Poetry

A narrator, possibly a former monk, looks back on his life: there wasn’t any real space for childhood and youth in it, his father and mother did not play the role intended for them. His path led him from faith to doubt, from the village to the city. He escaped the city into the solitude of his hermitage, where he tries to put into words what leaves him bewildered, investigates the...

Poetry owes many evergreens to »occasional poems«. In the case of Friedrich Ani, such poems constitute deliberate addressing, musically worded compositions if one considers current political-individual situations the occasion to which one must react immediately, showing oneself and the counterpart in all its vulnerability. These realistic-spontaneous sounds find very different forms: from the...

For the young Ingeborg Bachmann and her generation, the great hope after the war soon proved deceptive. The themes in Bachmann's first volume of poetry, Deferred Time (1953), are representative of the experience that defines writing after 1945: Departure and farewell, guilt and memory. In the dramatic gestures and memorable images of her poetic language, this experience found a...

The verses in Ingeborg Bachmann’s second collection of poetry, Invocation of Ursa Major (1956), caused a sensation when they were published and soon became canonised: they were immensely...

When everything is text, because everything is code, there is no more work, only wrought material, a semi-finished product. Images, films, sounds, words – in the digital world, everything is open...

There is a performance at the trashy theatre. Hildegard Knef gets in a car. Rudolph Moshammer carries his Yorkshire Terrier around Munich. S. T. Coleridge makes a joke about Cologne. Works of art...

In her new volume of poetry, Nora Bossong travels from small-town Germany to the Mediterranean and onwards into the Holy Land and beyond. Her natural manner of movement a shifting back and forth...

Thomas Brasch, poet, playwright, filmmaker and translator, is one of the most striking figures in contemporary German literature. From poems with personal dedications and occasional poems to...

»What did you do in 2020?« The year when the world is »moved, all of a sudden, to stand still«. When the streets are »humanless«, the city is quietened and...

For Paul Celan reading was always an experience as well: the books, journals, and daily newspapers he read were as much a source of his poems as personal encounters and political events. When a...

Paul Celan’s exceptional oeuvre of letters – half of them unpublished so far: An oeuvre, on par with the poetic works, of immense stylistic range. Biographically insightful and poetologically fruitful.

Paul Celan, the most-interpreted German-speaking poet after 1945, is also the author of an eminent opus of letters. In this edition, it becomes visible as its own...