MODERN GERMAN POETRY
(June-August 1992; updated September 1998)
The individual poets listed in the Bibliography of modern German poetry are as follows: Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Johannes Bobrowski, Volker Braun, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Gnter Eich, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Peter Huchel, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Wilhelm Lehmann, Heinz Piontek. This must be a reflection of what has interested academics worldwide, who are not idiots; the reader may prefer to seek out these poets and bypass my subjective discussion beneath. The list dates from 1977, and time has probably added Friederike Mayröcker, Jürgen Becker, and (I would think) Ernst Jandl.
Imported German books are expensive, and there are a lot of poets whom I would like to know more about whom I don't have texts of. It is fairly simple to get hold of them once you know the author's name: Grant and Cutler (Great Marlborough Street, London) have the German-language Books in Print (Verzeichnis lieferbarer Bücher), which includes the most exotic small presses, you just look the book up and they will import it for you with 6-8 weeks delay. There is also a German-language Amazon on the Internet (called amazon.de), not especially good at small press items.
More on German poetry: reader's guide
Rhys Williams' section on German-speaking countries in the Oxford Guide virtually does away with poetry, as it fails to fit into the oh-so-familiar essay on politics and society. Altogether, this chapter is written from the "German studies" angle and useless for poetry. The academic world has, I suspect, decided that Difficult Poetry does not teach you words likely to appear in A-level translations and also faces the student with failure and loss of confidence. I daresay they're right, but we have to go further. Seymour-Smith's chapter on German in his Guide to Modern World Literature is much more instructive, although obviously not useful for the past 20 years. Michael Hamburger supplies a great deal of information on contemporary poetry in his After the Second Flood.
Leitgedanken
1. "And Peter Hacks sees in the continuously new, difficult production of the iamb in Müller a linguistic fixing of the difficulty of producing Socialism, as he sees the unruliness of political debate formally rendered in enjambement, that is, the non-identity of end of clause and end of line." (Fritz J.Raddatz)
and Heiner Müller: "Far from being mistakes, deviations from metre belong wholly to the essence of prosodic utterance: they give it formal beauty, and they are the only means of translating emphases of content into emphases of form: they make stress possible."
Walter Höllerer: "The long poem is, at the present moment, political already by virtue of its form; for it shows a movement opposing confinement in delimited boxes and domains. It is out against petty restrictions of country and intellect. ... The long poem has enough breath in its lungs to achieve acts of contradiction."
Krolow on the metaphor: "A poem activates itself through its metaphors. In a certain sense it is the metaphor which interests me most about a poem. It is flesh and sensorium of the poem at the same time."
Gottfried Benn: "I am of the generation which as a result of its position and experiences is perhaps especially enabled to see one thing quite clearly: if the White race was doomed, it would die of France. (...) (But) France closed itself in with concrete and walls (...) and guarded, as a little provincial people of notaries, its fabulous fleamarket of antiquities; unable to think racially, biologically outright defective, dysgenic and intellectually tank-neurotic, today it stands for Africa, not Europe. The White race is Germany, o Youth, its latest breeding, latest gleam art thou... " (from Art and Power, 1934). (I quote this to show how you can be a gibbering Nazi and still become a venerated poet figure in the 1950s.)
Historical deposits; general principles
The poets who seem chiefly to be worth a foreigner's while reading are the "hermetic" ones. This term is worth discussing. There are alchemical writings from 4th C Egypt which go under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, who was held in the Middle Ages to be the founder of alchemy (al-chemy, "the Egyptian art"). So "hermetic" came to refer to ciphered language, initiatory symbols. Because alchemy turned into chemistry, and chemists use rigorous sealing of vessels, "hermetically sealed" somehow crept into modern speech- but is really quite different. The word "hermetic" is applied to poets (Celan, Meister, Demus, but also Ungaretti, Quasimodo) whose work is not paraphrases of newspaper editorials. Its meaning is not shoved down the reader's throat. It is more user-friendly than Enzensberger or Brinkmann because the latter's simplicity reduces the reader to a coma. The term is quite wrongly applied, since Celan did not belong to a secret society and his poems can be understood without initiation.
Modern German literature has tended towards monumentalism, stimulated perhaps by the example of German philosophy and by a certain lack of sophistication, in mediaeval fashion. The sheer scope of the fictions of Spitteler, Hesse, T. Mann, Jahn, Musil, v. Doderer, Gutersloh, Döblin, Canetti, Däubler, Pannwitz, Mombert, Moser, etc., unreadable as many of them might be, puts all other literatures in the shade. But this educated tradition only reached a tiny fraction of the population, and was printed in tiny editions; the German people as a whole was always liable to revert to much coarser strata of verbal art, for example Luther, Reformation pamphlets, church hymns. This kind of mass communication points forward to pop songs and tabloid magazines like BILD. This situation is now totally altered, with a very educated public which offers a mass public for T. Mann and Hesse, certainly. (The monumental works completely ceased in 1945; perhaps the urge to create private universes was authoritarian and based on subliminal envy of absolute sovereigns.) But poetry is still suffering from this dumbing-down. It's always possible for someone to accuse complex poetry of containing stored "cultural capital" and consequently of bearing the German "historic guilt" and of upholding the Wilhelmine, elitist, social order. The great ignorance of the people was the source of their great respect for authority.
Hellas
Classical learning was like colour TV, it was a source of joy to those who had it and of irrational envy and contempt among those who lacked it. The class basis of the educational system led to an awkward social tension over possession of it. (Girls, evidently, were also shut out of this elite club.) One can posit a phase or stratum of German poetry when all, apart from Classical or Christian forms, was shaggy folk production. (The latter was not, of course, in any way more "authentic" than the Classically inspired poetry of a Gryphius or Balde.) Unfortunately, the general cultural symbolism of the Roman Empire had been taken over, in the 19th century, by the Prussian State, as the scenography of the new world-empire it was trying to become; the grandiose royal architecture of Schinkel, the fanatical nationalist occupation of broken-down Greek myths and phraseology by Hölderlin, the failed but canonized pseudo-Greek dramas of Goethe and Schiller, all added up to a megalomaniac illusion too pervasive to be ignored. Certainly, a vast section of those Classically trained were also sick nationalists. The reversion of all this after 1945 was a distrust of Classical themes, as if Hellas were to blame for the course of German Empire. The mythic-formal stock of Classical themes came to stand for the Past as a whole. A number of poets brought about their own total artistic failure by reckoning "the Past is to blame for history. Knowledge is the Past. I am totally ignorant. Therefore, the future belongs to Me." "Culture is the past. Words are culture. Therefore, the fewer words I use the less I am guilty of history". Or "Knowledge is authority. Authority is hierarchy. Information is knowledge. Therefore, if I write poetry that contains almost no information, I am being liberating." Today, they are a laughing-stock the world over. A Germanic craving for authority and Gründlichkeit led them to phrase the proposition "I am a bad writer" as "art is dead, poetry is over".
Another influence was the existence, over a long period of German and Austrian history, of a stratum of Latinate or French words used by the bureaucracy and the professions, but which the ordinary people being administered could not understand. The "State marriage permission", needed in 19th C Austria was called a "politische Ehekonsens": leaving aside the total State regulation this implies (poor people were being forbidden to marry in an era of rapid population growth), note the Greek and Latin words which were certainly quite foreign to landless peasants and handworkers. (These words mostly were purged during the formation of the modern literary language; differences in this purging are one difference between Austrian and German.) So Fremdwörter and Classical or French learning were identified with social privilege and oppression. It was possible for populists to manipulate this hostility against vocabulary or culture or refinement of style. The propositions were "I am really stupid therefore I must be honest" and "my vocabulary is small so I must be a democrat."
The ruins of 1945 Germany (including, obviously, the ruins of many Neo-Classical government buildings by Speer, Schinkel, etc.) could be taken as the collapse of the European and German cultural heritage, and used to justify a frenetically dull cast of language. Just as some people translated the physical damage into an expectation that the traditionally rich families would be dispossessed, as part of a general Year Zero; which did not happen. Predictably, the housing shortage led to huge profits for builders, speculators, and landowners. But even in the 1960s there was a lingering belief that crassness of language was virtue. There was a synergy of this with American influence in the direction of banality, flatness, immediacy, denial of depth: poems for a throw-away society.
A problem of poetry is to explain to the reader the values accumulated by objects and people through events like memory, interaction, love, and hope: the poet can physically show a house but needs some kind of symbolism to explain feelings about its being a home and where the poet's family lives. It was the Symbol which mediated past and present, inner and outer. Symbolic systems from the Hellenistic and Christian civilizations were available. The contest of the post-war era has been to build a valid personal set of "equivalences", symbols, to release the inner life in words. Replacing the Greek-Roman or Christian symbolic systems. But many poets have failed to grasp this and tried to write about physical surfaces only, in snapshots, as if there were no inner states and no deposits of affective memory. This, of course, is Behaviourism. The poem without inner life predominates in West German history.
