Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 105

Georg Trakl and t/am e Immortelle
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intensity as well. In the last line, “Seid alle verflucht! Da ward die Tat” (Be all
cursed! All of you! Then was the deed) the word “verflucht” (cursed) is
especially emphasized.
The fourth and final verse of the song—consisting of the last five lines
of Trakl’s “Nachtlied”—begins immediately after the third. In comparison to the
previous verses, Rainer’s voice has lost all signs of stability. When he
transforms the former simile “Lieder, die wie Wunden bluten” (Songs that bleed
like wounds) into the much stronger image “Lieder, die von Wunden bluten”
(Songs that bleed from wounds), the words are no longer spoken but screamed,
drowning out most of the sounds heard previously in the background. As after
the first verse, Kraushofer once again sings “Durch das Dunkel her” (through
the dark); however, this time it is repeated five times. After her last recitation,
electronic noises continue for another thirty seconds and then the song ends.
It has been said that “die Traurigkeit, die dem lyrischen Werk von
Georg Trakl den Grundton schenkt, am meisten die allgemeine Stimmung der
Zeit in den ersten Jahrzehnten des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts widerspiegelt” (the
sadness, which gives Trakl’s work its basic tone, mostly reflects the general
mood of the first two decades of the twentieth century) (Trakl, jacket
description). A similar deep sadness is expressed in all songs of L’ame
Immortelle and other Gothic bands; it reflects the basic mood of this youth
subculture. In a song called “In the heart of Europe,” the musical artists of
L’ame Immortelle tried to describe the reason for their sadness. Rainer who
most of the time writes his lyrics in German, used English, the language of
globalization, to outline these reasons:
Here in the heart of Europe
No one stands up proud no more
Here in the heart of Europe
Our culture is a dying whore
No room for individuality
Grey masses [that] think one way only
Move like robots through the streets
In our thinking we stand lonely.
These lines reveal the already mentioned basic concerns of the
contemporary Gothic subculture: that life in Western society has been
rationalized socially and culturally to a degree that suffocates the individual.
There is only one small step from this concern to a Gothic way of making sense
of the world. David Punter stated: “Certainly the reduction of life to that which
can be programmed and assessed by machine, as Gothic has always known, is a
process of the monstrous; the discernment of our own inner monstrosities . . .
then becomes an essential task.” (8)