Yvan Goll was born at
Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, in
Lorraine. His father was a cloth merchant from a Jewish family from Rappoltsweiler in Alsace. After his father's death when he was six years old, his mother joined relatives in
Metz, then a major town of
Lorraine in the 1871 German Empire (after 1918 the area was claimed by France). In this predominantly Lorraine/French-speaking western part of Alsace-Lorraine, high school education inevitably involved German. Later he went to Strasbourg and studied law at the university there, as well as in Freiburg and Munich, where he graduated in 1912. In 1913, Goll participated in the expressionist movement in Berlin. His first published poem of note,
Der Panamakanal (The
Panama Canal), contrasts a tragic view of human civilization-destroying nature, with an optimistic ending that evokes human brotherhood and the heroic construction of the canal. However, a later version of the poem from 1918 ends more pessimistically. At the outbreak of
World War I he escaped to Switzerland to avoid
conscription, and became friends with the
dadaists of
Zürich's
Cabaret Voltaire, in particular
Hans Arp, but also
Tristan Tzara and
Francis Picabia. He wrote many
war poems, the most famous being 1916's "Requiem for the Dead of Europe", as well as several plays, including
The Immortal One (1918). It was in 1917, while in Switzerland that Goll met German writer and journalist Klara Aischmann, better known as
Claire Goll. They settled in Paris in 1919 and married in 1921. In his essays, such as
Die drei guten Geister Frankreichs (The Three Good Spirits of France), Goll promoted a better understanding between the peoples of France and Germany, even though he was personally more attracted to France by the greater liveliness of the art scene there. It was in Paris that his
Expressionist style began to develop towards
Surrealism, as witnessed in drama and film scenarios he wrote there, such as
Die Chapliniade (The Chaplinade) and
Mathusalem (Methusalem). These works blend fantasy, reality, and the absurd, continuing and extending the Expressionist program of arousing audience response by means of shock effects. They also reveal the autobiographical nature of much of Goll's writing, but also his tendency to appear in the guise of a persona rather than in the first person. While in Paris he also worked as a translator into German (
Blaise Cendrars and
Ulysses, among others) and into French, adapting
Georg Kaiser's
Fire at the Opera (
Der Brand im Opernhaus, 1919) for ''
Théâtre de l'Œuvre. He formed many friendships with artists and his collection The New Orpheus'' was illustrated by
Georg Grosz,
Robert Delaunay and
Fernand Léger.
Marc Chagall illustrated a collection of love poems by both Golls, and
Pablo Picasso illustrated Yvan's ''Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre
(1949; "Elegy of Ihpetonga and Masks of Ashes"). Goll also published anthologies of other French and German poets, as well as translations. In 1924 he founded the magazine Surréalisme
, publishing the first Manifeste du surréalisme'' The central figure, who wanders the earth in 69 smaller poems, belongs everywhere and nowhere. He looks for love and identity and yet the absence of these things also acts as a kind of freedom. From 1939–1947 the Golls were exiles in
New York, where friends included
Richard Wright,
Stefan Zweig,
Henry Miller,
Kenneth Patchen,
Piet Mondrian, and
William Carlos Williams who translated some of Yvan's poems. Between 1943 and 1946, Goll edited the French-American poetry magazine
Hémispheres with works by Saint-John Perse, Césaire, Breton ... and young American poets. In 1945, the year he was diagnosed with
leukemia, he wrote
Atom Elegy and other death-haunted poems collected in the English language volume
Fruit From Saturn (1946). This poetic language of this final phase in Goll's work is rich in chthonic forces and imagery, the disintegration of matter - inspired by the atomic bomb - alchemy, and the
Kabbalah, which Goll was reading at the time.
Love Poems, written with his wife Claire, appeared in 1947. These poems, written in a pure and lucid style, speak of the poets' love and their need of each other, but also of jealousy, fear of betrayal, and a clash of temperaments. Goll's final works were written in German rather than French, and were collected by the poet under the title
Traumkraut (a neologism - meaning something like 'Dream Weed'). Here, in his poetic testament, Goll mastered the synthesis of
Expressionism and
Surrealism that his work had hinted at most of his life; it was for this reason that he asked his wife to destroy all his previous work. These were eventually edited and brought to publishing by Claire. Goll died aged 58, at
Neuilly-sur-Seine, and was buried at
Père Lachaise Cemetery opposite the grave of
Frédéric Chopin. The epitaph on his tombstone contains the following extract from
Jean Sans Terre: In 1953 Claire confronted the poet's friend,
Paul Celan with the accusation of plagiarism, unjustly claiming that Celan had copied from Yvan Goll's
Traumkraut; Celan committed suicide in 1970. Claire Goll died in 1977, and bequeathed to the town of
Saint-Die-des-Vosges several French manuscripts, the couple's library, their works of art and furniture. The set - including a reconstruction of his Parisian apartment - is now on display at the Museum Pierre-Noël. ==References==