Something else compelling in the poem: fear and things that resemble reflection, like: all men must die… or: I am only a little book of pictures… that will not be discussed here.
V
That Twilight and other poems take things strangely (The comic is experienced tragically. The representation is "grotesque"), to notice the unbalanced, incoherent nature of things, arbitrariness, confusion… is not, in any case, the characteristic of "style." Proof is: Lichtenstein writes poems in which the "grotesque" disappears, without notice, behind the "ungrotesque."
Other differences between older poems (for example, Twilight) and later ones (for example, Fear) in the same style are detectable. One might observe that ever increasing idiosyncratic reflections about landscape clearly break through. Certainly not without artistic purpose.
VI
The third group consists of the poems of Kuno Kohn.
Alfred Lichtenstein
(Wilmersdorf)
The Athlete
A man walked back and forth in his torn slippers
In the small room
He inhabited.
He thought about the events
About which he was informed by the evening paper.
And sadly yawned, the way only that man yawns
Who has read much that is strange—
And the thought suddenly overcame him,
Like a timid person who gets gooseflesh,
And the way the person who stuffs himself
Starts to burp,
Like a mother in labor:
The great yawn might perhaps be a sign,
A nod from fate,
To lie down to rest.
And the thought would not leave him.
And then he began to undress…
When he was stark naked, he lifted something.