Antecedents 1918-45
Ronald Taylor remarks, in German literature and society 1918-45, "The lyric had withered in the Weimar years: except for Brecht, and an occasional moment in Werfel, Nelly Sachs, Wolfskehl and a few others, it continued to hang its head through the years of isolation from 1933 to 1945. Apart from Stefan George's Das neue Reich and a handful of poems by Gottfried Benn, the last sustained and substantial lyric poetry to be published had been Rilke's Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus, both in 1923." The collapse of Expressionism (the silencing of the first generation and the absence of a second generation) is one of the great mysteries of twentieth century poetry. German poetry began again in 1945 with a massive streak of Expressionism right through it. In the 1930s, Meister and Huchel were writing unpublished; Arendt was unknown and in exile. Taylor goes on to praise Brecht, the greatest native German poet of the century.
Brecht
I could leave out Celan, a genius recognized as a modern classic. Everyone already knows Brecht was one of the greatest of 20th C poets, but his influence is so pervasive that I must discuss him. Michael Hamburger remarks that what Brecht "washed out of poetry was nothing less than the sediment of the whole Romantic-Symbolist era, with its aesthetic of self-sufficiency". The correct dialectic response to Brecht is to put it all back.
Theses on Brecht
1. Hollywood is all based on a dream of American prosperity, which underpins everything else and draws everything in. Brecht, equally, is drenched in a dream of Communist prosperity and Marxist moral rightness and certainty, which gives every line its precise value.
2. BB was a didactic writer. This means that he thought he had a system of reality which everyone else could wonder at and be uplifted by. The difference between him and any other self-struck Germanic sage is his simplicity of language. Two models for this simplicity were Luther and street murder ballads. But the irresistible vintage richness of the German writers was precisely their complex and dialectic language. (Other models: journalism, the tough dialogue of Hollywood films, the laconic style of early Chinese philosophers.)
3. BB is filled with inner certainty. His poems and plays may be "critical" of those in power, but their internal structure is as harmonious and self-reinforcing as a propaganda radio station. He is as silver-tongued as the speeches for the prosecution at a Show Trial. The defence is mysteriously paralyzed. He places the reader as a child while he is the adult: the German authority complex. This kind of selfconfidence led to terrible results among virtually all his imitators.
4. BB wanted lyric poetry to be judged entirely by its usefulness. He supported a minority party, which never took part in governing, up till 1933, then was in exile and unable to influence his fellow-countrymen. After 1948 he was the official dramatist of a dictatorship. I don't see the usefulness of his career. He was irrelevant to politics or to reality, his only impact was aesthetic. And his world was just as artificial as Hesse's or T Mann's.
There were two genocidal factions in 20th century Europe. Brecht supported one of them throughout his life. I fail to see what acuity or political cleverness this amounts to. I don't see what he knew which others didn't and which was also true.
5. The New Testament is written in a realistic style compared to the lofty prose of the Roman Empire all around it: full of everyday nouns and scenes from domestic life. Yet it is full of allegories and miracle tales. This specific "lower mimetic" is very close to BB. When you turn water into wine, the everydayness of wine doesn't mean that you aren't pulling a rhetorical trick.
August 1914
The great politicization of German literature began in 1933, which effected a total polarization of German writers. The two sides were numerically roughly equal. But perhaps it began in 1918, with the half-successful German Revolution: the models of criticality, montage, and agitprop were laid down in those years. And perhaps the break point was in 1914, when the war propaganda machine turned on such hysteria, polarization, and "national feeling"; Robert Minder has reminded us how Rilke, Musil, Döblin, Thomas Mann, were all fired with martial enthusiasm in the first few weeks. A datum which sums up the ultimate irony of politicized art. The Cold War, of course, used Germany as its ideological firing range.
The heritage of the Third Reich
The anthology edited in 1939 by Will Vesper (hard-core Nazi poet and a later father and father-in-law of two famous Baader-Meinhof terrorists) covers the whole of German poetry in 415 pages, of which 34 go to Hölderlin. I physically can't read Hölderlin, he makes me ill. I can't reproach people who have no feel for German cultural history and don't resent his identification of Germany with Hellas, his surrender of the "poetic vision" to gloating nationalist politics, his undermining of every rational procedure in public life in favour of a "mysticism" which is really an apology for dictatorship. Surely, though, his Victorian fake Hellenism must grate on every ear.
The "visionary" stream of poetry was out, because so many German visionaries (starting with the 16th C author of the Book of a hundred chapters, see Norman Cohn's fascinating account of this text) had tuned into angelic messages about killing the Jews, the greater glory of Germany, the need for pitiless military hardness, etc. The "Book" says, about the Emperor of the Black Forest: "He will reign for a thousand years... The heavens will be opened up to his people. He will come in a garment white as snow, and his throne will be as fire, and a thousand times a thousand and ten times a hundred thousand shall serve him, for he will execute justice" and "control the whole world from West to East by force of arms". Surely this is just like Hölderlin, including the scenographic effects and the total reliance on texts two thousand years old. So you could go in for non-subjective committed poetry- but of course this was something the Nazis were very enthusiastic about. You could lay great stress on the Community, in which individual wills must dissolve- another eternal theme of Nazism. You could withdraw into private life and allegory- fine, but very unpopular because of all the writers who'd done that all through the Third Reich and made no resistance at all. So you could give over poetry to propaganda, put poets under committee supervision, and vociferously chivvy your fellow-citizens into doing just what you want- but then you would be taking lessons from Mr. Hitler and Dr. Goebbels, undoubtedly the world's most gifted propagandists. You could shout at people in the purity of your own rage- but this was something the Nazis went in for. Who does not know the scene in The Mortal Storm: venerable white-haired biology lecturer proclaims that there is no difference between Jewish blood and German blood, ardent adolescent stands up, trembling with purity and loyalty, and says, I know you lie! White-haired professor is carted off to concentration camp. (Later, in the Sixties, this became very fashionable again among young German people. Nothing can exceed the cruelty, fervour, and ignorance of the young.)
One of the most common themes of modern German literature has been disillusionment with Marxism- a kind of political hangover and sobering-up. But a 1933 novel by Max Barthel, Das unsterbliche Volk, has a worker hero who loses his Communism on a visit to Russia, and joyfully turns to Nazism. (This was Barthel's own career.) Madness has no lessons to teach. Good writing was, after as before, only possible for the very intelligent, astute, unpredictable, and selfcritical.
Kulturoffizier
When the great Socialist writer and thinker Alfred Döblin returned to Germany after the war, he had become a French citizen and was employed by the French Army of Occupation as a Kulturoffizier. My sources say this involved wearing uniform! degraded as this post might sound, the majority of German writers ever since have had a hankering to put that uniform on: Pay attention, I've come down from the Mountain (or: from reading Marx) to mend your rotten ways.
Ruins, nature magic and personalist Christianity: 1945-52
Trümmerkunst; Kahlschlag
The 1940s (or actually from 1945 up to an unnamed date in the 1950s) were an era of minimal living conditions, as the visible destruction was cleared up by the sacrifice of working people. The literary scene was dominated by returning soldiers, an irritable and radically democratic lot, eager to raze German culture (the Kahlschlag) as the RAF had razed German cities. The war made narrative dominant, because it gave thousands of riveting stories. Equally, bareness of style answered to a general level of traumatizing grief, as well as to the missing education of people who'd spent their youth fighting the war, and to "sobering up" from the kitsch scenography of Goebbels. (Of course, people who are genuinely practical and strenuous don't read books, and the reading public was full of secret lovers of landscape, Greece, refinement, etc., as before.) The Gruppe 47 (certainly a vital source of instruction and inspiration for young writers) never conquered the public, which had quite enough of ruins in real life. (Trümmerkunst means "ruins art".) Temporal perspective has shown that material misery produced a nation of people who put personal prosperity before anything else, and wanted the Government to preserve order rather than human rights; just as many people were asoziale (antisocial, without ties and inhibitions) as if continuing Nazi philosophies of struggle, or eager to relive the War through patriotic military tales, as to be good citizens.
The loss of collective memory had for its most important and popular result a repression of the Nazi past and denial that guilt, which after all is a function of social memory, obtains. Germans have an especially damaged relationship to national past, leaving them more exposed to the attractions of Russia and America. One common way of being German is a kind of ascetic conscientiousness, like the Swiss or the Scandinavians: a bit of a pain in the neck, but a more promising model for human survival in the 21st century than any other. I would question whether a human needs to identify with a State (this did for Hölderlin), and whether novels and plays are necessarily more admirable productions than first-rate sociology and politology.
