German Poetry Since Reunification

Introduction

The dramatic events leading to the sudden collapse of the socialist regime of East Germany in 1989 came almost as a complete surprise to many German poets in West Germany. By the late 1980s, most poets in the West had come to accept the separation of Germany into two separate states. In spite of an increasing stream of East German poets who were either forced, like Wolf Biermann (b. 1936) in 1976, or allowed, like Uwe Kolbe (b. 1957) in 1987, to leave East Germany, the socialist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East was considered durable. Western poets were locked in their own debate about the sudden rise of traditional form in poetry and took scant notice of the massive changes in the East.

A year after the reunification of Germany in 1990, the West’s Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929-2022) revisited the effects of this surprise in his collection Zukunftsmusik (1991; future music) when he wrote:

Future Music

That what we can’t anticipate

Will teach itself.

It shines, is uncertain, distant.

Here, the poem acknowledges that great changes may actually catch the human poet unawares. Similarly, the negative ending of the poem that the music of the future “isn’t there for us,/ never was there,/ is never there,/ is never,” articulates the mood of the post-reunification hangover, with rising Western resentment at the cost of the bailout of the East, and Eastern nostalgia for a time when the state guaranteed employment for all, for example. Enzensberger’s conclusion that in spite of all the changes, the future is not “for us,” the common people, and echoes popular misgivings surfacing in Germany in the early 1990s.

In the years before reunification, many Western poets looked at their East German counterparts who had stayed in the GDR with a mixture of disdain and indifference, often regarding East German poetry as backward in form and provincial in theme. However, relatively unbeknownst to the West, East German poets often found themselves at the vanguard of rising popular unrest. After reunification, the “underground” poets of the big cities like East Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden found themselves in a certain vacuum.

Elke Erb (1938-2024) had been an influential, nurturing presence for the initially only loosely associated group of young poets residing in the hip Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin. In 1991, she published her collection Winkelzüge: Oder, Nicht vermutete, aufschlussreiche Verhältnisse (shady tricks). These poems, which were actually written just before the fall of the Berlin wall, already foreshadow the poet’s uncertainty about the future. “The heroine, led by her history…so uncertainly/ that she can identify herself neither in the present/ nor the future” stands at a new path. The old (socialist) directives have vanished, “swallowed up by the Earth,” and she has to carve her own way without any external spiritual guidance. Erb’s Poet’s Corner 3 (1991) hammers home this point of disillusion with the past coupled with apprehension for the future. Here, her poem “Thema verfehlt” (off the topic) calls upon the ghosts of past communist leaders, who appear “like someone without a home/ someone who holds a sail, not his own,/ into the wind, which is not his own.” There is a gathering of restless spirits, whose borrowed ideals have failed them in a world not of their own making, and yet the direction for the future is indeterminable.

For the poets of the East, reunification thus brought a moment of pause after the heady days which had seen the toppling of the repressive regime. Erb’s friend and protégé Kolbe expressed a common nostalgia for the days of struggle and togetherness in his volume Vineta (1998). The title poem “Vineta” alludes to a mythical Nordic Atlantis, whose greedy inhabitants caused it to sink forever to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Ironically, Vineta Street is also the terminus of the subway line running through Prenzlauer Berg, where Kolbe lived and worked before leaving for West Germany in 1987. In his poem, Kolbe reflects:

Do you still remember, back then, when we knew the

name, when we

knew every name, when the chestnuts were talking to

us, burst open

with their horny shoots

The poet laments the passing of the vitality of the poets’ gatherings in the backyards of residential apartment buildings graced by old chestnut trees. In reunified Berlin, modernization increasingly gets rid of these old trees, just as the subversive political journals of the East (samizdat literature) died out for lack of state oppression, which had forced them to be self-published in editions of less than one hundred copies. Some of the famous literary journals to which Kolbe and his associates had contributed poetry survived past 1993, but their character had become more mainstream since the flair of the forbidden had vanished with the advent of freedom of speech after reunification.

Ironically, the opening of the archives of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, revealed that one of the Prenzlauer Berg poets, Sascha Anderson (b. 1953), who later emigrated to West Germany, was one of the Stasi spies himself. Thus, the socialist regime had tried to subvert the opposition, but it had collapsed despite these secret machinations.

