Writing in the years before and during World War I, he became one of the key figures of Austrian Expressionism.
2 Audiobooks
Gedichte
by Georg Trakl
Die Dichtungen von Georg Trakl Erste Gesamtausgabe
by Georg Trakl
About the author
Born in Salzburg in 1887, Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet whose intensely musical, dreamlike poems helped define Expressionism in the German language. He trained as a pharmacist in Vienna, and that scientific discipline existed alongside a literary life marked by isolation, emotional strain, and a strong attraction to images of decay, dusk, and death.
His published work was small but deeply influential. Poems such as those collected in Gedichte and Sebastian im Traum established the dark, visionary atmosphere for which he is remembered, and later readers and writers came to see him as one of the most important Austrian poets of the early 20th century.
During World War I, he served as a military pharmacist. After the traumatic experience of the war's eastern front, he died in Kraków in 1914 at just 27 years old. The brevity of his life, together with the intensity of his imagery, has given his poetry an enduring aura of beauty, sorrow, and unease.