The Spectral Soliloquy of Ernst Herbeck
For those voyaging along the obscure tributaries of post-war European poetry, the name Ernst Herbeck glimmers faintly like a phosphorescent ray in the flooded underlevel of psychiatric literature. Born in 1920 in Stockerau, Lower Austria, Herbeck’s life is composed largely within the precincts of the National Mental Hospital in Gugging, where he spent the majority of his adult years after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is not incorrect to say that his poetry was forged within the stifling rooms of silence, administered between electroshocks and psychotropic haze. Yet from this living mausoleum, Herbeck produced over a thousand poems that resist classification—strange, aphoristic, radiant with a powered logic altogether autonomous.
Herbeck began writing in the 1960s under the encouragement of Dr. Leo Navratil, a psychiatrist at Gugging, who had the precocity to see art in what others perceived only as delusion. Navratil’s compilation of patient art in his seminal book *Schizophrenie und Kunst* introduced Herbeck to the broader literary world, not as a curiosity or outsider primitive but as a poet operating on the periphery of reason and revelation. Herbeck wrote in bursts, often on imposed themes; he was assigned topics ranging from ‘Nose’ to ‘World War II’, and his oblique responses form texts as gnomic as gospels, yet anchored in the auditory logic of disaster and innocence.
One of the succinct marvels of his oeuvre is the poem “Die Nase” (“The Nose”):
“Ein Hoch der Nase,
sie bringt uns zum Blasen.
Die Nase ist schön,
wie Wälder mit Höhn.”[^1]
Here, the confluence of bodily function and lyric cadence converge in a perverse hymn. The nose is not merely the appendage of olfactory function but a herald of wind-instruments and hill-ridden glades. The poem is significant not solely for its imagery but for what it suggests about Herbeck’s syntax: a radical recombination of perception and metaphor, as if language had been shattered in the mind’s depths and reconstituted under alien gravity.
To read Herbeck is to enter an alternate topology of consciousness—a linguistic theatre wherein grammar no longer imposes logic but is guided by an ontological non sequitur. Consider another poem, “Ich war Adolf Hitler” (“I Was Adolf Hitler”):
“Ich war Adolf Hitler
und war in der Hölle.
Ich war in Polen.
Ich war der Mann.”[^2]
It is chilling how Herbeck couches one of history’s most grotesque figures within the confessional “Ich”, claiming not only historical persona but metaphysical burden. The poem is unadorned, severe as a cut from broken glass, and yet in its brevity, Herbeck traverses autobiography, dream, and inherited trauma. He does not comment on history; he reincarnates it in the voided corral of his self.
As post-Holocaust Europe wrestled with memory and unimaginable grief, Herbeck wrote in near-isolation, his mind perforated by voices not of the world but of internecine genesis. Still, his voice is more than mad. He reveals in language what Wittgenstein never formalized: that meaning can be an emission backward, from nonsense to sense, illuminating obscure corners of ontology.
But Herbeck is not a poet to be anthologized for exoticism; he is a metaphysical thinker, albeit one who uses the unstable footing of disordered thought to walk freehand over existential precipices. In his poem “Der Mensch ist ein schöner Geist” (“Man is a Beautiful Spirit”), the final line slides like mercury through the intellect:
“Er kommt und geht, wie das Licht am Abend.”[^3]
“Comes and goes, like evening light.” The solemnity, the fragility—one feels not diagnosis here but dignity, the echo of Hölderlin in a ward, dragging his nightshirt through electric corridors. What does it mean that man is a beautiful spirit who comes and goes like light? Herbeck is not describing death or birth, but the Anthropocene itself—as a flicker, a brief participation in vibrant decay and sentient emergence. Light at evening, not lost, but transforming visibility into myth.
And so I must express reflection through a personal interlude—not just a recitation of Herbeck’s aesthetic but a confrontation with his mode of existence. I, too, have locked gazes with the specter of inner fragmentation, though far from the clinical wards of Gugging. I once sat with a copy of Herbeck’s collected poems (“Im Herzhaus,” 2000), surrounded not by doctors but by mute branches of an olive grove in Kalamata. There, turning to page 77, I discovered four plain words in the poem “Sehnsucht”:
“Ich bin manchmal draußen daheim.”
“I am sometimes at home outside.”[^4]
It gored me—not because of some facile romanticism of madness, but because it conveyed precisely what poetry is meant to bear. The “home outside” is itself a paradoxical cartography—a psychic exile, and yet also a return to some primordial Eden lost not in the Fall, but in cognition itself. Herbeck described fugue without flourish, and in doing so, founded new narrative principles for authenticity.
This raises irreconcilable questions: Can poetry survive without structured mind? Is mad speech truer, or merely removed from probability? Herbeck’s work reposes in the borderlands of these queries, and perhaps recalls the poetic aphorisms of Angelus Silesius: mystical fragments indifferent to approval, written with god-riddled certitude. Only Herbeck’s theogony was not of divinity—it was human flesh sculpted by noise, confused by centuries, redeemed by whispered meter.
As readers, we must not be voyeurs of pathology when reading Herbeck. Instead, we are to become auditors of internal topologies previously inaccessible. The enigma of metaphor returns not as ornament, but as philosophy: not ‘how the poem means’ but ‘how the world arrives to the disconfigured soul.’ In a sense, Herbeck reverses Shelley’s dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Herbeck’s poems legislate nothing; they testify to phantom treaties signed between soul and silence.
In closing, to study Ernst Herbeck is to undertake not a literary initiative but a metamorphic investment. One must abandon the shields of semiotics and the desire to categorize; one must surrender to the navigable absence within language itself. As he wrote in another fragment:
“Die Stille trommelt mit nassen Fingern
auf mein Gehirn.”[^5]
“Silence drums with wet fingers on my brain.” It is in this image, terrifying and intimate, that the mystery of Herbeck endures.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, schizophrenia, Austrian poetry
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[^1]: Ernst Herbeck, *Der Hase!!! (Die Gedichte)*, ed. Leo Navratil, Residenz Verlag, 1990, p. 19.
[^2]: Ibid., p. 61.
[^3]: Herbeck, in *Im Herzhaus: Die schönsten Gedichte*, ed. Klaus Siblewski, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000, p. 47.
[^4]: Ibid., p. 77.
[^5]: Herbeck, *Der Hase!!!*, p. 25.