Editor’s Note: We are so pleased to be presenting the second part of Alexandria Peary's long poem, "The Pforzheim Quartet." Readers who want to experience the entire poem in sequence should start with the first section, here. Below, readers can encounter the following three sections of the poem, which center on the destruction of the German city of Pforzheim during the bombing campaigns of the Second World War, but also investigates deeper and more complicated moral questions about violence, family, language, and the aftermath of destruction. Peary's poem seems to have space for every broken thing, and for mourning, but also for rigorous, incisive questions—she acknowledges Pforzheim's complicity in the Holocaust, the "aryanization" of its population, the deportation of its Jewish citizens, the Nazification of this, the Goldstadt, city of jewelry. But she does not shy away, either, from the unspeakable violence of the destruction of the city by the bombing campaign of the RAF, the death and ruination visited on civilians, and the aftermath of this destruction, as members of her own family, no older than children, begin to grow up in the rubble. In the end, the poem has space for everything we have ruined, everywhere we have done harm to our neighbors or rained destruction on people and the land. Holding space for the evil of oppressive, murderous regimes, but also making space to acknowledge the evil done in the name of obliterating those regimes, Peary's poem is clear-eyed, questioning, and uncompromising.
-Dr. Katherine Hollander, Poetry Editor
*The author is grateful for the support of the Pforzheim Stadtarchiv as she conducted research for this poem.
II.
The Poem of Rubble
i. Trümmerliteratur (literature of the rubble)
Rebar are growing
in the lot left empty
in a dictionary's silence,
dual-language pocket
dictionary given to her
at the train station
by her older brother
she hasn't seen in fifty years
but I have seen him,
and maybe this must be
what counts, a mile away,
Wallberg, mountain
of Pforzheim's rubble
with five silver steles,
contains the ruins
like broken dishes
of your family of many families
ii. Trümmerkinder (children of the rubble)
Between gaps built by war
twisted angel, kicked star
rebar are made from the metal of
Günter Eich’s valuable nail,
Heinrich Böll’s silent angel
like an angel on a ledge
like a little girl, a Trümmerkind
(meine Mutter) kicking her feet
over a shaft straight down
in the bombed building missing a wall.
She fell four stories,
her luck, that "she wasn't killed."
Once she and her playmates
found melted rubies, sapphires, emeralds
[it is the city of jewelry]
after the Inferno and then Bodies and Ruins
in Sebald’s On the Natural History
of Destruction.
No one notices the other angel balanced
on an epigram in a cornice
from the Weimar era, Rilke’s “Angels
(they say) don’t know whether
It is the living / they are moving among,
or the dead.”[1]
iii. Trümmerfrauen (women of the rubble)
Rebar are an interpretation
of staples pulled from clouds.
Staples in clouds,
hyphens to reconstruct buildings
to reconnect people.
German-American, American-German.
Below a cloudless sky the rubble women work,
Trümmerfrauen, for a bowl of soup.
Rebar are vertical hyphens a stubble of men
prisoners-of-war sitting on the open ground
April-September in The Golden Mile,
Remagen by the river,
re: Eich's valuable nail.
The divorce rate in Germany in 1948
increased by 200%.
Rebar grow like weeds in what is broken in un opened un an swered let ter s
grow in cracks, fissures, ravines between words.
Rebar were “shortened sentences
and straightforward language
as a response to the misuse
of German by the Nazis.”
The subject matter fit
with former soldiers and P.O.W.'s
who could return to Germany,
"who must stand before the rubble
of their homeland and their possessions
as well as before the rubble
of their [sic] ideals and deal with it.”[2]
III.
Requiem
A bouquet of bombs for Pforzheim February 1945. FUNERAL FLOWERS SOUTH REICH CITIES POUNDED BY R.A.F. Heavy Bombers Strike Centers on Route to Italy, Said by Berlin to Be Karlsruhe, Pforzheim A bouquet of bombs for Pforzheim From HG Bomber Command WELL PLACED To Air Ministry Whitehall. AND STRONGLY BACKED UP. GROUP Intelligence Narrative of Operation. DETAIL WAS IDENTIFIED Night 23/24th February. WITHOUT DIFFICULTY AND BOMBING IS 247/258 Lancasters of 1 group, REPORTED TO 50/50 Lancasters of 6 Group, HAVE BEEN VERY GOOD. FIRES 7/13 Mosquitos and 52/53 Lancasters of 8. STARTED EARLY Group, and 1 Lancaster of 5 Group IN THE ATTACK AND SPREAD RAPIDLY. (FILM UNIT) BY THE END OF THE ATTACK ATTACKED THE TOWN IN CLEAR ALMOST THE ENTIRE TOWN NORTH OF WEATHER. MARKERS WERE. THE RIVER CONCENTRATED, WAS A MASS OF FLAMES. A bouquet of bombs for Pforzheim SMOKE ROSE TO SEVERAL THOUSAND FEET AND A NUMBER OF LARGE EXPLOSIONS WERE REPORTED. FIRES COULD BE SEEN 150 MILES ON THE RETURN JOURNEY. SLIGHT H/F AND CONSIDERABLE FIGHTER ACTIVITY IS REPORTED. 12 A/C ARE MISSING. TOT. 1952-2011 HRS. A City Dies! Air war fare, terrifying and devastating, has returned 100 fold to Germany! RAF Lancasters unload everything from 500 pounders to Blockbusters on Pforzheim! Important industrial center! A city is literally being wiped out before your eyes! Explosions and fires are sucking the oxygen from the air! Nothing can live in this inferno! utterly vanished from the surface of the earth, razed com pletely to theground, smashedtobits and pieces. No soul left here. Pforzheim ––you have been wiped from the world 's atlas. alfred döblin, 1946 "I left the basement with my mother. My mother was carrying my baby brother, who was limp. Tired, I sat down on a blackened corpse, thinking it a sack of potatoes."[3]
i.
Stamped on Passport
Witwe Witwe ermordet Witwe ermordet
Wallberg Wallberg Vesuvius Wallberg Vesu-
The der die das wall
der die das der die das
der die das der die das der der die das
die das der die das der die das
†
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