In the West, poets found themselves less forced to embark on a quest to redefine their position in regard to their art and their audience. There, the continuous strong output by women poets like Elisabeth Borchers (1926-2013), Karin Kiwus (b. 1942), Ulla Hahn (b. 1946), and Ursula Krechel (b. 1947) has substantially defined much of German post-reunification poetry.

Karin Kiwus

Karin Kiwus’s Das chinesische Examen (1992; the Chinese Examination) focuses on the power of personal memories and the various attitudes toward change. Drawing from the author’s cultural exchange with East Asia, Kiwus informs the reader that for a certain kind of Chinese examination, the student has to remember and write down everything they are thinking about while sitting in a barren room for a set amount of time. Reminiscent of modernism’s fascination with the so-called stream-of-consciousness approach to writing, Kiwus’s painter-protagonist Soutine, in “Bonjour Monsieur Soutine,” remembers a grisly scene in his studio:

And the flayed ox in my studio

Don’t you know that I must rescue

Its flesh from decay, pouring buckets of

Blood over it

While flesh and the organic is in danger of decay, statues contain at least the promise of timelessness. However, timelessness invites stasis, and the world changes around its leftover monuments. “Dieser eine Russe” (this one Russian) is a statue commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, such as can be found in the Treptow Park Soviet War Memorial in (East) Berlin. While his expression, literally cast in stone, never changes, history has moved on and has obliterated not only the vanquished Nazis but the victorious Soviets as well. What meaning, the poem inquires, can still be attached to these statues?

Ulla Hahn

Symptomatic of the unexpected lasting power of the traditionalist revival in German poetry since the 1980s, Ulla Hahn, who had begun her career as a radical left-wing poet, continued to surprise her audience with a return to more traditional, formal poetry. In 1993, she published Liebesgedichte (love poems), but she reminded her readers that her poems were not the lyric equivalent of easy listening when she wrote that, “The poem my lady is not eau de cologne…no deodorant for the sweaty smell of fear.” Invigorating love poetry with a strong feminist bent, Hahn has developed a devoted readership who welcomed Epikurs Garden (1995; the garden of Epicurus). Her later publications include the poetry collections Süßapfel rot (2003) and So offen die Welt (2004), as well as the novel UnscharfeBilder (2003).

Ursula Krechel

Feminist rebellion is alive and well in Ursula Krechel’s collection Technik des Erwachens (1992; techniques of awakening). The poet expresses disgust with societal strictures designed to keep women complacent in traditional roles. “Weisheit” (wisdom) exhorts the reader that “in the margin the woman does not become womaner,” ironically using the grammatically incorrect comparison “womaner” to bring home her point of the impossibility of being “more of a woman” if content with a marginal role. Similarly, teachers in the employment of the government, with its conservative rules and regulations, are to be mistrusted regardless of their gender, as “Nachlass” (last will) admonishes:

I do not believe in the entrails of women teachers

Girded with principles and ordinances

In Krechel’s Verbeugungen vor der Luft (1999; obeisances to the air), she combines the political with a more formalist interest in the intricacies of language and sound, almost returning to some of the preoccupations of Germany’sconcrete poetry of the 1970s. She insists that her poems are mere “projections,” plays on words, yet also attacks conservatism with cynicism and occasional obscenity. Krechel’s poem “Goya, späte Jahre” (Goya, later years) plays fast and loses with history and insists that artistic work has to go on despite political pressures. Her nineteenth-century Spaniard Goya shouts, “world, stay outside, I’m painting.”

Elisabeth Borchers

Elisabeth Borchers’s Was ist die Antwort? (1998; what is the answer?) brought a return of a well-regarded poet who had been silent for a while. Most of her poems are very short, but contain strong moral messages, as in her “Wohnungen” (residences): “Everything returns/ And has reached its end.”

There is no escape from history, a point especially relevant as Germany still has to live with its Nazi past. If many of Borchers’s poems remain somewhat impersonal and distant, the reader is confronted with an author who generally rejects the autobiographical style in search of a larger truth.

Helga M. Novak

In a career that began in the East and, by force, moved to the West, Helga M. Novak (1935-2013), who was stripped of her East German citizenship in 1966, saw a steady revival of her poetry in the 1990s. Her collection Silvatica (1997), was praised for its use of the metaphor of the hunt to comment on womanhood. Here, Novak returns to the Greek myth of the hunter-goddess Artemis, reviving an interest in classical allusions. Her massive collection of a life’s worth of poetry, Solange noch Liebesbriefe eintreffen (1999; as long as love letters still come in) met with mixed criticism. Her political poems were criticized for a lack of aesthetic achievement, and her moral focus on the underdog was found lacking in sophistication. However, her power to evoke emotions with her socially engaged poetry was welcomed by many.

