Little is known about the German author Jakob Haringer, born Johann Franz Albert (1898-1948), who led a restless life. He was unconventional, obstinate and outspoken, and enjoyed duping his contemporaries with fictional details regarding his life and his works. In the 1920s, he started living as a vagrant, as he was wanted by the police, first for a customs offence and later for failure to register with the authorities and blasphemy. In 1929 and 1931, Haringer was a patient of several mental institutions. His work, which consists mainly of poetry, is uneven in style and level, and his often imperfect rhymes show his reluctance to strive for form. He wrote how he felt, and thus his work fluctuates between few happy memories, deep melancholy, complaints about his fate and savage rants against God and the bourgeois institutions he hated. His poems subsist in the sound and musicality of their language and range stylistically from simple arrangements reminiscent of old folk songs to works that exhibit expressionist traits. “Sommermüd” was published in Der Reisende oder Die Träne (The Traveller or The Tear) in 1932. As the book was turned down by Zsolnay Verlag, Haringer published it himself in Grigat Verlag, which was named after Herta Grigat, his girlfriend from the early …show more content…
It could either mean that someone is tired of a summer that was characterised by loneliness and misfortune, or it could refer to someone who is tired and longing for summer. Apart from addressing another person, the speaker is not involved, although he or she might speak about his or her own experiences. The addressee might be the reader, but it is also possible to see autobiographic connections. Haringer himself, who has experienced loneliness and desperation many times in his life, could be the speaker who reminds himself of being quiet and grateful the next time he wants to quarrel with God as he did in so many of his