Collected Poems

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...

»Esteemed listeners, do not try to lift the secret of this text«, orders Friederike Mayröcker in her new work of prose – but even its title leaves an infallible...

»Jimi the Polar Bear was lying in the arms of the sleeping child, his paws crossed. It was 1 very young polar pear the size of a puppy and he hardly dared to breathe so as not to wake the child. The child was dreaming that Jimi was lying in its arms and told him 1 story.«

Thus begins the short poetic story of Jimi the Polar Bear and the child Emma, told by the great Austrian poet...

Considering this current moment of great change as well as the 20th century when death became a master from Germany, is literature still possible? Does it still have a reason for being in a post-Auschwitz world where all cultural production can only be an expression of barbarism? Or is literature necessary, indeed indispensible, precisely because of such atrocities? Which methods must such a...

fleurs – the flowers, the flower petals, they give this book its title, make us think of spring, of mild air and gently flowing ribbons. But if you let yourself be lured onto that...

Friederike Mayröcker doesn’t have time. Neither for résumé and memory, nor for extensive observations and reasoning and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself...

Études is what Friederike Mayröcker calls her prose poetry and lyrical prose pieces, studies then, or »shreddings«, as she says, splintering, brittle and highly concentrated; the language...

»brütt«. To Friederike Mayröcker a symbol of pain and hardship, of the cold and of grief, were it not for the »sighing gardens« that lend a soft counterbalance to the stirrings of love...

World War II. The final days of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer, is obsessively compiling an archive of every conceivable nuance of human sound. Karnau's work so impresses...