Sonnets from Prison: Cassou and Haushofer's WWII Literature

Extract

[...] This structure allows them to have a certain balance in the chaos that surrounds them, a chaos that can go so far as to make them lose their sense of day and night, for example. « This whistling, outside. Thick clouds pass, That tears apart sometimes suddenly the clear blue, The northwest wind has risen in sudden gusts And shakes loudly the grating and the windows It invades my cell. Can this be? - My nose flares - isn't there in the air Like a whiff of salt? Could it be an illusion? And suddenly, the roar of the sea bursts into me. [...]

[...] The present indicative here can thus be presented as a present of narration. And the final question gives the feeling that the writer has really the conviction of having left his terrible cell to have embarked on the sea. In the same way, dreams also allow Jean Cassou to escape a particularly oppressive daily life. The poet presents himself as a dreamer: 'Golden skeleton along the sealed walls, the awakened sleeper promenades his victorious misery and the wondrous treasure of an indulgent ingenuity to chimera'46 ». [...]

[...] The rhymes are often rich 'voilure/adventure', 'frissonne/personne'. The sonnet chosen by Jean Cassou is here a Marot sonnet. In sonnet VI, we will find this time a sonnet of the Peletier type, of the type ABBA ABBA CCD EDE. We can have the feeling that the form of sonnet chosen by Jean Cassou seems relatively classical, with different variants. If we now examine the sonnet used by Albrech Haushofer, we can note that most of the rhymes are consonantal, which is evocative of classical Germanic poetry. [...]

[...] In his texts, one finds a painful reflection on guilt and political commitment. This German intellectual also evokes the concept of internal resistance to totalitarian oppression. These poems present a radical introspection, revealing the internal struggle by the fact that he was a German intellectual confronted with Nazi horror, which he fully measures from his cell.6 It is interesting to note that these two works present certain common characteristics. Among them, one finds the chronological proximity, the similarity of the circumstances of detention, or even the common poetic form: the sonnet. [...]

[...] I still do not know how to determine the expression of what is not determinable but tends itself to be determinant53 ». Albrecht Haushofer is also a brilliant intellectual who is no more destined to become a resistance soldier. Several of the poems of Sonnets of the Moabit Prison testimony of his intellectual and artistic formation. Albrecht Haushofer was born in 1903. He is a geographer and university professor, like his father, specializing in India and East Asia. None of the Haushofer family members have truly joined the Nazi party. [...]