Buttner's excellent book on German Poetry 1945-70 (Von Benn bis Enzensberger) gives a very clear picture of the division of the field as it might appear in 1965: there is conservative poetry of Sprachmagie (verbal magic), there are the hermetics (given a programme-model by Hugo Friedrich's book Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik of 1956), and then there is the avant garde, who are objective and arbitrary (making up small artificial worlds based on experimental rule-sets) compared to both other groups. To be more exact, the divisions of his guide to reading are as follows: Conservative and progressive traditions, subheading Christian belief; Humanist spirit; Mythical nature; Tradition and modernity; Artistic poetry, subheading Experiment and montage; Surrealism and abstraction; Comedy, parody, lettrisme; Political poetry. Buttner's careful, widespread, and non-partisan account draws to our attention a group of at least sociological significance who are unlikely to be translated or to appeal to the English reader. Paul Konrad Kurz (quoted by him) describes 1945-52/3 as the septennium of tradition, of Christians, and of returning soldiers, although he also recognizes a lyric breakthrough around 1952. The poets of tradition would include Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Gertrud von Le Fort, Ina Seidel, Werner Bergengruen, Friederich Georg Jünger, Peter Gan, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Albrecht Goes. For us, these poets don't exist (although it is welcome to have 60 pages about them in Buttner's book), and the period is dominated by Benn, Brecht, and Celan. Since in the 1940s a large proportion of living Europeans died, the mood of the times was open to the sublime, the supernatural, and to religion; poetry hovered far above the street; we can see that Celan's Todesfuge (1948) partakes of this mood, and is itself sublime, ceremonial, non-realistic, and an act of mourning. It has a certain affinity with contemporary poems by JF Hendry and Dylan Thomas. Christianity was staging a come-back, and Adenauer's restorative regime identified itself with the "Christian Occident", a phrase (developed for a campaign to recruit non-German Fascists into the Waffen-SS) meant to play down its nationalism for international consumption; Celan didn't fit into this image, since he was a Jew from south-eastern Europe, but this alignment of the Church with the regime which gave off a certain smell-Adenauer's right-hand man was the same who, as a brilliant young lawyer, had drafted the Nuremburg decrees defining the place of Jews in the National Socialist State-guaranteed the estrangement of youth and of literary opinion after a certain delay. Let's give an example from Heinz Piontek:
Durchs Grabengras rolln die verschwitzten Hute,
die Manner wischen sich das Fett vom Mund,
bei Schaufeleisen und Kamillenblute
spurn sie des Daseins wunderlichen Grund.
Sie stopfen Krull in die zerbissnen Pfeifen,
ein Becher Kirschschnaps treibt ihr zahes Blut.
Das kunftige, schon ist's fur sie zu greifen
im Schotterhugel. He-die Welt ist gut!
(a crew of Strassenwärter) What strikes me is the mere positiveness of the last (and climactic?) lines of each stanza. Piontek wants to be a man who has said yes to life. Anxiety has been allowed into the poem (it will find a way) only to be dismissed in a way which is reminiscent of a certain kind of popular song and which I find unconvincing. I am quite happy to agree that human beings are stirred by deep anxieties, and that the beneficence of art is to face them, stage them, and dissolve them; but Piontek's treatment of the anxiety is simplistic and as it does not catch it, therefore does not refute it. Piontek, and many other poets of affirmative culture, were simply thrown on the scrapheap by the advancing wave of political poetry, which it would take more capital resources than I have got to pick off the scrapheap. Contrasting the two, we find:
anxiety. the agitprop poem relies on an inflated monster image of the capitalist and the (bourgeois) State as pure threats. That is, the size of the poem depends on the size of the anxiety it arouses. Heart-warming and tranquillizing murmurs about the flowingness of rivers and risingness of flowers are a threat to this threat situation.
optimism. The agitprop poem pushes its ideal moment out beyond the bounds of the poem, in the (near) future when the political measures being recommended have worked.
conclusiveness. the verbal magic poem's success is proportional to how much uncertainty it allows in, the quality of the tension before the blissful relaxation and resolution. The agitprop poem's success depends on how detailed a portrait it draws of the Fat Enemy, on which depends the convincingness of its overthrow of them.
security. The poem which relies on angst as a source of energy-and I think this is true for most modern urban poetry-is so psychologically secure that it seeks out conflict and avoids reconciliation. This over-reliance on risky stimulants points to membership of a privileged group that really has no idea about poverty and low esteem.
hurt. The dislike of reconciliation suggests someone who has never been hurt. This ignorance is connected to the move away from Christianity, which makes reconciliation mandatory; sociologically, this move was carried out more rapidly by men than by women, who on balance get hurt more often than they hurt others, and the names of women are more frequent among the conservative and Christian poets (of the post-war period) than among the daredevil modernists. Just as noisy street demos served emotional needs rather than any conceivable political gain, so also the competitive layout of literary values, delegitimating almost every player on the field, may have served male emotional needs for clear competitive structures and point-scoring, rather than any conceivable artistic gain.
Accounts of the post-war period show enormous emotional gratitude to, in particular, Wilhelm Lehmann and Hans Egon Holthusen, whose elaborately literary, elevated, and symbolically self-complete works, with their stress on Bewahrung (abiding, being conserved) brought happiness to a generation of bourgeois readers who had seen their physical and moral worlds blown apart. It must have been difficult for Holthusen (1913-), having been one of the biggest stars on the scene in the 1950s, to watch his reputation get smaller with every passing year. (He didn't publish any more books of poetry after 1956.) Lehmann wrote:
Moisture grips, in the uncertainty
Ferments the yeast of fallen foliage,
Pythic as if from cracks in the earth
Smokes rot of the blown.
Maple leaf touches healing the temples,
To remind us of certainty:
So that a firm glow would meet us,
Sink acorns and chestnuts.
As Paracelsus thought of it,
Vapours sweep, fogs drift;
Larva spins at her shaft,
Puss-moths at their pupa.
The weighing tunes from inside
Mothwings, root fibres,
And a generative coming to sense
Rescue our world in its transit.
(from a 1946 volume; poem "Über abgefallenem Laub")
I don't think their poetry is bad, although I don't feel a mission to translate and comment on it. Lehmann (1882-1968) was associated with the poet Oskar Loerke, a secretary of the Prussian Academy who left acrid diaries about the behaviour of the new cultural-managerial regime after 1933. The reference to Paracelsus gives the poem a conceptual level; though P. was also a favoured Nazi subject, glorified in a trilogy (1917-25) by Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, made into a kitsch film by Goebbels. His theory of signatures anticipated modern biochemistry, although Lehmann is less concerned with the real links between man and nature than the affective and suggestive ones. I think it is good for our awareness to descend briefly into piles of fermenting waste, zombie bodies acting only by diffusion and steeping, since after all that level is there as well as the part that can do geometry. As is well known, poetry can effect the transformation of everyday consciousness either by speeding it up or by slowing it down. Holthusen's deliberately long and resolution-delaying sentence structures have an unceasing poemicity without really amounting to poems. The conservative writers around in '33 were generally pro-Nazi, or at least smiled on by the regime; Bewahrung could mean rejection of the new, of the culture of the Weimar Republic in '33 or of the agitprop-underground currents of the 1960s.
A golden age: the 1950s
Hilde Domin: "The decade, in which lyric poetry stood in the middle of a really passionate interest, and took a front rank internationally, is already history, a closed period of our post-war history. From 1965/66 at the latest, with the increasing re-ideologization, politics began to clench literature, and lyric poetry more than everything else, in its pincers." ("Das politische Gedicht und die Öffentlichkeit.")
Horst Bienek: "for a decade, we see that now with hindsight ever more clearly, German lyric poetry underwent an upswing, a blossoming, as it had perhaps not known since early Expressionism. It may be... bold to specify this new beginning, but the year 1952, in which Celan's second volume, Poppy and Memory, came out, will have to be taken as an important date. In this year the new lyric poetry made a tempestuous onset, there appeared from Rainer M. Gerhard Encirclement, from Holthusen The Labyrinthine Years, from Höllerer The Other Guest, from Heinz Piontek The Ford, and the slightly older Karl Krolow The Signs of the World... After a long time of searching and imitation did German lyric poetry, as I believe, not only find the door into what has been called 'the world language of modern poetry', but also to itself. A year later the unknown Ingeborg Bachmann made her debut with a stroke of genius Held-up Time, the late Benn offered the sinister melancholy of his Distillations, Eugen Gomringer ventured a lettriste new start... It was a breakout, stormy and sovereign; they were fruitful years. And there was no group, no direction, but strong, individually profiled, original personalities... Since the beginning of the Sixties a certain exhaustion can be observed."
(I am not familiar with the poetry of this period, for which I apologize. Bienek spent 1952 in a Russian concentration camp doing a 25-year stretch for "political offenses".) Kurz names the same year but gives an almost completely different list of books.
The Sixties: crass immediacy
Let's say first of all that the Sixties lasted roughly from 1965 to 1975. The pressure to write dull agitprop reached its greatest virulence between about 1966 and 1972. There was a distinctive Sixties school in Germany, but none of them had any artistic merit and reading them today is tedious and embarrassing. I think the explanation is to be sought in the domination of other media, especially the pop record, glossy magazine, and TV; but also the poster, clothes, the snapshot, cover design, advertisement, interview. All of these privilege the Personality as the main carrier of meaning, concomitantly suppressing form, effort, and self-awareness. The Sixties poets couldn't write poetry because they were totally in the sway of media sets incompatible with poetry. On TV, 80% of the signifier is the body or bodies of the humans on camera; being thin and well made-up are terribly important, words are very unimportant. We can understand the Sixties poet if we imagine them imagining themselves as a Star, famous for being themselves and not needing words. They had bought the myth of Immediacy. Unfortunately, this applies to the agit-text writers and not just to the Americanizing hippies and rock fans.
Children born after 1950 had absorbed TV as a basic part of life and, in many cases, their self-presentation in poetry assumed a camera pointing at them, with the curious combination of hype and banality which TV implies. Having faith in "immediacy", they were disinclined to bother with anything but the flattest and most self-assured verbal explanation. This tendency was reinforced by the other dominant capitalist genres: the pin-up, the interview, the pop song, the advertisement. All have this idea of the "self as commodity", the real content of the image, and this banality. It followed that "technique" was an obstacle to total identification of the reader with the artist, and was "inauthentic". Certainly, no good poems came out of this belief.