Heinz Czechowski

Heinz Czechowski (1935-2009) straddled the East and the West. In Nachtspur (1993; night track), he gives voice to his despair of having lost his bearings and calling in life, when he writes in “Damals zuletzt” (back then, for the last time):

Thus I give up

To search for my lost identity

It is sufficient to be here

And to know that one is still here.…

Five years later, in Mein westfälischer Frieden (1998; my peace of Westphalia), Czechowski alludes to the peace treaty of Westphalia, which ended the devastating Thirty Years’ War in 1648, as an allusion to the peace he has made in his life with his move, in 1995, from his native Dresden in the East to Western Germany. While his voice is still full of sorrow, there is a sense that the poet has forgiven history for having disappointed him. It is a time to make peace and enjoy the beauties of the day.

Joachim Sartorius

Reunified Germany’s renewed weight in international affairs was echoed by the internationalist poems of Joachim Sartorius (b. 1946). A prolific collaborator with international visual artists, Sartorius’s poetry celebrates a masculine sensuality that unifies the global sphere. In Der Tisch wird kalt (1992; the table turns cold), Sartorius imagines world peace to feel like the first breath after ejaculation: “A final joyous breathing…so clear a breath as if it journeyed/ around the whole of the world.” In Vakat (1993; vacant), Sartorius provides poems to Nan Goldin’s pictures of deserted brothels and hotel rooms around the world, reveling in a sex worker’s joy that “The evening is young/ Money from beauty/ Jingles in the pockets.” Sartorius continued writing poetry in the twenty-first, including the 2019 collection, Poetry and Time.

Gerhard Falkner

Internationalism takes a different turn in the poetry of Gerhard Falkner (b. 1951), who continues to remind Germany that, for example, in spite of winning the soccer world championship in 1990, “there are shadows/ abrupt poems” which function “like supreme tribunals” to remind the reader of the powers of words like “Auschwitz” and the evils of the past that continue to cast a shadow on the joyous present. Falkner also wrote the poetry collection Hölderlin Reparatur (2008) and was awarded the 2009 Peter Huchel Prize.

Thomas Kling

Instruments of information technology populate the work of Thomas Kling (1957-2005), who dedicated himself to incorporating the language of the new technology and issued collections like nacht.sicht.gerät (1993; night.vision.apparatus), Morsch (1996; Rotten), and Fernhandel (1999; long distant trade). Embracing a technocratic, computerized world, he offers love poems that express age-old sentiments in the language of Silicon Valley. His other works include Gesammelte Gedichte (2006; collected poems) and Auswertung der Flugdaten (2005; analysis of flight data).

Durs Grünbein

Refocusing on the human body, yet maintaining an almost clinical distance, has become the trademark stance of celebrated poet Durs Grünbein (b. 1962). Growing up in East Germany’s Dresden, Grünbein developed his craft by pointing out the absurdities of socialist society. After reunification, he continued to dissect the fabric of comfortable lies attempting to hold together postmodern society. His caustic vision of the loneliness of the Internet age strikes a chord with his urban readership. “Apart from the screen, as you can see/ the image of the screen is a nothing” is his verdict on the empty, self-referential nature of cyberspace, in his poem “Ultra Null” (ultra zero) in Schädelbasislektion (1991; skull crash course). His Nach den Satiren (1999; after the satires) carries his theme of an impending bio-apocalypse further. His witty satires on the new Berlin, which evokes in the brain “something which cries for destruction,” and his somewhat stereotypical denunciation of California’s body culture have made Grünbein one of Germany’s most widely read contemporary poets. His further works of poetry include Koloss im Nebel (2012), Zündkerzen (2017), and Il bosco bianco (2020). In 2020, Grünbein won the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award.

Revitalization

In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany’s poets have embraced a wide variety of styles, themes, and forms in their literary attempt to work through the political, social, and intellectual ramifications of reunification. Their vibrant poetry ranges from a vigorous revitalization of old traditions to a keen awareness of the new self in a newly reconfigured country. The urge to express the impact of the digital society, envision the integration of East and West, and give a voice to the female perspective inspired vivid poetry that continues to connect to an interested, wide-ranging audience.

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