@bluescreen - you were close but not quite there with the chiasmus. It has to be the same words or sentence structure reversed. So an example would be:

"Are you working hard or hardly working?"

As you can see, the word 'work' and 'hard' changed order in the second part of the sentence, leading to a very different meaning.

Dr Mardy Grothe has lots of examples on his website if you are interested to find out more: http://www.drmardy.com/chiasmus/book

This is what I got from Google Translate for your German phrases, is it about right?:

Oh God! The art is long;
And short is our life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I

the Lord broke the bread,
the bread broke the Lord.
Paul Celan: Thread suns

Tight is the world, and the brain is far.
Friedrich Schiller: Wallenstein's death