Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 109

Georg Trakl and L’ame Immortelle
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melodies, but the drums drop out before the end. The fact that Rainer sometimes
screams Iraki’s verses, as well as the repeated growling vocals “Die tote Kirche
lebt,” doubtlessly stresses the poems’ relevance to the band’s own experience
and point of view.
Eykman has shown how in German Expressionism the criticism of the
church led to an elevation of art as a substitute for religion. Quoting Doblin’s
observation: “Die Kunste treten als Surrogate der Religionen auf, sie sind
zerflossene Religionen” (The arts appear as surrogate religions, they are melted
religions), he states: “Sie [die Kunst] sammelt all jene ziellos gewordenen
religiosen Krafte und wird so selbst etwas den Menschen Ubersteigendes.” (Art
collects all religious efforts that lost their destination und thus becomes
something that transcends men.) (132) Similarily, the members of the
contemporary Gothic scene, which has a lot in common with Expressionism, see
themselves and their artistic activities.4 On the one hand, these activities are
desperate statements of “einer Seel’ [die] urns Uberleben ringt” (A soul that
straggles for survival) (L’ame Immortelle, “Stem”) in a superficial society that
thrusts aside the theme of death. On the other hand, these activities have a quasi-
religious function. Bruno Kramm from the band Das Ich had this to say about
his band’s performance in a church in New York: “We felt like preachers”
(Interview Leguay 3). However, what Gothic artists “preach” is very different
from official religion; it has a touch of the Satanic; see, for instance, the laughter
of the demon in L’ame Immortelle’s interpretations of Trakl’s “Ballade” and
“Die tote Kirche.”
As Elisabeth Jane Wall Hinds pointed out while referring to the satanic
subject matter in Gothic literature as well as in some youth subcultures, these
occult references play on the already established mass cultural mythology in
order to forge a sense of the subversive more than through any “real” belief in
Satan or occult practices. Supplying Gothic writers or the members of a new
subculture with a shock element, this subversive satanic dimension helps them
to carve out an identity in contrast to mainstream culture.
Wall Hinds also shows that Gothic novels and rebellious youth
subcultures, such as Heavy Metal, have in common the fact that, in their
beginnings, they reject commodified art. They do so because of the
commodification itself and the resulting emptiness of value. However, while
they reject it, they “attempt to reinsert absolute value into the apparently value-
less free-play of commodity consumption.” This absolute value is not religious,
but it pretends to worship a deity “thereby subscribing to the concept of
transcendence.” In the Gothic subculture, this deity is the devil, who by means
of his alternate spirituality destroys “the Hallmark-card ‘spiritualism’ of
commodity culture” (Wall Hinds 158).
In conclusion, we can say that L’ame Immortelle, in its musical
interpretation of Trakl’s three early poems, aggressively points out the relevance
of Trakl’s pessimism to life in Austria today—almost one hundred years after