The public had rejected the artist in favour of the Personality or Star. It was fruitless to copy the artless intimacy and openness of the Interview without realizing just how much skill in suggestion and the complicity of context was needed to produce that intimacy. Stars weren't famous for being themselves but were empty ciphers filled by hundreds of brilliant technicians. Sixties poets, and this is the key difference between West and East, gave up the difficult practice of writing: they wanted to be famous for being themselves. (Or at most for lifting bits of popular or classical culture and gluing them together at a jaunty angle.) The whole poetic texture was emptied out because it competed with the expanding Self. The snapshot was preferable to the painting. We need to relearn the difficult techniques of verbal art from the Russians and East Germans. (The specific smouldering cigarette-end was a shift within cinema from studio-based pictures with labour-intensive planning and control to an ideology of "spontaneity" in which nakedness and sexual come-ons made the star's body the decisive element; "natural" colour photography and open form collaborated with this. There was far less emphasis on script and dialogue. The disappearance of the studio technicians set off the arrival of artlessness and low affect in poetry. "Spontaneity" probably arrived earlier in pinups; the Sixties film was an animated pinup.)
Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann was the acme of this dull development. Brinkmann's whole poetical philosophy seems to be based on the observation that a teddy-bear receives more love than a friend because it has absolutely no intelligence. The influence of a certain broken-down US poetic is unmistakable. TV-oriented beliefs about "immediacy" helped Olson and O'Hara write god-awful poems, and the technology transfer helped Brinkmann do that too.
RB has a striking reluctance to talk about people relating to each other or even having feelings. Like many American writers post W.C. Williams ("no ideas but in things") he clearly thinks that objects are more authentic than people. As he says: "My own origin, which in memory only consisted of half-obscure things. And the less I understood in language, the more clearly to me present objects came into my awareness, as if they were living people. If I remembered myself in a situation, which lay a long time back, then I saw in my memory only things. The things were going to, or had, replaced the feeling. Every sensation was occupied with details of objects." One reflects that staring at the floor is a sign of embarrassment, numbness, social incompetence. RB keeps describing objects, but objects are only of interest in a teleological programme; screws if you are designing an object, fruit if you want to eat, landscape if you want shelter. RB just has an endless flicker of meaningless sensations.
His book is a kind of "road movie", and we realize that travelling is a sign of vacuity, inability to get interested or committed. The moving camera is relaxing, like TV, because every idea disappears so quickly that mental functioning rapidly declines altogether. This poet never suggests that anything is of interest, has no means of emphasis, so you never disagree with him: disagreement is stressful. But the fact is he isn't interested by anything in his own poems. He states that he deliberately avoids thought or choice in stringing words together, his poems are part of the throw-away ethos. He walks out of every place from an inability to relate to other people or to subjectivity altogether. The suspicion is that he rejects Culture because for him it represents the refusal of cultured girls to sleep with him: "You really think you're clever, girl/ to tie off my balls/ with your opinions/ many women are the State/ locked up/ in it/ get out of here, twat."
"And as soon as they are together, they speak in the same language. And as soon as they speak, the differences begin. And as soon as the differences begin, there's war." So war is caused by language, a typical Sixties belief, but never expressed with so much stupidity. So not thinking is innocence and also revolutionary and also very sexy. Note that the background to concrete poetry is not totally different, i.e. that language is corrupt and games are better. Brinkmann never analyzes or integrates experience, every detail is primary and mindless. This vacuity makes way for the one big meaning of the poet's narcissism, the payoff for eliminating thought is that primary snapshot reactions reveal the Beautiful Self. When nothing is being said, the Sayer fills 360 degrees of the visible horizon. We are offered a Star, a crush object, instead of a poem. Unfortunately, I suspect that the "youth politics" of that decade defined alienation in just such narcissistic consumerist terms.
There is an odd equation between RB's denial of the Past at each moment and the Kahlschlag project of erasing the collective Nazi past. The mindless shallowness of his poems can be taken as being future-oriented and resembles the shallow and witless images of the collective Future evident in the poems of teenage bourgeois Maoists. Somehow the vision of the 1968 generation had the vacuity, time-shallowness, and low affect of television. Their rejection of the working class and its political organizations somehow came from the insight that those people didn't look good on TV. The thinkers of the Fifties told us that the victims of effective conditioning would be loyal but shallow, poorly oriented, without drive or a personality, and this is just how R-D Brinkmann is.
This era prepared the ground for the extreme consumerism/kulinarisch narcissism of the Eighties. The arrival of electronic leisure media made the private illusory world far more inviting; this notably weakened the position of poets vis-…-vis genuine Media Personalities; another effect was to make it easy for social dissidents to slow down their thought world and live in it for all of their leisure hours, privatizing the radical. This was actually a form of deep compliance. It's hardly coincidental that the rolling back of the State was occurring in an era when people were losing interest in politics in the workplace, local government, or central government, and getting into the "politics" of what music they listened to or T-shirts they wore. Politics was a leisure activity because it took place in leisure hours, imaginary politics was shinier than real politics. This was already the promise of the Sixties: that politics would be as much fun as TV and politicians would be sex symbols. People bought what they have since been given.
Hamburger lists, as poets working between 1965 and 1975 who weren't the usual mindless agit-pop, Günter Eich, Peter Huchel, Erich Arendt, Max Hölzer, Ernst Meister, Paul Celan, Johannes Poethen, Franz Tumler, Rose Ausländer, Hilde Domin, Heinz Piontek, Wolfgang Bächler, Rainer Brambach, Margarete Hannsmann, Christoph Meckel, Klaus Demus, Franz Wurm and Christine Koschel (list from After the Second Flood).
Seventies: new subjectivity
The mid Seventies are often cited as a reaction away from the marching political discipline of the Sixties into a "new subjectivity", allegedly exhibited in Theobaldy's anthology ich bewege mich doch, which reads to me just like more empty-headed pop poetry from a Sixties dustbin. One's first reaction is not "hey! this is really subjective!". Certainly, a number of individuals began writing good poetry as part of shedding the crude beliefs of 68. One would argue that this was a new phase of consumer malaise: the Sixties were consumerist but believed in some kind of Marxist Utopia, the Seventies and Eighties reduced poetry to something like expensive stereos, expensive furniture, the accessories of a bourgeois personality, and had nothing beyond that. The famous "openness" of form was like that of an exhaustive capitalist shop: sampling world literature was a part of being bored, satiated, and vacuous, not of energy and joy. Perhaps the apathy of these writers was caused by an unwillingness to stain or rip their discreet designer clothes. Narcissism, their common fortune shared with popstars and the tireless heroes of advertisements, could never quite go far enough to make the text happen. As for the alleged ideological conformity of West German poetry in the Sixties, let's note (a) it must have been voluntary, since there were no means of compulsion and the laws of the market still determined rewards (b) it's ridiculous to suggest that the Sixties weren't subjective (c) consumerist and pop culture reached that generation more than Maoism and Trotskyism.
In a commercial context where the specific difference between Quality Literature and Quantitätsliteratur, which is so virulent and profitable and noisy, is a kind of "evidence of handcrafting in the writing", the danger is that "quality" writers will be lured into abandoning the features which they share with mass literature (general human features) and overstressing the features which define them uniquely, and adequately for Brand Identification, as cultured. Such features are then practised in a blatant way, overdeveloped, quite without relevance to artistic design. Two such features are "vivid description of sensuous reality" and social detachment. The former is the kind of thing that appeals to ambitious but insensitive types, and can easily be spotted as set-pieces which simply bore and alienate the reader. (It resembles,of course, a typically bourgeois recession into wine, gourmandise, and expensive possessions at the expense of personal relations and civic ardour.) The latter is pervasive and pernicious, the writer's squeamish avoidance of any emotional or moral commitment grasps out to empty the relationship between reader and writer; in an overeducated, controlled, vacuity. This kind of "quality" writing (Botho Strauss and Patrick Süskind spring to mind) represents a new kind of boredom and inauthenticity, never before seen. Unfortunately, the new prevalence of literary studies among writers and the reading public, leading to an excessive sensitivity to surface, has led to dull, queasy, formalist writing; encouraged no doubt by the excessive flipness and stylistic acuity of advertizing and commercial photography.
Eighties and Nineties
I admit that I couldn't locate the raw material needed to study the poetry of the past fifteen years (although I have read a certain number of plays and novels, which are more rapidly disseminated). Obvious external factors would include: the replacement of the USA by Germany (and Japan) as the world's leading industrial power; the ever increasing influence of Americanization; the enervating hangover from 68 and the days of the non-parliamentary opposition; the competition of the media (TV, cinema, magazines, rock music, posters) with print; the displacement of the lyric by more aggressive means of promoting the Personality, now totally commodified, and making self-presentation almost impossible; feminism; the Green movement; ever-increasing wealth; the huge growth of spending on leisure (and even on culture); the collapse of Communism and opening of the East as an underdeveloped hinterland waiting for German engineers and German capital; the undermining of all socially radical movements by prosperity, and the popular faith in prosperity; the diversion of radical energies to the Third World (and the Turks as internal Third World), which makes European writers write badly and vaguely and undermines their ability to interest the home market; consumerism, collecting, and drugs as dominant elements of leisure, redesigning the understanding of art; the decline of the Army and aristocracy and rise of a totally self-confident, populist, pragmatical, cultureless nouveau riche dominant group; many others. More positively, the passage of time means that at least the Nazi veterans are finally dying off.
