SOURCE: Abrams, Karin von. “The ‘Du’ of August Stramm's Liebesgedichte.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 18, no. 4 (October 1982): 299-312.

In the following essay, Abrams offers a critical overview of Stramm's 1915 Du, focusing on alternatives to the standard interpretation of the volume as a collection of love poems.

Ever since its first appearance in 1915, August Stramm's Du has been considered almost exclusively as a collection of love poems. This view is of course warranted not only by the collection's subtitle, “Liebesgedichte”, but also by evidence which the individual poems themselves supply. The clearly indicated thematic framework of personal love becomes a handicap, however, if and when it prevents critical awareness of alternative, even complementary, interpretations of these texts.

Some indication of the wider thematic scope of the poems in Du may be obtained from their titles. The only explicit mention of love in any form occurs in the title “Liebeskampf...