Hugo Friedrich ou les incertitudes de la modernité

Abstract

Hugo Friedrich, or the Uncertainty of Modernity. Paradoxically enough, Hugo Friedrich’s study, Die St. der M.L., has been most instrumental in the reviving of the discussion on poetry in Germany. It was published in 1956, six years after Benn’s lecture on Probleme der Lyrik, and may be seen as an homage paid to the German poets, but also as a briliant introduction to the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and as the attempt to draw from them systematic criteria to define modernity in poetry. The contradictions as well as the qualities of Friedrich’s work cannot possibly be assessed apart from the historical situation. He was holding neo-expressionist views on poetry and was at the same time under the influence of Benn and his late adaptation of Mallarmé and Valéry’s poetics. His approach of French poets throws light on the determining part played by creative language ; it is an original approach which proves to fall within an interpretation especially based on existential concepts, exactly as expressionism was interpreted in the fifties, in close relation with Benn’s keener insistence on the tragic situation of “the modern man”. In spite of a very loose definition of modernity, Friedrich’s analysis has been most stimulating for the critics. The present study is a survey of its heritage. However, it appears that the evolution of post-war German poetry escapes the type of interpretation which no longer sees any place for innovation after Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Hugo Friedrich thus peremptorily brings the criteria whereby to define modernity to a standstill, and, in so doing, shows the limitations of how and when they can be put to use.