By Albrecht Haushofer (translated by Cameron Lambright)

Albrecht Haushofer was a geography professor and member of the resistance in Nazi Germany. His father was an early geopolitical scholar whose writings were influential on Hitler and the Nazi worldview. Albrecht was implicated in an assassination attempt on Hitler and imprisoned in 1944. As Soviets marched through Berlin in 1945, Haushofer and fellow prisoners were released from prison, but were seized outside the prison by a passing Nazi SS squad and executed en masse. Five sheets of paper were later found clasped in the hand of Haushofer’s corpse, covered in tiny handwriting, comprising an 80 poem sonnet cycle written in prison. These became known as the Moabit Sonnets.

[ I translated the first ten of these sonnets some years ago, and they seem especially pertinent today. ]

I. In Fetters

For him, who is to sleep in it at night,
the cell’s bare walls will seem such vivid things,
rich and alive. His guilt and fate will weave
its vaulted air into a grey veiled light.

Live breath is in the grief that overflows
this building. Underneath its brickwork and
hard iron bars, a secret tremble can
be felt that reveals pain in other souls.

I am not the first within these builded seams
whose wrists the fetters slice into and bleed,
upon whose grief the wills of strangers feed.

Sleep becomes waking then as waking dreams.
As I listen, I sense through these grey walls
many trembling hands on which the same fate falls.

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