Michael Hamburger's essay on the scene since 1975, Afterthoughts, printed in After the Second Flood, is not expansive but gives brief discussion to the following poets: Horst Bingel, Hans-Jürgen Heise, Walter Helmut Fritz, Max Hölzer, Jürgen Theobaldy, Paul Wühr, Oskar Pastior, Botho Strauss, Peter Huchel, Ernst Meister, Klaus Demus, Nicolas Born, R-D Brinkmann, Klaus Konjetzky, Karl Mickel, Gregor Laschen, Günter Herburger, Johannes Schenk, Helga M. Novak, Ursula Krechel, Rolf Hauf, Gabriele Wohmann, FC Delius, Heinz Piontek, Guntram Vesper, Friederike Roth, Karin Kiwus, Harald Hartung, Michael Krüger, Christine Koschel, Werner Dürrson, Walter Neumann, Rose Ausländer, Hilde Domin, Cyrus Atabay, Kurt Marti.
This is a useful list.
Tony Frazer sent me (from Mexico City) photocopies of texts by the following poets: Durs Grünbein, Uwe Kolbe, Thomas Kling, Jürgen Becker, Andreas Altmann, Karl Krolow, Joachim Sartorius, Andreas Okopenko.
Poetry in the Democratic Republic
Now that the DDR is over there is little point listing its bad features. More relevant to our quest is the remarkable success of lyric poetry in the DDR. Clearly the only thing a government should do about art is chuck money at it. And perhaps a few Kalashnikovs to mow down the art bureaucrats, art politicos, and academics who rush in to restore "order". Any other intervention is fundamentally inappropriate. It's ironic that both East and West offered writers the same material protection; both sides were radicals living off subsidies, rebels wallowing in material ease.
Common themes of DDR careers are the struggle with bureaucrats (and the Security forces); financial autonomy, achieved by huge subsidies (to put it another way, the DDR poet got a bigger share of the retail price of the book); and seriousness, absence of throwaway ideology and the star cult, with great stress on technique and hard work. Related to the last is the attempt to represent contemporary reality, if necessary going on long study trips to factories or collective farms to gather information. The poet's world thus stretches further than the confines of a bourgeois living-room and bookshelf.
There were serious disagreements between the Party and various poets, but let me stress that both sides were Socialists, the struggle was between different interpretations of the revolutionary duty of the artist, and the excesses of one side are partly an expression of how much both sides valued the shared object. It was not like the Soviet Union, where a petrified and police-dominated Party fought with fundamentally alienated writers. The struggle should be compared with a parallel struggle in West Germany, where the party of crudity and subordination arguably showed less respect and imagination than the East German Writers' Union. The petty vindictiveness visited on (say) Berndt Jentzsch and Rainer Kunze at times reminds us that factionalism is a basic human vice.
Herwegh: "Mann der Arbeit, aufgewacht,/ Und erkenne deine Macht!/ Alle Räder stehen still/ Wenn dein starker Arm es will!" I was delighted to find in Raddatz the original poem by the revolutionary of 1848 Herwegh which was parodied by the punk/disco group Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (on the album "Gold and love"): "Und alle Sterne/ gehören Euch./ Wollt Ihr/ dass die Erde wieder bebt?/ wollt Ihr/ dass die Erde sich bewegt?/ Wenn Ihr es wollt. Bewegt Euch!" DAF's intuitive mix of Dietrich-style torch songs (few other punk bands covered a Dietrich song) and East German style agitprop hymns to the State worked incredibly well, if only for a short time. It was very funny and very erotic. After the fact, it seems obvious to sing about a revolutionary hero where iron will means that his cock never goes soft, dialectic means that he always knows what to do, rebellion means sexual autonomy, and the dream of possessing the earth means that seed will flow like the stars of the sky. After the fact, DAF seem to have gone further into Herwegh's text than Herwegh; torchsong's (Piaf, Dietrich) image of the Strong Man seems a weak anticipation of DAF's lascivious workerism. DAF's irony resembles (by chance?) the killing mythological re-compositions of Heiner Müller, who quotes the same Herwegh song in GERMANIA TOD IN BERLIN. The Germans may not be good at painting or poetry but they did produce the world's best disco music. Thankyou, Mr. Moroder. Thankyou, Sash.
POEM TYPES
(a) The concrete poem
The concrete or "shape" poem reached its highest peak in the Mannerist era, i.e. circa 1590-1625. In modern times, it was revived by Eugen Gomringer in the 1930s, with the typically "modern" traits of being much less complicated, suggestive, and ornate than its classical forebears. Hamm:
"Who does not think, at the text of Eugen Gomringer
The black mystery
is here
here is
The black mystery
of an advertisement? In the effort to escape the dominant ideology, just these adherents of 'concrete poetry' demonstrated themselves as people who judged ideologically about the real system structure of the world, even precisely there, where they tried to deny it."
This is hard to disagree with. The exit from poetry is no exit from a prevailing "visual ideology". Because of the sheer informational sparseness of such poems, they adhere to the belief that language is corrupt and "innocence" is to be achieved by throwing away every rule; just as advertizing builds a transient world in which reality is suspended. But also, they have an affinity to the widespread epigrammatic and oversimple political poem, of e.g. Erich Fried and Kurt Marti, since these rely frequently on an "ambiguity" (like the visual aspect of a word) which makes language "concrete", and virtually avoid mimesis. Marti even likes automatic procedures.
The concrete poem reached quite a popularity in the early Sixties (Mon, Kriwet, Bense, etc.), but such poems are today only written by the most diehard traditionalists of the avant-garde.
(b) The agitprop poem
The typical protest poem was an epigram based on altering a clich‚d Establishment utterance; unfunny, uninformative, smug, and easy to write. It occurs to me that this genre is a continuation of the celebrated (and boring) father-son conflict of German Expressionism: the poets were so obsessed by watching and providing fine criticism of what the Government and Capitalism did that they remained in infantile psychological dependence. Their poems are simple derivatives of the "master texts" of authority; defiant and parasitical. Classically, of course, the conflict is resolved by the son growing up and becoming tight-fisted and overbearing just like the father he hated. I admit that poetry has absolutely no equivalent for the Economic Miracle (you write a million poems about contemporary society and miss the most central thing because your rules have no place for it), but a kind of affectless consumerism is visible in modern German literature.
I wouldn't want to attack the practice of politics. I think being politicized is like being gay, it is physiological and goes right through everything, to block it would be to cause huge frustration; it's unmistakeable when you see someone like that. (Listening to Chris Harman recently at an SWP fair was such an experience.) Someone like Harman is so eager to speak that their words are throwing them around the room. When disagreements are thrown at them they instantly frame an answer, they are all answers because they are integrated enough to react instantly and because they are they spend all their waking hours tearing ideas apart and locating the problems. Listening to Harman think and speak was like watching a cat hunting. People like that are desperate for newsprint, they get hold of all the papers by one a.m. and read them jumping up and down with excitement. They tear the papers apart trying to find more information, because information is the drug they run on. They are bored with yesterday's papers because their brains are working the whole time, they take in what they see and hungrily move on.
Well, there are people who are political. It's a gift, maybe a curse; certainly we need them around. I'm not like that. But I think virtually all the German "agit poets" were fakes, not genuinely politicized people. There is a lack of cerebral energy driving them. They lack curiosity and so they aren't real politicos. There is an aesthetic of information, curiosity is a drive like sex: politicizing poetry is a good idea, but it takes the gift to make it work. Conversely, investigative prose works by Günther Wallraff, Bernd Engelmann, and Michael Jungblut are so fascinating that I can't think why anybody would want to write poetry instead. But the answer is that the poets were too shallow and selfish to gather the data needed for real social documents. Their language is thin and spindly because of their lack of deep commitment. Politicization for them was like buying a pair of jeans. Finally, there are great political poets such as Brecht, Hochhuth, Arendt, and Heiner Müller; who have great cerebral energy and in no way resemble the Sixties agit-texts.
The comparison to advertisements is borne out by the lack of critical distance, the poet gives no information to the reader because the latter is supposed to have obtained all necessary information from the news media: since the poem has no function of bringing information, it expresses only heedless group togetherness. Consequently it resembles an advertisement in which two people make a "gesture" by choosing the same brand of jeans.
Immediacy excludes the world from the poem. The rubbing out of the information which once filled poetry, as other information sources become ever more dense and specialized, forces lyric poets to pump up the Personality as the one commodity which they can still supply competitively; as poetry bleeds to death from lack of content, the personality function bloats and distorts. Sixties poets endorsed political slogans in the way that unemployed filmstars endorse Nescafe; a tiny trickle of information is overrun by the merciless onslaught of Hello It's Me.
