Latrine

Latrine is a poem by the German poet Günter Eich. It was published in the journal Der Ruf in 1946 and included in Eich's first post-war poetry collection, Remote Farmsteads, in 1948. The poem was written during or shortly after the Second World War, as a result of which Eich, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, became a prisoner of war of the United States. Eich depicts what happens in a makeshift latrine, contrasting the beautiful spiritual contemplation with the excrement. He quotes the poem Andenken (Remembrance) by Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who was particularly revered during the Nazi era, and contrasts it with a present marked by illness and death. The rhyming of "Hölderlin" with "urine" had a particularly shocking effect on contemporary reception. However, it was also seen as a break with outdated conventions and a signal for a new beginning in German literature after the Second World War. Latrine is considered a typical work of the genre called "clear-cutting literature" (German: Kahlschlagliteratur) and is one of Günter Eich's best-known poems.