Voci dalla fine del tempo. Poesia tedesca e apocalisse

This essay traces the presence and transformations of apocalyptic imagery in German poetry from the early twentieth century to the present, showing how the end of the world functions alternately as revelation, diagnosis, and allegory of the historical moment. Beginning with Expressionism – where catastrophe appears both as ruin and regeneration, visionary outcry and ecstatic prophecy – and moving through the secularized apocalypses of the postwar period, German poetry constructs an emotional cartography of the end reflecting historical crises, technological shifts, and the fractures of modern experience. Voices such as Lasker-Schüler, van Hoddis, Heym sketch an initial atlas of dissolution; Bachmann and Huchel, after 1945, expose its ethical charge and the radical retreat of the sacred; while poets like Kunert and Enzensberger bring apocalypse into an entirely human horizon marked by ecological devastation, nuclear threat, and systemic collapse. The end of the world thus ceases to be a divine decree and becomes a form of human knowledge about its own derailing: a revelation without redemption, registered by poetry with clarity and imaginative force.