Another tactic is to decide that psychological extremism can outweigh majority resistance. You only have 5% of the electorate, but to make up you scream and scream and reject factuality. Well, this is how to become Fascist. Fascism was about totale Mobilmachung (total mobilization), against Vernunft (mere reason). You must respect majority opinions. I feel that a professional writer should have enough respect for the reader to offer information and analysis, not instructions. If your arguments aren't credible, perhaps they're also wrong. In art, extreme positions are disconnected and locked up, trapped and irretrievable.
(c) the Christian poem
Little need be said about this, as it resembles the English variant so closely. (Indeed, some popular English hymns are translations from 16th C German hymns.) The model is ultimately Latin hymns of, I suppose, about the 4th C AD onwards. Such emotional outpourings could also be taken as personal lyric poems, as self-realization is redefined as following the Will of God. The ability to combine the personal and the cosmic is impressive.
The point is that poetry has moved forward in the past few decades, with the poem-types which seemed eternal in the 1930s dwindling and vanishing. A sceptic might observe that the hymn-lyric has been replaced by genres which preserve its naivety and religiosity, in myopic benevolence to the world; often using scraps of other religions to provide verbal decoration. The poem about submission to God was arguably a victim of the anti-authoritarianism which followed 1945.
(d) the warm subjective poem
This could be thought of as the equivalent to a kind of painting in which colour is used purely subjectively, to indicate feelings. A merging of childhood feelings and cognitive frames with objective adult ones is another feature. One could use the term "mythical world-view", only that the term "fairy-tale" seems more accurate; the situation is domestic. We could use the term "surreal", but this is also misleading, since the intention is expressive, not tendentious. Personalization and the use of animals to carry affective values are frequent. In a certain sense, these poems are in very simple language, the stratum of German before Mediterranean or scientific influences; but it is also very rich, the problem of expressing the affective world upon the object world has been solved. In general modern poetry is alienated or critical and scientific in approach, but there are important exceptions.
(e) the poem of Kulturgeschichte
(f) the hermetic poem
SINGLE POETS
A bluff for the middle class: Gottfried Benn (1886-1956)
Twenty-two years ago, I saw some of Benn's Morgue Poems in English, and wrote them off as medical-student grotesquerie. In fact, they are; but this led me wrongly to ignore, for that length of time, Benn's poetry; said to be dangerous, refined, sinister, and nihilistic. I don't think he ever said anything more profound than what might appear in a film script; but he had the ability of a great actor to animate his words, to prevent you from thinking about anything else, and to make you anticipate what will come next. He could even write tourist poems about exotic places and make them come off. Few poets can, like Benn, write volumes which are interesting as wholes, where the gambler's move of descending into the vagaries of life supplies a wealth of incident, and each poem is incomplete enough to send us eagerly on to the next. In general he wrote about things that could appear in glossy magazines, desirable and yet accessible. For example, his poem about Rouge Baiser, a lipstick which appeared at about the time of the Korean War; pretty sprightly for a chap of 66:
That is the painful hour,
where an old wound falls open:
a panorama is the round
of sensual- and humanity.
They wear red hats
and trenchcoats with built-up shoulders,
so they exist for today as the flower
of happiness and being.
They have full faces,
also lips with Rouge Baiser,
who could wish, as judge and avenger,
to say: wipe your face clean, go?
They have fallen into history,
they carry the Ur and the gene,
who knows, if higher orders
exist, and better than them?
This is the painful hour,
what caused you all the trouble,
did you get some kind of warning
of after-life, faith, and more?
His sophistication was of the cocktail-bar kind. After embracing the Nazis, being banned by them, and a period of lying-low under the Allied occupation, he re-emerged as a masterly character actor, presenting a wonderful sketch of sleaziness, experienced disillusion, and hopeful depravity. He went out in a blaze of glory, all bar-bills paid by an adoring West German public which regarded him as the living master of Christian-Occidental, bitterly-acquired but ah! sweet in the enjoying! life-wisdom. Calling a book of poems "Distillations" was obviously a pose, but it also subtly includes the word "Destille", a kind of low boozer.
Benn really falls outside our period. However, there is a certain carry-over from his pose of cerebral, detached, cold observation to the cold eye pose of the avant garde which grew up after his death. The pretence at objectivity gave especial problems when the experimental gaze is being directed at women. Benn is present in his own pictures, however disorderly the scene. The notion of that "cold formal gaze" somehow reminds me of Erich von Stroheim's absurdly lecherous monocle in "Foolish Wives" (and, for the matter of that, "Blind Husbands"). His comeback volume of 1948 was called "Static Poems", statisch being to do with what makes buildings hold up, a mathematical term opposed to mechanics. The phrase in German gives a strong impression of "seeing through to the ultimate structure of things while cutting right through the illusory and superficial layers of clothes, make-up, and flesh". This was an incredibly clever publicity image, but the actual poems have strong affinities to popular songs about night-clubs and vamps. The jaded pose builds up to the line "Gee, I never thought I'd feel like this again."
My East German dictionary of literature quotes a pre-1914 poem of Benn, "The brain is a path that leads nowhere. A bluff for the middle class. We want the dream. We want the rush", and says of his post-1945 stance, "In the following time he composed a 'cerebral lyric', operating with scientific and foreign-language concepts (from medicine, technology, existentialist philosophy, etc.), in which he opened up new lyric stimulations through rhythmic and rhyme-technique, and therein lies his Dangerous Influence-through a seductive mixture of provocative tone and elegiac mood he impressed many members of a young generation of poets, oppositionally inclined, but directionless, and despairing of itself and the world." Wonderfully shuddery! I am the Mad Daddy! Vincent Price for the biopic! Every small town needs someone like this to lead its young astray. I especially like the implication that foreign languages imply sophisticated vice: I would never have specialised in modern languages, at the age of fourteen or so, if not for high hopes that this might be so. As for what "cerebral lyric" might mean from someone who thought the brain was "a bluff for the middle class", the answer might also tell us how to become the State-ordained official avant-garde.
Benn's use of ideas reminds me of the use of sampling by Portishead: they sample an ancient Johnny Ray number ("I'll never fall in love again") and somehow the whole idea of the song is present, in ten seconds of distorted (distilled?) extract. His ability to throw in an idea is a similar coup; something fantastically difficult, and relying on split-second control of belief and detachment. Someone interested in ideas dwells on them, and the song nature of the poem is lost. Crucial is his very strong sense of the symptomatic value of phenomena, in a set of relentless cycles which, creaky as they might seem today, gave everything a specific literary and psychological value within an overall dynamic scheme. Benn was a VD doctor, and, in those days before effective treatments, was struck by the regular nature of the cycle of the simple parasite as it spreads through spine marrow and brain. Statische Gedichte was a response to the death of his wife, an attempt to seize the flow of time and halt it; he knows very well that this is impossible, but the attempt turns every line into a symptom of the strength of the organism, pitted against impersonal forces which must drain it in the end. One may regret the historical systems of Spengler and the Kulturkreislehre school, so useful for poems, and especially for the German poem about the history of culture.
Stefan George (1868-1933)
George is miles outside our period, but is of some relevance; also, a poem in Geoffrey Hill's latest collection, ("Algabal") refers to a poem of his, in connection with Claus von Stauffenberg and the Christian-aristocratic resistance to Hitler. Willy Haas, a Jew from Prague and the editor of the Neue Literarische Zeitschrift, liked Rundfragen, where many writers were asked to reply to set questions; in 1928, one on the 60th birthday of George elicited a reply from Brecht:
This writer belongs to the phenomena, which because of their isolation in a time regarded as corrupt seem to be a contrast to it, and so win for themselves a sympathy, which was really produced as antipathy to the time-until it came out, that by their being they were part of it; and as the differences of opinion, which can actually be established, seem to be extraordinarily slight, or lie in such a peripheral area, that the suspicion arises only their vanity and wish to dominate made them isolated. I personally don't reproach George's poems for being empty; I have nothing against emptiness. But their form is too pleased with itself. His opinions seem to me irrelevant and casual, merely original. He probably has swallowed a heap of books, only because they were nicely bound, and socialised with people who have private incomes. So he has the appearance of idleness, instead of the perhaps desired one of a contemplative. The pillar which this saint sought out was too slyly designed, it stands at a too frequented spot, it offers a too picturesque view...
