Däubler, Theodor
(1876-1934)
He wrote about his spring of 1914 meetings with Trakl in 1921 from Athens:
My last trip with this poet of gentle sadness led us from Innsbruck along a springtime road through villages towards Hall. At that time we became acquainted with each other; he often spoke cautious words with children we met, otherwise he spoke continuously of death. When we parted in the evenings, it seemed to me as if I would hold a lacy gift of Georg Trakl in my hand: I felt gentle syllables blossom together, understandable literally only between him and me. Before the Styx I deliberated on exactly this sentence: The kind of death is unimportant: death is so terrible, because of the fall, that everything that may proceed or follow seems slight. We fall into incomprehensible blackness. How could dying, the second we pass into eternity, be short? I asked him: “Are we, therefore, seized by vertigo in abysmal conversations and on precipitous sites, in life as on high places?” He nodded: Yes! Only a few months later Georg Trakl had not shied away from the necessary fall. Saying and jumping occurred in the spring and autumn of the deadly year of 1914. Suddenly I was frightened away from the Styx: Thus the jump into black water! Without being smashed?