George's poetry is not wholly separate from the coterie which he formed, to provide the social setting for the Great Poet to have his elite experiences in. The German pattern was of hundreds of minor courts, each claiming autocracy, and developing a stiff court ceremonial, on however slight a cash basis; because the educated bourgeoisie, up till the arrival of large-scale commerce with the railways, were so largely employed by the court and the court aristocracy, they absorbed the patterns as their model of the world, and this petty autocracy and ceremoniousness is what George reproduces. It points forward to the observation of arbitrary rules within a small authoritarian world, which was important for the German avant garde poem of the 1950s and 1960s. The princely courts were all small imitations of Versailles, and the inner circles spoke French.
a) language is a social tool and therefore not made by individuals
b) language is not made by millions of people, since this is physically impossible. It can only be made by audible interaction
c) language is made by small groups in intense face to face contact
The shape of the language in the poem may reflect the dynamics of the entourage of the poet who wrote it down. The public suspicion of the poet who merely lives in books may be justified, in the sense that live interaction produces a different quality of language than literary consumption, even when that language is itself written down and printed. The interest of hanging out on the literary scenes of London and Cambridge is observing the connections between social activity and literary creation. Perhaps George was right to make the ordinance of the small group the centre of his attention, as the mould in which the speech of the poem was to be cast. He says I AM A HIGHER BEING and the chorus of personable young men-some rather ageing young men-cry out HE IS A SUPERIOR BEING. This brings us to the question of what we admire in writers. As the writers pass the tests we set, most of the "proofs" are circular, "intelligence" meaning "impressive" without answering what it is that impresses us. Nuclear physicists are "intelligent", that doesn't make them poets. "Sensitivity" is equally circular. I am surrounded by the zoo of experimental poets, hundreds of them each believing that their variant on a common language and life is proof of superiority; I fail to sign up to their private acts of ennoblement and they think I'm stupid, that I haven't understood; as one abolishes feeling as an obsolete bourgeois trick, one abolishes thought as middle-class guilt, and both regard adulation as the only logical response. Circularity is the key mechanism, once it starts to roll then the poem is what it says; but the incidence of failure makes us ask, what is the precondition of assent, what sets off suggestibility. The impression of a group saying the same thing, rather than just an individual, is persuasive.
His failure is partly to do with the historical problems of being homosexual in the late nineteenth century, partly to do with the excessive respect for authority and rigid role ascription which typified Wilhelmine Germany.
Heiner Müller
Müller, East Germany's leading playwright, has used verse a number of times; notably in GERMANIA TOD IN BERLIN, his best piece; and in Cement, his version of Gladkov's tedious 1920s Socialist Realist novel. I don't think the verse form is essential to M\üller (except in the lower function of setting-up, incorporating, and parodying Germany's "classic" verse dramas and their vatic historicism), but he is standing proof that the poetic impulse doesn't have to be confined to short forms if you are a genuine writer. His success proves yet again that the "agitprop" poets failed by their own inanition and lack of belief in their own methods; they introduced some information and some montage shocks, but compared to the fifty pages of total montage shock of GERMANIA TOD IN BERLIN they are shallow and trivial, their montage undercut by the thinness of context. If the reader is awaiting the end of the whole poem a few lines away, this must empty out the impact of any "jump cut" in the middle of the poem. Müller's ability to deliver several thousand lines of blank verse (as in Cement and his version of Aleksandr Bek's Volokolamsk Highway; proved the robustness of verse: if you only take a gnat's bite of data, you can't say anything about a complex object like society. The whole path of epigram, paradox, minimalism, was scared and flawed.
I am still pondering the implications of turning Socialist Realist novels about factories into blank verse. Müller is a clever bastard because he undercuts everything and, the more he cuts, the more content there is left in his plays.
Enzensberger
One of the best known of modern German poets is Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929), who made his debut in 1957. He has been welcomed by the media largely because he thinks like a journalist: they can instantly assimilate his poems. But who on earth would read journalism that was years out of date, contained no new information, expressed itself in generalities, doesn't promise new developments, doesn't spill secrets, has been emptied out to become allegory? No-one, of course. Angel Exhaust says: leave it out, Mr. Enzensberger!
This is the man who said: Railway timetables are preferable to lyric poems because they are more accurate. As a Socialist writer and friend of the proletariat, I must say: take this man behind the engine-sheds and shoot him.
Mausoleum is a volume of poems about "the history of progress", in the form of biographical sketches: his fans might say that he integrates history and technology into poetry, actually what we have is a volume that reads like a set of cigarette cards. Enzensberger is also well known for writing books of essays on politics and society; perhaps he should stick to these and give up poetry.
Rolf Hochhuth
Hochhuth made his first impact with a verse play, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative, also The Deputy) about the failure of the Catholic Church to condemn Hitler's genocide and euthanasia programmes although perfectly well informed about them from Polish and German clergy. It was first directed by Erwin Piscator, and the density of information (in a limitlessly fluent and forward-moving verse form) which passes before us reminds one of Piscator's theories of the 1920s. Der Stellvertreter is almost shockingly brilliant, a flawless work of art. I think the message is that writing about politics without also representing society is a waste of time. Poetry which is short of breath cannot deal with social issues except in fairytale terms; but poems can go on for hundreds of pages, as this one does. The writers of those skimpy little Sixties poems really thought that politics was too boring to write about, and this unconscious message is the one which affects the reader most. Hochhuth constantly arouses our curiosity about reality and constantly satisfies it, and really I don't think the intellect can be engaged in any other way.
His second play, Soldaten. Nekrolog auf Genf was about the Allied bombing campaign against German civilians. One reflects that, whereas the Nazis killed people after identifying them singly and checking very carefully, the British and the USAAF killed a million people at random. Was this a war crime? are civilians a legitimate target? The question makes one ask if the Third Reich wasn't just a logical extension of the territorial and military imperatives of the historical European State, and if the true solution to warfare (in an era when mass destruction is technically easy) is not much more radical, calling for much deeper changes. This, after all, was the issue worked-over by so many modern German intellectuals. It is possible that the victors of the anti-Nazi war were misled by their success into believing in practices of force and "morality" and nationalism which were fundamentally archaic and corrupting; France, Serbia and the USA are only the saddest examples of this. If I legitimate the burning of Dresden I legitimate someone dropping an atomic bomb on me.
Hochhuth moved onto contemporary society, writing a series of plays about the corporate self-interest and moral partiality of middle-class professionals, including lawyers and doctors.
Sarah Kirsch
There is a lyric poet named Sarah Kirsch (b. 1935), recently translated by Wendy Mulford and Anthony Vivis, and by Margitt Lehbert. In 1966, DDR poets were asked what their creative problems were. Kirsch responded: not enough hours in the day, impossible to get hold of good cognac, no carbon paper in the shops. Tame proletarians were found to retort that her poems read as if they'd been written in Fuseldusel (literally, state of dizziness brought about by cheap spirits in which overtones of fusel oil are friendly if not positively obtrusive). I don't have any information whether cognac is available in Schleswig. Sadly, her poems read as if they'd been written on alcohol-free lager.
Johannes Bobrowski
Bobrowski (1917-65), an East German poet, records that his poetry started when he was in the German Army in Russia: he wanted to describe, lovingly, the society he was attacking. The method he chose, of identifying Place with Culture and evoking a nation as the "deep" aspect of a landscape, produced poetry of almost limitlessly receding perspectives in time and place. He invokes culture in the way an archaeologist does: probably because he grew up in a borderland (Masuria), rich with Jewish and Polish culture as well as German, his attitude to culture is lingering and sensuous but also ironic, he is always looking deeply at alienness.
His methods are undoubtedly like Celan's- but then, I sometimes think, Celan's sensibility was so great that, like Rilke, he absorbed virtually every literary tendency around him. JB can occasionally be seen executing something very like a Classical topographical ode with exotic ethnic and place-names, close to passages in Ovid or Propertius. A translation by Matthew and Ruth Mead exists.
Bobrowski's two novels are remarkable because they refuse categorization and causality as the basic planks of a verbal narrative; reminding me of Boris Vakhtin's fiction, e.g. Odna absoliutno shchastlivaya derevnya. Causality may be misleading in terms of how we actually reach decisions, how group dynamics work, how we really think of the world. Rationality may simply be a public face disguising our real psychological processes. Typical is the Masurian region in Levins Mühle where all those who have German surnames speak Polish and all those who have Polish surnames (e.g. Bobrowski) speak German. JB is suggesting that the notion of "ancestry" is erroneous, or at least that ethnicity is not based on ancestry. How many other bureaucratic notions fail human reality? eastern European history is more complex than the administrative solutions propounded by its inhabitants. These two novels of Bobrowski (and the prose of the late Vakhtin, not legally published and never collected in book form so far as I know) constitute one of the more important critiques of Marxism, among the torrent of critiques which constitute the last thirty years of eastern European intellectual history.
Thinking about people I have actually lived with tells me that they didn't act like people in novels, character and destiny are just textual artefacts. We have crude views of humanity because of the limits of our data storage and classification devices. These are parallel phenomena.
The Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group)
The specific moment which brought the Group was the release, circa 1948, into ruined Vienna of the spoils of twentieth-century avant-garde art which young Viennese had grown up, during the Hitler years, without. It was the simultaneity of the hit which gave them their brief energy; which was predicated on backwardness - their own. Modern Austrian poets of calibre seem divided into the self-exiles and those fuelled entirely by fury at the Austrian public. Their style pointed back too much towards the pre-modern, with its dialect humour and student frolics. The Viennese public was all too ready to go to a cabaret and laugh at the antics; which drew on the traditional sexual privileges of students. Their performances may have been important (film documentation by Kurt Kren suggests otherwise). The Vienna Group were men driven by frustration and misgivings, not important artists. Although they were important for their diversity of techniques, none of these was really satisfactory. Obviously people find dialect funny, dialect has been pressurized out of literary existence precisely because it has been used for humour and no longer functions as language for the reading public. Laugh at dialect and expect the rural lower class not to play any role in politics.
Their use of dialect is strangely like their use of automatic and inorganic processes of generating poems, as both lack seriousness and are not ways of organizing experience. (Konrad Bayer was also a mathematician and interested in non-human means of generating or altering language.) There has always been a certain anxiety "in the doorway" about acquiring educated speech modes, especially where this also means shedding a regional pronunciation norm: students have insight into this experience but usually deal with it by humour. The macaronic poem, which dates from the 15th and 16th Cs, is a response to this "doorway" experience: the vital point about these mixed Italian-Latin poems is that the Italian element was dialectal, i.e. a brilliant mixture of hypercorrectness and sub-correctness. This was a really clever idea. It's so bloody Viennese to do something that dates from the late Middle Ages and regard it as modern. The Wiener Gruppe assured their minor status by failing to contain this anxiety, happy for their texts to remain prankish and lovable. Also, translating dialect poetry, especially without turning it into a dialect of English, is a straightforwardly stupid idea.
Walter Höllerer
Höllerer's (1921-) poetry is hard to typify; starting premises appear to be a ruthless shedding of all conventional artistic effects and all philosophical assumptions about what constitutes experience. This places Höllerer in the tiny group of artists who have accepted the challenge of their time. I don't like to speak of artistic progress, but Höllerer is visibly beyond the crew who use everyday language and the agreeable toybox of emotional rewards. His artistic career has clearly had difficulties and silences. I associate him with Roy Fisher as someone primarily interested in interrogating perception to discover the reference system by which we organize it; certainly WH is a realist poet. Another trademark is the use of animals, possibly to put humanity in perspective, or simply as decoration.
WH wrote a poem about Gaspard, who from being the mythical Black one of the Three Kings became the blackface among pierrots and the Kasperl clown of the Viennese puppet theatre.
Once bridge wake. The white
Lightnings set the skin alight.
Frigates sail.
Above the vulture banners
Of Etruria and Hadhramaut
To migrate with the years.
Keel wake. The parchment
Lets the journey under way.
Ox and dolphin in the wind-
Depart, Gaspard.
A poem "Bird clouds" runs in part, (part 2: "Face. Woven." ):
The lips sharp, o bird-stiff
It has set down on your eyes. Too late
For us to look at each other. The little feather flies
No longer from your lips, the down breaks.
From quite a different bone was this face made.
The nostril wings, which from the coastal strip
Brought their sharp crease, fishbone. A sceptic
Pulled furrows around his mouth.
Because monkishly hard glare was on the brows,
Burrowing mice came into the forehead. The clergy
Unfolded the black sails. The landsknecht chief,
A counterpart of the captain, gave you away
To a superior force.
"So sleep so wake" runs in part:
So to remain, that the waggons only
Stand around the circle, without moving,
So to sleep with the obol
For its day in my hand.
Erich Arendt
The early death of all the most important Expressionist poets has allowed foreign critics to seal the style off at some point in the 1920s, a move aided by the obscuring of Arendt (1903-84), published in Der Sturm in the late 1920s but active until recently. A political refugee from Hitler, he lived successively in Switzerland, Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, before returning to become the DDR's leading modernist. He is little discussed in the West. My feeling about Arendt is that he is major but not great. I find this failure hard to explain, but I think the lack of affect (derived from the tradition of Expressionist angst), the lack of joy, explains it. Arendt has a cold majesty, a sensuous and exotic richness.
Earth-bare,
how it blows on you! dumb
out of the deep age of the world: faceless,
a mind, waste,
of cliff and moon-empty flood!
And before the hard-winged light,
walling the impenetrable sky,
the world-wave of stone: you
timeless: stiff
terror! where never a man
suffered his hour
nor did one look up, hoping.
This ("Ode 1") emerges out of Expressionist split-second style, where each word is isolated and occupies its own space. Arendt has a mesmerizing ability to freeze an object and by montage animate that frozen frame so that we are lifted out of the verbal realm and plunged deep inside the landscape. Yet clearly the main influence on these poems is Greek poetry, specifically the more elevated passages of the Athenian tragedy of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. They also remind me of the early poetry of the Austrian Klaus Demus, another example of the continuing development of the Expressionist tradition. A basic technique, shared with Demus, is decentring, the elimination of mind (partly also of syntax) in the race of sensations. Another comparison might be Riefenstahl's editing style, cutting off moving objects from the beginning and end of their run so that pure motion emerges. I also think of Herzog's redefinition of ski-jumping as flight in the awesome Die grosse Ekstase des Bildhauers Steiner.
Arendt's experiences as a refugee allowed him to perceive the world-system of the capitalist economy; his exceptionally precise topographic technique allowed him to capture the far-flung limbs of this organism by marks in space, matching the large-scale with the very fine and detailed. Certainly this genre of describing exploited Third World workers in picturesque landscapes could verge on the touristic; the poem ("To the chopping block, on which the peasant Sebastian/ chopped wood for the Asturian winter,/ shoved him the Guardia Civil and spat at him:/ Now clench your fist, which you carried so high!") in which a Spanish radical has his hands cut off, lacks dialectic; and the rhyme scheme is a bit populist. Nonetheless it completes an Expressionist impetus to link up with non-European art, as part of despair with European classicism; Arendt's exoticism is comparable to the results of Emil Nolde's trip round the world in about 1905, his treatment of song forms is an important aspect of modernist research, comparable to Jawlensky's use of icon conventions. Arendt's refusal to accept borders to his sensibility allowed him a scope broader than perhaps any other modern poet.
Ernst Meister
Meister (1911-79) is another second generation Expressionist, who achieved integrity and continuity in the midst of chaos; history deprived German poetry of its own past, making it imitate first Nazi ideals and then terrible American poets while its own living potential, like Arendt and Meister, was cut out of the record.
German poetry was profoundly influenced both by the Märchen (fairy-tale) and by psychoanalysis, each in their way locked into the mysterious life of the household and assigning it a symbolism, a set of verbal correspondences at once domestic and arcane. Having gone beyond the bounds of existing rational (and universally shared) language, the task was to rebuild it in terms of these mysteries. Semantic research into the word-field, the total resonance of a group of words and the deep emotional and sensory positions beneath them, stressed the subjective, human component. German poets habitually reflect not the surface, the visible, but the mythology of daily life, instinct with shared secrets and deep memory, shining with a gentle but obstinate illumination. I associate this with the attitude to visible reality of Expressionist painters. For Meister especially common are images of non-human organisms, taken as partial equivalents for the human organism and showing it as something made of many parts. (It's interesting that Höllerer, too, constantly uses animal imagery.)
Max Hölzer
I know nothing about Hölzer except that he was born in 1915, in Graz; and the poems themselves. Hölzer was evidently influenced by Surrealism, but his version was neither chance nor loaded down by the conventional imagery of the French stars. Predictably, it is less full of clarte and more full of Innigkeit, the German internal commitment.
Pull the skin from this river
it mirrors covered sky
nothingness is open, the throat
you flow away
feel only yourself
Lift up the silk of the water
as if you wanted to fold your hands under it
and rip it-
the little tatters
roll themselves up in falling
He dies of thirst
and the open mouth
begins to see.
(Amfortiade). Almost unbelievably, he admires Artaud and Bataille but is still a good poet.
Gerhard Ochs
Once again I know nothing about Ochs, except for a few poems in a generally tedious anthology. But he seems to me to be a continuator in a younger generation (b. 1944) of the best and most radical traditions of German poetry:
Thoughts of peacefully flowing blood.
Word seeker.
Where is the fishing-rod of the world?
Ask the river
about superstition
there at the bend
against the overhang,
ask the heart,
now it hurts.
I am walked on over corpses.
Let go,
Bridlegear,
cutting thread!
I mention the names of Ernst Meister and Max Hölzer only to suggest that the best poets are systematically excluded from the standard anthologies and consequently each new wave of poets masters the tedium and banality of established stars.
Peter Hacks
H. caused a sensation (in 1956?) by emigrating to the DDR when his play was staged there. (He was born in Breslau, now in Poland, and lived through the famous and absurd siege, built up to a myth by Goebbels even before it started, against Russian attackers.) His play, The Chapbook of Duke Ernst, so-called, treats a 12th C hero in the manner of the 16th C (or early modern) chapbook and simultaneously with the overview of a historian. I suppose one could relate it to the theatre of the Absurd, but I don't know of anything there with a smidgin of its substance. The chapbook-perspective both makes the feudal system ridiculous and somehow retrieves its values for the theatrical show. I admit it isn't in verse; a play of the same period about relations between two neighbouring factories-the coke plant earns fabulous wages by delivering bad coke to the steelworks next door, whose workers are consequently on their beam ends- is partly in verse, of banal facture. This, brilliant and socially committed, proletarian drama angered the authorities, and H. saw his career curtailed from that point. According to the available historians of theatre, H. has since the early sixties made a living by comedies of a rococo character, in neat verse, highly acceptable to the audiences and managements of West German theatres, but of slight literary Niveau. His glistening literary intelligence is apparent in his plays of the fifties, a real joy to read even for someone like me reading stacks of German books as work, and in his essays (Über die Literatur). The massively subsidised German theatre has produced a string of significant playwrights, in severe contrast to the literary nullity of English playwrights.
I got this far in 1992, but then drifted into another way of doing criticism, at greater length. There are dozens of other interesting German-language poets. I hope longer articles will appear on Mayrocker, Heissenbuttel, Friederike Roth, and Jurgen Becker.